This caught my eye from the story;-

Former Meta AI chief Yann LeCun is also skeptical, posting on X.com that Anthropic's Dario Amodei "was already claiming that GPT2 was too dangerous to open source back in 2019. I made fun of them then. Everyone should make fun of them now."

Hang the fuck on Yann. The ACTUAL warning was that GPT2 would lead to the internet being flooded with bad advertising copy, fake news stories, impersonations and spam.

That actually happened Yann!

OOOooo I so miss actual ice cream with real chocolate on it.
What would you do...?

AI books are crawling out of the dark cracks, and the "feeling" is the same. It takes a few chapters but the hollowness comes through. It lacks direction and intent.

that is actually the truth. We remove the "dangerous" elements to protect the rest. The problem lies when the worst distill into absolute anarchy. Do you believe in capital punishment ? That is truly the only way to remove the worst elements from society. While in theory I support it. I would not want to be the one deciding who gets the "final solution". Things like that seldom work out :(.

Only if we allow private equity to run for profit prisons. We tried it in Arizona. It went badly. The federal government now runs our prisons because our state legislators will not pay for or hire Dr's in prisons. We allowed a company to run them. They did, right into the ground and criminal proceedings.

The problem isn't so much about true public places, but the quasi-private places. If I as a journalist (I'm not, but I did a minor in journalism a very very long time ago) film you in the town square, I'm free to run that footage on a news show. Your in a public place, you dont have a reasonable expectation of privacy. Everyone understands that.

And if your sitting in your bedroom you very much do. I cant filmn you through your window. Everyone also understands that.

But what about when your sitting in your car at the lights chatting to your kids on the way to dropping them off at school. Your sort of in a public place, and your sort of in a private place. But now you have flock cameras peering in your window facial recognizing you and your kids, logging your activity into a database, to be fed into a palatir like system designed specifically to strip you of privacy and be used by potentially hostile adversaries looking to hang you for unaproved activities. They MAY have a legal right (Although thats VERY much something lawyers are challenging) but its certainly not what you expect.

And the way privacy laws work, expectations are very important.

That is what it is supposed to be. We don't rehabilitate in the US we PUNISH, and incidentally teach criminal techniques.

One of the neat things about Deep Seek is they actually do something OAI and Anthropic do not;- They actually publish their methods, training code and all that.

Theres actually a lot more going on with these models than "Trained it on ChatGPT" (And its not like the chinese are alone in that. When claude first came out, it kept randomly claiming to be ChatGPT, a smoking-gun level sign of distillation, and OIA has *heavily* implied that they've caught XAI out multiple times trying to distill CGPT. And to be clear , amongst ML researchers, distillation is considered an entirely legitimate and normal part of AI training.). What is clever about deep seek is they've made pretty significant progress on getting a very big model and running it cheap and fast on more commodity software. And importantly , they've published how they do it in a reproducable way. They've also made *significant* progress on training methods that drastically lower the cost of training up a model the hard way.

So yeah, its more than just distilling western models. The chinese are actually making real progress. And..... Deepseek and Kimi and the like are actually really good models. You can do 90% of what the big american frontier models are doing with them, and on a budget, 90% is good enough.

Also, what could he possibly do out of jail that he can't already do in jail? Clearly he's able to talk to people, which he could do outside too. Nobody will listen to him inside or out, because he's a convicted fraud. Also in jail he gets 3 square meals per day. Outside he would have to get a job just so he could buy the meals to sustain himself.

Not that I think he should succeed in his appeal, but as someone who's worked at the DOJ and seen the inside of a prison multiple times (as a staffer), I can assure you being incarcerated is a miserable and demeaning experience. Zero freedom, awful food, extremely uncomfortable conditions (what you think those places are air conditioned?). Throw the non-zero chance of being stabbed to death because your neighbor, chuck the schizophrenic rapist , doesn't like your hair color, and your absolute inability to escape unpleasant people. Oh and months on end of 23hours a day locked in a single mindmeltingly boring room. For the next 30 years!

Yeah trust me any sane man would do anything in their power to get out of that very fucking unpleasant situtation,

Civilly, absolutely. Ultimately their machines did a harm to the other guys machines. They have to pay the fixem price. A judge would find that a fairly straightforward decision. Two agrieved parties, one harmed the other. No jugement as to culpability. If I accidently hit your car, I have to pay your repair. (Or rather my insurance would reimburse your insurance)

Criminally, there might be an argument for negligence? But it'd be a really hard case to prosecute, and frankly I suspect most prosecutors would rather be using their limited resources locking up rapists and muggers, than trying to stick bracelets on a guy who can turn up with the entire wall street legal bar as defence on a *very* cloudy question of culpability.

Honestly, I think they actually need to pass some laws to actually create a more straight forward theory of prosecution. "If you negligently let your clankers rape another dudes servers, you can be charged as if you broke into that server yourself. Incompetence is a partial defence. Genuine ignorance a complete defence" (Ie if you had no idea your robbie the robot had trundled down the road and held up the gas station, then yeah.... that might be a bit unfair to give you 30 hard years for owning the robot. But your ignorance that its possible should only be a partial defence if you had every opportunity to read the fucking manual where it says "Robbie is bit of a clepto, dont let him have a gun".

Thats actually really interesting. Both my sister and I work in climate science (in her case) or climate adjacent (ag-tech focusing on soil carbon sinking) fields. When I was at the CSIRO, I was a bit shocked that none of the climate scientists had kids. All for very much the reason that they didnt see much of a future for humanity that wasn't utterly miserable. The predictions that climate scientists make in private are generally a LOT more dismal than the ones they are allowed to put in reports where there is a massive institutional pressure to downplay the seriousness of climate change.

The people who think climate scientists do it for the money are literally the opposite of correct. Almost every one of those guys have had offers from right wing think tanks to defect and become "celebrity scientist climate deniers" making stupid stacks of money on the talk circuit to just lie about science and claim its all a big conspiracy. None ever took up the offer. The stakes for not fixing climate change are so much higher.

My dude, Google is RIGHT THERE. If you don't know what a company whos software powers about 2/3 of the internet is, what are you even doing on a tech website?

We really need a moderation tag for [What is this thing -1] and [How is this story about tech news for nerds -1].

It costs less key strokes to type "Automattic" into google than it is to post a useless rage-bait post on slashdot.

You don't need good timing to make a lot of money on the stock market. All you need is to listen to Trump every Friday, and then every Tuesday. A few dollars(*) gives you a seat in Mar-al-Lago's dining room table.

When sanity regains control over washington and the adults are back in charge again, there is going to be *hell to pay* for all the blatant stock market manipulation going on right now. A friend of mine is a stock broker and he's convinced a lot of very powerful people are going to be getting very rude knocks on the door from heavily armed goons with arrest warrants a few years from now.

One should not put oneself on the shortlist of people getting those goon visits, if one values their freedom.

The thing that gives me pause is , yes ChatGPT will tell us that its "all" it is.

But an awful lot of the RLHF fine tuning is spent ensuring that this is the response it gives.

I don't think these things are conscious or emotional, at least not yet. But lets not fool ourselves, these things ARE some sort of intelligence, even if , much like a big chunk of human cognition, they are just "predicting tokens".

Christ, we really are getting older on this forum aren't we. I remember reading the something awful forums a couple of years ago and realising that the majority of posters on there are Gen Xers and......... we're not the kids running the internet anymore, we're the kids running the internets Dads (and a few Moms, of course).

Slashdot, thats an even older vintage. No wonder we're always complaining on here lol. When I first posted on here, I had a bright yellow mohawk, played in punk bands, got myself into trouble for abusing my knowledge on how to stack smash a Unix server's TCP stack (Unix, not Linux), and my favorite bands where not yet called "Dad rock".

Now my knees hurt, I know far too much about the unique horrors of "Bowel Prep" and I keep having to stop myself saying "In my day....." around the kids, and to circle to the topic... I genuinely worry about my hips....

Where did the years go?