This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
They don't want any regulation ever or for things to slow down, more broadly they hate the frontier labs in general. There are a few groups in this category, some are angry that they passed on investing in the labs early on in favor of crypto. Broadly their preferred future looks something like the labs burning the money of other investors to produce powerful models that chinese labs are allowed to distill and then they can run them locally to power their anti-social revenue extracting products. They see themselves as the "application layer" that Huang often talks about. They have very little vision about the future of AI and broadly only care about what makes their low effort wrapper start up more money.
Can you explain the alternative view? Can you point to a regulation proposed by any of the labs that would actually hurt the little guys more than the frontier labs? Or at all?
As per our discussion last month, it seems pretty clear that Anthropic's proposed regulations would hit "little guys" like Mistral, and their regulations impose a burden on small companies, burdens are costly, cost hurts, ergo is seems pretty clear that the regulations would hurt little guys. (This does not necessarily mean that regulations are bad.)
With that being said, I'm still not clear on your argument. If your position is that the regulations wouldn't hurt the little guys, or would hurt the frontier labs (whom you say they hate) more so than the little guys, improving the competitive position of the little guys, then why are the little guys against the regulations?
Ok, so Mistral would be required to to submit to the security requirements that the other labs have to submit to. Such as registering with CAISI or some other organization depending on what blueprint you're talking about and submit their models to pre-release testing. How does this lock them out of the frontier exactly? I actually wouldn't be surprised if they already had stricter requirements from the EU given they're based in france.
They want the labs to push the frontier forward as fast as possible, the labs want to slow down. They also find it annoying when the labs have guardrails at all. There's two things "the little guys" could mean, smaller labs and "application layer" startups. The concern for the smaller labs seems totally hallucinated, the idea that a lab is going to be able to put billions into training runs but can't comply with some oversight is absurd on its face. The real concern is about these "application layer" startups who are shoveling absolute rancid slop everywhere as fast as they can. These slop merchants don't discriminate on what type of regulations are proposed for AI, they oppose it all categorically.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link