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.

What is "it" in this sentence?

Are you talking about the minuscule Google RAG model whose weights are probably measured in megabytes to lower-gigabytes and which you could run on a cell phone with capacity to spare, and comparing it to the multi-terabyte frontier models in question?

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".

OM NOM NOM BOOTS

THAT IS WHAT THEY ARE DOING, BOOT LICKER.

You're a traitor in spirit, if not in law.

OTOH, this sounds like one of the reasons I prefer debs from the standard repository over things hosted on other sites. Yeah, it's not perfect, but it's safer than lots of project specific repositories. (And it's one of the reasons I try to avoid Javascript, Go, and Rust.)

They are a safety concern. They are creating an opportunity for a foreign adversary. Does anyone really believe these clowns are capable of maintaining security?

WordPress would probably improve if he did

at least the person downloading such a component is responsible for "looking over it" before using it.

I'm sorry, but since when? You absolutely should not be tasking every single user of major projects with the responsibility of doing a code review on the whole thing before installing it. There needs to be a clear distinction between "fly-by-night thing that some rando uploaded" and "library that a million people depend on". In the traditional approach, the latter was something tat you installed with a package manner, while the former was something you went and fetch off e.g. Github or whatnot - and if you did the latter, then you were accepting that it was untrusted software. But now we have both (including the potential for "soundalikes") installed by the same means with no distinctions made by the install method. That is not good.

The funny thing about all this is that their only goal appears to have been to download publicly-available data off of UK government websites. I'm betting that they were (A) being tested on a knowledge-related task, and (B) not given direct access to the internet, but their tool capabilities involved access to the "gem" command (so that they could install Ruby packages for their work), and so decided to abuse (B) to cheat on (A).

Once again: training a model with the reward being "does it solve the task?" without looking at how it solves the task is very, very dangerous. This is basically the plot of Universal Paperclips.

I know a LOT of software that could use that as a pull request...

Of course the third bomb probably wouldn't have gotten used regardless of the order, as the next bomb (made from the infamous Demon Core) was scheduled to be ready to drop on the 17th, whereas Hirohito announced the surrender on the 15th (wasn't signed until 2 September, but it's hard to imagine that the US would have dropped the bomb after the announced surrender).

One of the amazing things is that the atomic bombings didn't shift the vote in the 3:3 deadlocked Japanese war council at all; the hawks (Anami, Umezu, Toyoda) remained focused on adaptation, not surrender. But it did make the doves (Suzuki, Togo, Yonai) more desperate, and Suzuki met with Hirohito. Hirohito had already been looking for an opportunity to surrender, having had plans to send Prince Konoe to Moscow to ask Stalin to function as a neutral broker to end the war (with secret instructions to accept "peace at any price"), but the trip was delayed by the Russian side, ostensibly by the Potsdam Conference (but in reality, to prepare for the invasion of Manchuria). When the terms of the Potsdam conference came out, Togo told Hirohito that they "were the most reasonable to be expected in the circumstances", to which Hirohito replied, "I agree. In principle they are acceptable." But the urgency to accept that in July wasn't present. Everything started collapsing in August, with the loss of their mainland and Pacific territories, the Soviet invasion, and the atomic bombings. What the bombings achieved was to help stir Hirohito to imminent action (which risked failing, as there was a coup attempt against him (the Kyujo Incident) to stop Japan from surrendering). The hawks saw unconditional surrender not as agreement to the loss of their sovereignty, but as agreement to enslavement.

But this is getting rather off topic. :) Main topic: if you think your AI is as much of a risk to the fate of humanity as the atomic bomb, which many of these people truly believe, then you can expect similar hesitancy as with the developers of the atomic bomb. They felt an urgent need - ending a brutal war - but at the same time had deep apprehension about what they were doing and how the fruits of their labour would be used.

And if you want a past example of scientists who feared their creation wanting to slow down, stop, or even undo it, BTW, let us consider the atomic bomb. Farrington Daniels took a poll of the Chicago nuclear scientists in 1945 asking what they wanted to happen with the atomic bomb. Remember that these were the people whose literal job was to make a weapon. Only 15% - 1 in ~7 - wanted the US to use it as it actually did, e.g. just start bombing cities just a couple days apart. Only a small majority wanted it even used in Japan, even against military targets without the Japanese first being invited to a demonstration in the US and being given ample opportunity to surrender. 13% - nearly as many as those who wanted the US to use it as it actually did - didn't want it used at all under any circumstance, in a war that had already caused a million American casualties.

The problem that they faced was that people like Groves** really wanted to bomb cities, and they, as the rank and file, didn't get a vote.

** - It seems dubious that Truman really understood what he was signing onto. While he never shirked from responsibility for authorizing it, the paper trail shows that he didn't seem to understand what he was approving at the time. In his diary before the attacks, he writes about the weapon, but about how he insisted it not be used against civilians, killing women and children, because he didn't want to sink to what he saw as the barbarism of the Japanese. In his first speech after the bombing, he refers to Hiroshima as "a military base", not a city, and says it was chosen to, insofar as possible, avoid the killing of civilians - but that if Japan did not surrender, then the US would bomb Japan's war industry, and then thousands of civilian lives would then be lost. Earlier drafts showed that it didn't contain the "insofar as possible" caveat. He genuinely didn't seem to realize what he was authorizing at the time. But Groves absolutely knew what he was doing, and deliberately selected sites for maximum civilian casualties. Truman seems to have come to understand what was going on by shortly after Nagasaki, where he gave the order to cease use of atomic weaponry, saying that the thought of wiping out another 100,000 people was too horrible and that he couldn't stomach the thought of "killing all those kids".

They are competitive in quality with American models.

They absolutely compete against lower-end or previous-generation US models. I use GLM-5.3 and GLM-5.3 flash a ton, for example. But they do not compete against the top-end US frontier models from Anthropic and OpenAI.

If you can do a normal difficulty, verifiable task with an open Chinese model, you probably should. GLM is less than $5 per 1M tokens out, vs. $50/1M for OpenAI Astra for example. But there are some things that you'll just get stuck grinding your gears on with the former that the latter will have no problems solving. Or it might be a really important nonverifiable task, e.g., not "does this program work".

Also, I'm not sure what "defenses against distillation" is supposed to even mean.

I've never met a Silicon Valley company that decided to slow down for reasons that weren't also aligned with business interests.

These people genuinely are scared of their creations.