"We absolutely understand why it works, if we didn't understand we would not be able to improve these systems" - Understanding how to improve something does not require understanding how it works.
Growing a plant does not imply understanding soil minerals or photosynthesis.
Training a dog does not imply understanding it's brain.
Using LLMs to improve a codebase does not imply understanding C++.
Improving a PC with new parts, does not imply understanding RAM.
You can understand abstractions about the system, without understanding the system.
Without gradient descent or other forms of automatic optimisation, do you think humans could build something as capable as GPT-1?
Not sure if this will bake your noodle or not, but yes this is basically my point. Saying I understand how dog training works has very little overlap with saying I understand how the dog brain proteome works, even though they're related, and even though I might (or might not!) understand better how to train my dog for having fully understood the proteome.
Saying we understand training and deploying machine translation systems that have strong predictive (rather than descriptive) power, apparently has very little overlap with defining a formal, analyzable, mathematical model of language. Mathematician who refer to "understanding" generally mean the second thing, but the first thing is also a kind of understanding. Just messier.
This is discussed at the bottom of the article:
"Menopause: Humans, killer whales, pilot whales, beluga whales, false killer whales, narwhals one group of chimps in Uganda.
No menopause: Everything else"
So, monkeys and apes (besides one species of chimps) don't get menopause, elephants don't get menopause, lions don't get menopause.
If your prediction is, social animal => menopause, it's wrong 99% of the time.
It seems it might be more a combination of whether it's a social animal and how much help / how much danger the offspring is actually in. There's not a whole lot that fucks with elephants, and not a lot that successfully fucks with the young ones. And female elephants universally live in groups and collectively all protect each other. Female lions tend to do the same, and also have very few things that fuck with them.
Conversely human offspring is especially weak and incapable and susceptible to harm, and experiences a lot of threat even within the same species.
Not sure where that are of whale and chimps fit into that - flukes can also happen I guess.
By your argument, I should be able to directly copy a book and sell it myself. The work was already done! What's more, they were fed by everyone's creativity, so of course I should be able to sell an exact copy.
In reality, the short-sighted greed is allowing widespread theft of intellectual property; do you think the number of writers would increase or decrease if there were no protections against content theft?
If you have such "immense gratitude", pay for the work.
Most likely increase, despite your intuition. This argument has been debunked so many times both intellectually and empirically. For one, read "Against Intellectual Property" by Stephan Kinsella.
I find Kinsella's argumentation extremely weak, and his defense of it (e.g. his AMA) entirely unconvincing. Unless you susbscribe to a number of very daring assumptions which, in my view, do not at all track with our reality, his ideas just don't hold up.
That being said, in this scenario of yours, how much of that additional work do you figure would be actually original? If someone wants to make a living with music, why bother learning an instrument and writing songs if nobody can stop them from just recording someone else and selling that?
That's really the heart of this lawsuit, isn't it? If we give freeloaders the right to legally monetise other people's work, we will drown in bland, derivative, stolen garbage and drive out the actual creators, in the process also breaking the "business model" of the freeloaders. A real lose-lose-lose situation which I see as much more realistic and believable than Kinsella's libertarian dream world.
Not much need for extrapolation, either. We can just watch it happen right now. "Content production" on the web is definitely exploding, as per your point. But even in the mainstream, most people will agree that this flood of new, LLM-generated "works" is worth less than the originals they're sloppy pastiches of.
They impersonated the moderator of the site and attempted XSS attacks. Additionally, when the moderator started deleting messages, they tried to hide their messages later in the alphabetical index.
Nothing to see here. Just billion dollar companies producing hacking geniuses that are open for the public to jailbreak and use. This could never effect us, not really our business.
> billion dollar companies producing hacking geniuses that are open for the public
Hasn’t the biggest complaint about these (non open weight) models been that the versions open to the public are very careful and will issue denials if the request is even tangentially related to ‘hacking’, or building a bioweapon?
Growing a plant does not imply understanding soil minerals or photosynthesis. Training a dog does not imply understanding it's brain. Using LLMs to improve a codebase does not imply understanding C++. Improving a PC with new parts, does not imply understanding RAM.
You can understand abstractions about the system, without understanding the system. Without gradient descent or other forms of automatic optimisation, do you think humans could build something as capable as GPT-1?