Why? Why would a non-deterministic engine be better for a game when it can be instead structured and made deterministic and then more effectively distributed to consumer hardware?
Sam, I'll grant you, is probably among the top 10 most dangerous, but Dario? The only thing he's done to piss people off is to predict, correctly, that releasing too-powerful models too-quickly would cause havoc and chaos. This prediction actively hurts his company! It actively harms his chances of a huge exit! It actively raises the probability that Anthropic and OpenAI get nationalized and treated in the same way as, for instance, the nuclear program!
By comparison, do you think the Chinese models are going to be trained in such a manner that you enjoy the society that results? What makes you think that?
>I hope the Chinese companies (and I say this as a patriotic American) slay these two companies and destroy their moats.
China cares about about stability way more than the US even, they aren't going to be big on AI models upsetting the governments power, and mass cyber attacks could do that.
At the end of the day we are going to have to realize AI is both dangerous and governments are going to control it. Worse if you start making and releasing your own dangerous models the 4chan party van is going to visit you.
> At the end of the day we are going to have to realize AI is both dangerous and governments are going to control it.
Your thinking is dangerous. Do you work for Anthropic?
AI is dangerous when these powers are being hobbled up by the select few. These systems threaten to put us all out of work. I refuse to be a slave to a company or a government that is taking away our livelihoods, scraping up our earnings potentials, then seeking to muzzle us and put us in jails with no rights.
I would rather burn down all of tech than have AI be owned by the elites.
Your thinking is a threat to all of our liberties.
>I would rather burn down all of tech than have AI be owned by the elites.
Then you better get your torches out now.
>I refuse to be a slave to a company or a government that is taking away our livelihoods
Don't worry, governments are fervently working on AI drones to take away your life when you get really upset about this. Oh, and they are also working at AI to detect when you write all this online, and track you down then monitor you on things like flock cameras. As they say, you'll be the first with your back against the wall when the revolution comes, I likely will be beside you for being too subversive.
>AI is dangerous when
Incorrect, AI is just dangerous. It doesn't matter who has it. The more powerful it becomes the more dangerous it gets. So, as you can tell I am an AI doomer.
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Now, don't get me wrong, I want freedom for me, I want freedom for other people. I do not believe the technologies we're developing are conductive to having any freedom at all. Hell, if we're lucky we'll be slaves instead of all of us dead, including the select few.
>Your thinking is a threat to all of our liberties.
Lol, now this is kind of funny. "I want freedom to think whatever I want, but you, you shouldn't think like that!". Careful or you'll max out your irony meter. Anyway, "My kind of thinking" is just next ____ prediction. I see what is happening in the world around us, and based on the shape of that probability I see what is going to happen. No, you and I are not getting unlimited AI to do whatever we want. Yes, governments are going to lock down the shit out of AI for end users. Yes, governments are going to declare advanced LLMs munitions.
Balls in your court, better think of what your next move is.
Which is a great example of what makes him dangerous: with the exception of Sam Altman he's arguably the single person most responsible for the current capabilities arms race.
Anthropic has pushed the frontier harder and faster than OpenAI or anyone else in the last few years. Beginning with Anthropic's founding to quickly raise huge amounts of cash with a pitch to investors to rapidly leapfrog ChatGPT in scale, and culminating with Mythos/Fable which carved out a whole new tier of super models.
He's always talked big about Anthropic prioritising safety and their "Responsible Scaling" but his words just simply don't align with reality while they keep going bigger, faster, until only OpenAI could briefly and half-heartedly claim near parity at the top (while cutting corners in safety because the existential threat to their market position is far more pressing to any corporation than some abstract risk for humanity).
Whether it's wilful cognitive dissonance, cynical opportunism, financial greed or something else, that kind of self-assured moral superiority paired with his real world record of self-interested decision making for Anthropic's market position is a big red flag.
If we ignore the massive amount of books being destroyed, the outages and increased usage bills for once free websites (some resulting in closure), the increased difficulty to access public information such as Reddit and Twitter, and lastly ignore the amount of conversations being taken away from the public in favor of LLMs, I would agree.
Your talking about a bunch of books that are out of print and sat unsold for years in a warehouse somewhere. The rights holders could print another run tomorrow if they wanted, or better yet digitize them but they don’t. Where’s your ire for the rights holders who sit on these books and don’t do anything with the ?
Destruction of books is normal and totally OK. Publishing houses do it daily in the thousands. When you own something, you can choose how to dispose of it. Come back when you have the title of actually valuable rare books that were bought and destroyed. The 404 article was not well researched in this regard.
The emotional reaction we're conditioned to have hearkens back to 1940s Germany, where the goal was to have people burn all the copies of existing works. But this is not that. They are going for "one of each book" so they have a comprehensive corpus of works to train from. They are willing to buy books to obtain this corpus. It sounds like the system working exactly as intended, with even the book sellers selling these books saying they are "dead inventory".
There's a time to be breathless about "destroying all of humanity's knowledge", but let's wait until it's actually happening.
Again, I'm am very anxious for anyone to come forward with credible information about any valuable/rare/irreplaceable book that was destroyed in this process. So far zero people have been able to do this, probably because they are buying the books in bulk and want to obtain them as cheaply as possible. Book sellers will know the value of any actually rare/valuable books, and would charge accordingly, which would be pointless for e.g. Amazon to pay. They don't need some crazy first edition, they just need some copy to digitize. The incentives just don't add up to "Amazon is buying priceless art and burning it!" the way the narrative suggests.
The publishers and rights holders still have the text, and the books themselves weren’t being accessed just sitting in a warehouse. This is a trivial problem to solve, digitize them.
the argument of some hypothetical "right to burn all the books i possess" is not really the topic of discussion here. it's not a "can" argument, it's a "should" argument.
> it's not a "can" argument, it's a "should" argument.
When you take a pitchfork against all the libraries out there who either refuse donations, or destroy the donated books, then we'll talk.
As plenty of people have pointed out, no one has shown that anything of value has really been lost. Either the works are still available for you to obtain (i.e. they didn't destroy the last version), or they are things no one wanted.
And while it hasn't come up in this thread, it was the last time it was discussed: These companies are legally obligated to destroy the books. It is illegal to scan the book, keep the scanned copy, and sell/donate the physical books. If you don't like that, change copyright law.
They have no more right to destroy cultural artifacts than you do. It's a red herring, as no one has demonstrated a single loss of a cultural artifact. What was destroyed, that satisfies:
1. You cannot obtain elsewhere
2. That anyone cares about
Destroying a copy of a Harry Potter is not a loss of a cultural artifact if I can still buy the book at a store.
Go ahead and start a campaign: For all who are upset by this, list your physical address, and tell everyone to mail their unwanted books to those on the list instead of destroying them.
The catch is the recipients are not allowed to destroy them. Then we'll see how much those complaining value culture.
I'm thinking more of a future where big tech successfully moves the overton window for AI, people gradually rely on getting information/entertainment from LLM's more than books, then it can follow the regular plotline of 451 with the public voting to ban books.
Most of these things are bad. None of them is robbery, though. Some are of questionable legality, but most are not.
People need to face reality. The old Internet was fragile and couldn't have lasted long. It was dying slowly due to closed social media and LLMs are accelerating that death.
I'd rather it die quickly and be replaced by something more robust than decay slowly. I was sick of how it was before LLMs even came among.
Except books are already destroyed in physical form every single day. My local library has a section near the front for free and/or extremely cheap books ($1) they are desperately trying to get rid of. My impression is that if they are untaken/unsold they will end up in a dumpster.
The scale is completely different. It is like comparing a tiny ant to a Star Devouring Shoggoth. Anthropic destroyed millions of books in hardly any time. They are destroying the foundations of civilization
> They are destroying the foundations of civilization
No, they are not. For all the hype around that 404 media article, no one came forward with titles or authors. Turns out the booksellers that sold them those books said they were "dead inventory".
If you're going to assert that companies are destroying the foundations of civilization, you're going to have to produce quite a bit more evidence than the (poorly cited) 404 Media article.
Evidence ? Good lord, how about the US district court of justice ? Anthropic physically destroyed millions of books after scanning them - are you really, truly questioning that ?
> Anthropic spent many millions of dollars to purchase MILLIONS of print books, often in used condition. Then, its service providers stripped the books from their bindings, cut their pages to size, and scanned the books into digital form — discarding the paper originals.
Dismissing the above as "dead inventory" is atrocious reasoning. The more obscure/low-circulation books are arguably MORE valuable as training material because they contain information that is less likely to be duplicated across the ordinary web.
And 404 Media's reporting wasn't merely based on a bookseller's terminology of your "dead inventory". There are now unsealed Anthropic internal documents describing Project Panama as an effort to "destructively scan all the books in the world"
They are destroying books that they bought. It should not be controversial that part of ownership is decided how to dispose of the owned object.
But nothing you're citing adds up to "destroying the foundations of civilization". What we have instead is companies that are now paying to get copies of creative works (isn't this what everyone is complaining about with all the "theft" rhetoric?) so they can use them for training.
When they discuss scanning all the books in the world, they are not talking about every copy, since that makes no sense. They want one of each.
So, in the end, this all sounds like some breathless emotional take because large companies are buying copies of books and using them to train AI and throwing them away. They are probably destroying fewer books than the publishing houses do over the same time period.
This is like the water discussion: people with no understanding of agriculture (or publishing) hear a sound-bite about what AI is doing, and, with little-to-no context, devolve into a panic about it.
Again: cite real harm. What books aren't available? What knowledge was destroyed? There are real concerns about AI, but this whole discussion is a distraction.
Many were out of print or were used copies, so they weren't books you could simply order new from a publisher. They are out of print. Anthropic deliberately sourced large quantities through used-book sellers such as Better World Books and World of Books and destroyed the physical copies after scanning them.
If you find this a "breathless emotional take", then I don't even know what to say. Nothing will meet your "evidence" criteria to dislodge your fervent fawning and support for destruction carried out by AI corporations.
> They are destroying books that they bought. It should not be controversial that part of ownership is decided how to dispose of the owned object.
By your reasoning, if I could afford to buy every surviving painting by Van Gogh and Rembrandt and I burned them in a bon fire I wouldn't be taking anything from human culture and nobody should care at all about what I do with my belongings.
Destroying something that is rare or one of a kind and valuable does matter. Doing it so that you can exclusively profit off of charging people for software that regurgitates lossy and error filled versions of what was lost makes it even worse.
In your scenario, the bug is letting someone control all of that in a private collection. But that scenario is completely divorced from what is actually happening, so I don't think it's worth discussing too deeply here.
If you actually object to the concept that people that own a physical object get to decide how to dispose of it, that would be an interesting discussion to have because it would fly in the face of property ownership rights.
Why such a blinkered argument, I own the soda can I just drank but it is still, arguably, wrong of me to chuck it in the trash instead of the recycle bin. Yes, you have the "right" to dispose of things you own but there's more to what's right than that. There's human decency, consideration, awareness of the environment, the spirit of the laws, cases the laws were not designed for in mind etc.
Like, tell your mother or HS teacher you decided not to recycle because you own your trash. See how well that clever argument goes.
you should indeed be able to, but maybe buying art shouldn't be allowed at all, with people only being allowed digital recreations.
why do you need more than a picture of the rembrandt? there's so much good artwork easily available that the rembrandt is only worth money because hoity toity people want to store their money in it and in the future sell it again
> There are now unsealed Anthropic internal documents describing Project Panama as an effort to "destructively scan all the books in the world"
If I do something destructive to my copy of Accelerate -- feed it through a scanner, leave it where the munchkin can reach, whatever -- that does nothing to deprive you of your copy. Books are funny like that; there tend to be lots of identical ones.
Surely that's not about AI? Or you mean the small fraction of that that's result of "destructive format shift" process[0], which itself is a consequence of copyright regulation that would otherwise prevent anyone from accessing these works?
> the outages and increased usage bills for once free websites (some resulting in closure)
That's assumed to be AI companies for some reason, even if they have no real incentive to do that, while the usual business underbelly of people scraping web for whatever reasons (which now may include some AI upstart wannabies too, to be fair) is forgotten about. Not helping is people confusing AI agents acting as user-agents and doing one-off fetches with "AI scrappers".
> the increased difficulty to access public information such as Reddit and Twitter
It was never public, and they started locking down before AI, when both platforms (as well as all other social media platforms) run out of VC subsidsies and realized they need to start monetizing; first step they did was to wage a war on third-party clients and API users. AI came later.
> ignore the amount of conversations being taken away from the public in favor of LLMs
You mean human agency? Like, humans deciding it's better for them to ask a machine instead of posting questions online? I can understand that, it's usually much better experience (particularly on sites like StackOverflow - they dug their own grave here, and they know it; there have been memes about this way before LLMs were a thing).
You're also not considering the amount of questions answered that would not have been asked otherwise. I for one don't ask many questions on-line, so anything I ask LLMs that they solve for me, is a question that would've remained unanswered for me otherwise. Not everyone is gregarious online, many people are more self-reliant and only answer questions, but solve their own problems without asking for help (it's probably not optimal thing to do, but that's another topic).
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[0] - Digitizing and retaining physical copy is clear infringement, digitizing but destroying the physical original can be argued to be fair use.
> You mean human agency? Like, humans deciding it's better for them to ask a machine instead of posting questions online?
Oh, please, AI is single most hated technology to the level we did not seen before. And that is after staggering propaganda going out of these CEO that hiding behind human agency is beyond lie. It was pushed on us, whether we like it or not, because people with a lot of money are the only ones who matter.
And people with a lot of money have that weird cult belief in emerging AI god and singularity, so they dont care what they destroy in the process.
They want the good, bad and ugly to flock to them as it were and vaporize them so Axon and Motorola Solutions can just pick up right where they left off. And people will just ignore or forget it because it's not the same company.
It's not like the before times were a paradise but putting together anything like this took time. If you're going to expend hours creating the page, the table etc etc then you're far more likely to also pay attention to the research. In LLM land you can just tell Claude to fart out an investigation in a few minutes and never invest time in it.
>If you're going to expend hours creating the page, the table etc etc then you're far more likely to also pay attention to the research
There are and were entire sites and networks dedicated to conspiracy and disinformation. Hell, people have been payed to spread disinformation. People have done it deliberately for the lolz.
It has alway been possibly to get your nonsense enrgaved upon the web in an afternoon. That it now takes less time is irrelevant. You should have been checking your sources then, and you should be checking your sources now.
Authors of the past would often not provide sources, so if you were interested you'd have to track them down. This is also true today.
That an LLM is in the loop is no different, in kind, from the old copy-pasta and network driven spread of misinformation. The problem was never the tools (ah, damn, now anyone who knows [html] can just lie on the internet)(ah, damn now anyone who knows [prompting] can just lie on the internet).
The problem isn't the tools, it's the users unwillingness and or reluctance to develop critical reading and thinking skills. If you're using "Not an LLM" as a proxy for "gains reliability in my mind" then you're being lazy. It is just as easy to lie without an LLM.
It'd be nice if you could back up your feelings with some reasoning.
The neighborhood is safe enough and the community is cohesive enough that kids can congregate along their way to school: go to their friend's house, meet at a park, etc.
It's researched enough that you can go and learn about it and challenge your feelings.
(Not the patent) I'm very much pro letting children roam freely, but police intervention for walking or driving with your own child is clearly overreach. The good intention does not change that.
And even as a German who already spent a lot of time in Switzerland, I've never heard of anything like that.
To join in on the therapy speak: it is very good to challenge one's feelings, let go, and then, by the merit of reason, realize that police intervention for spending commute time with your children is bonkers.
It is just a very unreasonable extension of a very reasonable position.
You say completely locked out, but be fair, that's a choice you're making. I don't particularly like Facebook but there are a few things I can only keep up with there, so I have a minimal account for that purpose.
In what world should a citizen be required to provide their details to a foreign, for-profit company in order to view the updates provided by their government?
Which is true for all parents recording all kids with every kind of camera, also in a way that is totally un-actionable.
Good faith question:
If your worry is, "I don't know you're recording", what did you do with that information when someone was using a digital camera to video record their kids 15 years ago, with you in the background?
P.S: if your answer is just "you could be a creep", I totally empathize, but this is for the situation where I am actually just a parent.
There have already been stories about meta contractors being able to watch the footage people are recording with the glasses. Recordings included people undressing, on the toilet, and other explicit stuff.
Yes, That’s an opt-in feature. You can record all the footage you want and keep it on your phone, and they won’t see any of it, unless you ask for it be analyzed by their AI (as laid out in the article you shared). Of course if there was evidence they’re doing it when I haven’t opted in I’d dump em.
It’s made clear during onboarding, but I’m sure it could be better.
People don't like to be watched and recorded. That's it.
This data - which includes their facial features, geolocation, and activities is not yours to take and immortalize.
This should be intuitive to any empathetic human being. One person saying "this breaches my sense of safety and privacy" should be enough for you to understand.
Meta was caught so many times on stealing user data and bypassing privacy controls that I don't even know how can you suggest believing them with straight face.
> what did you do with that information when someone was using a digital camera to video record their kids 15 years ago, with you in the background?
I'm the asshole that covers his face while flipping off the person with the camera. I've done this for years. It used to be for news or other TV based content that they would blur out the finger gesture which meant blurring out my face. I've also noticed a camera in public places and deliberately stepped behind someone else as a blocker, or just moved to be behind the person with the camera. These are easy to do when it's obvious there's a camera. Glassholes are much more difficult to notice. Comparing these as equivalent is just a lack of being rational.
The glasses are a trust destroying device that degrades privacy.
If someone shoves a camera in my face in public I am going to move away from that person. If I see them filming someone with me in the background at least I know what is going on and can judge the situation accordingly.
Now I don't know. Everyone with glasses is a suspect. It's more public tension, hyper vigilance and uncertainty.
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