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 -
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.
Your position upstream was "it's simply not the case that they give the labs asking for them a competitive advantage" and then you asked me to "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?" Seems like you can create a competitive advantage without locking down the entire space for yourself.
As we discussed previously, you can hit the FLOPs requirement to trigger oversight without spending billions; Mistral did it. Now, it is true that Anthropic's proposed rules would also not apply to anyone who made less than $500 million in annual AI-derived revenue or spend more than $1 billion on R&D annually, which doesn't seem to have anything to do with the frontier at all - if someone decided to make an Evil AI in their basement/supervillain lair based on an existing open-sourced design, it wouldn't need to comply with Anthropic's model regulations, even if it exceeded the FLOPs requirement (which some open-source models do).
Which of these application layer startups need to worry about this right now? Perplexity is the biggest one I can think of, and they just now hit $500 million AAR, right? And most of those application layer startups don't really develop their own models, do they? So (to your point) these sorts of regulations might not even hit them.
If I am getting your argument right, then, application layer startups are against regulations less because it might affect them directly (in terms of oversight) and more that it will slow down the progress of the frontier models that they interface with to make their "absolute rancid slop," thus slowing their revenue gain. Is that a good summary?
And you didn't, you refused to do any work so for the conversation to continue I cited the proposed legislation myself which does not hurt the little guys more than the big guys.
the openai FLOPs requirement is 10^26 which cuts a bit higher, but if your argument was "actually it should be 10^27" then we can have a conversation. But you don't seem at all interested in engaging with regulation as if it's a valid end at all. You make arguments that generalize to all regulation in all cases is bad because you can make up a story for how this somehow helps incumbent companies.
They're part of the a16z group that broadly opposes all regulation and actively funds pacs to this effect(leading the future). Their opposition to this regulation in particular is over determined. They want the frontier to advance quickly and be distilled by open weight models because it's their belief that every other layer will be a commodity layer and they're the real enduring layer. They have a love hate relationship with the frontier labs. They also oppose all regulation in general because they fear if some AI regulatory organization got some teeth they might come after their slop, which the public widely hates. for fun here are a few examples of a16z funded projects:
Doublespeed Slop social media spammatron 5000
Cluely literally cheating as a service
Character.AI this one literally has blood on its hands
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link