You're right: civilian nuclear programmes are not cost effective compared with renewables. But, there's also the military aspect to this too. Military nuclear benefits by hiding/sharing some of the costs, industrial infrastructure, training, expertise, supply chains, etc with a civilian programme. If there was no civilian nuclear programme, the defence budget would be much bigger to fund things like the nuclear navy.
The UK is at 46% renewables, and that number is increasing rapidly. Why hasn't it collapsed yet?
https://ourworldindata.org/gra...
Spain is at 56%:
https://ourworldindata.org/gra...
Iceland is at 100% renewables:
https://ourworldindata.org/gra...
You fail.
I think what they are, in effect at least, trying to say is that you do own (not license) the model output, but as a pre-condition for using their service you agree not to use the output to compete against them.
It's basically as if Microsoft said you can't buy our compiler if you are going to use it to build a compiler (or a clippy, or anything else that we do).
How they work, and/or how they are trained?
Anything specifically?
Distillation is the word used to refer to the practice of using the outputs of one LLM as inputs to train another, often smaller one.
The big US companies like OpenAI and Anthropic have usage "terms of service" that forbid you from doing this, but Gary Tan is saying this is unreasonable and you should be allowed to use the outputs of an LLM in any way you choose.
Specifically, Tan is hoping that, if allowed to, some US companies will choose to do this - train their own models with the help of outputs generated from these large/expensive OpenAI/etc ones, then release these new models in "open weights" form (i.e. downloadable, so you can run it on your own computer if you want to).
The "open weights" business model is interesting. The companies doing this can still make money by making larger customers pay, or by selling services (e.g. model customization), just as a Linux vendor can make money selling/providing open source software.
It does seem a bit weird.
When you pay for API usage, are you buying the model's output or are you licensing it under some restricted usage terms?
It seems what companies like Anthropic are saying is "you are buying the output, but we won't sell it to you unless you agree not to use it to compete with us".
It'd be like Microsoft saying we'll only sell you a C compiler if you agree not to use it to write a compiler.
The headline is questioning what Gary Tan is advocating for, namely that:
1) The US frontier labs shouldn't be allowed to impose terms of service that restrict how users can use the model's outputs
AND
2) Some US labs should take advantage of 1) to distill a, presumably smaller, model from the outputs of these frontier ones, and should release the resulting model in open weights form
I don't think they lose money on everything - it seems their coding subscription plans are probably not proifitable when maxxed out, as many people do, but at current full API rates it is likely quite a profitable business. It's not so hard to figure out, since the cost to provide the service is basically the cost of the hardware amortized over it's useful lifetime.
It does seem that AI is basically a commodity, and when cheap is good enough then the cheapest providers win, just as happened to PCs. No need to pay for a Ferrari when all you need/want is a Ford.
Yes, the AI companies, especially OpenAI and mostly Anthropic, are lobbying for government regulation, partly to exclude Chinese and open weights competition.
It is complicated though.
The guy, Jacob Coxon, you are presumably referring to, may well be regarded as part of Anthropic's own fear-mongering campaign and push for at least partly, maybe largely, self-serving regulation, but at the same time there are many developers working for these companies who say that the internal fear of what they are developing is almost universal.... and yet they keep working on it for whatever reason(s), whether that is pending IPO-riches or some justifcation about needing to develop AI to keep up with an arms race (which they seem to be the ones accelerating).
It seems what we need to do, and perhaps actually will, hopefully before it's too late, is to distinguish AI that is useful for everyday use like coding, and AI that is ridiculously overpowered for things like this and anyways dangerous, that indeed should be government regulated.
It's not an either/or matter of regulate or not - there needs to be some intelligence put into what is regulated or not, just as we allow people to own guns, but not fully automatic assault weapons or rocket launchers, allow people to drive cars, but do not license top fuel dragsters to be used on public roads.
> Controlling superintelligent AI is a fantasy.
Perhaps, but what we have today is something much dumber, yet arguably equally dangerous, in the form of these RL-trained LLMs.
It's like trying to beat DeepBlue or Stockfish as chess - it may not be intelligent, but by automating something and applying brute force compute to it, it becomes highly capable.
Many of these RL-trained LLMs have been specifically trained to be good at hacking and exploit generation, and also just for finding software bugs, which is only one step-removed. Take a hacking-trained LLM and apply brute force compute to it and you get the hacking version of Stockfish - you can call it dumb if you like, but it'll be able hack into many/most of the systems that have a vulnerability to exploit.
Could we at least control these hacking experts? Perhaps, or minimally we need their release to be slow enough to give time for all the potentially vulnerable systems (esp. infrastructure - air control systems, power/water plant control systems, etc, etc) to be checked and hardened against attacks.
Rename the North Atlantic to the English Pond, and have King Charles scribble his name in a giant black marker on the bill when it makes its royal ascent.
Whitehall's taste for secrecy is 'needlessly' straining relations between the two allies.
Never mind the thin skinned orange man baby and the effect heâ(TM)s having on relations with all his back stabbing and attacking of allies! Perhaps look a closer to home and fix your own house first.
Why does the UK need to respond to what some American politicians think?
Yes, for anyone interested a lot of the details are here:
Estimated around $20M at API prices.
Just to scoop a human researcher's work, then threaten to "ruin his career".
These are the same thing these days!
After Expedia bought Hotels.com, they killed off their rewards scheme and all their prices went up against others like Booking.com. They backtracked on the rewards scheme, but it's still not as good as it was before. They also made things like the login experience harder (why are they sending me 2FA emails instead of text messages, which are faster and auto populate in my browser almost immediately?!).
I haven't booked through Hotels.com for years because they are more expensive. Expedia gives the same results for hotels, so it's pointless. I only use Expedia to search for flights because it's more reliable than sites like Skyscanner, but then I go to the airline's website and book direct. I'd rather deal directly with the airline if there's a last minute problem with the flights than have to try to get Expedia to help.
Bell Labs Unix -- Reach out and grep someone.
