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by jack_pp 126 days ago
And you believe the other open source models are a signal for ethics?

Don't have a dog in this fight, haven't done enough research to proclaim any LLM provider as ethical but I pretty much know the reason Meta has an open source model isn't because they're good guys.
2 comments
bigyabai 126 days ago
> Don't have a dog in this fight,

That's probably why you don't get it, then. Facebook was the primary contributor behind Pytorch, which basically set the stage for early GPT implementations.

For all the issues you might have with Meta's social media, Facebook AI Research Labs have an excellent reputation in the industry and contributed greatly to where we are now. Same goes for Google Brain/DeepMind despite their Google's advertisement monopoly; things aren't ethically black-and-white.

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jack_pp 126 days ago
A hired assassin can have an excellent reputation too. What does that have to do with ethics?

Say I'm your neighbor and I make a move on your wife, your wife tells you this. Now I'm hosting a BBQ which is free for all to come, everyone in the neighborhood cheers for me. A neighbor praises me for helping him fix his car.

Someone asks you if you're coming to the BBQ, you say to him nah.. you don't like me. They go, 'WHAT? jack_pp? He rescues dogs and helped fix my roof! How can you not like him?'

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bigyabai 126 days ago
Hired assassins aren't a monoculture. Maybe a retired gangster visits Make-A-Wish kids, and has an excellent reputation for it. Maybe another is training FOSS SOTA LLMs and releasing them freely on the internet. Do they not deserve an excellent reputation? Are they prevented from making ethically sound choices because of how you judge their past?

The same applies to tech. Pytorch didn't have to be FOSS, nor Tensorflow. In that timeline CUDA might have a total monopoly on consumer inference. Out of all the myriad ways that AI could have been developed and proliferated, we are very lucky that it happened in a public friendly rivalry between two useless companies with money to burn. The ethical consequences of AI being monopolized by a proprietary prison warden like Nvidia or Apple is comparatively apocalyptic.

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jack_pp 126 days ago
A gangster will give free turkeys on thanksgiving while also selling drugs to the same community, enslaving them in the process. Very good analogy you found, thank you.

My problem is you seem naive enough to believe Zuck decided to open source stuff out of the goodness of his heart and not because he did some math in his head and decided it's advantageous to him, from a game theoretic standpoint, to commoditize LLMs.

To even have the audacity to claim Meta is ETHICAL is baffling to me. Have you ever used FB / instagram? Meta is literally the gangster selling drugs and also playing the filantropist where it costs him nothing and might also just bring him more money in the long term.

You must have no notion of good and evil if you believe for a second one person can create facebook with all its dark patterns and blatant anti user tactics and also be ethical.. because he open sourced stuff he couldn't make money from.

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MarsIronPI 125 days ago
IMO in a company (or rather, a conglomerate) as big as Meta, you can have teams that are genuinely good people and also have teams that don't have principles or refuse to live by them. In other words, divisions of big companies aren't homogeneous.
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imiric 126 days ago
The strongest signal for ethics is whether the product or company has "open" in its name.
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