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Comment by smoldesu | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, this is a perfect microcosm of how "the system" works. This guy is right! He just got there too late, with too little money and not enough fanfare.

Sam Altman, on the other hand? He's the figurehead of a consumer-facing product with a brilliant marketing team and probably a crack team of lobbyists to boot. He's got billions of dollars in Microsoft funding and a product you can go use for free. All he's got to do is roll in there first with an AI alarmist response and convince lawmakers the state-of-the-art is dangerous. After all, OpenAI is synonymous with SOTA, right? So we follow the industry leaders, without really looking where they're headed. And now we end up here.

Oh how I wish Open Source software was fairly represented in court. But ideas don't pay for themselves, and money talks awful loud...

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> All he's got to do is roll in there first with an AI alarmist response and convince lawmakers the state-of-the-art is dangerous.

Mr Altman didn't go before congress to convince them of anything, he was invited by Blumenthal to make their case to the media. Congress is embarrassed that social media got out of hand and is chomping at the bit to regulate AI. There was no disagreement at the testimony, the intentions of government and industry are aligned perfectly here - roll out the red carpet for centralized control, regulate competition out of existence.

This sounds correct. My only hope is since AI will be regulated in the US, there is still a chance that given other countries do not have the same leverage as the US, they will keep AI unregulated as a way to avoid being controlled by the US.

AI will not be regulated in the US because the first amendment prohibits such regulation. Software is speech and is this protected per Bernstein v DOJ.

You can distribute binaries as speech but the services you're offering as an API is a different matter, more interstate commerce, what you're allowed to sell as opposed to what you're allowed to say

"software is speech" .. if speech is taken to be solely a means of communication between humans, this statement has been untrue ever since Turing

The government's interests are going to align more with OpenAI's, and they would be fools not to eliminate open source/local models.

Anything local bypasses traversal of any network edges they can tap and monitor. Anything you ask Google is logged, and your search history can be subpoenaed, same as with any public library and the books you check out. OpenAI or whatever gatekeeper would assume that role and charge tolls.

Do the same research with Vicuna-13B-ggml or whatever and nobody can sniff out what you're doing. Which sounds great for people who just want to jerk off and be left alone, but has terrifying implications for anybody tasked with stopping more-malicious users.

Unfortunately nobody can ever compromise on these things. Best case would be adopting a law like the recent one in NL, where given probable cause the government can hack into your machine, but that won't happen. The only alternative in their favor is banning local models and open-source development of them altogether.

That worked well in the past with crypto. /s

People yearn for "a room of their own"[1], a sanctuary for contemplation and creativity. There was a time when our minds and pieces of paper were the only canvases for our imaginations, but increasingly our web browsers have morphed into thought surveillance systems. Now, the tide is turning back towards private creative spaces, enhanced by generative AI. Even if there are attempts to ban it, the edge now lies with private AI. In the future, we might even have the ability to run even more powerful models on standard hardware.

Moreover, we must consider the defensive strategies against other AI entities that will soon permeate the internet. Operating much like a firewall, private AI models could safeguard users from external threats such as involuntary data breaches and misinformation. This will be an endless cat-and-mouse game akin to battling security exploits or viruses—there's no one-size-fits-all solution. Venturing into the internet without your AI shield may soon be as unthinkable as stepping outside without a mask amidst a pandemic like COVID.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Room_of_One%27s_Own

I can run GPT-3.5 level models on my laptop (albeit a chunky high end one). It is indeed only a matter of time.

I’ve unfortunately not found an open source model that can perform at the this level for anything beyond madlibs-style text generation. Most of my prompts are a combination of sequential tasks and one-shot prompting, typically between 1K-2K tokens and everything I’ve tried falls down at this. Granted, I haven’t gone beyond 30B models, but the gulf still seems quite wide (and even wider compared to GPT-4). Really hope it does close in the next year!

I admit I have not pushed them that far, though I am also using 40B and 65B models which may perform better than a 30B model.

Nothing open approaches GPT-4 yet, which I have heard is an overlay of multiple 220B models.

The only way you will see that on even high end consumer hardware is advances in compression and pruning, but those are happening. There’s a lot of research in those areas.

Of course then cloud models could use the same techniques to get even bigger, if the model and training will keep scaling.

Edit: as AI matures you may also see lots of custom ASICs hit the market. I could see those getting cheap enough to run many hundred B models locally. The acceleration of an ASIC designed for a specific type of model over CPU and GPU could be dramatic, reducing the amount of silicon you need.

In my experience, Wizard-Vicuna output at 13b will match or exceed the prose quality of GPT3.5 in smaller generation tasks. I've been using it for a Discord bot to great success.

99% of people with crypto own it through a middle man.

edit: you're talking about crypto in general. Bitcoin spam has broken my brain.

There is an argument about the open source models causing more innovation and thus more industry and/or competetive advantage of a nation. So I can't imagine that control is the only thing they are thinking about, though surely they are thinking about control.

The horrible thing is that in the public opinion OpenAI is also incorrectly connected with "Open Source" purely due to the similarities in the name. So the two opposing approaches are conflated in the public view.

Do you think it’s really too late though? Aren’t we just at the beginnings?

In my opinion, it's definitely too late. ChatGPT is one of the most well-marketed products of all time, and it frankly didn't achieve all that much. It scaled up current SOTA and put it behind a paywalled API, and the rest is history. It's like the fountain of youth, a dream API for most developers. Put something in, get something out. Whoever owns the endpoint just prints money.

Everything after this point will just be habitually disappointing. Everything will be held to the impossibly high standard of the first time you tried ChatGPT, not the more realistic benchmarks of GPT-2, LLaMA, Bert, or even Talk-To-Transformer. I don't think it will be possible to recapture that magic, and Sam Altman was the first-mover on turning that awe into fear.

Weird take; doesn't strike me as at all inevitable. I can't think of any similar huge thing that won like this merely by being a first-mover. Google, Facebook, Spotify etc etc?

I agree. ChatGPT is like the Windows of LLMs in it's dominance but that still leaves plenty of room for smaller players to make a niche.

Eh, I think they flubbed it. Agreed that they put it on the market at a time that made a splash and gave a lot of magical first impressions, but at this point the possibility of ever trusting these things is burned, if improved models manage to lie a little less, that won't be enough to actually integrate them into mission critical tasks.

Instead of an oracle they released an improv comedian. Entertaining enough but not what you want running the show.

Someone will build a better app layer that supersedes theirs and they will have to hope that app sells out. The pioneering innovation left the building when they quit being open imo and their frontend / pace of development on the frontend leaves a lot of opportunity.

But there's effectively 0 barrier to moving to something else, right? The simpler the API, the less lock in effect you get.

I’m optimistic mostly because, a lobbyist for closing ai has the disadvantage that congress isn’t good at doing these days, and the status quo is “do nothing” on this issue. Overcoming the resistance of the status quo requires a large popular support that isn’t there and is very expensive to buy with money.

I don’t want to be that guy but iirc Sam was a wealthy person before OpenAi so it’s likely he had connections which other people didn’t have so there’s that. I could be wrong though.

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