It seems like the issue here is, users want to be spoken to in colloquial language they understand, but any document a legal entity produces MUST be in unambiguous “legal” language.

So unless there’s a way to write a separate “unofficial FAQ” with what they want to say, they are limited to what they legally have to say.

And maybe that’s a good thing. Maybe now they need to create a formal document specifying in the best legalese exactly what they mean when they say they “will never sell your data”, because if there’s any ambiguity around it, then customers deserve for them to disambiguate. Unfortunately, it’s probably not going read as quick and catchy as an ambiguous statement.

I agree that you can’t know if the AI has been deliberately trained to act nefarious given the right circumstances. But I maintain that it’s (currently) impossible to know if any AI had been inadvertently trained to do the same. So the security implications are no different. If you’ve given an AI the ability to exfiltrating data without any oversight, you’ve already messed up, no matter whether you’re using a single AI you trained yourself, a black box full of experts, or deepseek directly.

But all this is about whether merely sharing weights is “open source”, and you’ve convinced me that it’s not. There needs to be a classification, similar to “source available”; this would be like “weights available”.

Those security concerns seem completely unrelated to the model, though. You can have a completely open source model that fits all those requirements, and still give it too much unfettered access to important resources with no way of actually knowing what it will do until it tries.

Is there any good LLM that fits this definition of open source, then? I thought the “training data” for good AI was always just: the entire internet, and they were all ethically dubious that way.

What is the concern with only having weights? It’s not abritrary code exectution, so there’s no security risk or lack of computing control that are the usual goals of open source in the first place.

To me the weights are less of a “blob” and more like an approximate solution to an NP-hard problem. Training is traversing the search space, and sharing a model is just saying “hey, this point looks useful, others should check it out”. But maybe that is a blob, since I don’t know how they got there.

It’s also the free market for those corporations to buy a government and use it to outlaw competition.

Yeah, I agree that in the long term those two sentiments are inconsistent, but in the short term we have to deal with allegedly misguided layoffs, and worse user experiences, which I think makes both fair to criticise. Maybe firing everyone and using slop AI will make your company go bankrupt in a few years, and that’s great; in the meantime, employees everywhere can rightfully complain about the slop and the jobs.

But yeah, I don’t think it’s fair to complain about how “inefficient” an early technology is and also call it “magic beans”.

Hah, see that’s what I thought when various family members asked if I had heard about it. Turns out, if our electronics need grounding, so must our bodies…

I have made only factual statements. You can believe I’m arrogant for doing so, you can believe the preference of hundreds of millions of people is “niche” or “few” in number. Those are called opinions.

Which statements have I made that you believe to be my opinion?

Yeah, I understand that you personally choose to disagree with reality, maybe you don’t like what reality has become, but unfortunately that doesn’t make it less real.

Twitter wasn’t profitable for its entire existence, it’s often a cesspool of ragebaiters, but clearly it has value because the second it was taken over, everyone insisted on continuing to use it, even choosing to migrate to various clones.

Uber and Lyft have been struggling to be profitable by effectively stealing from their drivers, but millions of people get off a plane and immediately use the services every day. It clearly has value.

Same for doordash and uber eats.

Your personal distaste for the business practices are valid, but they’re not relevant when discussing what the current state of the technology is. For many millions of people, chatgpt has (for better and worse) replaced traditional search engines. Something like 80% of students now regularly use AI for their homework. When Deepseek released, it immediately jumped to #1 on the Apple Store.

None of that is because they’re “magic beans” from which no value sprouts. Like it or not, people use AI all. the. time. for everything they can imagine. It objectively, undeniably has value. You can staunchly say pretend it doesn’t, but only if you are willingly blind to the voluntary usage patterns of hundreds of millions (possibly billions) of people every hour of every day.

And for the record, I am not in that group. I do not use any LLMs for anything currently, and if anything makes me use AI against my will, I will promptly uninstall it (pun intended).

No opinions whatsoever. I believe I made that clear in my list of things to disregard when considering the objective reality of current AI tech.

Lol this article is very relevant to a lot of scam industries (essential oils, Earthing, 5G protection crystals, etc), but AI is objectively not one of them.

Regardless of how much of a bubble we’re in, regardless of how many bad ideas are being pushed to get VC funding or pump a stock, regardless of how unethical or distopian the tech is, AI objectively has value. It’s proving to be the most disruptive tech since the world wide web (which famously had a very similar bubble of bad ideas), so to call it “magic beans” is just wishful thinking at best.

“Facebook says it’s not forcing you to use Facebook”

The US leadership right now, maybe, but remember that Trump didn’t win so much as the incumbent lost. Most Americans didn’t vote for right-wing policies, they voted against inflation and housing costs. It’ll only take a year or two before people start realizing that Trump can’t fix the problems either (or won’t, because that would mean eating the rich).

So yeah, probably no alliance in the short term, but the US isn’t even its own ally right now, so we need to see how this all shakes out before we know how we’ll align with the EU in the long term (i.e. beyond this term).

Trump knows this, and he’s also been advised that the one thing that historically restores popularity for a leader is expanding a country’s territory. So my guess is that, the worse Trump’s approval rating is, the more likely it’ll be that he tries to take Greenland or Panama. Which I think is still a huge gamble for his approval rating.

Yeah, i don’t like that all the more recent devices all added remotes and explicit apps you have to install and launch. Also the “newest” 4k-capable chromecast is from 2020, so I would already be upgrading to old hw that’s a worse experience.

Hah, I was going to say, I do check for updates at least once when I first get it, because I have run into TVs that shipped with HDR bugs in the stock firmware.

For the Chromecast, what happens with yours? Mine randomly restarts, or reconnects to wifi, or sometimes Plex has trouble buffering until I reboot it.

I recently bought a raspi5 to try out FCast, though currently afaik only Grayjay supports it.

I just never connect my TV to the internet and never have any problems. My old Chromecast is showing its age though.

I assume DeepComputing isn’t releasing any of their designs as open source, right? They’re just producing RISC-V compatible chips?

What the? I’m literally saying what action to take, what is happening? Is there maybe a bug where you only see the first few characters of my post? Are you able to read these characters I’m typing? Testing testing testing. Let me know how far you get. Maybe there’s just too many words for you? Test test. Say “elephant” if you can read this.

we will not land in a society where the general public profits from not having work. It will be the same owners of capital profiting as per usual.

If we do nothing, sure. I’m suggesting, like the article, that we do something.

The only sentiment I took issue with was the poster above who suggested that somehow the solution would be to delete/destroy illegally trained networks. I’m just saying that’s not practical nor progressive. AI is here to stay, we just need to create legislature that ensures it works for us, especially when it couldn’t have been built without us.

I didn’t misinterpret what you were saying, everything I said applies to the specific case you lay out. If illegal networks were somehow entirely destroyed, someone would just make them again. That’s my point, there’s no way around that, there’s just holding people accountable when they do it. IMO that takes the form of restitutions to the people proportional to profits.