I would never have imagined hackers becoming copyright zealots advocating for lawsuits. I must be getting old but I still remember the Pirate Bay trial as if it was yesterday.
I'm all for abolishing copyright, for everyone. Let the knowledge be free and widely shared.
But until that is the case and people running super useful services like libgen have to keep hiding then I also want all the LLM corpos to be subject to the same legal penalties.
LLM tech is pretty cool.
Would be a lot cooler if its existence wasn’t predicted on the wholesale theft of everyone’s stuff, immediately followed by denial of theft, poisoning the well, and massively profiting off it.
People who confidently assert either opinion in this regard are wrong. The lawsuits are still pending. But if I had to bet, I'd bet on the OpenAI side. Even if they don't win outright, they'll probably carve out enough exemptions and mandatory licensing deals to be comfortable.
And LLMs are really a bad choice for infringement. They are slow, costly and unreliable at replicating any large piece of text compared to illegal copying. There is no space to perfectly memorize the majority of its training set. A 10B models is trained on 10T tokens, no space for more than 0.1% to be properly memorized.
I see this overreaction as an attempt to strengthen copyright, a kind of nimby-ism where existing authors cut the ladder to the next generation by walling off abstract ideas and making it more probably to get sued for accidental similarities.
That profit will be squeezed to zero over the long term if Zuck maintains his current strategy.
That's not true anymore, Meta isn't behind OpenAI
If Meta stopped now, there would still be profit in the market, but if they keep releasing Llamas for the next 5+ years then OpenAI et al will be fighting for scraps. Not everybody needs a model that can prove theorems.
So, capitalism.
It's taboo to criticize that though.
It's not, that's playing the victim. There are hundreds or thousands of posts daily all over HN criticising capitalism. And most seem upvoted, not downvoted.
Don't even get me started on reddit.
However markets also have limits. A power company competing for your business is largely a farce, since the power lines to your home will not change. A cable company in America is almost certainly a functional monopoly, and that fact is reflected in their quality of service. Infrastructure of all sorts makes for piss-put markets because true competition is all but impossible, and even if it does kind of work, it’s inefficient. A customer must become knowledgeable in some way to have a ghost of a clue what they’re buying, or trust entirely dubious information from marketing. And, even if somehow everything is working up to this point, corporations are, above all, cost cutters and if you put one in charge of an area where it feels as though customers have few if any choices and the friction to change is high, they will immediately begin degrading their quality of services to save money in the budget.
And this is only from first principles, we have so many other things that could be discussed from mass market manipulation to the generous subsidies of a stunning variety that basically every business at scale enjoys to the rapacious compensation schemes that have become entirely too commonplace in the executive room, etc etc etc.
To put it short: I have no issue at all with capitalism operating in non-essential to life industries. My issue is all the ways it’s infiltrated the essential ones and made them demonstrably worse, less efficient, and more expensive for every consumer.
The competitive landscape where consumers vote for the best products with their purchasing decisions is simply not a sustainable equilibrium.
The ability to accumulate capital (I.e. “capitalism”) leads to regulatory protectionism through lobbying, bribery, etcetera.
The biggest and most salient critique of liberal capitalism as we now exist under is that it requires far too many of the "right people" to be in positions of power; it presumes good faith where it shouldn't, and fails to reckon with bad actors as what they are far too often, the modern American Republican party being an excellent example (but far from the only one).
There is a saying that when you have a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.
In what world is this taboo? That critique comes back in at least half the HN threads about AI.
Watch any non-technical video about AI on Youtube and it will mention people being worried of the power of mega-corporations.
Your take is about as taboo as wearing a Che Guevara tshirt.
All sorts of more taboo stuff gets said on hacker news. It's not exactly a cultural bellwether that ideas outside of the overton window are entertained here.
Wearing a che guevara t shirt is similarly "allowed" in public, but the last article about him in the new york times is fawning admiration for his assassin.
Criticism of capitalism is still taboo.
Pirate Bay: largely facilitating the theft of material from large corporations by normal people, for generally personal use.
LLM training: theft of material from literally _everyone_, for the purposes of corporate profit (or, well, heh, intended profit; of course all LLM-based enterprises are currently massively loss-making, and may remain so forever).
This undermines your own point.
Also, open source models exist.
Help me understand the negative effect of AI and LLMs on hackers.
I've never actually used an LLM though - I just don't have any use for such a thing. All my writing and programming are done for fun and automation would take that away.
Bill Gates' infamous letter was sent in 1976[1].
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Open_Letter_to_Hobbyists
And you're trying to suggest that these two are the same?
Edit: I don't mind downvotes, karma means nothing, but I do appreciate when folk speak up and say why I might be wrong. :)