[Chance-Device]

I think he probably didn’t go far enough to be honest, though I acknowledge that’s difficult to do in his position and with the amount of attacks being thrown at Anthropic at the moment.

At some point open weight models will need to be restricted in some manner, likely multiple manners. We have rules about everything, you need a license to drive a car, your car must be roadworthy, your car can’t have certain modifications, you can’t drive over certain speeds, you can’t drive in certain areas at all, you have to wear a seatbelt etc. That’s one analogy amongst many, with the point being that regulation is a general public good that really does make the world a safer and better place.

Nobody should care about smaller local models that don’t have significant capabilities enough to be dangerous, and people should have the right to run them locally, privately and do whatever they do with them.

I don’t think that an AI monopoly or duopoly should be allowed to exist either, and I think it is possible to reach a reasonable set of compromises on each of these points, if the will exists and people can be convinced to be reasonable with one another. I think the will may not exist, and that reason is lacking in our discussions of reasoning machines, but I would like to be wrong about that.

[argee]

The only widely publicized AI orchestrated cyberattack in recent memory came from a closed-weight model, and the only widely publicized defense from said attack came from an open-weight Chinese model. What do you make of that?

> I don’t think that an AI monopoly or duopoly should be allowed to exist either

Monopolies have always been allowed to exist, even welcomed. People have gotten confused, but there is a big difference between a monopoly and an illegal monopoly. Deciding what should and shouldn’t be allowed to exist as determined by regulatory bodies and not consumers goes against democratic principles (though it is sometimes necessary, such as with drugs).

I don’t think I want to live in a world where police decides what brand of chips I can eat on the sole basis of the chips having gotten too popular. Do you?

[Chance-Device]

> What do you make of that?

I don’t make anything of it. That’s only been reported because it came from OpenAI and was a frontier model, incidents involving open models are probably happening but are not being widely reported, and those are happening with less capable models, so they aren’t successful enough yet to make headlines. I draw that inference from the amount of AI bot traffic which is now saturating the internet, AI driven attacks almost certainly have increased in like manner.

> Monopolies have always been allowed to exist

Antitrust law also exists, but is weaker than it should be. The customer doesn’t win from the existence of monopolies, they go against one of the basic premises of capitalism. Assuming you believe capitalism is a good thing which is its own conversation.

> I don’t think I want to live in a world where police decides what brand of chips I can eat on the sole basis of the chips having gotten too popular.

I really don’t know how you ended up with this as an example, did anyone say this, or anything close to it?

[unclad5968]

I'm mostly ignorant to anything regarding the safety of LLMs. What makes an open-weight LLM dangerous?

[blooalien]

> What makes an open-weight LLM dangerous?

Same thing that makes any LLM dangerous. The intent and actions of the person using the LLM to do bad things. Any tool can be dangerous in the hands of the wrong person...

[anon373839]

Computer keyboards are incredibly dangerous. You can even use them to type out the same text a dangerously capable LLM might write!

[Chance-Device]

As the sibling comment says, user actions are the main driver, but also the fact that the weights can be modified. If a model is released with safeguards, they can be ablated out or the model can be fine tuned for nefarious purposes, and nobody can really stop that from happening.

That’s not to say that the majority of open weight models are being used in nefarious ways or are dangerous, but unfortunately despite (hopefully) most people being responsible, we have to guard against the small number of bad actors. Like with everything, a small number of people ruin it for everyone.

[anon373839]

Nothing makes an LLM dangerous. An LLM remixes existing knowledge and outputs text. Any danger comes from what one subsequently does with the text.

For example, when a lab like OpenAI negligently wires up a harness to an LLM and executes arbitrary code in YOLO mode without common-sense isolation measures, the executed code can do bad things.

[watwut]

The first thing to restrict, long before open models, are large closed corporate LLMs.

After all, open models are not nearly as dangerous as rich companies.

[Chance-Device]

I tend to agree with this also. The idea that the impact of AI is being decided by private companies with no control either by governments or the public doesn’t sit well with me. You need the most regulation where most of the danger is, and most of the danger as you say is with the big AI companies.

But there are some moves towards regulating them now.