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Well that’s exactly the authors’ claim. Legalese and patents intent is not to facilitate communication but to maintain a claim under the most bad faith, hostile reading.

AI language, it seems, is optimized to support reasoning from the interior monologue.


A mature religious belief knows that the god that created the doctor also created the cancer.

As humans were more likely to celebrate the God who provides the cure more so than the God who creates the disease.


Is there adverse selection in reports of the callousness, incompetence and greed of US healthcare providers?

Three years ago, of necessity I became a big-time consumer of healthcare[1] and I can't believe I just been lucky that nearly all my doctors seemed reasonable and effectively treated me. Of the dozen or so doctors I dealt with only one left me with a bad feeling.

[1] Stage 4 renal cancer, successfully treated with immunotherapy and surgery at Perlmutter Cancer Center in NYC.


There is definitely some, but the #1 advice is excellent advice pretty much wherever you go IMO. Beyond just scheduling: You absolutely have to be your own advocate for all sorts of stuff that will otherwise often get dropped through the cracks.


> Is there adverse selection in reports of the callousness, incompetence and greed of US healthcare providers?

I assume so. My experience is pretty similar to yours.


perlmutter is also one of the best cancer centers in the country, things are often quite different at smaller hospitals


And in addition to variance among institutions, there variance in practice at each. The best groups have a consummate professional's focus on reducing their own. But even at another "one of the best", let alone at the merely good... my impression was "there's lots of holes in the cheese around here", and left me wondering whether/how a transient outsider might usefully help folks towards more of a safety culture. It seems a reoccurring opportunity.


providing top-level medical care requires a very rare combination of incredible technical skill, organization, humility, and life-long dedication to the craft. i would wager that it's largely a numbers game. how many humans on earth have that combination of skills and traits?


The way the US would leave a crater where the ICC was would not be militarily.

Go ahead, indict Trump. Trump, being the provocateur that he is, would travel to the Hague, or wherever else, and he would not be arrested. The ICC would do nothing and exposes its toothlessness as a performative political tool of center left Europe.


But it's largely the court of center-left European thinking. It's a political tool without teeth, and since none of US, China, Russia are signatories, it can only prosecute people without a great power sponsor.


That’s what makes this so annoying. I don’t mind a template, but the fake personalization gives it a whiff of deception in a way a pre-LLM simple template mass mailing doesn’t.


Your book doesn’t seem very amusing.


But the analogy still holds.

The original authors of all the text, creators of the media and developers of the software did far more work than Anthropic.


Yeah, the whole thing seems like a human centipede of rug pulling. Probably the same as it's always been. Curating AI knowledge should be something that we put our best researchers towards, but realistically I think we wind up with 2-3 highly biased nationalistic models that are constantly copying off each other's notes.


Thanks, that’s the nature of any business. Founders see a way to take existing knowledge and expertise, combine it in some novel or interesting way, and produce a new product


Napster was a fantastic and disruptive product, the likes of which arguably has no equal to this day. But eventually the hammer came down from the courts and it was replaced by streaming services like Netflix, which pay to license materials from their creators.


This is a rubbish lossy statement. And reductionist to the point of nothing has meaning.

Did Anthropic put work in? Yes. Did they derive their value from Humanity being open with knowledge then try to sell it back? Also yes.

Did they even steal the tech? Also yes.


Ai should fall under libraries not mega corporate tech houses. They are our existing knowledge repositories.


But if you take it deeper, didn't most of those authors rely on the work of others? Most of human knowledge is small advancements of things we already knew. Often by reorganizing what we already knew.

Is that not what the foundation models are? A new reorganization of existing knowledge?


Yes this is all true.

So then the problem is that Anthropic seems hypocritical when they knowingly insert themselves into this chain, and then complain about people down-chain from them.

To remedy the negative impressions (if they even care to do so) they should do 1 of 2 things: 1) stop complaining about it 2) stop distilling other people's work


It's hypocritical and we shouldn't listen to their bullshit but I wouldn't expect anything else from them.

This generation of frontier models is "good enough." At some point, the Chinese labs will get to where the Americans are right now, they'll race to the bottom, and we will actually see what proliferation of AI looks like.

If Anthropic wants to be a trillion dollar company, they need to make revenue like Google or Apple do. Both of them have near monopolies, Anthropic is only getting further and further away as time goes on.

Of course they're gonna complain until they either figure out a better plan or accept a new valuation which is high but not spectacular.


They insert themselves into this chain for profit and complain about it. I really think that adds a thick layer to the hypocrisy that people, or at least me, feel is especially distasteful.

No LLM products would exist without the avalanche of largely non-consensual use of IP to create them, full stop. Any of these companies doing this and then turning around and complaining when their IP is "breached" are going to met with a chorus of tiny violins.


quite the leap from “authors rely on the work of others” to vacuuming up the sum total of digitized knowledge to tune some matrices


Often people ignore scale. N=1 is OK, therefore, N=1billion is OK. Same flawed argument as: "It's OK for one police officer to watch one street corner for the purpose of observing crime; therefore it's equally OK to have cameras recording every street corner in the city 24/7, for all purposes. Same thing!"


It is an ancient practice, that when a human creates something, other humans will observe it and learn from it. Every group of humans living together has practiced this in some form for tens of thousands of years if not longer. Even animals do it. It's a natural assumption when making any form of art.

It is not a natural assumption that someone will digitize the artwork and use it to adjust a couple thousand matrix coefficients in a complex computer program. To most people that seems like copying with extra steps. The brain may in some ways resemble a computer, but what sets it apart is that we have always lived with brains. Everything a human does has already anticipated the presence of other brains, while etched circuits on ultrapure silicon crystals are something new.


not at that scale though


It’s a few corporations stealing work from others, to sell it back to us. That’s it.


But it's selling it back to us cheaper and with more utility. That's not something to sneeze at.


Don't forget the mothers of all those original authors, as well as everyone who labored to build and sustain the societies which produced writers.


It all comes full circle with chinese models being available free for all humanity to use


Beautiful, right?


Kinda agree statistical modeling relies on all the hard work, effort, passion and risk taken from just about everybody.


To a degree. The human produced knowledge is the product of all humanity (no human is an island).

A comparable idea could be that an encyclopedia or maths book is only distilling the things that other people did, and how dare they sell them. But the "only" is doing quite a bit of work. LLMs do not just spawn into existence. There is a body of work that they feed on, and then there is also very attributable work they do around and on top of that. All labs are struggling around the first order question: Is it okay to use prior work like this? The second order issue is still entirely reasonable to separately have and enforce rules about.


All the text and so on had unrealized potential. Without Anthropic et al it would remain unrealized.

It’s like FTL. Until someone realizes it, it’s just talk.


He didn’t say it was an analogy. He said both are distillation.


SOTA models cost hundreds of millions to train. Did creating the contents of the text corpus they were trained on really cost an equivalent of 20x as much (~10 billions)? I honestly don’t know, but I could imagine it having been significantly less.

This isn’t meant as a moral argument, just musing about the relative cost comparison.


If you look at movies alone that would easily surpass 10s of billions. The cost of most books is probably more nebulous, but books, research, and more all have time and money spent to create them. I would guess the corpus of all media from the 20th century on would be minimally in the hundreds of billions of dollars.


LLMs aren’t trained on movies, though.

Image/video models are, but those weren’t the topic.


Given they ingested basically the whole internet and then some, you cannot possibly be serious when you mean it's worth less than 10 billions.

The totality of the content on internet is worth several orders of magnitude more.


The argument wasn’t about how much it’s worth, but about how much it cost to create. These are very different things.


do you also count eg published results of very expensive physics experiments? because once the costs of things like these are taken into account, we are way over 10 billions.


Why? Are we doing labor theory of value now?


I would argue that producing the complete written corpus on which they at least intend to train (even if some is still out of reach) cost literally everything to produce.

And the monetary cost doesn't even register when weighed against the blood, sweat and tears that went into capturing the authentic experiences of real human beings, whose honest expressions are now at least in some cases getting hoovered up, ingested, and then destroyed for all eternity, for fear that this specific work is the rounding error that might give an equally immoral competitor the edge in the bicycle-riding flamingo race that is currently consuming an absurd amount of the world's creativity and attention.


Simple math:

A training set of 15 trillion tokens is 10 trillion words.

A penny a word is cheaper than the cheapest beginner freelance writer.

That makes a training set of 10 trillion words cost $100B.

Lots of assumptions there for sure, but we're certainly in the ballpark you are describing.


How much did you get paid to write this?


I asked Claude to estimate the cumulative salaries of US only journalists over the last hundred years:

$500B for all kinds including TV and online

$300B for newsrooms including all staff

$140B for newsroom reporters only

So yeah, I think the price of the information ingested is way higher than training costs


Yes, Easily, and by multiple orders of magnitude.


I suspect so. It is a lot of data. You're looking at essentially all publicly available (and some non public) intellectual work.


Yes, duh! Human output across the millennia is worth much more than whatever is being invested in frontier labs.

How is this even a question.


They are solving unsolved math problems right now, so probably soon or very soon their output will be more valuable than all human recorded knowledge.


What do you think mathematicians were doing for centuries before LLMs?

And also, humans have been doing a lot more work than just mathematics...


Pre vaccination smallpox killed hundreds of millions of people just in the twentieth century [0], the knowledge that allowed for the creation of just that vaccine is worth hundreds trillions of dollars in humans lives, let alone all of `the knowledge and experiences those people were involved in.

The knowledge that created the Haber-Bosch process [1] helps to sustain the majority of the world's populous, add another five hundred trillion dollars for that just to start with.

The creation of the printing press and all written information that allowed it to be built provided dissemination of knowledge beyond the ultra wealthy and is worth a non-finite amount of money.

LLM's are cool math, but they are less than a rounding error in comparison to even the tiniest sliver of human knowledge and technological output.

[0] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35143880/ [1] https://cen.acs.org/food/agriculture/The-industrialization-H...


this is the sort of brain rot thought that you have in a dorm room the day you are introduced to Econ

“bro like, what if we could price the sum total of human knowledge? That wouldn’t be that much, right?”


Did you ever pace yourself or know anyone who had?


They could get warmed up for it by first impeaching Pete Hegseth and RFK.


They wouldn't bother -- those people are obviously fully endorsed by the mainstream of their party.


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