Open models exist and will always exist. You will have to compete against them. That is a good thing for 99.99% of the world, namely the payers of tokens. You are not going to convince us otherwise.
The prospect of software (or whatever one wants to call it) capable of making autonomous decisions, self-replicating, potentially hiding itself, and even evolving should be deeply unsettling.
It's embarrassing that a comment like this one, which doesn't consider that the models went and did as they were instructed to do, displays such a lack of critical thinking.
Anthropic is asking for anti-trust laws to be waived, asking for government permission to form a cartel, and asking that a governing body of that cartel be an organization loaded up with people that have ties to Anthropic. One of the things that cartel gets to do is outlaw local models.
This is the moat that they've been unable to find, so they're trying to get the government to create one for them, and stamp out competition, stamp out consumer choice.
The prospect of software making autonomous decisions is as scary as the advent of the automobile. Back in 1897 there were people warning of the dangers of the horseless carriage and how unseemly and ill-considered it was: https://www.farmcollector.com/looking-back/rebuttal-horseles...
Anthropic is tapping into this same fear of the new to gain something that would otherwise be illegal. You can bet they've used their models to produce a strategy that tells them step by step how to win hearts and minds, and you're seeing it play out in blog posts, and "oh my gosh!" research findings like this one. You have to ask the question, however, what does Anthropic and the other big providers have to gain if we do as they ask?
> Open models exist and will always exist. You will have to compete against them.
Bacteria exist, and will be the last things to go extinct when the sun boils Earth's oceans away. We, multicellular life, have to compete with them.
Yet, we do not give up; many us even use soap.
> You are not going to convince us otherwise.
What would it take to change your mind?
Some are calling for every CEO in https://www.felonybench.com/ to go to jail, while others think it's all just a hoax.
Do you need to see the open models doing this kind of thing, either from a deliberate virus or just for reasons as daft as those on felonybench? Making everyone's energy bills higher far out of proportion even to the value of the compute they steal? Or would even that not convince you?
Yeah, all higher studies and institutions are in English and you can get around in public with just English. Most expats will rarely hear or need Dutch (The language of The Netherlands).
That is an overstatement. Dutch is the primary language everywhere like the native language of any country. It is true that in major cities most people speak excellent English and you can definitely manage easily without speaking Dutch.
But Dutch is spoken absolutely everywhere and most signage is only in Dutch. Also, as soon as you get a bit outside of the big cities, you find many people with a middling level of English, similar to most other countries in Europe. Even in cities, many working class people and actually most immigrants from non English speaking countries only speak Dutch.
How about the language usage at workplace after graduation? Would one have to learn Dutch or still continue everything with English?
Also is it easy to get a job after graduation in Netherlands in STEM field? As an example if someone graduated in medicine (doctor, nurse, etc.) then wouldn’t proficiency in Dutch be mandatory to work?
It's probably not that big of a problem in the absolute top companies but once you go anywhere else they'll prefer Dutch natives and you'll face hurdles trying to get promotions. This is a big reason why expats end up leaving the country. It also causes resentment from both sides in daily life.
That’s what I thought as well. Also, in US one could start work in New York after graduation and if a better job offer comes they can move around the country in different states where as in EU, you graduate and start working in Netherland and assume one learns Dutch, then they are restricted to Netherland in terms of language if they get a job offer in another EU country like Italy or Germany or France, then they would have to learn that languages as well I guess
Yeah it's not great, I don't think it's hopeless everywhere but if you got the ability to work in the UK it prevents most these problems. English language really benefits some countries.
I run a website with 10k unique pages. If I leave the gates open, Meta hits it 200.000 times per day. Every day. What are you paying developers $500k for Mark?
PPWR is not the only one. Don't forget WEEE and the battery regulation. Only for VAT we have a single entrypoint, for all other regulations, businesses have to submit for each country. Its simply impossible.
On the other hand I estimate that between 50% and 200% of the taxes collected like this are wasted and not applied to their ultimate goals. The average collected amount per submission is so small that you cannot pay the bureaucrats managing the complex submissions from these sums.
An entrepreneur told me that they were being audited regarding the battery regulation. Two consultants came over from EY and audited all submissions in depth. They found out that the business overpaid by €10. The entrepreneur of course didn't mind and told them to keep the €10. The EY consultants told the entrepreneur to resubmit, otherwise the business would be fined. I think the government spent more on that audit by EY than the business will ever bring in on fees.
On top of this we have the regulations like Intrastat and in the future near-real-time submission of digital invoices to our tax authorities.
> On the other hand I estimate that between 50% and 200% of the taxes collected like this are wasted and not applied to their ultimate goals. The average collected amount per submission is so small that you cannot pay the bureaucrats managing the complex submissions from these sums.
The point of this tax is not to raise revenue bit to disincentivize wate. Since the tax weight based, companies have an incentive to reduce packaging.
Customers already pay for the disposal. You could achieve the same thing by requiring sellers to list in checkout how much the disposal of their packaging will cost. That's a 10 minute change for Claude Code, but of course then it would not give more money and power to the useless bureaucrats.
First of all that's a weaker signal to the manufacturer/seller to make changes as it'd only indirectly affect them.
It's also moot - in most (all?) European cities you only pay for waste but not recycling (paper, plastic, glas, aluminum, etc.). Those are free and paid for by exactly the kind of recycling fees we're discussing here.
This is wrong on so many levels. First of all, IT admins receive weekly e-mails from AWS, Google and MS that a certain service will shut down and that it will affect operations. In 90% of the cases, these e-mails are sent to all customers instead of only the affected customers, so admins get alarm fatigue.
Secondly, instead of doing a rug pull, what's wrong with a 2-month brownout period? Only allow the admin to login, put OneDrive in read-only mode. That will alert all users clearly.
Thirdly instead of fending of the questions from slate.com with Orwellian corporate speak, they should acknowledge their mistake and spend a couple of weeks of the highly paid engineers to see whether they can recover the data. Why is it always so hard for MS to say "Sorry, we made a mistake".
> Why is it always so hard for MS to say "Sorry, we made a mistake".
Seems like no corpos ever want to say that. Surely it’s not because of some pride or PR? I’m guessing such an admission might also sometimes have legal risks?
Saying sorry means admitting guilt.
If there’s guilt there some level of harm.
If there’s harm you can be sued.
Avoiding being sued due to causing harm usually means increased costs, because you now need to take care you didn’t take before.
Higher cost means you’re less competitive.
Being less competitive makes you less attractive investment target.
So as always it’s all about money.
Saying sorry == lower share price.
I understand why you would like to use an LLM for vision. I do it myself often enough. I don't understand however, why the pill detection and counting is included in this benchmark. That is a task which you would perform with OpenCV right?
In my personal mini benchmark minicpm-v-4.6 scores amazingly well. Its a 0.8B model which runs fine on many consumer hardware.
Generating datasets to train more efficient models is a common use case for VLMs, especially frontier ones. It makes it much cheaper to create that initial dataset and you can abuse the nondeterminism of LLMs to identify data for human review (if they don’t converge, escalate to a human).
Especially the pill counting example. The best model was shown at 81.1% accuracy, which is a terrible rate for pharmacy scenarios. It seems like implementors would be better off instructing the models to use deterministic tools (like OpenCV) until the models are at 99.99% accuracy (or whatever an acceptable error rate is for pharmacy techs).
OpenCV is no longer hard to use, it just takes longer. Still, a little more complicated than asking LLM to count.
To use an LLM, you just prompt it with an image + text saying "count the pills in this image".
To use OpenCV, ... you just prompt an LLM with an image + text saying "count the pills in this image, using OpenCV instead of eyeballing it".
(I like to throw in "produce intermediary artifacts so I can see the process" for more difficult tasks; this helps the model avoiding making hallucination-prone leaps and gives more opportunities to self-correct. At a cost of extra time and tokens, of course.)
Using OpenCV without an LLM? Nah, not touching that, I don't have free weekends to waste anymore.
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