That seems to be an attempt to push liability/responsibility onto the end user. As in “it’s not us doing this, we’re just executing the instructions from X”.
It baffles me that Western countries don’t seem to apply the principle of reciprocity in matters like this.
If Western companies can’t realistically win a lawsuit against the Chinese government in China, why should Chinese companies be able to do the reverse?
Consider the second order effects, there's a reason Western systems emphasise equality before the law. Of course most real-world implementations fall far short, but the system makes equality before the law a goal for a very good reason.
Consider the alternative option, we weaken equality before the law when dealing with non-Western entities who are bound by legal systems we consider on strategic grounds to produce inferior justice. Not only would this by definition be a weakening of our standards of justice, it creates an enormous moral hazard. Common law systems like the UK and US rely strongly on precedent, imagine the kind of unjust precedents which might be set if we do not apply equality before the law strictly. On top of that, having weakened standards of justice to frustrate foreign opponents, what is going to stop the political apparatus from weakening standards of justice again to frustrate domestic groups it doesn't like?
Even if it leads to disadvantage on the global stage, in my opinion the risks associated with weakening equality before the law far outweigh the benefits. A legal system with strong integrity is an asset, and it shouldn't be spent cheaply on short-term geopolitical gain.
> Consider the alternative option, we weaken equality before the law when dealing with non-Western entities who are bound by legal systems we consider on strategic grounds to produce inferior justice.
Maybe the alternative is equality-before-the-law, but the judgement amount won by the Chinese company gets put in escrow until there's legal reciprocity, to create pressure for it.
Holding payments in escrow has the problem of making the administration of justice contingent on the behaviour of a foreign government, which brings us back to where we started with equality before the law. How can we be said to have a higher standard of justice if we explicitly carry out the same kind of instrumental justice we're accusing others of?
Personally I think building trustworthy systems for international arbitration is the method most likely to succeed, if the aim is to come to a common standard of justice for commercial matters then courts on either side of the equation will always be considered suspect by the other side. Both credible international institutions and neutral third countries are a good way of doing this. Appeals to the virtues of different systems aren't going to work here, instead we have to create material incentives that favour a high standard of justice. A reduction in these kind of legal difficulties would improve trust and efficiency.
Obviously this approach has its limits but that's when things like diplomatic pressure, economic protectionism, and in the worst cases economic sanctions come into play. This is all the realm of the executive and legislature though, not the judiciary. The principle is not mere idealism, if we let day-to-day international relations contaminate the judicial process we are committing exactly the same sin that we're accusing China of. By keeping the instrumental aspects of foreign policy isolated in the executive and legislature, this problem is avoided in the interests of justice. It also helps avoid the perception of hypocrisy which is always a diplomatic advantage.
because western countries operate on a principle of equality before the court regardless of who it is and this principle shall not be broken even if the those in court practice their laws differently. Creating another special system for addressing this would open a way for the abuse of justice thus it better to maintain the system as is.
They’re a kind of modern version of web directories, and they failed for the same reason the original web directories did (spam/self-promotion, and outdated stuff).
The "actual awesome" lists were awesome, as every single software linked in those were good software.
But yeah, once "influencer developers" got a hold of the concept, misunderstood it to be an index rather than a curated list, it stopped loosing any value the concept had.
Now it's just random individuals who want to "own" a collection, but have zero care about the quality, and just merge whatever additions.
Sure, but that developer set out to curate a list, not do what seemingly everyone did afterwards, which was just to build the "longest list possible" with zero regards to quality of linked projects.
FWIW, I appreciate their contributions to the ecosystem, in the sense that you can just take whatever they're doing, multiply by -1 in each dimension, and there you have your steering vector towards good ideas.
That is genuinely useful and provides a lot of value.
> You can demonstrate definitively that there nothing other than "next token prediction" by running
Describing LLMs as next token predictors isn’t incorrect, it’s meaningless. It’s the equivalent of describing brains as “a bunch of atoms”.
The problem with these descriptions is that they say nothing about high-level capabilities. If you can predict the next token in a proof of the Riemann hypothesis, then you can prove the Riemann hypothesis.
In a similar vein, if the string of "next tokens" based on 300k input tokens is: "run this bash command and paste the results into the token stream", followed by another call that includes the output of that bash output giving "Based on the output from that bash command, now run head -n 30 /foo/bar/baz.txt and paste it here", finally followed by "Based on that, here's the problem with your systemd configuration: [...]"
The part that really bakes my noodle: `/foo/bar/baz.txt` can be a filename that no one has ever typed before, the error inside the file can be a typo that no one has ever typed before, and it will still correctly "predict the next token" to solve your problem.
I don't think that's true and I don't think your comparison is accurate.
In the case of the brain, it'd be more akin to the reduction of the brain to just the neuronal dynamics (obviously experience phenomenally is much more than that to us!)
But both views can be useful, depending on what you are trying to understand.
The problem with these arguments is that people pick and choose based on their persons preferences. People who are in love with LLMs will, on the LLM side, argue against reductionism "they are way more than next token predictors!" then they'll turn around and equally try to argue "the substrate doesn't matter! The brain is "just" neurons and digital activity so of course we can replicate it!" (this is also incorrect, btw, the brain is also an analog system, even in its electrical connections and not just in its chemistry)
The on the other side the anti LLM crew will do the opposite (launch into reductionism when it comes to LLMs, resist it when it comes to humans). I'm a human being and I like humans and I think people have adopted a strange view of LLMs, which are a tool and should be treated as such, so I tend to side with the humans. The stalwart defenders of LLM honor that would balk at any attempt to reduce them in stature to what they fundamentally are, mechanistically, are... an odd bunch. I'm confused why people are so passionate about it. If someone told me "well your IDE is just a fancy AST walker" yeah I think that is a dumb take but I wouldn't feel like I had to argue against such a take either saying "no! no! it's so much more!"
I think the point was meant to be more simple and broad:
A system is not just its little bits.
Where "system" and "little bits" can be just about anything. But people endlessly repeat this mistake, and it has been a go-to misunderstanding/misrepresentation for a lot of people on this forum.
So instead of doing this during a potential future war when it could be a strategic advantage, Russia is doing piecemeal attacks right now to show Europe where the weaknesses are and give them time to upgrade their defenses?
As a reminder: Russia gave Ukraine tutorial level war from 2014 to 2022, allowing them to fix many problems in armed forces. Resulting in 2022 being far less lopsided than it would be with Russia attempting the same in 2014 or 2015 or 2016 or 2017 or 2018 or 2019 or 2020 or 2021.
Why you would assume that Russian strategy is optimal?
In Russia various security services and oligarchs are always trying to win Putins good will. Which is why they will try various low level sabotage actions like paying some losers on signal to firebomb a warehouse or hack into freezers. Remember there is no possible downside for them.
> Anthropic cannot wait until they have the leverage to ban all their users.
Huh? Their power is precisely in the users they have.
Let’s say they build a godlike superintelligence. Now they ban all their users. Let’s further assume that they are fine with all their users rotting and dying (easy to believe). Now what exactly is Anthropic going to do in that world? Invent Millennium Problems and solve them?
> Their power is precisely in the users they have.
False. There is a brilliant quote from The Blacklist series: "every information is worth something to someone". Their strength comes from the fact that they convinced everyone to willingly let user-facing computers collect data, write and execute arbitrary code on people's computers with a simple "trust me bro". In other words they have near complete monopoly over the world's infrastructure.
> Now what exactly is Anthropic going to do in that world
Dario already said it according to multiple sources: he believes Anthropic will be the last surviving company in the world, where all the value will accumulate
Elon Musk has another vision: his AI is going to build the Dyson swarm around the Sun. Money doesn't matter in that world, only how many robots you have, and how much mass you can put into orbit.
> Dario already said it according to multiple sources: he believes Anthropic will be the last surviving company in the world, where all the value will accumulate
Given that LLMs are practically commodities and open models are a dime a dozen, this is pure insanity. There's no way there from here.
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