882 karma · joined May 29, 2025
Such a negative tone they put on this. Distillation is amazing, because it means anthropic and openai fail to keep a monopoly. Who even are they who claim it's unethical? If it is truly unethical, then so is the mass data scraping they do on my personal website on a regular basis (without my consent), and all the unauthorized use of content produced by authors, blog writers, wikipedia contributors, and creators everywhere. If it is truly unethical, then anthropic, openai, meta, google... all these companies should have deleted their LLMs long ago. This wording disgusts me.
Heck, it would be amazing if we had more models without guardrails - some of the models that are produced via heretic[1] are actually quite nice to use - in particular, I've enjoyed investigating Chinese censorship by interacting with an abliterated model of Qwen3.8-27b. If security is really a concern, then secure your systems - don't attempt to dumb-down the tools we use. If someone breaks your window, then they are responsible, not the hammer they use to do so.
Where is your source for this? It is entirely possible to make a secure computer system, though it does require effort. The article specifically mentions "up to" 10% and the fines applying to companies leaking data on purpose or through negligence. I doubt the fines will be nearly as high for a company that tries to secure a system (and thus prevents more leaks) rather than a company that does not try to secure a system (assuming that leaks will occur), if the same breach happens.
Computers are deterministic (excluding cases where practically impossible cosmic ray events occur), so while we have the power to ensure system security, we should ensure system security. Heck, even just encrypting consumer information and protecting just the keys to this data would already decrease the effectiveness of many data breaches.
The bun team tried to parallelize Zig's semantic analysis a while back - and it DID compile about 4x as fast... YET the builds were no longer deterministic, which is a hard requirement for lots of things. More effort will need to be spent here than naively adding a thread pool. Hopefully Zig's Sema.zig gets faster, but Rust is also super slow at compiling and needs to improve. Oh - one last thing to note, Zig has very fast debug compilation and incremental compilation, it's a real nice thing to work with that you simply can't approach in most other languages right now.
We can't find someone to blame for forces of nature. This includes an earthquake, tsunami, etc. Insurance can help recover from these events, but nobody is "responsible" for the events happening. This may or may not include healthy trees falling. LLMs are not a force of nature, and we can and do expect them to have erroneous output. We can and do assign responsibility to the humans who use LLMs. Again, they are not a force of nature. We control them, we give them the ability to do bad things, so it's pretty obvious that there would be responsibility and blame attached for when things go wrong.