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Comment by xianshou | Hacker News Reader

In light of last week's fiasco with Reflection (https://venturebeat.com/ai/new-open-source-ai-leader-reflect...), I hope the community has a newfound enthusiasm for independent testing!

This is extremely exciting news if true, so I'm eager to have it either confirmed or questioned. The one thing I hope we won't be doing is accepting SOTA evals from open-sourced models at face value.

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I don't know how people like Matt Schumer can attempt what looks like fraud and deception being chalked off as a giant oopsies (which isn't really convincing) and not face any consequences.

For rest of us, this is a privilege that we don't have. We can't deceive, defraud our investors because it has real consequences....but not for people like Matt Schumer, why is that?

Having mountains of money, in the US, is equated to being smart and better than. This means that failures, unless they purposefully exploit other better thans, are always forgiveable. Even when they're mildly intentional.

Pretty sure it's not a US only thing.

Just imagine the legal system as a money duel. If you have little money you can be crushed at no cost. Trying to fight someone with big money, even if you're likely to win, will take a lot of time and money. Unless the fraud was black and white or you're in for the long haul it's easier just to lick the wounds.

Does that logic apply to the State - usu plaintiff?

Doesn't seem so since they have seemingly endless capital but have limits in what they can bring to bear. You tell me...

"The state" is not a monolith. Anti-fraud enforcement is handled by agencies with limited budgets and resources. Often they are deliberately underfunded and understaffed precisely so they cannot cause too much damage and embarrassment by going after really big targets.

Theranos everywhere? Except you can’t afford to mess up when it comes to health.

Oh, pharma messes up all the time.

But it’s an interesting question. You can’t be too risk-averse because there’re thousands of patients dying horrible deaths every single day. There’s simply a need for bold approaches in many areas of medicine.

I'd like to add a perspective that might not resonate with everyone, based on the famous quote: "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." I sometimes adapt this to say: "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a scam."

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