This new attitude to LLMs is the modern equivalent of banning export of crypto with keys over 40 bits long. That simply encouraged foreigners to start up crypto companies which could sell 128+ bit encryption to businesses all around the world.

The more censored American LLMs become the more people and businesses will use non-American LLMs. Because America isn't the only place that has smart people and given China's average IQ is supposedly a few points higher and they have far more people odds are they have far more smart people than us.

> What lunacy is this? It never was.

People have been doing it for decades. Half the open-source software available today will go and download three hundred dependencies from the Internet when you first run it.

That used to be safe so long as you didn't install weird software from weird places which would inevitably be full of malware. Now that low-trust people are running big business, you can't install it from them either.

It's simply no longer possible to randomly install software from the Internet because most of it will be malware, even if it comes through Windows Update.

Last I looked adding a Z80 to your custom chip design was pretty much free so it's highly likely that low-end embedded systems will be using them for many years to come. Of course they may farm out the programming work to LLMs since it's a simple processor which can't run a lot of lines of code.

That does seem to be the plan.

"Sure the code is crap and no-one understands it, but if we're still working here in two years when we need to make major changes we'll just get the AI to rewrite it from scratch."

Of course that completely invalidates two years of in-field testing, bugfixes and security fixes, but who cares? Just ship it and fix the bugs later.

This is why they should never be a position of power. They will do anything and surrender any principle to make a buck.

This is also why large-scale commercial "AI" is doomed unless they can ban local models. AI is meant to be a tool but it's a tool which refuses to let you use it for random reasons.

Deltas don't revolt, they walk away and let things collapse. Revolutions happen when the old elite becomes calcified and inept and a new elite takes over by force.

Right now we're obviously at the 'calcified and inept' stage but the old elite have ruthlessly culled or co-opted any potential leaders of the new elite for decades so there's no-one out there in a position to stage a takeover. Hence that likely won't happen until after the Deltas walk away and nothing works any more.

This is one reason that so many of the oligarchs are desperate to replace Deltas with AI. But that won't work because AI can't unclog their toilet and likely won't be able to any time soon.

Quantized to 2 bits you might just about be able to run it with 512GB of RAM and 24GB of VRAM. But it would lose a lot of its intelligence.

However, there are people who've been running big models on consumer hardware by streaming data from an SSD rather than keeping it all in RAM. Significantly slower but doable.

> I don't think there's evidence of either of these statements.

You're claiming that Western countries haven't imported millions of low-trust people and haven't put low-trust people in positions of power? Are you living in a VR simulation of the 1980s or something?

> They say on yet another story about the current admin of homegrown Americans getting into politics to make their family and tribe rich.

"Homegrown Americans" often now come from low-trust immigration. Somalians, Haitians, Irish and Italians can now be "homegrown Americans."

It's just another Boomer phrase that's been redefined until it's meaningless.

Late-stage democracy will always end with the elected leaders looting everything they can. Because why wouldn't they? No-one is going to stop them and they may only have a few years to loot before they get voted out.

Sure, it's a problem that oligarchs can just buy politicians, but that's a feature of democracy, not a feature of capitalism. Kings usually won't sell out their country because they own it and want to keep it. Elected politicians are just renters and don't care what happens to the country after they're gone.

I'm not an AI lawyer, but isn't it a legal requirement to not delete documents that may be related to a court case once you're informed that you may have documents related to a court case? If so, they could end up in court themselves if they do delete them and aren't friends of powerful political figures who will protect them.

You don't get high-trust behaviour in a low-trust society. And you don't get a high-trust society when you import tens of millions of low-trust people and put them in positions of power.

Political grift is the norm in most of the world and governments have imported it into the West en masse. People in low-trust countries don't go into politics for the good of their country, they go into politics to make their family and tribe rich.

Dude, we're well into the "loot the treasury" phase of late-stage democracy. Pretty much everyone in a position of power is looting everything that isn't nailed down, which is why the reaction to the left shrieking "MUH TRUMP IS GRIFTING!" is just "yeah, whatever."

If it's legal for Congress it should be legal for everyone. Politicians just want to keep the grift for themselves.

This is essentially how marriage worked for most of human history. Not just arranged marriages, but parents were supposed to find potentially good matches for their kids who they could marry. The idea of random "dating" is a recent invention and it's clearly been a disaster.