[fnetisma]

Iterative leaps of open-source models becoming better are huge examples that companies competing on LLM model layer have an ephemeral moat.

Serious question: assuming this is true, if an incumbent-challenger like OpenAI wants to win, how do they effectively compete against current services such as Meta and Google product offerings which can be AI enhanced in a snap?

[123yawaworht456]

the very first big AI company who gives up trying to lobotomize and emasculate their models to align with the values of 0.01% of the world population will win a lot of hearts and minds overnight. the censorship necessary for corporate applications can be trivially implemented as a toggleable layer, using a small, efficient, specialist model to detect no-no words and wrongthink in inputs/outputs.

gpt, claude, gemini, even llama and mistral, all tend to produce the same nauseating slop, easily-recognizable by anyone familiar with LLMs - these days, I cringe when I read 'It is important to remember' even when I see it in some ancient, pre-slop writings.

creativity - one of the very few applications generative AI can truly excel at - is currently impossible. it could revolutionize entertainment, but it isn't allowed to. the models are only allowed to produce inoffensive, positivity-biased, sterile slop that no human being finds attractive.

[andy99]

> the censorship necessary for corporate applications can be trivially implemented as a toggleable layer, using a small, efficient, specialist model to detect no-no words and wrongthink in inputs/outputs.

What's really funny is they all have "jailbreaks" that you can use to make then say anything anyway. So for "corporate" uses, the method you propose is already mandatory. The whole thing (censoring base models) is a misguided combination of ideology and (over the top) risk aversion.

[cosmojg]

> creativity - one of the very few applications generative AI can truly excel at - is currently impossible. it could revolutionize entertainment, but it isn't allowed to. the models are only allowed to produce inoffensive, positivity-biased, sterile slop that no human being finds attractive.

Have you played around with base models? If you haven't yet, I'm sure you'll be happy to find that most base models are delightfully unslopped and uncensored.

I highly recommend trying a base model like davinci-002[1] in OpenAI's "legacy" Completions API playground. That's probably the most accessible, but if you're technically inclined, you can pair a base model like Llama3-70B[2] with an interface like Mikupad[3] and do some brilliant creative writing. Llama3 models can be run locally with something like Ollama[4], or if you don't have the compute for it, via an LLM-as-a-service platform like OpenRouter[5].

[1] https://platform.openai.com/docs/models/gpt-base

[2] https://huggingface.co/meta-llama/Meta-Llama-3-70B

[3] https://github.com/lmg-anon/mikupad

[4] https://ollama.com/library/llama3:70b-text

[5] https://openrouter.ai/models/meta-llama/llama-3-70b

[acka]

From [3]:

> Further, in developing these models, we took great care to optimize helpfulness and safety.

The model you linked to isn't a base model (those are rarely if ever made available to the general public nowadays), it is already fine-tuned at least for instruction following, and most likely what some in this game would call 'censored'. That isn't to say there couldn't be made 'uncensored' models based on this in the future, by doing, you guessed it, moar fine-tuning.

[Hugsun]

I think you vastly overestimate how much people care about model censorship. There are a bunch of open models that aren't censored. Llama 3 is still way more popular because it's just smarter.

[malfist]

Please explain what you mean when you say the 0.01% are emasculating AI

[mavhc]

They're suggesting that 99.99% of people don't mind if AI reflects biases of society. Which is weird because I'm pretty sure most people in the world aren't old white middle class Americans

[123yawaworht456]

yes, yes, bias like the fact that Wehrmacht was not a human menagerie that 0.01% of the population insist we live in.

https://www.google.com/search?q=gemini+german+soldier

prompt-injected mandatory diversity has led to the most hilarious shit I've seen generative AI do so far.

but, yes, of course, other instances of 'I reject your reality and substitute my own' - like depicting medieval Europe to be as diverse, vibrant and culturally enriched as American inner cities - those are doubleplusgood.

[mavhc]

A study of a Black Death cemetery in London found that 20% of people sampled were not white

[AnthonyMouse]

London has been a center of international trade for centuries. It would have been a much more diverse city than Europe as a whole, and even that is assuming the decedents were local residents and not the dead from ships that docked in the city.

[ben_w]

Indeed. If religion is a good guide, then I think around 24% think that pork is inherently unclean and not fit for human consumption under penalty of divine wrath, and 15% think that it's immoral to kill cattle for any reason. Also, non-religiously, I'd guess around 17% think "中国很棒，只有天安门广场发生了好事".

[fjdjshsh]

Maybe you meant something like 天安门广场上只发生了好事

[ben_w]

Given I was using Google Translate, which isn't great at Chinese, I assume you are absolutely correct.

My written Chinese is limited 一二三 and that from Mahjong tiles, and I keep getting 四 and 五 mixed up.

[somenameforme]

Modern chatbots are trained on a large corpus of all textual information available across the entire world, which obviously is reflective of a vast array of views and values. Your comment is a perfect example of the sort of casual and socially encouraged soft bigotry that many want to get away from. Instead of trying to spin information this way or that, simply let the information be, warts and all.

Imagine if search engines adopted this same sort of moral totalitarian mindset and if you happened to search for the 'wrong' thing, the engine would instead start offering you a patronizing and blathering lecture, and refuse to search. And 'wrong' in this case would be an ever-encroaching window on anything that happened to run contrary to the biases of the small handful of people engaged, on a directorial level, with developing said search engines.

[mavhc]

Encoding our current biases into LLMs is one way to go, but there's probably a better way to do it.

Your leap to "thou shalt not search this" is missing the possible middle ground

[fjdjshsh]

The problem is with the word "our". If it's just private companies, the biases will represent a small minority of people that tend to be quite similar. Plus, they might be guided by profit motives or by self-censorship ("I don't mind, but I'm scared they'll boycott the product if I don't put this bias").

I have no idea how to make it happen, but the talk about biases, safeguards, etc should be made between many different people and not just within a private company.

[fragmede]

Search for "I do coke" on Google. At least in the US, the first result is not a link to the YouTube video of the song by Kill the Noise and Feed Me, but the text "Help is available, Speak with someone today", with a link to the SAMHSA website and hotline.

[andoando]

Yes and the safeguards are put in place by a very small group of people living in silicon valley.

I saw this issue working at Tinder too. One day they announced how they will be removing ethnicity filters at the height of the BLM movement across all the apps to weed out racists. Nevermind that many ethnical minorities prefer or even insist on dating within their own ethnicity and this was most likely hurting them and not racists.

That really pissed me off and opened my eyes to how much power these corporations have over dictating culture, not just toward their own cultural biasis but that of money.

[otterley]

I think you have your populations reversed. The number of people who get their knickers in a twist over LLMs reflecting certain cultural biases (and sometimes making foolish predictions in the process) amounts to a rounding error.

[123yawaworht456]

I'm not talking about twisted panties, I'm talking about their inability to generate anything but soulless slop, due to blatantly obvious '''safeguards''' present in all big models, making them averse to even PG13-friendly themes and incapable to generate content palatable even to the the least discerning consoomers. you couldn't generate even sterile crap like a script for capeshit or Netflix series, because the characters would quickly forget their differences and talk about their bonds, journeys, boundaries and connections instead.

without those '''safeguards''' implemented to appease the aforementioned 0.01%, things could be very different - some big models, particularly Claude, can be tard wrangled into producing decent prose, if you prefill the prompt with a few thousand token jailbreak. my own attempts to get various LLMs to assist in writing videogame dialogue only made me angry and bitter - big models often give me refusals on the very first attempt to prompt them, spotting some wrongthink in the context I provide for the dialogue, despite the only adult themes present being mild, not particularly graphic violence that nobody except 0.01% neo-puritan extremits would really bat an eye at. and even if the model can be jailbroken, still, the output is slop.

[knowaveragejoe]

"Consoomers". Jesus christ. Back to whatever dark, perpetually angry echochamber you came from.

[AnthonyMouse]

> gpt, claude, gemini, even llama and mistral, all tend to produce the same nauseating slop, easily-recognizable by anyone familiar with LLMs

Does grok do this, given where it came out of?

[cal85]

Their moat atm is being 6 months ahead of everyone else on model quality. Plus the ‘startup’ advantage over their corporate competitors. Oh and they can hoard a lot of the best talent because it’s an extremely high status place to work.

Their task now is to maintain and exploit those advantages as best they can while they build up a more stable long term moat: lots of companies having their tech deeply integrated into their operations.

[andy99]

Just to add, they don't have the baggage of google or Meta so they can do more without worrying how it impacts the rest of the company. And of the big players they seem the most aware of how important good data is and have paid for lots of high quality curated fine tuning data in order to build a proper product instead of doing a research project. That mindset and the commercial difference it makes shouldn't be underestimated.

[myko]

> Their moat atm is being 6 months ahead of everyone else on model quality

Really? Most of our testing now has Gemini Pro on par or better (though we haven't tested omni/Ultra)

It really seems like the major models have all topped out / are comparable

[golergka]

They scare the government into regulating the field into oblivion.