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Comment by Jtarii | Hacker News Reader

>Like we either live in a world with freedom or we don’t

This is something I would expect a 12 year old to say. Constraints on your freedom are literally everywhere in every interaction you have with every part of society.

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That's a bit literal of an interpretation. Even acknowledging freedom as a spectrum that can never truly be absolute, there's gotta be a threshold you cross where you'd say "OK, we no longer have basic freedoms." And not only are we definitely screaming towards that threshold, but people seem thrilled about it, for a variety of reasons.

All I can say to that is I guess I hope everyone enjoys the world they think they wanted.

The article seems to be taking a very literal interpretation of "freedom" as in any restriction on what a local LLM can do is totalitarian dystopia.

I don't think it should be legal to get an LLM to research how to make a bioweapon in your basement, that seems like a bad idea.

And there’s where some people disagree.

IMHO, one should be able to research absolutely anything, for any reason. “Forbidden knowledge” shouldn’t exist as a category, freedom of thought should be protected, even if that thought is intended to cause harm.

What shouldn’t be possible (and obviously not legal as well) is building that bioweapon.

I got bad news for you - GLM 5.2 runs on basement-level hardware and supports 1 million token contexts for bioweapon research. There are already people halfway finished with novel bioweapons research as we speak! A man in Tuscon is designing the next sarin gas! A 12 year old in Stockholm is perfecting his prompt for the Fart Virus! Humanity is doomed.

Well, we're doomed once they iron out all the kinks, get their supply chain set up, hire professionals to assemble their device, find a clandestine cell of conspirators to deploy the thing... then it's P(doom) all the way to the bank. AI is the red mercury of the 21st century, a surefire shortcut to escaping the law and building your terrorist superweapon/time machine of choice.

I just don't subscribe to the belief that knowledge itself is dangerous. Well, that's a bit of a cop-out; a lot of things aren't inherently dangerous but that doesn't mean they must never ever be regulated, but regulating knowledge and information under the belief that it is essentially inherently dangerous to have access to it is truly as cut-and-dry as it comes. We already know where that ends.

When people say this they’re most likely referring to negative liberty - freedom from external coercion and interference. This is not the same as positive liberty - “I can do whatever I want”.

I think it’s self-evident there is a difference between having the “freedom” to punch random people on the sidewalk, and having the freedom to walk down the sidewalk without being randomly punched. Now replace walking down the sidewalk with using an uncensored LLM and it might be clearer what freedom means in this context.

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