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Besides the things other comments mentioned: There is a longstanding sentiment that "It can't happen here".

The wider public in America more or less blocks out the risks involved. "They're not actually going to blow up the power grid."

Hell, just look at the tech industry. Endless whining about not needing to be regulated, and what have they done? Built an enormous surveilance machine, lead by executives who preemptively kowtow to any authoritarian leader. Europe's attempt to regulate this is still angrily opposed by heaps, even on this very site.

That's a red herring.

The problem is that these are fundamentally NOT reasoning systems. Even when contorted into "reasoning" models, these are just stochastic parrots guessing the next words in the hopes that it's the correct reasoning "step" in the context.

No approach is going to meaningfully work here. Fiddling with the prompt may get you better guesses, but they will always be guesses. Even without the antonym it's just a diceroll on whether the model will skip or add a step.

> I don't think that's true for their VR/MR hardware.

They literally record the cameras and 'screen', then send it off to their servers.

The VR hardware absolutely spies on you. Even if you tell it not to, it still shows up in the mobile app.

> You can easily be undercut. If you're successful selling FOSS, it's because you've made it really easy for your customers, been really helpful to them, or because they want to pay you because they like you, probably because they know you're putting work in.

What you are mincing words about here is the fact that no, you are not selling software, you are receiving voluntary donations.

It's the same rhetoric as always "Um akshually you can sell Free Software" when what is meant is "You can put it up for sale".

I am not obliged to humour it, so I will not.

> supplying corporations with free labor in return for nothing.

As opposed to FOSS, which is currently ... Coping and Seething in this thread about receiving nothing in return.

It ain't a ploy. We just don't care if corporations use it.

> The problem is trying to benefit from the concept without actually believing in it, and failing. The point of Free Software is that people have access to the software that runs the machines that their lives depend on. The point of Open Source is to supply free labor to others in order to hopefully get attention, praise, or simply personal satisfaction.

The word for that is "cult".

> Under copyleft you pay for free code with more code

You do not. There is nothing in the GPL that mandates you contribute. You can simply use the software as-is, and never contribute. Sit on your hands when there's a major exploit and wait until someone else fixes it, then take their fix.

It is, in fact, piss easy to get around the GPL because it only applies to distribution. If you SaaS or simply do not distribute the software, you can do whatever you want. You can dynamic link all day against evil proprietary software so long as you make the user download the GPL'd bit from a third party.

And this is obvious to all because the AGPL exists to fix this, but is an even worse shitshow.

> Corporations can just build upon your codebase and privatize your base effort, giving just the middle finger back to community.

And the humble non-commercial clause trivially resolves this while the copyleft licenses have spent decades trying and failing.

> So it's Free as in speech, not as in beer.

See how in my comment I use 4 synonyms for "free", including "gratis"? That was not just trying to sound cool. That was trying (and evidently, failing, given you're not the only one) to pre-empt this exact point.

> It's entirely possible to sell free software.

This is much more controversial in the FOSS space than it seems to outsiders.

There is the obvious problem that one of the Freedoms involves the ability to take your purchased copy and give it away 'gratis' to everyone else, thus undercutting the market for the original author.

And this begs the question: Can I practically charge money for the freedoms? Must it be gratis?

It would be relatively easy to write a license with a royalty fee. Every time you distribute a copy of the fork, you must pay the original author. This would be a cromulent way to get around the piracy problem.

Except it is deeply controversial. To the point where even the FSF tries to play games around "selling the software" versus "selling the service of providing a download of the software".

In practice, no you can't really sell Free Software. Just look at all the startups that were Open Source and immediately shut that down when the infinite free venture capital ran out.

> Non-commercial actually worsens the free-rider situation imo. I don't count it as Free Software at all.

I simply do not care about the designation of "Free Software". It sucks and has painted itself into a corner. Modern policing of it's meaning (especially by the OSI which hilariously tries to pretend that "Open Source" is subject to FOSS definitions) is entirely just hypocrisy favouring the GPL.

If you want to get paid, cash money, just fucking put it in the license. Use a user agreement like everyone else on the planet.

If you want it to be Free, slap a 'gratis' license on there and don't get upset when companies don't give anything back.

> They've just legally given up all the coercive options, so the only tool left is complaint

My previous comment on this was unclear.

The very act of complaining about it betrays the idea that it's "freedom".

Either companies have the freedom to take without giving back, in which case forcing them to buy the software breaks those freedoms, but you shouldn't complain.

Or they do not have the freedom, in which case just sell the software normally.

> if the end user can't use it for commercial purposes then the software is by definition not FOSS software.

Okay but like, who cares. The definition of "Free Software" is just whatever RMS screeches about. The OSI is rather biased towards them, and importantly, does not own the trademark.

> That would be a major restriction on their freedom.

Then why complain that they excercise that freedom.

Either commercial use without paying back is an explicitly granted and supported freedom, and then companies doing that is fine. Or it is not, in which case restrict commercial use on the free license if you want companies to pay up.

Public transit companies that make tickets explicitly free and then get upset nobody pays them would get laughed out the room for bemoaning "free-riders".

It may be a "technically correct" use of the word, but it's not a useful definition to include this.

It is not "free riding" to take the software that is explicitly given away, for free, gratis, nada, nothing, and not pay anything in return.

"I want this to be given away free for ideological reasons but you must also pay me" is a moronic position. Pick one or the other, if you want money, just sell the software.

The refusal of "FOSS" communities to use a direct non-commercial clause is an entirely self-inflicted wound.

Different tasks then? If you are using VLMs in the context of medical imaging, I have concerns. That is not a place to use hallucinatory AI.

But yes, the transformer model itself isn't useless. It's the application of it. OCR, image description, etc, are all that kind of narrow-intelligence task that lends itself well to the fuzzy nature of AI/ML.

> Anyone who says AI is useless

Most of those people are a bit bad at making their case. What they mean but don't convey well is that AI is useless for it's proclaimed uses.

You are correct that LLMs are pretty good at guessing this kind of well-documented & easily verifiable but hard to find information. That is a valid use. (Though, woe betide the fool who uses LLMs for irreversible destructive actions.)

The thing is though, this isn't enough. There just aren't that many questions out there that match those criteria. Generative AI is too expensive to serve that small a task. Charging a buck a question won't earn the $100 billion OpenAI needs to balance the books.

Your use case gets dismissed because on it's own, it doesn't sustain AI.

> "Silicon Valley" is not an actor (human or organization of humans) that decided any such thing.

Oh come on, you understand full well that they're referring to the wider SV business/software development "ecosystem".

Which is absolutely to blame for javascript becoming the default language for full-stack development, and the resulting JS-ecosystem being a dysfunctional shitshow.

Most of this new JS-ecosystem was built by venture capital startups & tech giants obsessed with deploying quickly, with near-total disregard for actually building something robustly functional and sustainable.

e.g. React as a framework does not make sense in the real world. It is simply too slow on the median device.

It does, however, make sense in the world of the Venture Capital startup. Where you don't need users to be able to actually use your app/website well. You only need that app/website to exist ASAP so you can collect the next round of investment.

> To be fair, Brendan Eich was making a scripting language for the 90's web.

He was, and he doesn't deserve the full blame for being bad at designing a language when that wasn't his prior job or field of specialization.

But Lua is older so there's this element of "it didn't need to be this bad, he just fucked up" (And Eich being a jerk makes it amusing to pour some salt on that wound. Everyone understands it's not entirely serious.)

> So yes, LLMs will make mistakes, but humans do too

Are you using LLMs though? Because pretty much all of these systems are fairly normal classifiers, what would've been called Machine Learning 2-3 years ago.

The "AI hype is real because medical AI is already in use" argument (and it's siblings) perform a rhetorical trick by using two definitions of AI. "AI (Generative AI) hype is real because medical AI (ML classifiers) is already in use" is a non-sequitur.

Image classifiers are very narrow intelligences, which makes them easy to understand and use as tools. We know exactly what their failure modes are and can put hard measurements on them. We can even dissect these models to learn why they are making certain classifications and either improve our understanding of medicine or improve the model.

...

Basically none of this applies to Generative AI. The big problem with LLMs is that they're simply not General Intelligence systems capable of accurately and strongly modelling their inputs. e.g. Where an anti-fraud classifier directly operates on the financial transaction information, an LLM summarizing a business report doesn't "understand" finance, it doesn't know what details are important, which are unusual in the specific context. It just stochastically throws away information.

> sorry, not to nitpick, but I am really not a fan of one-based indexing

It is very funny how this is just the one sole criticism that always gets brought up. Not that other problems don't exist, but they're not very talked about.

Lua's strength as a language is that it does a lot quite well in ways that aren't noticeable. But when you compare things to the competition then they're quite obvious.

E.g. Type Coercion. Complete shitshow in lots of languages. Nightmare in Javascript. In Lua? It's quite elegant but most interestingly, effortlessly elegant. Very little of the rest of the language had to change to accomodate the improvement. (Excercise for the reader: Spot the one change that completely fixes string<->number conversion)

Makes Brendan Eich look like a total clown in comparison.

Do keep in mind that both Trump and Andreessen & co are not interested in deregulation for ideological reasons, only because this specific deregulation is favourable for the men in question.

It's not about "open AI" but just opposition to the tech giants. And as a consequence, there's a danger that they may pivot on AI regulation the moment anything happens to the current AI bubble that makes it unappealing for VC funding. (OpenAI & co raising the prices on the models to above operating costs would almost certainly eviscerate the AI startup scene)

> Also OpenAI in no way has a monopoly of the kind that Visa/MC has.

I think this is misreading how literal the comparison is meant to be; Sherwood's running a bunch of "OpenAI is X" articles today. This is not about the massive duopoly which has been catastrophic for US payments, but about the way companies entrench themselves.

> Doesn't explain what regulations Visa pushed for and got which helped it maintain its monopoly.

Those details are in the linked WSJ article; https://www.wsj.com/finance/banking/visa-wanted-a-vast-empir...

> but doesn't really present any evidence to support it.

The main points of concern are mentioned; OpenAI is pushing for "AI regulation" that focusses on the nebulous "doomsday"/skynet scenarios, rather than any of the material harms of AI. The subtext of that is a straightforward "you should ban anyone else building AI because only we can do it safely".

Similarly, OpenAI demanding it's investors not fund competitors is pretty ridiculous and explicitly trying to establish a monopoly.

> Meanwhile, no one answers this because they are getting value.

You're literally doing the same thing you're accusing of. Every HN thread is full of AI boosters claiming AI to be the future with no backing evidence.

Riddle me this. If all these people are "getting value", why are all these companies losing horrendous amounts of money? Why has nobody figured out how to be profitable?

> Please take the time to learn, it will give you value.

Yeah, yeah, just prompt engineer harder. That'll make the stochastic parrot useful. Anyone who has criticism just does so because they're dumb and you're smart. Same as it always was. Everyone opposed to the metaverse just didn't get it bro. You didn't get NFTs bro. You didn't get blockchain bro.

None of these previous bubbles had money in it (beyond scamming idiots), if AI wants to prove it's not another empty tech bubble, pay up. Show me the money. Should be easy, if it's automating so many expensive man-hours of labour. People would be lining up to pay OpenAI.

It's a good example of how ridiculous the AI training situation is.

They claim it's fair use for them to steal all data they want, but you're not allowed to use AI data output, despite this data literally not being subject to copyright protections on account of lacking a human author.

And especially Github. They already have an enormous corpus that is licensed under MIT/equivalent licenses, explicitly permitting them to do this AI nonsense. All they had to do was use only the code they were allowed to use, maybe put up an attribution page listing all the repos used, and nobody would've minded because of the explicit opt-in given ahead of time.

But no. They couldn't bother with even that little respect.

> but the facts that he was in possession of were not only widely known at the time but were the subject of an ongoing lawsuit that had launched months prior.

That is an exceedingly charitable read of these lawsuits.

Everyone knows LLMs are copyright infringement machines. Their architecture has no distinction between facts and expressions. For an LLM to be capable of learning and repeating facts, it must also be able to learn and repeat expressions. That is copyright infringement in action. And because these systems are used to directly replace the market for human-authored works they were trained on, it is also copyright infringement in spirit. There is no defending against the claim of copyright infringement on technical details. (C.f. Google Books, which was ruled fair use because of it's strict delineation of facts about books and the expressions of their contents, and provides the former but not a substitute for the latter.)

The legal defense AI companies put up is entirely predicated on "Well you can't prove that we did a copyright infringement on these specific works of yours!".

Which is nonsense, getting LLMs to regurgitate training data is easy. As easy at it is for them to output facts. Or rather, it was. AI companies maintain this claim of "you can't prove it" by aggressively filtering out any instances of problematic content whenever a claim surfaces. If you didn't collect extensive data before going public, the AI company quickly adds your works to it's copyright filter and proclaims in court that their LLMs do not "copy".

A copyright filter that scans all output for verbatim reproductions of training data sounds like a reasonable compromise solution, but it isn't. LLMs are paraphrasing machines, any such copyright filter will simply not work because the token sequence 2nd-most-probable to a copyrighted expression is a simple paraphrase of that copyrighted expression. Now, consider: LLMs treat facts and expressions as the same. Filtering impedes the LLM's ability to use and process facts. Strict and extensive filtering will lobotomize the system.

This leaves AI companies in a sensitive legal position. They are not playing fair in the courts. They are outright lying in the media. The wrong employees being called to testify will be ruineous. "We built an extensive system to obstruct discovery, here's the exact list of copyright infringement we hid". Even just knowing which coworkers worked on what systems (and should be called to testify) is dangerous information.

Sure. The information was public. But OpenAI denies it and gaslights extensively. They act like it's still private information, and to the courts, it currently still is.

And to clarify: No I'm not saying murder or any other foul play was involved here. Murder isn't the way companies silence their dangerous whistleblowers anyway. You don't need to hire a hitman when you can simply run someone out of town and harass them to the point of suicide with none of the legal culpability. Did that happen here? Who knows, phone & chat logs will show. Friends and family will almost certainly have known and would speak up if that is the case.

> Some oddly defensive reactions here.

They're not odd. These reactions pop up to all criticism of the current tech hype bubble. Happened with metaverse, NFTs, blockchain, etc.

They know that the emperor has no clothes. That the moment people in power start asking "So... where's all the profit on this investment?" it's game over.

AI is supported by massive subsidies and R&D from the big tech giants. Wall Street demanding that Microsoft stop wasting tens of billions on investment in a product that does not generate a profit for Microsoft will kill AI as it exists right now. OpenAI will raise their prices significantly, killing most-to-all of the startups relying on them.

This is especially dire because there's copyright and regulatory changes going on. An AI winter now means there's substantial risk of the next "AI summer" being crippled by actually having to abide by copyright and being subject to regulations.

Startups, not big tech companies.

> Am I reading the wrong page?

Yes. That's a separate investigation; "Today's action focuses specifically on the assessment of Meta's practices under EU consumer law and is distinct from the ongoing ... , and the assessment by the Irish Data Protection Commission under the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)."

The illegality of "Pay or Consent" is a GDPR thing. The EDPB ruling on that issue is here: https://www.edpb.europa.eu/system/files/2024-04/edpb_opinion...

But it's an extremely settled matter. The GDPR says explicitly that consent is not "freely given" if the provision of a service is dependent on said consent. (Where the service does not absolutely require the data processing in question; See Article 7, recital 43)

> EU didn't go into an uncontrolled spree investing every company that had .com in its name and ruined thousands of lives and wasted billions of dollars.

This is the thing that so many Americans in tech don't seem to understand. VC Twitter is full of smugposting about how the US has "$5 trillion market-cap of startups" and the EU doesn't.

And what they miss is that the EU doesn't want Silicon Valley. It doesn't want the "trillions in startups". Because essentially none of them turn any profit. Why on earth would anyone want $5 trillion dollars in companies that do not make financial sense yet have awful externalities.

I have some excellent news for you about the legality of targeted advertising under the GDPR.

The GDPR is very clear about this. Advertising is not a legitimate interest or a functionally-required data processing, ergo, it may only be done with user consent. And that user consent may not be coerced in any way at all, you may not even refuse access to services if users reject their data being used.

It's taking a while to go up and down the courts, but the days of ad-tech are numbered.

A piece of advice: Avoid using general and indirect terms like "Them" when referring to the state of Israel and/or it's government.

Antisemites deliberately use such language to conflate the Israeli government with the global Jewish population, in order to blame & slander the latter for the actions of the former.

If you use similar language, you'll sound like an antisemite.

It is Israel's problem either way.

Either Israel is involved themselves, which is quite plausible given their history of this shit.

Or Israel is not involved, and they massively fucked up by letting their malware be used against their supposed allies.

In both cases, we are left with the question: Why are we letting this country develop malware with our approval and funding?

> Consider that the alternative to reading the summary often isn't reading the entire text yourself. It's reading nothing.

Having no information is always preferable to having wrong information.

> If you ask an intern to summarize some text, you trust them to do a half decent job

Yes.

And if I were to propose that we filter all information we consume through completel unqualified interns summarizing it, I'd be laughed out of the room.

Yet that is the future all these AI firms seek to build.