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by edouard-harris 1647 days ago
I agree these capabilities can't really be suppressed in the long term. But, as with nuclear nonproliferation, there is safety value in lowering the diffusion coefficient of their spread to the point where policy and countermeasures may be able to catch up. From that perspective, OpenAI's gatekeeping contributes to this effort at the margin.
1 comments

We aren't talking about nuclear weapons where you need extreme niche expertise and billion dollar labs to build one.

We're talking about stopping the proliferation of binary blobs banged out by college kids on their laptops. Good luck.

We’re still not at the point where the larger language models can be banged out by college kids on their laptops. Maybe we’ll be there soon, but that’s a different point. And we want openai to hasten that future?
A model of GPT-3's scale is not going to be trained or run on a laptop. OpenAI's restrictions are significant because not many people can run a model that large.
> A model of GPT-3's scale is not going to be trained or run on a laptop.

LOL, yes it is... it's only a matter of time, and not much of it at that. Computing power is making enormous leaps and bounds. Look at GPUs. The leaks coming out of AMD and NVIDIA already point to AMD's 7000 series cards and NVIDIA's 4000 series cards as being somewhere from 2.5x to 3x more powerful than the 6000 and 3000 series cards.

Storage is getting cheap as well. I just bought a decommissioned storage appliance off eBay for $9000. 640 terabyte raw capacity. 1200 watts to operate, so about another $75 a month for electricity.

These dollar figures are very reasonable for just about anyone in the middle class, and certainly reasonable for the demographic of users on this site.