skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Whenever rich people with a stake in something propose regulation for it, it is probably better that it be banned.

I say this because the practice has a number of names: intellectual monopoly capitalism, and regulatory capture. There are less polite names, too, naturally.

To understand why I say this, it is important to realise one thing: these people have already successfully invested in something when the risk was lower. They want to increase the risks to newcomers, to advantage themselves as incumbents. In that way, they can subordinate smaller companies who would otherwise have competed with them by trapping them under their license umbrella.

This happens a lot with pharmaceuticals: it is not expertise in the creation of new drugs or the running of clinical trials that defines the big pharmaceuticals companies, it is their access to enormous amounts of capital. This allows them to coordinate a network of companies who often do the real, innovative work, while ensuring that they can reap the rewards - namely, patents and the associated drug licenses.

The main difference of course is that pharmaceuticals are useful. That regime is inadequate, but it is at least not a negative to all of society. So far as I can see, AI will benefit nobody but its owners.

Mind you, I'd love to be wrong.
> If you want someone to produce a piece of writing about something, how they produced it is less important than the result. If it is correct, clear, and gets the job done, then good.

No, this fundamentally misunderstands the difference between work and pedagogy. With a work product, the end result is all that matters because it is a fundamentally new contribution for which the contribution is prized. If a marketer can get a 0.1% better conversion rate using ChatGPT, then that's the best course of action.

Pedagogy is a deliberate simulacrum of work under artificial conditions where learning is done via the process. Nobody cares that you've built the 10 millionth version of tetris, the work product at the end of it is fundamentally uninteresting. The work product is solely there to force you to engage in the process and deliberately useless so it can be shaped towards maximal learning.

Nobody mistakes, for example, that someone who uses a forklift to lift a 300lb bar or pays a friend to do it for them is getting their reps in at the gym because it's intrinsically obvious that the work of moving metal has no value but is instead, meant to induce an internal change in the athlete. Using ChatGPT on an assignment is no different from hiring a forklift to do your workout but people seem to want to get confused about it.
I was doing my undergrad during the same time period, and I always went with the physical book option when one existed.

I for some reason find it much quicker to read and find stuff in a physical book. I also hate reading on a screen (didn't have any e ink device).
>large swaths of the global South will not be livable anymore and a lot of people will be forced to move to cooler climates.

The global North is unlivable for most of the year. Winter as a phenomena is a form of natural disaster, making it impossible to grow food and energy intensive for humans to survive.
Apple accessibility features are second to none. They have been leading the charge ever since Mac OS X 10.0 Cheetah 22 years ago.
*sci-fi but I can’t edit it now
Out of curiosity, has anyone here ever used Autonomy's product? Given it was such a high profile company, I have
always been surprised that I had never seen it action or met anyone who had used it?
If LLMs/AI are the problem, they're also the solution. Access restrictions will do nothing but centralize control over one of the most important developments of the century.

What if we required licenses to create a website? After all, some unscrupulous individuals create websites that sell drugs and other illicit things!
Unfortunately it’s illegal to dig ponds on your property without a permit and the appropriate water rights in some areas. There’s a whole field of law around water rights and these sorts of permits, it’s really wild. You need an engineering plan with the expected evaporation rate and then need to describe how you’d replace the water you took from some downstream, more senior rights holder.
It's not the tvs fault people you like found an excuse to be outwardly racist and xenophobic. What's next, videogames make you violent?
> Right now there's no sustainable source for baseload power.

To push back on this, there is a centurys' old technology for this in hydro. There's also an emerging field of geothermal.

The Pacific Northwest (both sides of the border) has an abundance of hydropower that was installed decades ago and provides clean, reliable, baseload power.

Geothermal has its challenges, especially at utility scale where geographic location is important and not typically close to population centers. On a smaller scale it is not geographically a problem, but not as economically viable for individual homeowners. It makes more sense when a large corporate is investing in it [1].

[1] https://news.microsoft.com/2022/04/20/microsoft-redmond-camp...
It's sad that "think of the children" is still argument that works on some dumbasses.
It is not about what the model tells you.

This paper shows an emergent world model in an LLM that was taught to play otello moves https://ar5iv.labs.arxiv.org/html/2210.13382

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2303.12712.pdf This paper discusses (among other things) how a GPT4 model navigated between rooms in a text adventure game and was able to create a map afterward. Literally building a model of the world as it was navigating and drawing a map of that afterwards
Businesses, Families, and Villages are fundamentally different creations. Unless you are going with the "company town" idea of a business. A business has a many to one relationship in regards to effort and goals. A Village has a many to many relationship. And a Family has a one to many relationship (though admittedly, at a certain scale, villages and families becomes very similar, but I think that's because a family naturally grows into a village given enough time). If a business has a one/many to many relationship, then it would be aimless and probably be a terrible business (as such things are determined).

There is a reason society has created these as distinct types of entity, because each has a strength that it serves and they are not interchangeable. So while I agree that ephemeral families and communities are not good, that doesn't impact the value of ephemeral businesses.

For the record, I'm undecided on ephemeral businesses, but I think its a valid conversation to have and might yield interesting insights.
My gut feeling is that the majority of AI safety discussions are driven by companies that fear losing their competitive edge to small businesses. Until now, it's been challenging to grow a company beyond a certain size without employing an army of lawyers, human resources professionals, IT specialists, etc. What if two lawyers and an LLM could perform the same work as a legal department at a Fortune 500 company? The writing is on the wall for many white-collar jobs, and if these LLMs aren't properly regulated, it may be the large companies that end up drawing the short straw.

How many of Microsoft's 221k employees exist solely to support the weight of a company with 221k people? A smaller IT department doesn't need a large HR department. And a small HR department doesn't file many tickets with IT. LLM driven multinationals will need orders of magnitude fewer employees, and that puts our current multinationals in a very awkward position.

Personally, I will be storing a local copy of LLaMA 65B for the foreseeable future. Instruct fine-tuning will keep getting cheaper; given the stakes, the large models might not always be easy to find.
It's always astonishing to me how pretty much every climatologist will tell you "clounds are the joker". It totally makes sense, but that doesn't make it in any way less fascinating and is kind of funny.
No, but I can use a calculator to find the correct answer. It's quite easy in software because I can copy-and-paste the digits so I don't make any mistakes.

I just asked ChatGPT to do the calculation both by using a calculator and by using the algorithm step-by-step. In both cases it got the answer wrong, with different results each time.

More concerning, though, is that the answer was visually close to correct (it transposed some digits). This makes it especially hard to rely on because it's essentially lying about the fact it's using an algorithm and actually just predicting the number as a token.
That term is a bit of a unwarranted meme but it's hard to take seriously the idea that there is not a problem when the model will unquestioningly write hagiography for blue president but absolutely refuse for red one.

At the end of the day, these kind of limits are artificial, ideological in nature, do not address a bona fide safety or usability concern, and are only present to stop them getting screamed at. It is not accurate to present that kind of ideological capture as anything to do with "empathy".
The Problem with Everything-Bagel Liberalism
Same thought here! it really sucks that 3g networks shut down making most flip phones functionality useless. there really aren't any modern smart phones designed for people who want something easy to use which makes this announcement so exciting
I keep seeing AI leaders looking outward and asking for 'someone else' to regulate their efforts, while they're accelerating the pace of their efforts. What's the charitable interpretation here? Elon Musk, too, has been warning of AI doom while hurriedly ramping up AI efforts at Tesla. And now he keeps going about AI doom while purchasing thousands of GPUs at Twitter to compete in the LLM space. It's like "I'm building the deathstar, pls someone stop me. I won't stop myself, duh, because other ppl are building the deathstar and obviously I must get there first!"
Thanks! Is there a status page like https://oblivus.com/availability/ for Lambda Cloud? I got very excited about building a product on top of Lambda cloud for cocalc.com, but after read lots of docs, when I tried Lambda cloud, I just got the message: "We are currently out of capacity for all instances. Please check again in a few hours." This was on April 27. I immediately thought: "There is no possible way I can build a product on this for my users, but it may be very useful for other tasks, e.g., training." If there were something like https://oblivus.com/availability/, especially with historical data, it would be very useful to appropriately set my expectations about how Lambda Cloud can best be used.

By the way, Lambda Stack is VERY impressive. Thanks for maintaining that!
Is there a name for this theatre/play/game in some playbook? I'd love to take notes.
Updating our inactive account policies
As a general matter, I hear you. But in this case I think your objections are misplaced: it actually agrees with you that the California basis is more stressed, but also is the subject of an ambitious plan to recharge it (which may or may not succeed) which is the topic of the article.

It also blames the stress on the Murzuk-Djado and Arabian Basins on climate change which, to me, places the blame more on the U.S. than on 'backwards muslims.'

Here's the full passage:

> Especially in places that have already been hard-hit by climate change, many aquifers have become so depleted that humans need to step in; the Arabian Aquifer in Saudi Arabia and the Murzuk-Djado Basin in North Africa, per a 2015 study, are particularly stressed and have little hope of recharging. In the U.S., aquifers are depleting fast from the Pacific Northwest to the Gulf, but drought-stricken California is the poster-child of both water stress and efforts to undo the damage.

In any case, it's actually pretty fascinating how a few sentences about aquifers can draw out these issues. And, to your point, I would certainly not be shocked to learn that there are ambitious plans to recharge the Murzuk-Djado and Arabian Basins that this article overlooks.
Remember that popular recent post about OpenAI not having a moat? Well it looks like they are digging one, with a little help from the government.
"Employees could pause during onboarding and say they want to create a new Apple ID specifically for work or use a different phone. But most do not — it seems a little paranoid, and the Apple instructions say to go ahead "

A real nothing burger as employees really do have a choice to protect their privacy.
Hear me out, just incubated a hot new lang that's about to capture the market and VC hearts:

SELECT * FROM llm
Then the government should takeover OpenAI
We need to MAKE SURE that AI as a technology ISN'T controlled by a small number of powerful corporations with connections to governments.

To expound, this just seems like a power grab to me, to "lock in" the lead and keep AI controlled by a small number of corporations that can afford to license and operate the technologies. Obviously, this will create a critical nexus of control for a small number of well connected and well heeled investors and is to be avoided at all costs.

It's also deeply troubling that regulatory capture is such an issue these days as well, so putting a government entity in front of the use and existence of this technology is a double whammy — it's not simply about innovation.

The current generation of AIs are "scary" to the uninitiated because they are uncanny valley material, but beyond impersonation they don't show the novel intelligence of a GPI... yet. It seems like OpenAI/Microsoft is doing a LOT of theater to try to build a regulatory lock in on their short term technology advantage. It's a smart strategy, and I think Congress will fall for it.

But goodness gracious we need to be going in the EXACT OPPOSITE direction — open source "core inspectable" AIs that millions of people can examine and tear apart, including and ESPECIALLY the training data and processes that create them.

And if you think this isn't an issue, I wrote this post an hour or two before I managed to take it live because Comcast went out at my house, and we have no viable alternative competitors in my area. We're about to do the same thing with AI, but instead of Internet access it's future digital brains that can control all aspects of a society.
"Congress cannot regulate AI"

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/04/remembering-case-estab...
If AI is to be a consumer good—which it already is—it needs to be regulated, at the very least to ensure equal quality to a diverse set of customers and other users. Unregulated there is high risk of people being affected by e.g. employers and landlords using AI to discriminate. Or you being sold an AI solution which isn’t as advertised.

If AI will be used by public institutions, especially law enforcement, we need it regulated in the same manner. A bad AI trained on biased data has the potential to be extremely dangerous in the hands of a cop who is already predisposed for racist behavior.
We can use ChatGPT for that.
Surely Shatner has sold his voice already like Bruce Willis did? I'd pay to hear my morning information read in the voice of the shat, in the format of a captain's log.
To the best of my knowledge this doesn't happen so much in more functional democracies. It seems to be more of an anglophone thing.
Agree with this analysis, when docs are written well, it's quite nice to read them through. They're succinct yet thoughtful.

Most docs aren't like that though, they are either trying to do far too much (being a marketing page + docs + list of jargon + competitive analysis etc), or are so minimal they do as you say and are exclusively useful to those already very knowledgeable about it.

I think docs organizers should plan it as if they were writing a short linear novel to improve those glaring issues. It would go a very long way to improving general readability even if you don't read them that way. Easier said than done of course, but there's value the "cover to cover" mentality.
So what if they kill us? That's nature, we killed the wooly mammoth.
> open source models

I read this as a try (conscious or not) to make them illegal.
People are being held up and forced to enter more passwords, it is definitely rarer than previously because of the technical hurdles Apple has thankfully added.

It's just interesting thinking about edge cases and what a stolen phone will mean for your identity 10-20 years from now.
I wouldn't say that autocorrect and autocomplete are well understood by most users, but are well-accepted and not feared and/or fetishized. Telling my non-tech relatives and friends that "ChatGPT is extremely fancy autocomplete" has settled most of them down a bit.
Ask HN: If Sam Altman succeeds, people will just use Chinese/Russian AI instead
I mean, if the regulations require a special government license to develop large language models, then that will stop US universities and open source community from making models competitive to GPT-4, 5, etc. But nothing stops people from using similar models built by China or Russia.
"Competition is for losers." — Peter Thiel
Starting a business is really challenging, as anyone who has tried it knows. Trying to make the finances work in something ephemeral is likely even more challenging. In any case, most businesses fail so ephemeral business is sort of the default unless you succeed.

There are individual businessmen who ride different business waves (like getting into frozen yogurt a little over a decade ago). But the skill those people have is in marketing and raising money and that transfers pretty well to different business types. There's also a whole world of business outside of tech that most of HN is not familiar with, and many of those people do extremely well for themselves. They also tend to be less idealistic and more focused on the money, which probably helps with adapting the business over time and figuring out what product/service the market actually values.
You ended up providing examples that have no matter or atoms: protecting jobs, or oversight of complex systems.

These are policies which are a purely imaginary. Only when they get implemented into human law do they get a grain of substance but still imaginary. Failure to comply can be kinetic but that is a contingency not the object (matter :D).

Personally I find good ideas on having regulations on privacy, intelectual property, filming people on my house’s bathroom, NDAs etc. These subjects are central to the way society works today. At least western society would be severely affected if these subjects were suddenly a free for all.

I am not convinced we need such regulation for Ai at this point of technology readiness but if social implications create unacceptable unbalances we can start by regulating in detail. If detailed caveats still do not work then broader law can come. Which leads to my own theory:

All this turbulence about regulation reflects a mismatch between technological, politic and legal knowledge. Tech people don’t know law nor how it flows from policy. Politicians do not know the tech and have not seen its impacts on society. Naturally there is a pressure gradient from both sides that generates turbulence. The pressure gradient is high because the stakes are high: for techs the killing of a new forthcoming field; for politicians because they do not want a big majority of their constituency rendered useless.

Final point: if one sees AI as a means of production which can be monopolised by few capital rich we may see a 19th century inequality remake. It created one of the most powerful ideologies know: Communism.
Will be trying this. Thanks for the tip!
Interesting, thanks! I guess I was wrong about him.
>It would be great if there was a government institution which would compensate such businesses for their tech to open source it.

Wouldn't that just incentivise more negative behaviour from businesses, since investors would know should they go bust, the government will buy all their IP?

It seems potentially more sensible to pass a law that the IP of any business that fails becomes public domain.
Pretty much says it all when after years of investigation, this report is finally published, and you currently can't even find mention of it on BBC's front page, and CNN's front page only barely briefly mentions it, half way down the screen, after a scroll, with a headline in small text.
OK, second try, since I was wrong about LeCun.

> You can also ask that question about the other side

What other side? Who in the "other side" is making a self-serving claim?
Turing police? https://williamgibson.fandom.com/wiki/Turing_Police
> A business is group of people building things together. Its a family. Its a village.

you'll be happier when you stop looking for family at work.
I mean, yeah, that sounds good. It wouldn't affect your ability to think for yourself and spread your ideas, it would just put boundaries on AI.

I've seen a lot of people completely misunderstand what chat GPT is doing and is capable of. They treat it as an oracle that reveals "hidden truths" or makes infallible decisions based on pure cold logic, both of which are completely wrong. It's just a text jumbler that jumbles text well. Sometimes that text reflects facts, sometimes it doesn't.

But if it has the capability to confidently express lies and convince the general public that those lies are true because "the smart computer said so", then maybe we should be really careful about what we let the "smart computer" say.

Personally, I don't want my kids learning that "Hitler did nothing wrong" because the public model ingested too much garbage from 4chan. People will use chatGPT as a vector for propaganda if we let them, we don't need to make it any easier for them.
There should be a standard template/language to structurally prompt LLMs. Once that is good, all good LLMs should use the doc to fine tune it to take in that standard. Right now each model has their own little way to best prompt it and you end up needing programs like this to sit in between and handle it for you
Interesting trick!
Have you tried using alpine based images instead of debian/ubuntu/others? I know it's not always possible especially because of musl but for most things it works fine and is tiny.
I feel like you're confusing a single person (me) with everyone who has access to an off switch at OpenAI or Google, possibly for the contorting an extreme-sounding negative point in a minority opinion.

You tell me. An EMP wouldn't take out data centers? No implementation has an off switch? AutoGPT doesn't have a lead daemon that can be killed? Someone should have this answer. But be careful not to confuse yours truly, a random internet commentator speaking on the reality of AI vs. the propaganda of the neo-cryptobros, versus people paying upwards of millions of dollars daily to run an expensive, bloated LLM.
With browsers now able to access the GPU, its not long until you simply need to leave a website open overnight and help train a "Seti@HOME" for an open-sourced AI project.
I just cancelled my ChatGPT Plus subscription. I do not want to support monopolization of this technology. Companies apparently learned their lesson with the freedom of the Internet.
> Livestock farming is the only activity which remains somewhat widespread on a small scale here and it's miserable. It's a buyer market. Farmers are being squeezed out as much as possible by their distributors.

Exactly, people removed from farming do not understand how predatory the market actually is towards them. And they go around tilting at windmills.
Not that one, but I found something that sort of worked but the false rejection rate was way higher than the windows driver. I just used a password and got a new machine this year.
Another old timer Yahoo engineer showed me something like this at a cupertino coffee shop a few years back but with like half the features ready but the enthusiasm is there so I guess vcf sharing is a pretty deep idea. The headline, sub, and intro copy can do with simple jargons. The nfc cards/stickers are a good incremental add on. Good luck!