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Comment by jeffreysmith | Hacker News Reader

Not sure what's with the HN tone on this announcement. AI2 are really some of the best people around for creating truly open artifacts for the whole ecosystem. Their work on OLMo and Molmo is some of the most transparent and educational material you can find on model building. This is just great news for everyone.

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Maybe because many of us are not from the US. The stated goal is US dominance of the AI field, and sorry if the rest of us don't see that as a good thing nor particularly open.

>The stated goal is US dominance of the AI field

Any country tries to dominate any field if they can do it, it's just human nature. Why is that a bad thing?

That constant competition for superiority between nations is how humanity has evolved from hunter gatherer to having tractors, microwave ovens, airplanes, internet and penicillin.

As an American, I obviously can get behind it, but I can easily see how a declared goal of superiority of others would rub those others the wrong way (and possibly prevent their contribution)

[Insert xkcd new standard image here]

>a declared goal of superiority of others would rub those others the wrong way

So what? Does that change anything in how things work in reality? Everyone knows it, so why pussyfoot around it?.

Why are people nowadays so sensitive about saying the truth of how things work? Have people been coddled that much that they've can't handle reality? A good life lesson is that the world does not revolve around your feelings.

It's not my feelings mate, if you don't live outside the US and have not been subjected to their unipolar attitude you will probably never understand and there is literally nothing I'm going to say to convince you of the objective reality the rest of us face.

Sorry, I wasn't talking about you specifically, but the general "you" as in you the reader.

As an American researcher, I can assure you that the Chinese superiority and behavior in the field is certainly ENCOURAGING my contributions.

Yes, competition is good. Monopoly is bad. A more distributed power structure is much better for overall progress, and even for the monopolist in the long run (Ex: Intel).

>Monopoly is bad.

So what do you propose? Should the US stop development till other countries catch up?

Nah, I'd say just do more anti-monopoly anti-inequality work. Probably start internally, that's a massive enough task on its own (eg breaking up big tech). Assist other countries eg with aid if (and only if) they are doing the same. This is a big topic, ask your favorite frontier LLM about it.

Unless China does the same that's an unrealistic ask. That would be like doing nuclear disarmament but only you and everyone else gets to keep their nukes.

Your "nukes" are leaking into the water supply. Inequality shows up a million different ways that Americans don't fully understand yet, eg inflation (dominant companies increasing profits), teacher shortages (low wages), student debt (not an issue for the wealthy so why fix it), housing prices (corporate landlords, exclusionary zoning), layoffs (despite record profits) etc etc. This situation (Trump/Musk/Bezos taking most of the gains) is just not long-term stable, and if any other country wants to do the same to themselves let them. The longer it goes the harder it will be to fix.

Again, go have this discussion with the LLM you trust, it's much more informative.

The issues you described have nothing to do with AI development.

India also has an advanced space program despite many of its people starving and not having running water.

If you decide to invest in advanced tech development only when all your citizens don't have any issues, tech development would stand still.

The Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence projects so far have been very open. They are open about the trained models, the inference code, the training data sets, and the training code. A research group from any country can pick up where AI2 left off if they want to try a different approach or extension. I want to live in a world where there are many models near the top of leader boards, from many different research groups and countries, and I think that AI2 helps enable that.

The stated "US dominance" goal just pays lip service to what appeals to the funders, kind of like how supercomputing projects traditionally claim that they contribute to curing disease or producing clean energy. (Even if it's something far removed from concrete applications, like high fidelity numerical simulations of aqueous solutions.)

Good luck trying to raise money from a NATIONAL science foundation without it being in the NATIONAL interest.

I think there’s an interesting cultural phenomena when dominance and interest are seen as one and the same thing

Of course you can justify this, as people have, but you can't then blame the rest of us non US citizens for not aligning with that goal. The US is only a small portion of the global population and the government itself has a long history of stamping on the rest of us.

But better for the rest of the world than private US tech companies dominating.

This just in: AI2 pivoting to a for-profit model, and is seeking venture capital funding.

Oops, sorry that’s next year’s news. Anyway, this is all ringing very familiar.

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