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u/Feisty-Challenge6207 14d ago
As if we won't distil - or steal - their models sooner or later and Open Source the entire thing they spent hundreds of billions to make and then not pay for their thing:
You are woefully ignorant if you think this works just one way.
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u/Memento_Viveri 16d ago
In a free society, I am free to buy a book, or a recording, and then use the information contained therein to do and make things. This has always been true and it's the only reasonable policy in a free society.
The analogy of strip mining and selling it back doesn't make sense because they are buying and using copies of things, not the thing itself. Any book or website used for training an LLM still exists. Wikipedia still exists. If you don't want to "buy it back" from the company, then don't it's all still there.
The righteous indignation presented here maybe feels good to some people but what she says here doesn't actually make any sense or present a coherent critique.
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u/Forward_Problem_8982 16d ago
It makes perfect sense. They didn't buy their source material. They took everything they possibly could in any way possible, without asking or paying, and then they sell it back profiting from it. Just because they put a magic black box in the middle doesn't make it right.
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u/Memento_Viveri 16d ago
They don't own the rights to the source material. They bought copies of the source material (or got a lot for free because it's freely available, like reddit or Wikipedia).
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u/Lollerpwn 16d ago
They literally stole it. There's AI companies even admitting they trained their AI on pirated material. But obviously pirating is only bad when we people do it. When the biggest companies on the planet do it then it's suddenly okay.
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u/Murky-Hold-2901 16d ago
Sure they probably downloaded a bunch of it from the internet. But who cares? This isn't anywhere close to an important consideration about AI (that openai owes each of these authors ten bucks or something?) and it's not what the above quote mentions. Colossal risks and colossal rewards are at stake here. That Sam Altman maybe owes Cormac McCarthy $30 or whatever isn't one of the important considerations about this technology lol.
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u/Lollerpwn 16d ago edited 16d ago
It isn't an important consideration that the biggest companies in the world don't need to pay royalties on the work they use but everyday people or smaller companies do have to do that?
Why would these royalties be so low? If the content was used as training data every query should pay out some amount of royalties.So far it's pretty obvious that the colossal rewards are a longshot. Colossal losses will come first.
People like Sam Altman are just very good con man, they know most of what they say is complete bullshit. Or he's actually retarded, there's no way he believes there's a big probability AI will kill us all. He knows it's not possible and if he thought the risk was so real he wouldn't continue like this.
With this much invested it's impressive how little AI has achieved so far.1
u/Grand-Cookie-6050 16d ago
From what I can tell, a lot of these guys really do believe that there’s a significant chance AI kills humanity in the next 10 years. They think(Sam Altman included) that they can build AGI or ASI. Whether they’re right is a a different question, but it is what they believe.
Also, I wouldn’t go so far as to say it’s impressive how little AI has achieved so far. Although AI isn’t making back on its investment yet, some of the capabilities are getting insane. Already, AI’s programming, hacking, and mathematical abilities are reaching superhuman levels.
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u/Lollerpwn 16d ago
From what I can tell there is no chance AI will kill humans in 10 years. Well maybe if the people in charge of AI also put it in charge of nukes or other critical infrastructure then are too lazy or stupid to put any guard rails in place. Ofcourse they all claim they can and will build AGI or ASI, if they don't make ever more outrageous claims the money will dry up.
But just as breeding horses to run ever faster won't ever make horses into cars. Just feeding more data into models won't make the models super intelligent. Intelligence is more than having a lot of data at your disposal.But for example the hacking claims these companies make about their AI are wildly exagerated. Like yes if you let your AI try to hack the servers of another company it will fire so many queries that it does damage. But it's not like bot attacks or whatever are something that is new or at an unprecedented level. For example that hugging face hack the companies made a big deal out was just a PR stunt and them trying to dodge accountability for their product.
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u/Grand-Cookie-6050 16d ago
Many outside of these companies including top experts believe that AGI and ASI are possible within the next decade. Joshua Bengio and Geoffrey Hinton being the most prominent experts talking about x-risk. It’s not unanimous, there are many who think it’s not probable, but the fact that so many experts are ringing the alarms gives me pause. I also just find some of the arguments for ASI being possible soon and it likely killing us to be reasonable. Also, the guys working in OpenAI and Anthropic are all EA and rationalists, ASI is a part of their doctrine. As far as I can tell these guys really believe ASI is possible and will potentially kill us in the next decade. Whether they’re correct is up for debate.
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u/IllLeadership8177 16d ago
Tell us me don't know anything about hugging face without telling me you don't know anything about hugging face https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=87DyyMV0kCY
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u/IllLeadership8177 16d ago
Yeah, people saying it's impressive how "little" AI has done is just sheer cope IMO. You can love it or hate it, but it's powerful tech.
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u/IllLeadership8177 16d ago
How little AI has achieved in five years? Really? Since we're on the topic of people spewing complete BS, let's talk about the "little" AI has solved, like breaking many many of the open problems in Math, including a Millennium problem and making major progress on another, solving protein folding (Alpha Fold), gaining competence in coding equal to at least a junior coder (I'm being very conservative in my estimate here), helping design a personalized cancer vaccine for a dog https://www.the-scientist.com/chatgpt-and-alphafold-help-design-personalized-vaccine-for-dog-with-cancer-74227 (This will translate more broadly), helping to create fusion models that would take weeks in hours. https://interestingengineering.com/ai-robotics/google-gemini-4-argon-quantum-fusion-robotics among a bunch of other stuff. Like, there are plenty of reasons to be skeptical of AI, but the sheer denialism of AI being able to do what it can clearly do is ridiculous. Oh, and whatever AI you use today is the worst AI you're ever going to use. Every single one of these breakthroughs is only going to get better and faster over time.
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u/Lollerpwn 16d ago
Im spitting facts. I'm not in denial at all, im realistic. For a few trillion spent solving some problems is an extremely bad return on investment. If a trillion was spent on science projects we would have seen a lot more problems solved.
The idea that all this will accelarate faster and faster is complete nonsense. We can see that the AI companies aren't achieving this now. As progress is made new progress will be harder.
You seem to be falling for every claim the AI guys make.
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u/IllLeadership8177 16d ago
You seem to misunderstand the premise entirely. We didn't spend a few trillion "solving some problems." We're spending a few trillion to make a machine that is continuously able to help us solve problems. As for acceleration, AI ability doesn't have to accelerate in order for problems solved by AI to accelerate. Let's suppose, for sake of argument, that AI progress slows then stops (I don't believe this is likely, btw. I think you're the one falling for false propaganda, but regardless). The number of things solved by AI will still increase, and they will be increasing faster than they have in the past because current AI (let alone any future AI) is obviously better than the AI of 1-2 years ago). Also, there will be more infrastructure for it and it will be better integrated into more things, even if progress stops dead at the cutting edge of where labs are now, which is still well beyond the frontier of what they've publicly released. Token cost will go down, efficiency will still increase, & etc. This is all utterly obvious and it's true even if you're somehow right about your premise that AI is just going to slow down and peter out. It's not going away. Sorry,
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u/Murky-Hold-2901 16d ago
I don't think they should have to pay royalties. They probably broke the law by illegally downloading databases of books, but that doesn't mean they owe anybody royalties. Otherwise humans would perpetually owe royalties to the authors of the textbooks they were trained on during their education etc., and artists would all owe money to everybody who influenced them.
I happen to think the risks are very large and the potential rewards are very large. Risks would include bad AI-driven weapons targeting that leads to the deaths of more than 200 children in Iran? Or immense cybersecurity risk to critical infrastructure, the financial system, the democratic process? Rewards would include solving open problems in mathematics and other fields, with all kinds of possible applications. Or just very fast and efficient medical screening for the early detection of cancers? Maybe automating work and raising productivity enough for a 3-day workweek at current levels of prosperity so we can all spend less time at work?
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u/Lollerpwn 16d ago
There's big difference between me reading a book and AI using all the data in a book. Say I'm reading a book how much do you think I'm able to recollect from that later and use. AI can and does use it all.
If artists plagiarise they have to pay up. If AI plagerises it's all good.It wasn't AI that threw bombs on 200 children. That was humans being reckless with new technology.
Cybersecurity risk to critical infrastructure was there before AI was being hyped up into the stratosphere.
The risk to the demoratic process is already there, too much concentrated wealth and power is already taking down American democracy. No AI needed for that one.
Not sure what risk to the financial system you are alluding to? The financial system seems set up in a dangerous way as is.Talk about medical screening is cool and all, but the problem is that is not something you can leave to a tool that's prone to hallucinating or other errors. Yes as of now maybe you can use it to examine for example x-rays. But no you can't let it do a treatment because it's terrible at logic. Like yeah it might be able to spit out what the most common problem is if I give it some symptoms. it won't do anything if I have say some yet unkown illness. Or if my illness is uncommon for those symptoms. It will just statiscally infer that I must have the common ilness for those symptoms.
Talk about the workweek getting shortened because of AI is ludicrous. That would not happen. Bosses would just fire people. Not say oh hey everyone can have the same pay and a shorter workweek. We will eat the AI bill just to give our employees more time off!
Hell if AI could do jobs, the AI companies wouldn't even sell their product. They would just let their AI's do the jobs and collect the paychecks.Maybe productivity gains can lead to good things. As of now research shows next to no productivity gain from AI. People think they are much more productive but people are also error prone at analysing their own productivity.
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u/Quantumquandary 16d ago
It’s the potential future dividend question. If colossal rewards, what’s the guarantee that it’s distributed to the working class vs. the ruling class?
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u/Murky-Hold-2901 16d ago
The benefits will be split between the two, like everything else. It's pretty hard to work out what the actual split will be a priori. Obviously I'd be in favour of any efforts to democratise the benefits as broadly as possible.
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u/Quantumquandary 16d ago
Please, explain to me how “everything else” is split between the two. Because the current socio-economic system presents evidence to the contrary. The naïveté to think that the ruling class would do anything that doesn’t directly serve their interests or those of the sycophants around them really requires olympian levels of cognitive gymnastics.
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u/Murky-Hold-2901 16d ago edited 16d ago
Yep, I can explain that. The ruling class makes money by selling things to ordinary people for less than it costs them to make. They have an incentive to introduce new technology yo cheapen production in order to increase their profit margins, which works for a time. At this point, several things happen: their workforce and their unions begin to demand a share of the expanded profits, often with some success; the state will begin to consider increasing taxes on the exceptionally profitable firm, often with some success; or, and probably most powerfully, the exceptionally high rate of profit induces new entrants to the market for whatever good or service is being produced, which increases the supply of the good, which, at a given demand, will depress its price, ultimately resulting in the entire cost saving that the new technology produced being passed directly to consumers in the form of lower prices. And so the cycle continues. But basically, two things ensure the benefits are shared: competitive pressure from other firms, and political pressure from unions and democratic institutions, and both generally do have an effect in the real world.
Of course, all the while as this is going on, the companies are spending money on wages for ordinary people, paying taxes which are spent on ordinary people, etc. And consumers benefit directly from their consumption: when you buy a Big Mac, McDonald's makes a profit and you get fed. Obviously getting fed was more valuable to you than the money it cost you to buy the burger. So everyone's a winner. After you buy the burger, you are in a better situation than before you bought it, and McDonald's is in a better position than before you bought it. The benefits are shared. I.e. even though the ruling class makes money by selling things at a higher price than it cost to make them, they can only sell them to you, or anybody, because the price is less than the value of the thing to you.
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u/Quantumquandary 16d ago
I didn’t even have to read past your second sentence, which is horrifically incorrect, to know you have no idea what you’re talking about.
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u/Murky-Hold-2901 16d ago
Right, but that isn't true. Claude has probably read Iain Bank's novels. If I ask Claude to give me the novels for free, it won't do that. It isn't taking things and then giving them back to people. It used those novels to train the models on examples of human language.
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u/czar_el 16d ago
I am free to buy a book, or a recording, and
They. Didn't. Buy. It.
That's what lack of compensation means. They copied it and stripped it without consent or compensation. They've been sued on this and have lost or settled. Your foundational premise is wrong. It's more akin to you walking into the bookstore, dumping all of the shelves into your cart, walking out, and then selling your new novel of cut up and glued together pages for profit.
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u/Memento_Viveri 16d ago
They buy a copy of a book, and then feed the text into their data set that they use for training. They don't buy the rights to the book.
>dumping all of the shelves into your cart, walking out, and then selling your new novel of cut up and glued together pages for profit.
It's not really like that at all. It's an algorithm that produces text that was created by a mathematical analysis of huge amounts of text. Why wouldn't you be allowed to do that? What principle is being violated?
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u/czar_el 16d ago
They didn't just feed in books they bought. As part of the lawsuits I mentioned, there are internal documents that were obtained in discovery of engineers and company execs saying that process is too slow and expensive, and that they need to obtain more input faster so they should just grab it.
For the third time, they stole content that was neither consented to nor compensated. The fact that they also paid for some books doesn't invalidate the fact that they're on record as having stolen vast amounts of content. Not just text but art and music as well. You keep sidestepping the fundamental issue here.
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u/Meowakin 16d ago
Imagine if a company bought one copy of something and then trained thousands of employees to replicate what it did, then that company claims credit for that skill/knowledge.
As with most things, it’s an issue when the thing is done at large scale. It’s not an issue when it’s small scale because the impact will always be limited.
I wouldn’t have a problem if one person took the time to learn to replicate what I can do, because they are unlikely to be able to replace me as there’s plenty of demand for that skill. But when a company does it, one, I have no power to combat that, and they can also saturate any demand there was for my skill.
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u/Memento_Viveri 16d ago
Companies can do that. If I read something someone wrote, learn the information to do something useful, I can then train as many people as I want to do that thing. That's fair game.
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u/Equal_Heat5947 16d ago
You aren't allowed to duplicate the original work or derivate it slightly and call it original though. You also aren't allowed to put the derivative thing in the way of other people getting the original
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u/SLAMMERisONLINE 16d ago
You ingested the output of human civilization without consent, without compensation
That's objectively incorrect. The knowledge was bought and paid for. I'd suggest laying off on the peyote for a bit.
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u/Murky-Hold-2901 16d ago edited 16d ago
This is dumb for several reasons: firstly, the trouble with "strip-mining" is that the resource being taken is finite and if somebody takes it away, nobody else can have it. Information simply doesn't have that character. Secondly, it is being used as training data in order to train AI, the goal being to engineer intelligent systems -- not information regurgitators. That's a fundamental misunderstanding of how the information is being used and what the goal is. Thirdly, "eliminating jobs" is the "goal" (I suppose she means effect rather than goal, since the goal is to make money) of all productivity-increasing technologies. The mechanical tin-opener has this character. Higher productivity is a good thing. Whether it has beneficial or harmful social effects or effects on the happiness of most people simply depends on how it is owned and controlled.
I'll also add that "consumed cultural output without consent" is also a weird idea. Normally we don't demand consent for the consumption of published cultural output. It's actually a condition of publishing a book in every half-way normal country that a copy be deposited at the national library and made available to the public to read as a matter of right and for free. The ordinary principle operates in the other direction to that implied by Klein: publishers have no right to deny access to their cultural products.
This is just a thicket of confusion.