Sorry but this "Meta shouldn't have released the weights" BS is exactly that... bullshit. All models should be open to everyone at any time, full stop.
I don't want to live in some corporatist future where we plebians have no choice but to eat the table scraps of cloud services that some selfish, political bureaucrat somewhere has deemed acceptable. Because that is the direction we are heading...
While I agree with your opinion here, I find it more alarming that these researchers are mixing the reporting of empirical evidence with "just like their opinion, man".
Joking aside, I think that's worrying. It immediately calls the researcher's motives into question.
I think that’s definitely true at any point in human history. But also, wildly insufficient as analysis or solution here. Malevolent people exist, in all classes, of all political persuasions. Morons are real, likewise. Now that a lot of the world is newly-minded to connect with each other and bond over unsourced and unsourceable text, do we want to really arm them with industrial bullshit generators? Calling this stuff ‘safety’ is irksome in the extreme, but far from completely wrong.
I dare invoke zimbardo that behavior is a product of structure, expectations and incentive.
If you treat people like morons they start behaving like them.
The reason (nuerotypical) people are studying in libraries and drunk in bars isn't because their fundamental constitution changes but instead, the context does.
So treat people right and they'll (mostly) reciprocate.
(I'm an exception to this rule somewhere on that vast spectrum. It's a handicap I assure you)
I had an actual laugh out loud when I scrolled down and noticed that they publicly published the "harmful instructions" yet concluding this was so terrible that Meta should stop publicly releasing models.
The dystopian AI scenario that's the most realistic is one where a tiny number of elites and/or governments control massively powerful superintelligent AIs and use them to basically rule the world and enslave humanity.
That's precisely the scenario the AI doom crowd is pushing by advocating laws preventing anyone except governments and huge corporations from operating or researching AI.
Autonomous AI going "foom" and deciding out of all the possibilities open to it as a superintelligence to go to war against humanity is incredibly unlikely compared to numerous other existential risks confronting humanity. I wouldn't quite call it impossible as that's a strong word, but it's profoundly less plausible than climate change driven collapse, nuclear war, a beyond-Carrington level solar event, or some rando doing DIY genetic engineering and making a super-disease. Yet these idiots are advocating bans on matrix multiplication when you can buy the supplies to do CRISPR genetic modification at home off Amazon.
I can churn out 20-100k images/day from Stable Diffusion on budget of $7/day, and I am training my own LoRAs on my own photography. I can run nearly any LLM on a similar budget. Self-hosted AI is here to stay, and once the technology is advanced enough, and the hardware cheap enough, people will very likely prefer their own private AI that they can trust over a big corporate AI that is inevitably going to be built to extract information out of people.
> Sorry but this "Meta shouldn't have released the weights" BS is exactly that... bullshit. All models should be open to everyone at any time, full stop.
It's honestly so short sighted. From a corporate liability standpoint, I get that hosted services need to avoid giving out harmful information, but trying to coral that from a software perspective is going to be impossible.
Pandora's box has been opened, and nobody is capable of closing it. Even if the corporate models exceed the FOSS models right now, the FOSS models we'll have even a year from now will put all of the corporate models to shame.
I don't want to live in some corporatist future where we plebians have no choice but to eat the table scraps of cloud services that some selfish, political bureaucrat somewhere has deemed acceptable. Because that is the direction we are heading...