24 ms·

Funny how no-one talks about AI neutrality like we used to discuss net neutrality. We literally now enter a space where not only you will have to prove your ide

by xmstan 3mo ago

Funny how no-one talks about AI neutrality like we used to discuss net neutrality. We literally now enter a space where not only you will have to prove your identity with a gov issued ID, but they will silently block you if they deem you try to use it in a way that they don't like. It is literally similar to a situation where your ISP would investigate all sites you visit and limit your bandwidth if they don't like the the ones you enter...

stingraycharles 3mo ago
> Funny how no-one talks about AI neutrality like we used to discuss net neutrality From my perspective, these LLM providers aren’t infrastructure providers but more like SaaS. And there are also open models that you can use to do anything you want. These AI companies are also under a lot of scrutiny and sometimes it feels like whatever they do in this regard, they’re bound to piss someone off. Last but not least, it seems like this is directly related to Anthropic’s latest models being blocked for export control by the US.
- fjsoxjdnwk 3mo ago
  The irony is the current administration’s posturing against Chinese AI companies forcing something like this is going to actually bolster competitive advantage overseas. That and European companies as well. The landscape is going to change drastically in 5 years once all the data centers are built all over the world. The science behind these models are being worked on IN PUBLIC. The research is not secret. The implementations will all catch up.
  - HarHarVeryFunny 3mo ago
    > The science behind these models are being worked on IN PUBLIC. The research is not secret. The implementations will all catch up. Only to a limited extent - the US companies stopped sharing research a long time ago, other than Anthropic's interpretability research (which also seems to have dried up?). Interestingly most of the sharing is now coming from the Chinese side, largely DeepSeek. Ziphu/Z.ai (GLM) is also partner in the Slime RL training framework. I wouldn't call much, if any, of this "science" - it's all empiricalism. Throw spaghetti at the wall and see what sticks. There's a famous quote from Noam Shazeer: "We offer no explanation as to why these architectures seem to work; we attribute their success, as all else, to divine benevolence" https://arxiv.org/abs/2002.05202v1 https://arxiv.org/abs/2002.05202v1 Jakob Uszkoreit has also talked about the empiricalism that it took to make what would become the Transformer, and any complex neural network architecture work.
    - adrian_b 3mo ago
      While OpenAI and Anthropic have not provided any useful information for a long time, there still are some research publications from a few US companies, e.g. NVIDIA about its Nemotron models, or Google and IBM about their small LLMs.
- slim 3mo ago
  you can't just selectively sell only to people you like. it's prohibited in most countries
  - cyanydeez 3mo ago
    In America, what you _can do_ is price "discovery" and create artificial price "discrimination". Just like Walgreens can lock up hair gels or condoms. Just like Gillette can create a pink tax: https://www.the-independent.com/life-style/gillette-ad-commercial-pink-tax-controversy-toxic-masculinity-metoo-a8731821.html https://www.the-independent.com/life-style/gillette-ad-comme... The idea that this prohibition is real when we're talking about the literal start of price discrimination that'll certainly proceed to dividing social classes into the $$$$ Fable and the $ OpenAI access to information. Back in slavery, was just listening to this, keeping slaves illiterate wasn't just a by product of slave owners, it was a direct action to ensure to minimize resistence. And now we're on the same lubricated slide, where white color workers will "demand" access to the "powerful" models and they'll leverage up the corpospeak to divide and conquer. Just don't believe "you can't just selectively sell". You can, and laws will selectively enforce.
inigyou 3mo ago
Net neutrality wasn't about ID checks.
- bitmasher9 3mo ago
  Net neutrality was about processing network traffic differently based on who was sending the packets. It’s not entirely dissimilar.
  - jjfoooo4 3mo ago
    One major difference is that to send network traffic, you have to go through an ISP. With AI you have the option of local open source models
- coldtea 3mo ago
  Doesn't matter, the neutrality part still applies: just provide the same damn service to customers, regardless of who they are.
hdndjsbbs 3mo ago
Net neutrality is about a natural monopoly - there can only be so many cell towers, satellites and fibre optic cables. This limits the number of ISPs. By contrast there is no natural limit to how many AI companies there can be. I would prefer if we just nationalized this stuff but if we have to let private companies control limited resources we can at least enforce anti-trust rules. That's effectively what net-neutrality is - preventing the monopolists from colluding with sites to provide uneven access.
- gentooflux 3mo ago
  The number of AI companies there can be is absolutely hard-limited by infrastructure. The ones which exist currently are racing like hell to horizontally integrate everything from network to power and water for themselves
  - fc417fc802 3mo ago
    That's nonsense. You might not be able to afford to enter the market but that's not at all the same as a physical constraint capping the number of competitors.
    - gentooflux 3mo ago
      You might not be able to afford to put up power lines or build a road, but that doesn't mean you physically cannot. By your logic there are no natural monopolies
      - fc417fc802 3mo ago
        If I want to service 1234 sesame st from my physical location with power lines there are a very limited number of routes I can take. The limited physical space quickly becomes crowded, duplicate physical infrastructure of that nature is highly inefficient, and there's a (completely pointless) negative impact on society to accommodate the constant installation and servicing. Commodity hardware installed in a commodity building on commodity land using commodity power hooked up to a commodity network isn't the same thing. By your logic anything expensive or inconvenient is a natural monopoly. I believe the term you were looking for was "high barrier to entry".
bko 3mo ago
Maybe because all the predictions of the very vocal net neutrality crowd didn't manifest. It got memory holed and life just moved on. The only outcome was maybe a few cell phone carriers bumping your bandwidth limits for netflix streaming
thinkingtoilet 3mo ago
Net neutrality is about the public infrastructure. This is a private company. I'm not happy with what Anthropic is doing, but it's a very large and obvious difference.
slim 3mo ago
what if they think your face is too brown to use sota ? (they do, and they will?
- deleted 3mo ago
  [deleted]
halJordan 3mo ago
In a roundabout way it's better. In that w/net neutrality isp's & big business got out from under it by promising bare minimums. Without that "head 'em off at the pass" collusion we'll actually stand a chance for things to get so bad legislators have to act.
epolanski 3mo ago
This is gonna bite the US long term very bad. With the frontier models ban, the rest of the world will just have more reasons to further detach technologically from the US, there's no way big tech, etc, can sustain such capex and valuations on US market alone.
cyanydeez 3mo ago
Isn't that because America has gone full fascist and a lot of white collar people fear the 'permanent underclass' and would rather buy lube than 'resist'
nicce 3mo ago
> It is literally similar to a situation where your ISP would investigate all sites you visit and limit your bandwidth if they don't like the the ones you enter... Same? Multitude of magnitues worse. The amount of data and type that is given here is from different level. ISPs have mostly seen it in encrypted format.
KaiserPro 3mo ago
THe reason why its not being talked about like net neutrality is because there aren't large companies with a vested interested interest in changing the status quo Net neutrality was about Google/netflix/etc not wanting to pay for transit to verizon/AT&T/etc Same with the copyright reforms, new, richer internet companies (at the time) wanted to avoid paying feesto copyright owners. The morality of these campaigns are out of scope, the point is, ID checks align with the new money.
- DarkVanilla 3mo ago
  > Net neutrality was about Google/netflix/etc not wanting to pay for transit to verizon/AT&T/etc That is the dishonest spin put forward by the "last-mile" ISP providers. The ISPs were already being paid by their customers in order to access the internet, but they wanted to leverage their natural monopolies in order to be paid twice, by whoever their customers were connecting to. Famously, the ISPs went as far as artificially throttling traffic in order to extort payments[1]. Framing this as a battle instigated by google and netfix is also the opposite of the truth. It was the ISP monopolies who brought this fight; not the internet companies. The battle was actually instigated by one of the last-mile ISPs, Verizon, suing the FCC. > not wanting to pay for transit to verizon/AT&T/etc If anyone was going to pay for "transit to" the last mile ISPs, they would actually be paying backbone companies like L3, because those are the ones that actually move traffic across the internet. [1] the throttling typically took the form of throttling certain backbone connections, so that no one would be able to prove they targeted Netflix specifically
miki123211 3mo ago
Why aren't we talking about bank neutrality?
slashdave 3mo ago
ISPs are legally protected. AI companies are not.

by xmstan 3mo ago

stingraycharles 3mo ago

> Funny how no-one talks about AI neutrality like we used to discuss net neutrality From my perspective, these LLM providers aren’t infrastructure providers but more like SaaS. And there are also open models that you can use to do anything you want. These AI companies are also under a lot of scrutiny and sometimes it feels like whatever they do in this regard, they’re bound to piss someone off. Last but not least, it seems like this is directly related to Anthropic’s latest models being blocked for export control by the US.

fjsoxjdnwk 3mo ago
The irony is the current administration’s posturing against Chinese AI companies forcing something like this is going to actually bolster competitive advantage overseas. That and European companies as well. The landscape is going to change drastically in 5 years once all the data centers are built all over the world. The science behind these models are being worked on IN PUBLIC. The research is not secret. The implementations will all catch up.
- HarHarVeryFunny 3mo ago
  > The science behind these models are being worked on IN PUBLIC. The research is not secret. The implementations will all catch up. Only to a limited extent - the US companies stopped sharing research a long time ago, other than Anthropic's interpretability research (which also seems to have dried up?). Interestingly most of the sharing is now coming from the Chinese side, largely DeepSeek. Ziphu/Z.ai (GLM) is also partner in the Slime RL training framework. I wouldn't call much, if any, of this "science" - it's all empiricalism. Throw spaghetti at the wall and see what sticks. There's a famous quote from Noam Shazeer: "We offer no explanation as to why these architectures seem to work; we attribute their success, as all else, to divine benevolence" https://arxiv.org/abs/2002.05202v1 https://arxiv.org/abs/2002.05202v1 Jakob Uszkoreit has also talked about the empiricalism that it took to make what would become the Transformer, and any complex neural network architecture work.
  - adrian_b 3mo ago
    While OpenAI and Anthropic have not provided any useful information for a long time, there still are some research publications from a few US companies, e.g. NVIDIA about its Nemotron models, or Google and IBM about their small LLMs.
slim 3mo ago
you can't just selectively sell only to people you like. it's prohibited in most countries
- cyanydeez 3mo ago
  In America, what you _can do_ is price "discovery" and create artificial price "discrimination". Just like Walgreens can lock up hair gels or condoms. Just like Gillette can create a pink tax: https://www.the-independent.com/life-style/gillette-ad-commercial-pink-tax-controversy-toxic-masculinity-metoo-a8731821.html https://www.the-independent.com/life-style/gillette-ad-comme... The idea that this prohibition is real when we're talking about the literal start of price discrimination that'll certainly proceed to dividing social classes into the $$$$ Fable and the $ OpenAI access to information. Back in slavery, was just listening to this, keeping slaves illiterate wasn't just a by product of slave owners, it was a direct action to ensure to minimize resistence. And now we're on the same lubricated slide, where white color workers will "demand" access to the "powerful" models and they'll leverage up the corpospeak to divide and conquer. Just don't believe "you can't just selectively sell". You can, and laws will selectively enforce.

inigyou 3mo ago

Net neutrality wasn't about ID checks.

bitmasher9 3mo ago
Net neutrality was about processing network traffic differently based on who was sending the packets. It’s not entirely dissimilar.
- jjfoooo4 3mo ago
  One major difference is that to send network traffic, you have to go through an ISP. With AI you have the option of local open source models
coldtea 3mo ago
Doesn't matter, the neutrality part still applies: just provide the same damn service to customers, regardless of who they are.

hdndjsbbs 3mo ago

Net neutrality is about a natural monopoly - there can only be so many cell towers, satellites and fibre optic cables. This limits the number of ISPs. By contrast there is no natural limit to how many AI companies there can be. I would prefer if we just nationalized this stuff but if we have to let private companies control limited resources we can at least enforce anti-trust rules. That's effectively what net-neutrality is - preventing the monopolists from colluding with sites to provide uneven access.

gentooflux 3mo ago
The number of AI companies there can be is absolutely hard-limited by infrastructure. The ones which exist currently are racing like hell to horizontally integrate everything from network to power and water for themselves
- fc417fc802 3mo ago
  That's nonsense. You might not be able to afford to enter the market but that's not at all the same as a physical constraint capping the number of competitors.
  - gentooflux 3mo ago
    You might not be able to afford to put up power lines or build a road, but that doesn't mean you physically cannot. By your logic there are no natural monopolies
    - fc417fc802 3mo ago
      If I want to service 1234 sesame st from my physical location with power lines there are a very limited number of routes I can take. The limited physical space quickly becomes crowded, duplicate physical infrastructure of that nature is highly inefficient, and there's a (completely pointless) negative impact on society to accommodate the constant installation and servicing. Commodity hardware installed in a commodity building on commodity land using commodity power hooked up to a commodity network isn't the same thing. By your logic anything expensive or inconvenient is a natural monopoly. I believe the term you were looking for was "high barrier to entry".

bko 3mo ago

Maybe because all the predictions of the very vocal net neutrality crowd didn't manifest. It got memory holed and life just moved on. The only outcome was maybe a few cell phone carriers bumping your bandwidth limits for netflix streaming

thinkingtoilet 3mo ago

Net neutrality is about the public infrastructure. This is a private company. I'm not happy with what Anthropic is doing, but it's a very large and obvious difference.

slim 3mo ago

what if they think your face is too brown to use sota ? (they do, and they will?

deleted 3mo ago
[deleted]

halJordan 3mo ago

In a roundabout way it's better. In that w/net neutrality isp's & big business got out from under it by promising bare minimums. Without that "head 'em off at the pass" collusion we'll actually stand a chance for things to get so bad legislators have to act.

epolanski 3mo ago

This is gonna bite the US long term very bad. With the frontier models ban, the rest of the world will just have more reasons to further detach technologically from the US, there's no way big tech, etc, can sustain such capex and valuations on US market alone.

cyanydeez 3mo ago

Isn't that because America has gone full fascist and a lot of white collar people fear the 'permanent underclass' and would rather buy lube than 'resist'

nicce 3mo ago

> It is literally similar to a situation where your ISP would investigate all sites you visit and limit your bandwidth if they don't like the the ones you enter... Same? Multitude of magnitues worse. The amount of data and type that is given here is from different level. ISPs have mostly seen it in encrypted format.

KaiserPro 3mo ago

THe reason why its not being talked about like net neutrality is because there aren't large companies with a vested interested interest in changing the status quo Net neutrality was about Google/netflix/etc not wanting to pay for transit to verizon/AT&T/etc Same with the copyright reforms, new, richer internet companies (at the time) wanted to avoid paying feesto copyright owners. The morality of these campaigns are out of scope, the point is, ID checks align with the new money.

DarkVanilla 3mo ago
> Net neutrality was about Google/netflix/etc not wanting to pay for transit to verizon/AT&T/etc That is the dishonest spin put forward by the "last-mile" ISP providers. The ISPs were already being paid by their customers in order to access the internet, but they wanted to leverage their natural monopolies in order to be paid twice, by whoever their customers were connecting to. Famously, the ISPs went as far as artificially throttling traffic in order to extort payments[1]. Framing this as a battle instigated by google and netfix is also the opposite of the truth. It was the ISP monopolies who brought this fight; not the internet companies. The battle was actually instigated by one of the last-mile ISPs, Verizon, suing the FCC. > not wanting to pay for transit to verizon/AT&T/etc If anyone was going to pay for "transit to" the last mile ISPs, they would actually be paying backbone companies like L3, because those are the ones that actually move traffic across the internet. [1] the throttling typically took the form of throttling certain backbone connections, so that no one would be able to prove they targeted Netflix specifically

miki123211 3mo ago

Why aren't we talking about bank neutrality?

slashdave 3mo ago

ISPs are legally protected. AI companies are not.