| The FTC also recently put out a statement that is fairly pro-open source: https://www.ftc.gov/policy/advocacy-research/tech-at-ftc/202... I think it's interesting to think about this question of open source, benefits, risk, and even competition, without all of the baggage that Meta brings. I agree with the FTC, that the benefits of open-weight models are significant for competition. The challenge is in distinguishing between good competition and bad competition. Some kind of competition can harm consumers and critical public goods, including democracy itself. For example, competing for people's scarce attention or for their food buying, with increasingly optimized and addictive innovations. Or competition to build the most powerful biological weapons. Other kinds of competition can massively accelerate valuable innovation. The FTC must navigate a tricky balance here — leaning into competition that serves consumers and the broader public, while being careful about what kind of competition it is accelerating that could cause significant risk and harm. It's also obviously not just "big tech" that cares about the risks behind open-weight foundation models. Many people have written about these risks even before it became a subject of major tech investment. (In other words, A16Z's framing is often rather misleading.) There are many non-big tech actors who are very concerned about current and potential negative impacts of open-weight foundation models. One approach which can provide the best of both worlds, is for cases where there are significant potential risks, to ensure that there is at least some period of time where weights are not provided openly, in order to learn a bit about the potential implications of new models. Longer-term, there may be a line where models are too risky to share openly, and it may be unclear what that line is. In that case, it's important that we have governance systems for such decisions that are not just profit-driven, and which can help us continue to get the best of all worlds. (Plug: my organization, the AI & Democracy Foundation; https://ai-dem.org/; is working to develop such systems and hiring.) |
i am not down with this concept of the chattering class deciding what are good markets and what are bad, unless it is due to broad-based and obvious moral judgements.