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It's becoming extremely important to support open-source AI, especially legally. Anthropic is willing to go totalitarian this quickly; imagine how much worse th

It's becoming extremely important to support open-source AI, especially legally. Anthropic is willing to go totalitarian this quickly; imagine how much worse they'd be willing to do with government-granted monopolies that ban open-source competition (like they've repeatedly pursued). It's a little shocking and gruesome how quickly they're willing to tip their hand. They want to replace all software engineering with their own product, and then silently kill anyone making competing software. What other products will they launch in the future? Better hope you aren't in a space they want into: they'll cut your legs out from under you. Oh, and training on your data from the internet? Ha ha. Terms of service apply to other people, not them. Parasites.

sometimelurker 3mo ago
> like they've repeatedly pursued). source?
- reissbaker 3mo ago
  Many, many, many public policy positions; for a clear-cut example, they eventually supported SB 1047 [1] which would have banned open-sourcing any model trained with over 10^26 FLOPS (i.e. what Anthropic reportedly used to train Mythos). Their "Responsible Scaling Policy" [2] — a set of policy proposals that includes recommendations for government regulation — specifically calls out requiring "third-party controls" on model weights to prevent access; for developers to prevent "modification of models" such as fine-tuning (obviously impossible for open-source or open-weight models); prevent usage of model weights in "Automated R&D in key domains" which they specifically call out AI development as a key domain (again, obviously impossible for open-source); etc etc. They want to ban open-source AI and are not shy about it. 1: https://campustechnology.com/articles/2024/08/26/anthropic-announces-cautious-support-for-new-california-ai-regulation-legislation.aspx https://campustechnology.com/articles/2024/08/26/anthropic-a... 2: https://www.anthropic.com/responsible-scaling-policy https://www.anthropic.com/responsible-scaling-policy
  - matheusmoreira 3mo ago
    Deeply concerning. How likely is this to become reality?
    - reissbaker 3mo ago
      America has somehow managed to hang on to the right to encryption, despite plenty of well-heeled opponents, so it's possible to hang on to the right to open-source models. But it'll take a lot of vocal support, since there's strong incentive for Anthropic to try to cajole the government into banning competition (and they've already crossed that particular Rubicon, whereas OpenAI to my knowledge hasn't and at least still releases some open-source models like gpt-oss-120b).
  - baq 3mo ago
    The nuance is not what they propose, but why, even according to them, they propose this. Honestly the proposals are appalling, but biosafety arguments are not immediately dismissible. Ultimate cyber threats we can handle by rewinding society 50 years back. We can’t undo a novel genetically engineered virus.
    - hypfer 3mo ago
      I mean arguably, we _could_ create conditions in which it is much less likely for people to start developing such a novel genetically engineered virus. If you think about the factors that lead to people wanting to do such a thing, they're almost always tied to (perceived) inequality, (perceived) injustice or similar in some way. I do believe that we could greatly reduce a whole bunch of such risks by just stopping to squeeze people as hard as we do right now. But that would require a major refactoring I guess.
      - sometimelurker 3mo ago
        > ...ch less likely for people to start developing such a novel genetically engineered virus. only people that would do this would be crazy bc it cant be controled after release.
ai_fry_ur_brain 3mo ago
Open source doesnt matter if you still need to make 100k year to have your own mediocre model. There is no magic compression. There is no magic post training. Your phone or laptop will never do what you think its going to be able to. There are limits to what consumer hardware will ever be able to run, in its current form. Open source isn't going to save us if they gatekeep access to hardware, which idk if you've been paying attention. They dont plan on making consumer grade hardware more powerful, they want to rent that power to you. Technological serfdom is coming if they get their way.
- reissbaker 3mo ago
  You don't need to be able to self-host it. It's fine to pay someone else for it. If it's open-source, competition will ensure inference providers support it well enough, and if an open-source provider is dumb enough to nerf their model for (useful) coding tasks, there's plenty of incentive for inference companies to do some lightweight finetuning to restore the capability.
  - thewebguyd 3mo ago
    I disagree, I think being able to self-host it to some extent is very important. Personal computing democratized the means of (software) production and enabled real upward class mobility for a lot of people. The efforts happening now are threatening to completely lock up the ability to compute locally, seizing the means of production from us. That must not happen.
    - deleted 3mo ago
      [deleted]
    - bigbadfeline 3mo ago
      your parent said "You don't need to be able to self-host it", you countered with "I disagree, I think being able to self-host it to some extent" Bro, I don't know what you're disagreeing with, the two statements can and should be true at the same time. It's not only unnecessary but also impossible for everyone to self-host, for the vast majority this isn't a necessity and it shouldn't be. Actually being stuck on self-hosting for all is mighty silly from economics standpoint, pushing on it can ruin the entire enterprise. But being able to self host? Sure why not, if you insist and are ready to suffer... knock yourself out, but that's a socially insignificant act which doesn't scale, good only as a backup option.
alvah 3mo ago
It does make you wonder about the "E" part of the EA cultists who infest that particular company.

sometimelurker 3mo ago

> like they've repeatedly pursued). source?

reissbaker 3mo ago
Many, many, many public policy positions; for a clear-cut example, they eventually supported SB 1047 [1] which would have banned open-sourcing any model trained with over 10^26 FLOPS (i.e. what Anthropic reportedly used to train Mythos). Their "Responsible Scaling Policy" [2] — a set of policy proposals that includes recommendations for government regulation — specifically calls out requiring "third-party controls" on model weights to prevent access; for developers to prevent "modification of models" such as fine-tuning (obviously impossible for open-source or open-weight models); prevent usage of model weights in "Automated R&D in key domains" which they specifically call out AI development as a key domain (again, obviously impossible for open-source); etc etc. They want to ban open-source AI and are not shy about it. 1: https://campustechnology.com/articles/2024/08/26/anthropic-announces-cautious-support-for-new-california-ai-regulation-legislation.aspx https://campustechnology.com/articles/2024/08/26/anthropic-a... 2: https://www.anthropic.com/responsible-scaling-policy https://www.anthropic.com/responsible-scaling-policy
- matheusmoreira 3mo ago
  Deeply concerning. How likely is this to become reality?
  - reissbaker 3mo ago
    America has somehow managed to hang on to the right to encryption, despite plenty of well-heeled opponents, so it's possible to hang on to the right to open-source models. But it'll take a lot of vocal support, since there's strong incentive for Anthropic to try to cajole the government into banning competition (and they've already crossed that particular Rubicon, whereas OpenAI to my knowledge hasn't and at least still releases some open-source models like gpt-oss-120b).
- baq 3mo ago
  The nuance is not what they propose, but why, even according to them, they propose this. Honestly the proposals are appalling, but biosafety arguments are not immediately dismissible. Ultimate cyber threats we can handle by rewinding society 50 years back. We can’t undo a novel genetically engineered virus.
  - hypfer 3mo ago
    I mean arguably, we _could_ create conditions in which it is much less likely for people to start developing such a novel genetically engineered virus. If you think about the factors that lead to people wanting to do such a thing, they're almost always tied to (perceived) inequality, (perceived) injustice or similar in some way. I do believe that we could greatly reduce a whole bunch of such risks by just stopping to squeeze people as hard as we do right now. But that would require a major refactoring I guess.
    - sometimelurker 3mo ago
      > ...ch less likely for people to start developing such a novel genetically engineered virus. only people that would do this would be crazy bc it cant be controled after release.

ai_fry_ur_brain 3mo ago

Open source doesnt matter if you still need to make 100k year to have your own mediocre model. There is no magic compression. There is no magic post training. Your phone or laptop will never do what you think its going to be able to. There are limits to what consumer hardware will ever be able to run, in its current form. Open source isn't going to save us if they gatekeep access to hardware, which idk if you've been paying attention. They dont plan on making consumer grade hardware more powerful, they want to rent that power to you. Technological serfdom is coming if they get their way.

reissbaker 3mo ago
You don't need to be able to self-host it. It's fine to pay someone else for it. If it's open-source, competition will ensure inference providers support it well enough, and if an open-source provider is dumb enough to nerf their model for (useful) coding tasks, there's plenty of incentive for inference companies to do some lightweight finetuning to restore the capability.
- thewebguyd 3mo ago
  I disagree, I think being able to self-host it to some extent is very important. Personal computing democratized the means of (software) production and enabled real upward class mobility for a lot of people. The efforts happening now are threatening to completely lock up the ability to compute locally, seizing the means of production from us. That must not happen.
  - deleted 3mo ago
    [deleted]
  - bigbadfeline 3mo ago
    your parent said "You don't need to be able to self-host it", you countered with "I disagree, I think being able to self-host it to some extent" Bro, I don't know what you're disagreeing with, the two statements can and should be true at the same time. It's not only unnecessary but also impossible for everyone to self-host, for the vast majority this isn't a necessity and it shouldn't be. Actually being stuck on self-hosting for all is mighty silly from economics standpoint, pushing on it can ruin the entire enterprise. But being able to self host? Sure why not, if you insist and are ready to suffer... knock yourself out, but that's a socially insignificant act which doesn't scale, good only as a backup option.

alvah 3mo ago

It does make you wonder about the "E" part of the EA cultists who infest that particular company.