i mean, 3 months ago i started to use AI for a project i'm working for around 6 years, full-time but calling a billionaire good and principled is a stretch and when you consider what made him rich, you sound like a 3 year-old kid trying persuade a mom or a dad to get lollipops when your are diabetic
LLMs it's already a economical treat for various fields/people, which not only funnels powers to the elite even more, it does through by violating copyright... everyone who uses this technology is dirt (that includes me and my little dreams of hopefully creating a company which employs minorities on the tech field) but the amount of greed from people who own these servers/GPUs is beyond this world - the world isn't GPLv3 licensed yet, an ethical society wouldn't find excuses to provide and sell LLMs to the masses
An open letter to Dario: if you mean it, give me a billion dollars!
Every time you, or any AI company releases a new frontier model, you have to give me a billion dollars. No strings attached. This will solve the danger of AI. Somehow.
Instead, they are partnering with some of the most disliked companies (x, meta) to further their goals.
1. AI model safety is the most important thing.
2. open weights decreases model safety
So it seems unlikely that this suggestion would be well-received
"Any AI model a company offers to the public has to be released as open weights."
OK great, that means no models released to the public, complete concentration of power.
Their entire funding model depends on that they generate much revenue _soon_
By acquiring companies and letting the now-internal employees use AI, easily outcompeting any company they didn't acquire
2) frontier models are way more dangerous if they are open. It’s opening Pandora’s box, there’s no going back once they are released if they are too dangerous.
Anthropic has already shown they're very comfortable with holding models from the public. Mythos has been around for what, six months, and there's never been a public release. Only the select few blessed by Anthropic have access.
Forcing transparency on public models will just accelerate privatizing access to these models. You don't want to live in that world.
This is such a short-sighted take and author seems unaware of what damage can be done with powerful open weights models (intentional or not).
Jail-broken Fable level LLMs can mean constant hacking leading to public desertification of the web (best case). Now imagine state sponsored bio lab leaking strange viruses on yearly basis. We've seen enough evidence already, it is difficult for me to imagine an engineer living at the centre of the change is writing this piece.
It's a different question if you ask me if I trust a single company to police the technology. But with the current state of things, I unwillingly admit that no state entity can do a better job at the moment.
A jailbroken model that can hack a website can also easily fix the vulnerability that allowed it to hack it. There is a limited number of such vulnerabilities. Over time, all vulnerabilities that are discoverable by the model would be patched and status quo would be restored (until a more powerful model is released: rinse and repeat).
I’m not saying I’m for these solution, I’m probably against, but if we are being serious why are we not discussing these options?
Are they trying to stop everyone else from catching up with them or have they hit some kind of roadblock to improve models even further?
But IMO, they're not trying to help humanity
He is the CEO of a venture-backed company.
What he says is merely intended to ultimately increase company valuation. Nothing more.
Many people seem to believe that GPT-7 will escape the lab and become Terminator. I'm tired of even allowing this stupid LessWrong science fiction garbage to be taken seriously, and if you have any self-respect it's time to push back. If we're going to call out Ed Zitron for being wrong about everything, let's also call out AI safety doomers, too: how are those timelines looking? OpenAI is probably lol'ing super hard every time one of their training sandbox escapes gets hyped up in the news. If they were really afraid of what they had produced, they would have airgapped it. You would have airgapped it. Duh.
The actual threat of AI is the users finding good ways to misuse it. That's the real threat. But, like as has happened with technologies of times past, it will be OK. The counter-measures will need to evolve to contend with the new threats, sometimes not with the level of suffuciency that we maybe hope for, but we will all adjust.
As for some crazy ass lab escape where an entire data center worth of agents is attempting to exploit and destroy infrastructure and kill humanity, well... Have you considered the mitigation of cutting the fiberoptic cables? This shit just sounds like Y2K all over again. Yes, it could actually disrupt society seriously if somehow a horribly badly aligned AI wrought maximum havoc, but the much more reasonable threat to human extinction remains climate change and war and it will be by the time I am dead, too.
You guys have got to get real. Just because it makes a compelling story does not mean it is true.
(And yes I do realize Y2K was a real threat, but the hype of the threat was definitely ridiculous.)
Frontier development won't simply move offshore because the GPUs, most of the people, and almost all of the funding is here.
Our European and Asian allies would probably go along with this idea, because it costs us far more than it costs them.
Step 1, form a world government?
Just asking for a friend (“shut up Netflix, I already asked”)
Aurornis•41m ago
No, really:
> As you know, funding for frontier model development depends on valuations that assume the weights remain proprietary. By changing that assumption, we can reduce the money available for future training runs and slow progress at every lab at once, without a regulator deciding anything.
Which doesn’t even follow. It depends on every lab in the world agreeing to self-destruct their valuations and stop competing. That’s a much more impossible ask than anything Dario is asking for.
It also ignores the possibility of new labs starting up, using the open weights, and continuing exactly where the old labs left off.
I feel like I just read the ramblings of someone who got so excited about the headline that they didn’t take the time to think if their argument was sound.
EA-3167•36m ago
Aurornis•31m ago
The conversation was about AI safety, monitoring, and regulations, not bubbles.
Forcing the weights to be opened to the world accomplishes the opposite of all of that. The argument is incoherent. Or this author doesn’t understand the topic at all?
> The companies themselves wouldn't do it, but they could be required to if they want to operate in the US.
What makes you think the companies outside of the US wouldn’t just thank the US companies for their open weights and then continue on without any of the regulations but all of the advantages?
jacobgold•19m ago
Or maybe you understand less than you think?
Frontier progress is limited by compute, and compute is bought with investor money. Investors fund labs at hundreds of billions because they expect exclusive ownership of the model weights.
If the weights are public the day a model ships, the valuations drop, the funding rounds shrink, and the next training run is smaller or later. Make sense?
Aurornis•16m ago
And that no other country might just take the open weights and continue right on with the advancements in private?
jacobgold•11m ago
Any country can take the open weights and keep going in private. They can do that today, since the weights are almost certainly already in foreign hands due to espionage.
What they can't do is fund the next frontier run at today's pace without selling into the US market, and selling into the US market can require opening the weights.
jacobgold•28m ago
It's a law, so nobody has to agree to anything. If want to sell access to a model, you have to open the weights.
It's Dario's plan that depends on every lab in the world agreeing.
Step #2 of his essay is "democratic coordination" among frontier labs and step three is coordination with China. I'm suggesting one simple law Congress could pass and every US lab would be covered the same day, whether they like it or not.
Frontier progress is compute bound. Compute is bought with investor money. Investors put up tens of billions because they expect to sell the proprietary model that is created.
You're welcome to think the effect would be smaller than I do. But "it requires everyone to agree" is backwards.
linkregister•25m ago
jacobgold•24m ago
hypfer•21m ago
Incredible.
Yes, why would you ever address someone with something that is not in their best interest. Especially people that have power.
I agree. We should never do that and let them just live in peace and do their thing.
Aurornis•21m ago
Laws don’t extend to the entire world. There are AI labs outside of the US that are not that far behind. Forcing US companies to open their weights would hand those labs another advantage, moving the frontier AI to a location outside of any US regulation.
Your proposal doesn’t make any sense.
> The plan that depends on every lab in the world agreeing is Dario's.
I don’t understand how you think creating a law in the US to destroy our AI companies and give an advantage to competitors we can’t regulate accomplishes anything in line with the AI safety debate.
floatrock•23m ago
What are the alternatives?
A regulator saying no? Easy, your headquarters has just moved the Cayman Islands, Ireland, or Switzerland... the US office is just a subsidiary leasing the brand IP and doing marketing.
Or, you just ignore the regulator behind closed doors because you're part of some black budget. You wouldn't be able to talk about that closet back there even if it did exist.
Or, you don't do any of these complicated loopholes and you simply move all the training and inference to a different jurisdiction.
If the only winning move is not to play, how do you ensure no one else plays?
So yeah, the argument is incoherent, but it does have a kind of "only way we can make sure everyone stops playing the game is to destroy the game" mad logic to it.
zozbot234•18m ago
That argument is straight from Dean Ball on Twitter. Open-weight models are "decelerationist", which is bad if you're completely AGI-pilled but is actually great if you're either worried about AI Safety falling to an arms-race at the frontier (this is Dario's argument, and note that open weight models are far behind the proprietary frontier, especially since they target widespread lean deployment so they must skimp on total parameters and compute requirements) or Yann-LeCun-pilled (i.e. skeptical about AGI/ASI but optimistic about the practical usefulness of current AIs) like most people in China (including, reportedly, Chinese leadership).
Aurornis•10m ago
Open weight models are accelerating AI adoption and make it easier for other labs to advance their own models.
There is nothing decelerationist about it.
This entire line of thinking can be dismissed by observing that labs releasing open weight models are advancing rapidly.
zozbot234•5m ago
andai•17m ago
The Chinese labs are already "self-destructing" voluntarily by releasing their weights. Or do they have an actual business model?