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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   15631 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 19, 2022

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backed by billions of dollars

This is actually concerning to me. Google's OpenAI and the like are happy to bow before the AI Safety crowd (the 'no racist chatbots' ones, not the 'no paperclip apocalypse' ones) so long as they can still make a gorillion dollars off the technology, and that means they really have no interest in allowing the existence of seedy AI applications like porn generators. That just brings bad PR to the whole field, for literally zero benefit. (Google isnt going to be entering the smut market anytime soon) Thus I worry that we're seeing the begginimgs of another unholy alliance between the progressive left & big money, nominally in the name of moral puritanism but with the real purpose of shoving the AI cat back in the SaaS bag.

I'd not worry too much, since as mentioned people can still use BitTorrent to download movies despite there being billions of dollars going into creating such movies.

Thus I worry that we're seeing the begginimgs of another unholy alliance between the progressive left & big money,

Probably, but not for any reasons that are unique to AI, I think.

I wonder if a better example is 3D printed weapons - the full might of the state is cracking down on them, yet it's still possible. BitTorrent is technically simple, there's no capital cost AFAIK. Models need to be trained, expensively.

But trained models are not so hard to distribute and I'm not sure it is trivial to detect when someone is in the act of training a model, there's just so much compute in the world.

So go after general-purpose GPUs. We're already deploying more and more DRM tech everywhere, and AI/ML loads look sufficiently different from graphics ones that it should actually be quite easy to force (or coordinate) GPUs to require a signature with a key stewarded by Microsoft (like with UEFI) before they load and evaluate anything that looks like an ML model.

Training the latest models already requires something that is far from consumer-grade.

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