[a_wild_dandan]

Right? I still remember the safety outrage of releasing Llama. Now? My 96 GB of (V)RAM MacBook will be running a 120B parameter frontier lab model. So excited to get my hands on the MLX quants and see how it feels compared to GLM-4.5-air.

[SchemaLoad]

I feel like most of the safety concerns ended up being proven correct, but there's so much money in it that they decided to push on anyway full steam ahead.

AI did get used for fake news, propaganda, mass surveillance, erosion of trust and sense of truth, and mass spamming social media.

[4b6442477b1280b]

in that era, OpenAI and Anthropic were still deluding themselves into thinking they would be the "stewards" of generative AI, and the last US administration was very keen on regoolating everything under the sun, so "safety" was just an angle for regulatory capture.

God bless China.

[a_wild_dandan]

Oh absolutely, AI labs certainly talk their books, including any safety angles. The controversy/outrage extended far beyond those incentivized companies too. Many people had good faith worries about Llama. Open-weight models are now vastly more powerful than Llama-1, yet the sky hasn't fallen. It's just fascinating to me how apocalyptic people are.

I just feel lucky to be around in what's likely the most important decade in human history. Shit odds on that, so I'm basically a lotto winner. Wild times.

[vlmutolo]

About 7% of people who have ever lived are alive today. Still pretty lucky, but not quite winning the lottery.

[foltik]

Much luckier if you consider everyone who ever will live, assuming we don’t destroy ourselves.

[4b6442477b1280b]

>Many people had good faith worries about Llama.

ah, but that begs the question: did those people develop their worries organically, or did they simply consume the narrative heavily pushed by virtually every mainstream publication?

the journos are heavily incentivized to spread FUD about it. they saw the writing on the wall that the days of making a living by producing clickbait slop were coming to an end and deluded themselves into thinking that if they kvetch enough, the genie will crawl back into the bottle. scaremongering about sci-fi skynet bullshit didn't work, so now they kvetch about joules and milliliters consumed by chatbots, as if data centers did not exist until two years ago.

likewise, the bulk of other "concerned citizens" are creatives who use their influence to sway their followers, still hoping against hope to kvetch this technology out of existence.

honest-to-God yuddites are as few and as retarded as honest-to-God flat earthers.

[kridsdale3]

I've been pretty unlucky to have encountered more than my fair share of IRL Yuddites. Can't stand em.

[ipaddr]

"the most important decade in human history."

Lol. To be young and foolish again. This covid laced decade is more of a placeholder. The current decade is always the most meaningful until the next one. The personal computer era, the first cars or planes, ending slavery needs to take a backseat to the best search engine ever. We are at the point where everyone is planning on what they are going to do with their hoverboards.

[graemep]

> ending slavery

happened over many centuries, not in a given decade. Abolished and reintroduced in many places: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_abolition_of_slave...

[hedora]

Slavery is still legal and widespread in most of the US, including California.

There was a ballot measure to actually abolish slavery a year or so back. It failed miserably.

[BizarroLand]

The slavery of free humans is illegal in America, so now the big issue is figuring out how to convince voters that imprisoned criminals deserve rights.

Even in liberal states, the dehumanization of criminals is an endemic behavior, and we are reaching the point in our society where ironically having the leeway to discuss the humane treatment of even our worst criminals is becoming an issue that affects how we see ourselves as a society before we even have a framework to deal with the issue itself.

What one side wants is for prisons to be for rehabilitation and societal reintegration, for prisoners to have the right to decline to work and to be paid fair wages from their labor. They further want to remove for-profit prisons from the equation completely.

What the other side wants is the acknowledgement that prisons are not free, they are for punishment, and that prisoners have lost some of their rights for the duration of their incarceration and that they should be required to provide labor to offset the tax burden of their incarceration on the innocent people that have to pay for it. They also would like it if all prisons were for-profit as that would remove the burden from the tax payers and place all of the costs of incarceration onto the shoulders of the incarcerated.

Both sides have valid and reasonable wants from their vantage point while overlooking the valid and reasonable wants from the other side.

[dingnuts]

you can say the same shit about machine learning but ChatGPT was still the Juneteenth of AI

[narrator]

Yeah, China is e/acc. Nice cheap solar panels too. Thanks China. The problem is their ominous policies like not allowing almost any immigration, and their domestic Han Supremacist propaganda, and all that make it look a bit like this might be Han Supremacy e/acc. Is it better than wester/decel? Hard to say, but at least the western/decel people are now starting to talk about building power plants, at least for datacenters, and things like that instead of demanding whole branches of computer science be classified, as they were threatening to Marc Andreessen when he visited the Biden admin last year.

[01HNNWZ0MV43FF]

I wish we had voter support for a hydrocarbon tax, though. It would level out the prices and then the AI companies can decide whether they want to pay double to burn pollutants or invest in solar and wind and batteries

[AtlasBarfed]

Oh poor oppressed marc andreesen. Someone save him!