It’s like listening to a mad scientist connect totally unrelated (seemingly) events.
E.g., I don’t at all understand the linkage between current events and the schism between the Catholic Church and Protestants denoms.
Maybe I’m just too dumb to follow this much brilliance.
His point is that LLMs are a disruptive technology at the level of the printing press. The power structure most famously disrupted by the printing press was that of the Catholic Church.
EDIT: Yeah this isn't what he's saying. His analogy is more like the major LLM companies like OpenAI or Google are like the Catholic Church which is being disrupted by European regulations which are like the protestants. Or the opposite. He literally says both ways as possibilities. And in this analogy the open models (the refinements of the 'leaked' LLaMa models which can fit on a single GPU) are like the wacky persecuted fringe sects which were exiled to the United States and which he thinks shouldn't be called as either Catholic or Protestant. At the end he says "This is, admittedly, a rather speculative and far-reaching Article" which I have to agree.
The American companies like Google/OpenAI (trying to export AI globally) are on one side, opposing them are Europeans (who want AI to be controlled, licensed, and regulated). Together, these two regimes are the Catholic Church and mainstream Protestantism of AI.
Opposing both these sides are open source AI models. He calls this group radical reformers like the Amish.
Yeah, don’t ask. This much brilliance in way above my pay grade.
Very typical of the author. Except few valuable ideas presented years ago, I haven't read or heard anything worthwhile. Mostly unsubstantiated speculation and “I've seen the big picture” type of ramblings.
Why a mad scientist and not a mad junkie? Or just some clueless language model, artificial or not? I think we tend to make this assumption that things that seem complicated _are_ complicated, and not just random bs, and that assumption no longer holds.
>E.g., I don’t at all understand the linkage between current events and the schism between the Catholic Church and Protestants denoms.
Hadn't read it, but let me guess, is it about how Gutenberg changed the society's interconnection fabric, and it triggered Thirty Year's War, and the same fabric remodeling thing is happening right now? :)
Yes, there is some reference to the evolution of the principle of national sovereignty which came from the disruption of the Catholic Church and how that ties to Europe trying to regulate AI advances coming out of America.
Like you said, he could just as well be an organic LLM.
That's just an attempt to prevent technical colonisation. An analogy would be Japan and China trying to fence off missionaries. Protestantism was about something different: decentralisation. And in that regard there's no difference between Google and their competitors - it's all strictly centralised; nothing Protestant about it.
Having properly Open Source models would be protestant. And EU regulations should help it happen by reducing the incentives for centralised ones.