> Encourage Open-Source and Open-Weight AI
It's good to see this, especially since they acknowledge that open weights is not equal to open source.
It's good to see this, especially since they acknowledge that open weights is not equal to open source.
In fact, if you open the PDF file and navigate to that section, the content is barely relevant at all.
What increased and decreased in the most recent budget bill? That is the full and complete story.
If no $$ for open source or open weight model development, then that is not a policy priority, despite any nice words to the contrary.
They very clearly have no idea what the fuck they are doing they just know what other people say they should do and their toddler reaction is to do the opposite.
The government owning the machine that does everything.
Tech bros, with their recent love of guruship, with their willingness to do any dark pattern if it means bigger boats for them, owning the entire labor supply in order to improve the lives of 8 bay area families.
And about your thought: I disagree. When I look at those online places, I see echo chambers, trolls and a lack of critical thinking (on how to properly discuss a topic). Some parts might be artificially accelerated, but I don't see propaganda couldn't be fought. People are just coasting, lazy, group thinking, being entertained and angry.
Propaganda is less about what it says, but more about how it makes people _feel_.
If you get the feels strong enough, it doesn't matter what you say. The game is over before you start.
It's also doomed to failure because of how transparent this is, and how abused previous dependencies (like the USD) have been. Every major country will likely slowly move to restrict other major powers' AI systems while implicitly mandating their own.
The USA supposedly have the most data in the world. Companies cannot (in theory) train on integrated sets of information. USA and China to some extent, can train on large amounts of information that is not public. USA in particular has been known for keeping a vast repository of metadata (data about data) about all sorts of things. This data is very refined and organized (PRISM, etc).
This allows training for purposes that might not be obvious when observing the open weights or the source of the inference engine.
It is a double-edged sword though. If anyone is able to identify such non-obvious training inserts and extract information about them or prove they were maliciously placed, it could backfire tremendously.
Transoceanic fiber runs become a very interesting resource, then.
And I think we can already see this. The gains in LLMs are increasingly marginal. There was a hugeeeeeeee jump going from glorified markov chains to something able to consistently produce viable output, but since then each generation of updates has been less and less recognizable to the point that if somebody had to use an LLM for an hour and guess its 'recency'/version, I suspect the results would be scarcely better than random. That's not to say that newer systems are not improving - they obviously are, but it's harder and harder to recognize those changes without having its immediate predecessor to compare against.
Today, Google and Apple both already sell AI products that technically fall under this definition, and did without government "encouragement" in the mix. There isn't a single actionable thing mentioned that would promote further development of such models.
The controllers of the whole system want open weights and source to make sure models aren’t going to expose the population to unapproved ideas and allow the spread of unapproved thoughts or allow making unapproved connections or ask unapproved questions without them being suitably countered to keep everyone in line with the system.
One can become more controlled and wrangle in the edge-cases, and the other has exploding edges.
You can have your politics around the value of open source models, but I find it hard to argue that there aren't MUCH higher risks with the lack of containment of open weights models
The other assumption is that nefarious actors will care about any of this. They'll use what's available, or make their own models, or maybe even steal models (if China had an incredible AI, don't you think other countries would be trying to steal the weights?). Bad actors don't care about moral positions, strangely enough.
Of course, the US is a captured state now and so the current US Government has no problem with Russian election interference so long as it benefits them