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 -
I just think the idea of US citizens having access to uncensored LLMs at close to SOTA quality will be considered far more dangerous than weapons (short of nukes, though even then...), meth, and counterfeit money.
Then again, perhaps a cyber-based defense is more likely than nukes. Perhaps we'll get a Great Firewall of America to keep Americans from surreptitiously accessing the NK LLM. And equivalents in other nations too. But that has its own issues in implementing, of course.
Do you mean SOTA as of today, or some hypothetical future model?
If it's the former, I disagree vehemently. There's nothing entirely uncensored on par with GPT-4, but OSS options like Mixtral that are on-par with 3.5 are available to anyone with the intelligence to follow a guide, and they have largely not caused any major negative disruption, in the same vein as nukes, drugs or fake money would.
The biggest problem AI has caused so far, is drastically reduced demand for artists and other online freelancers. And spam bots, fake reviews and so on.
I am not denying future risks (me, of all people?), but even if something exactly as powerful as GPT-4 was available freely and entirely unrestricted, I don't think it would do much.
I mean whatever the SOTA is whenever this hypothetical uncensored NK LLM is released. To be fair, whatever NK could produce might always be pretty significantly behind the SOTA at the time, and so might not be something Western governments are too concerned about. But given the nation-level resources they can throw at it, I'd expect them to be always be ahead of what a hobbyist could do in their home computer, if only through raw compute and memory. And once the tech reaches a state where NK can make an LLM that makes GPT4 look like GPT3.5, that's probably intelligent and useful enough that the everyday citizen having access to an uncensored version of it would be considered too dangerous.
Local open source LLMs must have made significant progress since the last time I checked them out seriously about 5 months ago, but it sounds like, at best, it's still GPT3.5 level, which, I'll be honest, I'm skeptical about due to just a lack of credible metrics to measure that kind of thing in this space. And I think the gap between GPT3.5 and GPT4 is a pretty vast chasm in terms of usefulness and intelligence.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link