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Comment by chrisdbanks | Hacker News Reader

These new models could be the downfall of authoritarian regimes. These regimes rely on suppressing access to information but soon we'll have an LLM that can answer any questions about the world and fit on a USB stick that can be passed from person to person. No more great firewall of China.

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Encyclopedias exist today as well, and already fit on USB sticks. Still, Britannica has yet to topple the Chinese political system, and ChatGPT will not succeed either.

Modern authoritarian states are extremely adept at controlling the spread of information. LLMs are not even a drop in the bucket for what the state apparatus can do. If sharing USB sticks with LLMs that talk about the Tiananmen massacre ever became popular, you would get USB sticks that talk about how these are Western lies the very next day.

> Britannica has yet to topple the Chinese political system, and ChatGPT will not succeed either

Text versus images? China’s urban elite are comfortable. They live a first-world life. China is a middle economy because the fruits of its gains haven’t reached the periphery. I can see Beijing being fearful of visual satire that can be perceived by a farmer in a way that written text, particularly English text, isn’t an issue.

There are several differences between LLMs and encyclopedias - LLMs don't need specific text about specific events in Chinese. They can be trained in text in English and produce answers in Chinese via translation. - LLMs probably need much more text to corrupt their veracity -- yet to be tested properly - LLMs are more obfuscated in their purpose. If I'm sharing a text about a specific event then that is pretty damning, but if an LLM can answer questions about an event then you can't prove that was why I was sharing it. In fact it would be pretty hard to exclude information about specific events from an LLM

Ok, and whoever is caught with one of those will disappear, and so will all their family/friends. Are you willing to risk your life for information? Proxies that bypass the great firewall already exist, but most people avoid them because they're not worth the risk

The "truth" is not enough. Look into Tian'Anmen and how the subject is completely taboo across generations. How to change social norms is a whole another thing.

Didn't we say the same thing about Wikipedia?

Wikipedia, whose concept of free speech is, "You can freely edit our encyclopedia as long as you cite CNN"

And the internet, liberalization, free trade, etc.

Propaganda has seemed pretty effective even with unfettered access to information, LLMs and free speech in the west.

Quite apart from arguments about the effectiveness of authoritarian regimes to prevent this, we would first need an LLM that can be trusted not to make stuff up.

Raspberry Pi could include that with Mathematica in their default OS install :)

I guess they are still a bit too heavy for small ARM boards but they are probably implemented in a way that is amenable to lots of systems engineering / demoscene optimizations.

Maybe demoscene will branch off into optimizing AI - ”here’s my llama 64kb demo…” :D

How much disk space does an LLM like GPT-4.0 need?

You can already fit something like 800,000 books on a 256 GB USB stick.

An LLM isn't going to be more effective.

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