I feel kind of good knowing that my code, design decisions, styles, are now part of the data shaping all software now.
It’s a wild thought to think that of all the things that will remain on this earth after you’re gone, it’ll be your GPL contributions reconstituting themselves as an LLM’s hallucinations.
Our comments here on HN are almost certainly going to live in fame/infamy forever. The twitter firehose is a pathway to 140-character immortality essentially.
You can already summon an agent to ingest essentially an entire commenter's history, correlate it across different sites based on writing style or similar nicknames, and then chat with you as that persona, even more so with a finetune or lora. I can do that with my gmail and text message history and it becomes eerily similar to me.
History is going to be much more direct and personal in the future. We can also do this with historical figures with voluminous personal correspondence, that's possible now.
It's very interesting because I think the era before mass LLM usage but also after digitalization is going to be the most intensely studied. We've lived through a thing that is going to be on the cusp of history, for better or worse.
Of course we should really be talking about using the state or otherwise to make training larger and larger models impossible. It's not in the public good if LLMs actually get good enough to replace a lot of human labor, only a small handful of billionaires and their cronies will ever benefit from that. The Luddites were not wrong after all.
There are also people who want to be eaten by a literal cannibal. I say, no thanks.
The c is for code. If adopted we could spend forever arguing how the c is pronounced and whether the original had a cedilla, circonflex or rhymes with bollocks, which seems somehow appropriate. Everyone uses xene instead. x is chi but most people don't notice.
That's 2X the salary of a lot of the world's software developers
But yes, that's very expensive and surprising to me.
I did implicitly assume USD but yeah still crazy cash, that'd pay for 2 junior-mid level devs in aus D=
Yeah Atlassian. 1/3rd of my team were given the boot sadly. One guy had 12 years at the company - crazy times
Is that the game? Lock in companies to this "new reality" with cheap tokens then once they fire all their devs, bait and switch to 2X the cost.
[0]: The pattern, or, as gamers would call it, the "meta", is that every ambitious person/entity wants to control as much of the economic/material surplus as possible. The most effective and efficient (effort per control) way of doing this is to make yourself into as much of a bottle-neck as humanly possible. In graph-theory this corresponds to betweenness-centrality, and you want to maximize that value. To put it in mundane terms, you want to be as much of a monopoly as you can be (Thiel is infamous for saying this, but it does check out, historically). To maximize betweenness, or to maximize monopoly, is to maximize how much society/economy depends on you. This is such a dominant strategy (game-theory term, but in modern gaming world, they might call this a "cheesy strat" -- which just means that the game lacks strategic variety, forcing players to hone that one strategy), that we even have some old laws (anti-trust, etc) designed to prevent it. And it makes a lot of sense: Standard Oil was reviled because everything in the economy either required oil or required something that did. 20th-century USA did a lot to mitigate this. It forced monopolies like ATT to fund general research like Bell Labs (still legendary) towards a public good (a kind of tax, but probably much more socially-beneficial). It also broke up the monopolies, and passed anti-profit laws (e.g. hospitals were not allowed to make a profit until 1978; I have seen in the last 10 years a tiny cancer clinic grow into a massive gleaming hospital -- a machine that transforms sickness and grief into Scrooge McDuck vaults of cash). This monopolistic tendency of the commercial sector, is a tendency towards centralization, which yields efficiency, sure, but also creates the conditions for control and rent-seeking and exploitation.
[1]: Much of the cloud-computing craze was similar in character (and also failed to deliver on some of its promises, such as reducing/replacing IT overhead (they just renamed IT to DevOps)). And Web2 itself was about creating and monopolizing a new kind of ad-channel and lead-generation-machine. There is a funny twist, that a capitalist society like the USA, has much more deeply rooted incentives to create a panopticon than communist states of the past ever did. Neither is pretty of course. The communists demanded conformity and loyalty, while the capitalists demand consumption and rent.