[HN Gopher] YaLM-100B: Pretrained language model with 100B param...
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       YaLM-100B: Pretrained language model with 100B parameters
        
       Author : f311a
       Score  : 674 points
       Date   : 2022-06-23 09:00 UTC (14 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (github.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
        
       | londons_explore wrote:
       | For those of us without 200GB of GPU RAM available... How
       | possible is it to do inference loading it from SSD?
       | 
       | Would you have to scan through all 200GB of data once per
       | character generated? That doesn't actually sound too painful - 1
       | minute per character seems kinda okay.
       | 
       | And I guess you can easily do lots of data parallelism, so you
       | can get 1 minute per character on _lots_ of inputs and outputs at
       | the same time.
        
         | julienfr112 wrote:
         | What about 250gb of ram and use a cpu ?
        
           | hnechochamber2 wrote:
           | $ dd if=/dev/zero of=/swapfile bs=1G count=250
           | status=progress         $ chmod 600 /swapfile         $
           | mkswap -U clear /swapfile         $ swapon /swapfile
        
             | jstimpfle wrote:
             | Is there a reason why it is required to fill the swapfile
             | with zeroes here? Normally you'd see something like "dd
             | of=/swapfile bs=1G seek=3 count=0", creating a file of size
             | 3G but with no space allocated (yet). It's much quicker to
             | complete the setup this way.
        
               | wongarsu wrote:
               | I assume if you force the file system to allocate inodes
               | you are likely to have a less fragmented file than if you
               | create a sparse file that gets inodes assigned over time
               | when each part is used.
        
               | olddustytrail wrote:
               | Interesting guess but wrong I'm afraid :)
               | 
               | It's simply because it's an easy way to create a file of
               | a certain size that most Linux users would be familiar
               | with.
               | 
               | The quicker way (and possibly more "proper" way) is to
               | use fallocate, but who has even heard of that vs dd ?
        
               | theblazehen wrote:
               | Which won't matter on SSDs
        
               | wongarsu wrote:
               | On all the benchmarks of SSDs I've seen they perform 1.5
               | to 4 times better on sequential reads than on random
               | reads. That's a much better ratio than HDDs, but still
               | enough to care about it.
               | 
               | You're also likely to get less write amplification if
               | your swap file is continuous.
               | 
               | Of course with all the layers of indirection it's a
               | numbers game, you don't know if your file system
               | allocates adjacent inodes, and you don't know how your
               | SSD will remap the blocks. But all else being equal,
               | trying to make the file as sequential as possible seems
               | preferable.
        
             | pflanze wrote:
             | If you bother to set the permissions, I suggest to do it in
             | a way that doesn't leave a time window during which it
             | still is unprotected (note that non-priviledged processes
             | just need to open the file during that window; they can
             | keep reading even after your chmod has been run). Also, not
             | sure what the point of `-U clear` was, that's setting the
             | uuid for the swap, better leave it at the default random
             | one?                   $ ( umask 077; dd if=/dev/zero
             | of=/swapfile bs=1G count=250 status=progress )         $
             | mkswap /swapfile         $ swapon /swapfile
        
           | Aardwolf wrote:
           | Way too slow on CPU unfortunately
           | 
           | But this does make me wonder if there's any way to allow a
           | graphics card to use regular RAM in a fast way? AFAIK built-
           | in GPU's inside CPU's can but those GPU's are not powerful
           | enough
        
             | julienfr112 wrote:
             | Slow, but is it still practical, like taking minutes to
             | generate few words ca still be useful for testing or on
             | certain low usage use-cases ?
        
             | easytiger wrote:
             | I thought cuda had a unified memory system? Maybe I
             | misunderstood
        
               | Cu3PO42 wrote:
               | Unified memory exists, but it's not a magic bullet. If a
               | page is accessed that doesn't reside on device memory
               | (i.e. on the GPU), a memcpy is issued to fetch the page
               | from main RAM. While the programming model is nicer, it
               | doesn't fundamentally change the fact that you need to
               | constantly swap data out to main RAM and while not as bad
               | as loading it from the SSD or HDD, that's still quite
               | slow.
               | 
               | Integrated GPUs that use a portion of system memory are
               | an exception to this and do not require memcpys when
               | using unified memory. However, I'm not aware of any
               | powerful iGPUs from Nvidia these days.
        
               | easytiger wrote:
               | Sure. Makes sense. So I guess for discrete GPUs the
               | unified memory stuff provides a universal address space
               | but merely abstracts the copying/streaming of the data.
               | 
               | There does seem to be a zero copy concept as well and
               | I've certainly used direct memory access over pcie before
               | on other proprietary devices.
               | 
               | https://docs.nvidia.com/cuda/cuda-c-best-practices-
               | guide/ind...
        
             | yarandex wrote:
             | Assuming running on CPU is memory-bandwidth limited, not
             | CPU-limited, it should take about 200GB / (50GB/sec) = 4
             | seconds per character. Not too bad.
        
               | lostmsu wrote:
               | That's per token. And you can generate quite a few per
               | pass.
        
         | [deleted]
        
         | toxik wrote:
         | These models are not character-based, but token-based. The
         | problem with CPU inference is the need for random access to 250
         | GiB of parameters, meaning immense paging and orders of
         | magnitude slower than normal CPU operation.
         | 
         | I wonder how bad it comes out with something like Optane?
        
           | amelius wrote:
           | It's not really random access. I bet the graph can be
           | pipelined such that you can keep a "horizontal cross-section"
           | of the graph in memory all the time, and you scan through the
           | parameters from top to bottom in the graph.
        
             | toxik wrote:
             | Fair point, but you'll still be bounded by disk read speed
             | on an SSD. The access pattern itself matters less than the
             | read cache being << the parameter set size.
        
               | lostmsu wrote:
               | Top SSDs do over 4GB/s so you can infer in 50 seconds if
               | disk bound.
               | 
               | You can also infer a few tokens at once, so it will be
               | more than 1 char a minute. Probably more like sentence a
               | minute.
        
               | toxik wrote:
               | You can read bits at that rate yes, but keep in mind that
               | it's 250 GiB /parameters/, and matrix-matrix
               | multiplication is typically somewhere between quadratic
               | and cubic in complexity. Then you get to wait for the
               | page out of your intermediate result etc etc.
               | 
               | It's difficult to estimate how slow it would be, but I'm
               | guessing unusably slow.
        
               | lostmsu wrote:
               | The intermediate result will all fit into a relatively
               | small amount of memory.
               | 
               | During inference you only need to keep layer outputs
               | until the next layer's outputs are computed.
               | 
               | If we talk about memory bandwidth, it is space
               | requirements that are important, not so much time
               | complexity.
        
             | guywhocodes wrote:
             | I wonder if you can't do that LSH trick to turn it into a
             | sparse matrix problem and run it on CPU that way.
        
               | nmfisher wrote:
               | That's pretty much what SLIDE [0] does. The driver was
               | achieving performance parity with GPUs for CPU training,
               | but presumably the same could apply to running inference
               | on models too large to load into consumer GPU memory.
               | 
               | https://github.com/RUSH-LAB/SLIDE
        
       | sharmin123 wrote:
        
       | egorfine wrote:
       | I have huge respect for developers at Yandex. It's kind of sad
       | that achievements like these are tainted by the fact that they
       | come from Russia (and I speak as a Ukrainian). I wonder if the
       | permissive license is able to mitigate that.
        
         | f6v wrote:
         | The achievements aren't in any way tainted by their
         | nationality, citizenship, sex, sexual orientation, age, etc.
        
           | toyg wrote:
           | Well... I'm sorry if I reach for the reductio at Hitlerum,
           | but any achievements Nazi scientists might have reached in
           | concentration camps are definitely tainted. Similarly,
           | achievements in the field of online consumer analysis in a
           | country where consumer-privacy protections are nonexistent,
           | surely should be considered tainted...?
        
             | f6v wrote:
             | > consumer-privacy protections are nonexistent
             | 
             | And you can back this up how?
        
             | pastacacioepepe wrote:
             | Wow. Yes you should have refrained from this. You are
             | comparing Nazi scientists who killed many innocents to some
             | software engineers working on a cool project and releasing
             | it for free to the world.
             | 
             | What is your problem?
        
               | f6v wrote:
               | Just FYI regardless of your stance on any of the recent
               | conflicts. De-humanization is a primary tool in
               | information warfare these days.
        
             | p1anecrazy wrote:
             | Wernher von Braun would disagree
        
             | amelius wrote:
             | I suppose the question should be: did the malevolence help
             | in reaching the results?
        
             | aaaaaaaaata wrote:
             | > definitely tainted
             | 
             | Operation Paperclip...?
        
             | FpUser wrote:
             | That is why the US imported Nazi scientists in bulk to work
             | in their labs. Starting with Wernher von Braun who had
             | become the heart of the US space program. Soviets did the
             | same at the time.
             | 
             | If you are so conscious about consuming tainted fruits the
             | only way to escape is to be living on some deserted island
             | catching your own food.
        
             | kamray23 wrote:
             | They are and we use them all the same. Rockets fly almost
             | every week now, jet engines are the most common form of
             | propulsion, tons of medicine forcibly tested on innocent
             | people is on the market, and to pass up any of that
             | technology would be pure idiocy.
        
               | dTal wrote:
               | >tons of medicine forcibly tested on innocent people is
               | on the market
               | 
               | What medicine?
        
             | skrebbel wrote:
             | And Yandex's AI work got helped by the Russian invasion of
             | Ukraine how, exactly? Did they train the bots on Ukrainian
             | captives first?
        
               | The_Colonel wrote:
               | It's the other way round. It's quite possible that e.g.
               | this model helped to spread Kremlin propaganda in various
               | discussion boards.
        
               | Svoka wrote:
               | Yandex search, which works on top of their AI is straight
               | out propaganda machine for Russian government. Every time
               | you go to yandex.ru, you're greeted with curated happy
               | news about how Ukrainians are killing themselves, and
               | russians are not fascists at all.
               | 
               | Their government does. They empower it. Just to be clear,
               | it is their army, and their government doing the deed.
               | They elected, they pay salaries to.
        
               | lotusmars wrote:
               | Its developers stayed complicit with a company with a
               | biggest propagandist pro-war resource in a country
               | (Yandex News).
        
               | trasz wrote:
               | I'd guess they've been getting a whole lot more traffic
               | lately, thanks to ban on Western services.
        
           | geek_at wrote:
           | the age old question if the art should be linked or
           | disconnected from the artist
        
             | somenameforme wrote:
             | This is nothing like that, because the question is not one
             | of their own personal actions - but of their nationality or
             | ethnicity. That, until about 4 months ago, would have been
             | widely acknowledged as racism.
             | 
             | The difference between holding values, and holding values
             | when convenient rather sums up the entirety of human
             | history in one phrase.
        
               | trasz wrote:
               | Yeah, it's certainly about ethnicity, not at all about
               | being controlled by a government which is in the process
               | of perpetrating genocide.
        
               | 5e92cb50239222b wrote:
               | I'm ethnically Russian (mostly), although I've never been
               | to that country and have less influence on their foreign
               | policy than your average European (who at least has some
               | say in how his own country behaves towards Russia -- and
               | we've seen how well they managed that). I don't know how
               | this would translate to the real world if I lived in "the
               | West", but from what I'm seeing on the internet for the
               | past few months, it definitely is about ethnicity. I've
               | been called many things and blamed for everything bad
               | that has happened since 1945, and not many seem to care
               | that half of Putin's army consists of people of Asian and
               | Caucasian ethnicities, and there are many Russians in the
               | Ukrainian army. If you go to places like r/worldnews,
               | there are open calls for violence that have strong
               | fascist overtones, and those seem to be getting more
               | popular.
               | 
               | Can't say the same about HN, it's one of the few places
               | that seems to have kept its sanity (for now?)
        
               | trasz wrote:
               | How is your Russian ethnicity different from average
               | Ukrainian?
               | 
               | But yes, there is, sadly, some discrimination. It's got
               | nothing to do with ethnicity though; it's the same thing
               | that happened to ordinary Germans in 1939-1945, and for
               | the same reasons.
        
             | rapnie wrote:
             | and if technology is neutral.
        
           | [deleted]
        
           | egorfine wrote:
           | Some people see it differently.
        
         | danuker wrote:
         | Coming from Russia doesn't mean you agree with government
         | policy. If you saw people get arrested as soon as they start
         | protesting, what would you do?
        
           | vegai_ wrote:
           | > If you saw people get arrested as soon as they start
           | protesting, what would you do?
           | 
           | Probably move if that's anywhere near a possibility, and if
           | not, cowardly stay as unnoticeable as possible. I know that
           | at least in Finland Russian refugees are mostly welcome
           | (although the border might be closed right now), even if they
           | probably will face a lot of scrutiny from various authorities
           | for obvious reasons. Most certainly it's nothing like the
           | attention such people would face in Russia.
           | 
           | We fondly remember even the smallest acts of defiance that
           | ordinary Germans acted out against their regime during
           | 1933-1945. We all would like to be those people in times of
           | crisis, but obviously most of us are not. They were probably
           | ultimately pretty futile acts during that time, though, but
           | put together with all the other actions that happened against
           | the Nazis played a significant grander role. And we know that
           | more than a few significant Jewish scientists and engineers
           | fled from Nazi Germany and made significant contributions to
           | the war effort. For instance, one guy called Einstein.
        
             | 5e92cb50239222b wrote:
             | Move where, exactly? I have a few friends in Russia and
             | they sit on their asses because there's nowhere for them to
             | go. You don't exactly qualify as a refugee unless the state
             | is after you (which you can trigger very easily, but then
             | you may not be able to leave the country), and even then
             | it's not a given.
        
             | martin_a wrote:
             | It would probably fit better to compare "small actions" to
             | the people of the DDR which were protesting against their
             | regime and ultimately helped to bring it down.
        
           | artemonster wrote:
           | But as a company, they do. They are filtering alternative
           | media from their search.
        
             | hnechochamber2 wrote:
             | Not much they can do if the alternative is go to jail.
        
             | guerrilla wrote:
             | They're just following the law of their host country, like
             | DuckDuckGo and Google have to... What's the alternative?
             | Open rebellion against the state?
        
               | chupasaurus wrote:
               | They've started to do so before the law was adjusted
        
               | guerrilla wrote:
               | Like Facebook, Twitter and every other forum did? I
               | wonder if there were any consequences if they didn't.
        
               | chupasaurus wrote:
               | Basically they've taken a step further with censorship of
               | all media not controlled by government which at the time
               | (2014) couldn't been penalized whatsoever.
        
               | guerrilla wrote:
               | And what if they hadn't?
        
               | chupasaurus wrote:
               | "Couldn't be penalized whatsoever" wasn't enough? In
               | broader view, government could start taking hostages like
               | they did with Google last December, but that wouldn't
               | help reaching the goal even a small bit back then since
               | there was no leverage on technical side of things.
        
               | lotusmars wrote:
               | No, they just removed all but pro-Putin or state media
               | out of Yandex News. It's just only pro-war Kremlin
               | propaganda now.
        
             | iillexial wrote:
             | Yandex is under full control of Russian government. Pretty
             | sure FSB can access anything.
        
               | lotusmars wrote:
               | Yes, similar to VK where low-level police can retrieve
               | all of your location, messaging, IP data and sell it to
               | mafia or thugs.
               | 
               | Russian police is notorious for selling logs, private
               | data or access and also selling databases on a black
               | market.
        
             | mojuba wrote:
             | Genuinely curious: which media outlets are banned from
             | Yandex Search? I just tried Meduza for example, comes up in
             | search just fine.
        
               | aliher1911 wrote:
               | Yandex has a news block right in the middle of its front
               | page. Only "approved" news sources could be shown there.
               | For people not specifically searching for recent updates
               | on a topic or particular media outlets it represents the
               | news. As far as I remember they wanted to remove this
               | block instead of completely instead of censoring, but
               | they were not allowed to. I think it was described in one
               | of the documentaries about Yandex, but my memories are
               | vague now.
        
               | mojuba wrote:
               | I know, but the OP meant Search, not News. Google and
               | even DDG can downrank certain news sources and I wouldn't
               | be very surprized if Yandex did too, but I'd really like
               | to see examples.
        
               | [deleted]
        
           | Thorentis wrote:
           | Doesn't mean you can't be punished for the actions of the
           | government though. See: Western companies and government
           | pulling out of Russia or issuing sanctions on private
           | individuals. I think it's even worse to say "we don't think
           | you're guilty, but we do think you should be punished."
        
             | baxtr wrote:
             | "We want to punish you" and "We don't want to make business
             | with you" are two very different things IMHO.
        
               | pastacacioepepe wrote:
               | If you go out of your way to not do business with
               | someone, in order to cripple them economically, then it
               | is a punishment.
        
               | layer8 wrote:
               | The purpose is deterrence, not punishment.
        
               | pastacacioepepe wrote:
               | And yet sanctions never work as a deterrent. Cuba is
               | still socialist after 60 years of sanctions. Great
               | deterrent! No, sanctions just punish generation after
               | generation of innocent people and serve no other purpose.
               | 
               | If you still mantain that the purpose is deterrence, then
               | you must be a fool or worse, since it never works! Can't
               | you learn from the past?
               | 
               | Edit:
               | 
               | Before you even dig out some article like this: https://w
               | ww.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2014/04/28...
               | 
               | I will make an important point: sanctions CAN work only
               | to prevent something from happening. Once that happened,
               | e.g. the war started, there's no sanction that can stop
               | it and that's exactly when sanctions stop being a
               | deterrent and start being a punishment.
        
               | The_Colonel wrote:
               | > No, sanctions just punish generation after generation
               | of innocent people and serve no other purpose.
               | 
               | They are pretty effective at preventing future wars. This
               | war happened only because Russia wasn't crippled enough
               | after 2014.
        
               | layer8 wrote:
               | Obviously you have a much stronger opinion on that than I
               | do, but at the very least, sanctions should deter other
               | countries from acting in a similar fashion. For example,
               | if -- hypothetically -- China is considering invading
               | Taiwan, they will have to factor in that the Western
               | world will stop doing business with them. If the West
               | hadn't put sanctions in place for Russia, that would
               | lessen the concern for China. Maybe you think that isn't
               | worth it -- that's a valid personal judgement of course.
        
               | trasz wrote:
               | And the fact that Russia is not capable of manufacturing
               | tanks anymore has nothing to do whatsoever with
               | sanctions?
        
               | baxtr wrote:
               | If you want to define punishment like that, it is your
               | call.
               | 
               | In my opinion it is not punishment to stop a relationship
               | if the basis of that relationship was destroyed
               | deliberately by one side.
        
               | pastacacioepepe wrote:
               | I don't define it, it's exactly the official definition,
               | like it or not:
               | 
               | > punishment: the infliction or imposition of a penalty
               | as retribution for an offence.
               | 
               | Then you can play all you want with language to make it
               | say what you'd like but it's pointless.
        
               | baxtr wrote:
               | An "offence" as defined in a criminal code? Two countries
               | don't share a criminal code AFAIK.
        
             | trhway wrote:
             | > Western companies and government pulling out of Russia
             | 
             | you can't really blame the companies for not wanting to be
             | associated in any way with a nazist regime genociding a
             | neighboring country.
             | 
             | And Starbucks or Mercedes pulling out of Russia isn't
             | punishment. It is freedom of association and economic
             | activity. Russians are whining about "punishment" because
             | they have no idea about freedom, and that is them getting a
             | bit of taste of it. They think they can plaster whole
             | country with their swastika - "Z" - in enthusiastic support
             | of the bloody genocide while the whole word shouldn't be
             | able to express its disgust at those happenings.
             | 
             | Especially funny how Russians are cry-baby style whining
             | about supposed violation of their property rights by the
             | West sanctions while Russians have been violating property
             | rights of more than 40 million of Ukrainians (even if we
             | don't consider all the mass killing and raping of civilians
             | that Russians have been doing there). The deep and profound
             | disintegration of any morals in my old country is stunning.
             | 
             | >or issuing sanctions on private individuals.
             | 
             | due to the size of their wealth and the de-facto rules of
             | economic activity in Russia those aren't private wealth of
             | private individuals - they are integral part of that nazist
             | regime, and thus they are guilty too.
             | 
             | And for the sanctioned Russian government officials - that
             | is for example the Roskosmos CEO Rogozin, who is one of the
             | main founders of the Russian Nazi movement "Motherland"
             | (people from which has since taken prominent roles across
             | the Russian government and the ruling Party) and who is one
             | of the most prominent voices around Putin and the Putin's
             | favorite, giving a Nazi salute and the end of his Nazi
             | speech at the Russian Nazi march in Moscow. The specific
             | phrase they all give Nazi salute to is "Glory to Russia!".
             | 
             | https://youtu.be/xkXVVcPWSU8?t=87
        
               | lotusmars wrote:
               | It was hilarious when people from Moscow wrote "they took
               | away our ability to buy Chanel bags, so much for European
               | tolerance!"
               | 
               | Not even seeing the irony. What did they expect in
               | response to bombing, pillaging, mass rape? Friendly hug?
        
               | cpursley wrote:
               | Just want to point out the mass rape claims were
               | fabricated. Ukraine even fired Lyudmila Denisova over the
               | ordeal:
               | 
               | https://greekcitytimes.com/2022/06/01/ukrainian-official-
               | fir...
        
               | lotusmars wrote:
               | No, there are credible and quite horrifying reports[1].
               | Also some of the actual rapists were found out and
               | victimes stepped forward. Please don't spew Russian
               | propaganda.
               | 
               | [1] https://meduza.io/en/feature/2022/04/18/i-can-do-
               | whatever-i-...
        
               | cpursley wrote:
               | How is it Russian propaganda? It's been widely reported
               | by western sources that Denisova was fired by Ukrainian
               | officials for lying specifically about the mass rape
               | claims.
               | 
               | I'm not suggesting there have been no rapes or that
               | Russians are the good guys. Just that the reports of mass
               | rapes were fabricated (Denisova admitted she thought it
               | would help Ukraine obtain more sympathy and weapons from
               | the west).
        
               | pastacacioepepe wrote:
               | If I counted every time a NATO member committed worse
               | atrocities but wasn't held accountable at all I'd
               | probably stop after Ukraine is conquered.
               | 
               | What did they expect? Probably indifference, same
               | reaction to any war crime committed by the west so far.
        
               | lotusmars wrote:
               | Say what you want, most people in Eastern Europe, Ukraine
               | and even lots of people in Russia would prefer to be
               | under protection of NATO.
               | 
               | If it were not for NATO, Russian rapists would already be
               | in Tallinn, Vilnius, Helsinki. Claiming they were
               | offended by historical injustices therefore women should
               | be raped and men shot dead ("denazified").
        
           | lotusmars wrote:
           | Yandex is arguably the biggest censoring and propaganda
           | machine in Russia.
           | 
           | Yandex News is IIRC the biggest news media in Russia.
           | 
           | It filtered all results on protests and opposition resources
           | leaving only government propaganda. Same with war. Filtering
           | not meaning downranking. Just straight up not showing.
           | 
           | Editors were fired for not staying in line until it was
           | completely sterilized and filled with pro-war propaganda.
           | 
           | Working in Yandex is being complicit with it.
        
           | Svoka wrote:
           | Every russian citizen pays for death and destruction in
           | Ukraine. With taxes, with national wealth.
           | 
           | What should russians do you ask? Fight. I did it in Ukraine
           | in 2004. Then in 2014. I didn't run from cops, I didn't let
           | them take my friends. But regardless, now we pay with our
           | lives, being subjected to genocide because of russian
           | cowardliness.
           | 
           | because so far they are all just paying for the genocide.
        
           | f6v wrote:
           | They might as well agree with it. Or agree with some of it.
           | It just strikes me how everyone wants to put everyone else
           | into these well-defined black-and-white boxes. I get that
           | it's simpler, but it's often at odds with reality.
        
             | FpUser wrote:
             | >"It just strikes me how everyone ..."
             | 
             | Because most of those "everyone's" are not facing the
             | choices themselves and are basically keyboard warriors.
             | Let's see what they say when they'll be asked to sacrifice
             | their own well being to be on a "high moral ground".
        
               | 5e92cb50239222b wrote:
               | I think we're already seeing that in recent French
               | elections. I have a feeling this is only the beginning.
               | 
               | As a relatively neutral party in all of this whose
               | country hasn't tainted itself (but who nevertheless spent
               | all my live under a similar autocracy), I can't help but
               | shake my head at keyboard revolutionaries who
               | _definitely_ would have overthrown the regime, if only
               | they lived in Russia. You just have no freaking idea what
               | you 're talking about. Guard your democracy as best you
               | can so you don't have to find out.
        
           | varispeed wrote:
           | This is a stupid argument. Ukrainians are being _killed_ and
           | you compare that to fear of being arrested? It 's a nice
           | excuse. "Oh yes I don't support my government, but you know
           | these arrests, I'd rather stay in my cosy home and enjoy my
           | tea. Now could you please lift the sanctions? I already said
           | I don't support my government, why normal people like me
           | should suffer?" etc etc
        
             | FpUser wrote:
             | >""Oh yes I don't support my government, but you know these
             | arrests, I'd rather stay in my cosy home and enjoy my tea."
             | 
             | Why are you so surprised? This is exactly how most of the
             | population behaves everywhere. People go about their
             | business and "support" criminal actions of their
             | governments all the time. This includes the West. Our
             | governments have no problems exterminating, starving and
             | displacing people (as long as they're the "right" people to
             | mess with) while the majority of the population is going on
             | merrily about their business. And Europe keeps buying
             | Russian stuff even now while "Ukrainians are being killed".
             | Where are the mass protests and fights with the police?
             | 
             | Things might change when "messing" with people will ALWAYS
             | have the consequences for ANY country. But this is not what
             | is happening and is unlikely to change. We have no extra
             | terrestrial entity to police us in impartial way.
        
               | lotusmars wrote:
               | > Our governments have no problems exterminating,
               | starving and displacing people
               | 
               | It's high time to bring "but US bombed Iraq". Classic
               | playbook.
        
               | dmpk2k wrote:
               | And yet it is still true.
        
               | lotusmars wrote:
               | Americans just love to talk about themselves. Who cares
               | about Russians under Putin's oppression or Ukrainians
               | being exterminated. Let's talk about your government,
               | Bush, Trump and Google.
        
               | mardifoufs wrote:
               | This is not true. I can assure you that tons of Muslims
               | and people from the middle east also care about the fact
               | that the same actors who gleefully engineered wars on
               | terror that led to a million people dying and entire
               | countries getting devastated, with absolutely 0
               | consequences for them, are now so very keen to hold other
               | people accountable for illegitimate invasions.
               | 
               | No one likes hypocrisy, especially when it is coming from
               | the same westerners that at most protested for a few
               | weeks back in 2003 when their own countries bombed us for
               | 2 decades, that are now calling for other people to get
               | arrested and possibly tortured/executed by putin's regime
               | because that's just the right thing(tm) to do to stop the
               | war. It would be laughable if it wasn't despicable.
        
               | FpUser wrote:
               | It is as classic as your own standard script. I've just
               | explained what is going on. I did not want to single out
               | the US as it happens everywhere. But if you are so touchy
               | maybe you should not have "supported" that particular
               | subject. Remind me what was your punishment?
        
             | oleg_antonyan wrote:
             | Yeah, by being arrested you're doing so much more for the
             | Ukrainians
        
               | varispeed wrote:
               | More people having to deal with prisoners, potentially
               | fewer people going to Ukraine. Certainly better than
               | doing nothing.
        
             | aaaaaaaaata wrote:
             | Wait until you hear about the folks your country is
             | killing!
        
               | varispeed wrote:
               | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/And_you_are_lynching_Negroe
               | s
        
               | mardifoufs wrote:
               | Yes posting that Wikipedia link isn't a magic way to
               | deflect from the fact that the iraq war led to a million
               | people dead. And that people are still dying from the war
               | on terror. It's amazing that you just said that people in
               | ukraine are still dying, and that just saying that you
               | don't support your government from the comfort of your
               | couch isn't enough... and then you proceeded to link an
               | article specifically so that you can ignore/deflect the
               | deaths that are also happening now and that should be
               | (according to your own argument) much more important than
               | any of your own comfort or even liberty?
               | 
               | "Yes hundreds of thousands of Muslims died and are still
               | dying, but bringing it up or asking me to do anything
               | about is fallacious! Checkmate"
               | 
               | As you said, who cares about debate tricks when people in
               | the middle east are still dying from the war on terror as
               | we spead? Why are you holding other people to standards
               | that you don't even pretend to hold yourself to? You are
               | expecting people to get arrested to prevent deaths and
               | talk about the situation in ukraine, but I guess making
               | you uncomfortable with "whataboutism" is the limit?
        
           | egorfine wrote:
           | I am asking this question myself for 120 days and I still
           | don't have an answer.
        
             | lotusmars wrote:
             | Maybe not be "apolitical" for 20 years that led to this?
             | 
             | Russian IT and media were showered with relatively high
             | wages to stay quiet while last semblance of elections was
             | finally destroyed, independent media was took over by pro-
             | Putin oligarchs and activists were crushed or murdered.
             | 
             | As was the sarcastic saying coined recently, "if you are
             | apolitical then bullets don't hit you".
        
         | 2Gkashmiri wrote:
         | https://github.com/yandex/YaLM-100B/blob/main/LICENSE
         | 
         | apache license
         | 
         | >The model is published under the Apache 2.0 license that
         | permits both research and commercial use
         | 
         | you should be fine
        
         | pfortuny wrote:
         | The achievements cannot be tainted.
         | 
         | Kolmogorov complexity is (I hope) untainted.
         | 
         | Also, Hilbert's problems are not untainted (and he never flew
         | Nazi Germany!).
        
           | ask_b123 wrote:
           | I think the correct word might be fled -> he never fled.
        
             | pfortuny wrote:
             | Yes, sorry.
        
         | puranjay wrote:
         | What percentage of American inventions and scientific
         | developments post WW2 were led or influenced by former Nazi
         | scientists?
        
           | Svoka wrote:
           | Probably about same as share as of USSR's. They just were
           | open about it. Also, crucial word here is "former". Like,
           | there is a big difference between being of a former fascist
           | state, and carrying on ongoing genocide.
        
         | niek_pas wrote:
         | Are American developers' achievement tainted by the fact they
         | come from the United States?
        
           | toyg wrote:
           | Some of them, like the invasive analysis tools that exploit
           | the Patriot Act, yes for sure.
        
           | martin_a wrote:
           | Yeah. US developers might create great software but due to
           | the Cloud Act, Patriot Act and whatnot you don't want to use
           | it for anything that's not public data at first. It's just
           | not protected against unauthorized access.
        
           | kamray23 wrote:
           | Often, yes. In many places we're even wary of using US-based
           | services at all. The EU has been having a bit of a back and
           | forth with the US and many companies because EU law prohibits
           | foreign states gaining access to personal information whereas
           | US law requires foreign personal information transfers to CC
           | the NSA on request. There's some big legislative deadlocks
           | where American companies simply cannot operate fully in
           | countries other than the US because the US laws require wild
           | violations of basic rights to privacy of anyone who isn't a
           | US citizen.
           | 
           | Lots of things have to be cleared for backdoors, Intel and
           | AMD are scary with their built-in ME and whatever AMD had, I
           | can't exactly remember, proprietary hardware in general is
           | very scary outside the US due to surveillance and possible
           | backdoors, it's kind of weird. Same goes for China, though
           | they don't surveil foreigners exactly as hard, at least here
           | they don't. It's not exactly an ideal situation and I think
           | there should be agreements done internationally on stuff like
           | this to keep the US and China out of our devices or allowing
           | them to kindly fuck off entirely.
           | 
           | Not exactly the same kind of taint though, your products
           | aren't as much morally tainted as they are simply dangerous
           | to use, like little telescreens you have to carry around.
        
           | MrBuddyCasino wrote:
           | Underrated comment, considering the history of NATO
           | expansion, color revolutions and the hundreds of thousands
           | killed in pursuit of reckless ideological overt or covert
           | warfare.
        
             | bloqs wrote:
             | Yikes
        
               | aaaaaaaaata wrote:
               | Unsure what this comment means.
        
       | throwaway4good wrote:
       | What sort of machine can run this model?
        
         | f311a wrote:
         | Nvidia DGX
        
           | throwaway4good wrote:
           | I can see it is about 150.000 USD for such a machine. Is this
           | the cheapest option out there?
        
             | kamray23 wrote:
             | Well you can custom-build a suitable system for the middle
             | five digits. It's still not something every idiot can run,
             | but most medium to large companies can set up their own for
             | sure.
        
       | SXX wrote:
       | First of all regardless for political situation this is great
       | step in making ML research actually open. So huge thanks for
       | those developers who pushed to make it public. Still...
       | 
       | Yandex is in fact share responsibility for Russian government
       | actions. While it impossible to fight censorship they could
       | certainly shut down their News service completely.
       | 
       | Yandex could also certainly move more of their company and staff
       | out of country. It was their deliberate choice stay in Russia and
       | getting advantages on local market by using their political
       | weight.
        
         | vbezhenar wrote:
         | If that would make you happier, Yandex is selling its News
         | service to Mail.ru.
        
           | SXX wrote:
           | This only happen now after the war began.
        
         | tomp wrote:
         | How much responsibility does Google share for US wrecking
         | Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria?
        
           | lostmsu wrote:
           | Google doesn't censor antiwar propaganda.
        
             | gambler wrote:
             | Blatantly incorrect. Google engages in egregious political
             | censorship all the time. Including censorship for Russian
             | government and censorship of US anti-war voices.
             | 
             | https://reclaimthenet.org/youtube-responds-to-cpac-
             | censorshi...
             | 
             | https://reclaimthenet.org/google-expanded-its-censorship-
             | of-...
             | 
             | https://reclaimthenet.org/russia-continues-to-order-
             | google-t...
             | 
             | In US they pretend to "decide" to censor things "on their
             | own" because 1st amendment prevents the government from
             | officially demanding censorship.
        
               | lostmsu wrote:
               | None of your links show Google censoring anti-war
               | propaganda.
        
               | gambler wrote:
               | https://medium.com/dan-sanchez/don-t-see-
               | evil-148ae18bc9fe
               | 
               | https://citizenactionmonitor.wordpress.com/2017/08/02/goo
               | gle...
               | 
               | https://www.protocol.com/bulletins/google-censors-war
        
               | lostmsu wrote:
               | Still no. First case I would not even consider
               | censorship. The third one was temporary until Google
               | stopped operating in Russia altogether.
               | 
               | A quote from the second one: "cumulative 45 percent
               | decrease in traffic from Google searches"
        
               | gambler wrote:
               | There is a difference between "Google does not censor
               | anti-war content" and "Google does censor anti-war
               | content, but usually has an excuse I find acceptable".
               | 
               | When a company puts Jon Lennon's Merry Xmas (War is Over)
               | behind age restriction banner[1], the question stops
               | being "Is there censorship?" and becomes about the logic
               | of such censorship.
               | 
               |  _> The third one was temporary until Google stopped
               | operating in Russia altogether._
               | 
               | They've censored other things on behest of the Russian
               | government _for years_ [2]. Again, I cannot fathom how
               | people on a tech website like HN can be unaware of such
               | things. This is common knowledge broadly covered on
               | mainstream websites.
               | 
               | ---
               | 
               | [1] https://reclaimthenet.org/youtube-john-lennon-war-is-
               | over-wa...
               | 
               | [2] https://www.rferl.org/a/google-censors-search-
               | results-after-...
        
               | lostmsu wrote:
               | Precisely zero of what you mentioned so far is censoring
               | anti-war content.
               | 
               | Even in the translation case (which I assume you mean by
               | your "excuse" remark) the original source is still
               | available as is. I am not even sure from the description
               | what translation team it was talking about and what does
               | it have to do with Google exactly. "translate company
               | text for the Russian market" this passage sounds like it
               | talks about translating Google's own interfaces, help
               | pages, press releases, or support articles to Russian.
               | E.g. no external voice is being censored.
        
               | dang wrote:
               | > This is either astounding ignorance or blatant
               | gaslighting.
               | 
               | Can you please edit name-calling / swipes like that out
               | of your HN comments? It breaks the site guidelines and
               | weakens your point.
               | 
               | https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
        
               | lostmsu wrote:
               | Considering the importance of the topic, and provided the
               | linked articles actually contained examples of Google
               | censoring anti-war propaganda, I believe the swipe would
               | have been fully justified.
               | 
               | Highly emotional tone changes how the data affects the
               | reader. If he is right, I would surely better remember
               | next time that Google is in the same ballpark due to the
               | insult hitting hard. If he is wrong, I will know better
               | to ignore such claims in the future without a direct
               | quote or something else that consumes less time than
               | reading an entire linked article.
        
               | [deleted]
        
             | kgeist wrote:
             | There's no laws in US which punish for spreading antiwar
             | propaganda which Google needs to comply with.
        
               | lostmsu wrote:
               | There's no law that says Yandex must operate in Russia.
        
               | kgeist wrote:
               | Yandex has offices in 8 countries. I wonder if they
               | censor news everywhere or only in Russia.
        
               | [deleted]
        
           | SXX wrote:
           | Google is US company which pays taxes in US. The company just
           | like everyone in US obviously do share responsibility for
           | what US government does. Fortunately Google and it's
           | leadership actually does have political positions even if you
           | dont like it.
           | 
           | In any case as unfortunate owner of Russian passport with
           | friends and collegues in Ukraine I am more affected by Putins
           | war than by anything US does.
           | 
           | So I want Yandex to be seen as part of Kremlin propoganda
           | machine and threated accordingly. This company grew monopoly
           | in many markets in Russia and they directly benefited from
           | Putin regime. Since Ilya Segalovich died company started to
           | be "out of politics" and this complete lack of any political
           | activity lead country to these terrible events.
        
       | idealmedtech wrote:
       | In the download script, it skips parts of the model (02 and 83);
       | any ML people have ideas why you'd do that?
        
         | hansonw wrote:
         | It appears the indexing for the model parts is deliberately not
         | contiguous; the 03-82 range represents the main 80 transformer
         | layers.
         | https://github.com/yandex/YaLM-100B/blob/main/megatron_lm/me...
        
           | idealmedtech wrote:
           | That makes sense, thanks for clearing it up!
        
       | lukestateson wrote:
        
         | memorable wrote:
         | Source for all the claims?
        
           | sgc wrote:
           | Those are trivial to verify. If you can't do your 5 minutes
           | of research, OP should not feel obliged to humor your attempt
           | to create busy work for them.
        
             | Vaslo wrote:
             | Plenty of people cite their work and arguments in
             | contentious discussions.
        
           | trasz wrote:
           | https://twitter.com/timsoulo/status/1510955352267063296
        
           | OmicronCeti wrote:
           | 2) https://www.businessinsider.com/yandex-russia-former-news-
           | di...
           | 
           | >The ex-head of news at Russia's largest internet company has
           | advice for his former colleagues: quit.
           | 
           | >Lev Gershenzon worked at Yandex in various roles for four
           | years, according to his LinkedIn profile. He took to Facebook
           | early Tuesday morning to warn people still working at the
           | company -- which is one of the largest search engines in
           | Russia -- that it was contributing to the censorship of the
           | country's invasion into Ukraine.
           | 
           | >"The fact that a significant part of the Russian population
           | may believe that there is no war is the basis and driving
           | force of this war," Gershenzon wrote, also tagging six of his
           | former coworkers. "Today, Yandex is a key element in hiding
           | information about war. Every day and hour of such "news"
           | costs human lives. And you, my former colleagues, are also
           | responsible for this."
           | 
           | 2) https://techcrunch.com/2022/03/16/russia-yandex-news-vk/
           | 
           | >Yandex's former head of news accused the company of being a
           | 'key element in hiding information' from Russians about the
           | war in Ukraine.
           | 
           | 3) Result of Yandex's slower crawler and default display
           | mode, although the effect is as described: https://twitter.co
           | m/maryilyushina/status/1510930537187319813...
        
         | jeroenhd wrote:
         | Russian company follows Russian propaganda rules, that's hardly
         | news. It's pretty clear that concepts like "free press" and
         | "freedom of information" aren't compatible with the Russian
         | regime and expecting such features from a company operating
         | mostly in Russia is kind of pointless. It should be obvious
         | that anything Yandex (or any company targeting Russia, really)
         | should be met with a good deal of scepticism. Companies like
         | Yandex and Baidu can still deliver usable research, though, as
         | long as you realise with what kind of perspective their code
         | was written and their algorithm trained.
         | 
         | In a similar vain, Microsoft has censored "tank man" from their
         | image search (and that of all their image search customers,
         | such as DuckDuckGo). Google is a more transparent about their
         | censorship, usually showing a link or explanation why they
         | remove certain information at the bottom of the page, but it
         | still reflects the values of western civilisation, for example
         | by delisting Russian propaganda such as RT.
         | 
         | These biases are everywhere in all research into this field.
         | The Russian situation is obviously worse than that in many
         | other countries, but you should never forget the bias that AI
         | models from free countries have been trained with either.
        
         | lizardactivist wrote:
         | Do you use Google, Bing, Twitter, or Facebook?
        
       | wongarsu wrote:
       | Now we just need someone to figure out how to compress the model
       | to get similar performance in 10B parameters.
       | 
       | I assume some of the services that offer GPT-J APIs will pick
       | this up, but it doesn't look cheap or easy to get this running.
        
       | alexb_ wrote:
       | I have to wonder if 10 years down the line, everyone will be able
       | to run models like this on their own computers. Have to wonder
       | what the knock-on effects of that will be, especially if the
       | models improve drastically. With so much of our social lives
       | being moved online, if we have the easy ability to create fake
       | lives of fake people one has to wonder what's real and what
       | isn't.
       | 
       | Maybe the dead internet theory will really come true; at least,
       | in some sense of it.
       | https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2021/08/dead-...
        
         | Jimmy wrote:
         | There's a very simple solution, of course: turn off the
         | computer and physically interact with real people.
        
         | espadrine wrote:
         | > _I have to wonder if 10 years down the line, everyone will be
         | able to run models like this on their own computers._
         | 
         | Isn't that already the case? Sure, it costs $60K, but that is
         | accessible to a surprisingly large minority, considering the
         | potency of this software.
        
           | alexb_ wrote:
           | ...what? 60 thousand dollars for a dedicated computer that
           | you can't use is not everyone, not on their own computers,
           | and is also a crazy large amount of money for nearly
           | everyone. Sure there are some that could, but that's not what
           | I said.
        
             | H8crilA wrote:
             | Indeed. What "everyone" can use is a ~$200 smartphone, so
             | there's a ~300x gap to be bridged.
        
               | wjnc wrote:
               | log(300) / log(2) = only 8.2 doublings away. That's near
               | future material.
        
               | thfuran wrote:
               | Maybe at 90s hardware growth rates, but not now.
        
               | rictic wrote:
               | The dream of the 90s is alive in the GPU market:
               | https://aiimpacts.org/2019-recent-trends-in-gpu-price-
               | per-fl...
               | 
               | Moore's law didn't stop, just Dennard scaling. Expect
               | graphics and AI to continue to improve radically in
               | performance/price, while more ordinary workloads see only
               | modest improvements.
        
               | thfuran wrote:
               | GPU TDP seems on the verge of going exponential, cost per
               | transistor isn't really decreasing so much at the very
               | latest nodes, and even that article seems to suggest it'd
               | likely be decades before 300x flops/$
        
               | ben_w wrote:
               | Most of the cost of a phone isn't the processor, so
               | probably closer to x1000. Hardware may get that much
               | cheaper, but it was never guaranteed, and we're not
               | making progress as fast as we used to.
        
             | px43 wrote:
             | Eh, 60k is just a bit more expensive than your average car,
             | and lots of people have cars, and that's just how things
             | are today. I imagine capabilities will be skyrocketing and
             | prices will fall drastically at the same time.
        
               | fuzzer37 wrote:
               | > 60k is just a bit more expensive than your average car
               | 
               | If by "A bit" you mean about 30-40k
        
             | paganel wrote:
             | Plus, that's the energy costs involved when running a
             | computer now worth 60k, I'm pretty sure that in the current
             | socio-economic climate those power costs will surpass the
             | initial acquisition cost (those 60k, that is) pretty
             | easily.
        
               | colechristensen wrote:
               | An 80GB nvidia A100 goes for $20k and uses 300 watts, the
               | energy costs of using one (or three) isn't going to
               | surpass the hardware costs for... a while.
        
               | paganel wrote:
               | I wanted to add that I was writing it metaphorically in a
               | way, as in, seeing as how high those energy bills will be
               | they might as well all add up to 60k.
               | 
               | Not sure about most of the people in here, but I would
               | get really nervous at the thought of running something
               | that eats up 3x300 watts per hour, for 24/7, just as part
               | of a personal/hobby project. The incoming power bills
               | would be too high, you have to be in the wage-percentile
               | for which dropping 60k on a machine just to carry out
               | some hobby project is ok, i.e. you'd have to be "high-
               | ish" middle-class at least.
               | 
               | The recent increases in consumer power prices are a heavy
               | blow for most of the middle-class around Europe (not sure
               | about how things are in the States), so a project like
               | this one is just a no-go for most of middle-class
               | European programmers/computer people.
        
               | colechristensen wrote:
               | At full power 3 of those would cost me ~$3.50 per day
               | ($0.15 per kWh is what I paid for last month's
               | electricity, though I could pay less if I made some
               | difference choices), I occasionally have a more expensive
               | coffee order, or have a cocktail worth three times as
               | much.
               | 
               | Things are getting more expensive here but nothing like
               | the situation in Europe (essentially none of our energy
               | was imported from Russia, historically ~10% of oil
               | imports but that was mostly to refine and re-export, we
               | have all the natural gas locally that we need) The US
               | crossed the line into being a net hyrdocarbon energy
               | exporter a while ago (unsure what the case is recently
               | but it is at worst about at parity)
        
               | golem14 wrote:
               | You must not have a pool :)
        
           | wellthisisgreat wrote:
           | What kind of computer would they be?
           | 
           | Can you spec it out roughly?
        
           | joshvm wrote:
           | You could just run this on a desktop CPU, there's nothing
           | stopping you in principle, you just need enough RAM. A big
           | memory (256GB) machine is definitely doable at home. It's
           | going to cost 1-2k on the DIMMs alone, less if you use
           | 8x32GB, but that'll come down. You could definitely do it for
           | less than $5k all in.
           | 
           | Inference latency is a lot higher in relative terms, but even
           | for things like image processing running a CNN on a CPU isn't
           | particularly bad if you're experimenting, or even for low
           | load production work.
           | 
           | But for really transient loads you're better off just renting
           | seconds-minutes on a VM.
        
             | sascha_sl wrote:
             | From the readme, it looks like you need that RAM on your
             | GPU.
        
               | joshvm wrote:
               | There isn't any reason you can't run a neural net on a
               | CPU. It's still just a bunch of big matrix operations.
               | The advantage of the GPU is it's a lot faster, but "a
               | lot" might be 1 second versus 10 seconds, and for some
               | applications 10 seconds of inference latency is just fine
               | (I have no idea how long this model would take). All the
               | major ML libraries will operate in CPU-only mode if you
               | request it.
        
               | visarga wrote:
               | They are pretty slow even on GPU. The problem is that
               | it's an autoregressive model. So it needs to do a forward
               | pass for each token.
        
           | kamray23 wrote:
           | You're grossly overestimating. People who make 60k annually
           | are getting a bit rarer nowadays, it's not like everyone can
           | afford it. For the majority of people it'd be a multi-decade
           | project, for a few it might only take 7 years, very few
           | people could buy it all at once.
        
           | uniqueuid wrote:
           | Nitpick: This uses 8x A100 which are at least $10k a piece to
           | my knowledge. Add in the computer and you're closer to $100k.
        
             | sascha_sl wrote:
             | And also, NVIDIA does not sell them to the consumer market
             | whatsoever. Linus Tech Tips could only show one because
             | someone in the audience sent theirs over for review.
        
             | taink wrote:
             | I believe you're confusing the amount of A100 graphics
             | cards used to _train_ the model (the cluster was actually
             | made up of 800 A100s), and the amount you need to _run_ the
             | model :
             | 
             | > The model [...] is supposed to run on multiple GPUs with
             | tensor parallelism.
             | 
             | > It was tested on 4 (A100 80g) and 8 (V100 32g) GPUs, [but
             | should work] with [?]200GB of GPU memory.
             | 
             | I don't know what the price of a V100 is, but given $10k a
             | piece for A100s we would be closer to the $60k estimate.
        
               | uniqueuid wrote:
               | The $10k price is for an A100 with 40GB ram, so you need
               | 8 of those. If you can get your hands on the 80GB
               | variant, 4 are enough.
               | 
               | Also, if you want to have a machine with eight of these
               | cards, it will need to be a pretty high-spec rack-mounted
               | or large tower. To feed these GPUs, you will want to have
               | a decent amount of PCIe-4 lanes, meaning EPYC are the
               | logical choice. So that's $20k for an AMD EPYC server
               | with at least 1.6kw PSUs etc etc.
        
               | taink wrote:
               | Do you happen to know the cost of the 80GB variant?
        
               | uniqueuid wrote:
               | The PNY variant is pretty much the only one you can try
               | to buy as an individual part, and those go for ~$15k. If
               | you can get them.
               | 
               | Note that A100 like other datacenter GPUs are passively
               | cooled. You need a strong airflow and duct in any case
               | that would house them.
        
               | colechristensen wrote:
               | Dell sells them for $20k
        
               | uniqueuid wrote:
               | Or ~25k in Euro. Ouch.
        
               | riku_iki wrote:
               | There is also $5k A6000 with 48GB
        
               | justinlloyd wrote:
               | Which will work just fine with NVIDIA SWITCH and a decent
               | GPU compute case from ASUS or IBM or even building your
               | own out of an off-the-shelf PCIe switch and consumer
               | motherboard.
        
               | justinlloyd wrote:
               | You don't need a "decent amount" of PCIe-4 lanes. You
               | just need 16 of them. And they can be PCIe 3.0 and will
               | work just fine. Deep learning compute boxes predominantly
               | use a PCIe switch. e.g. the ASUS 8000 box, which handles
               | eight cards just fine. You only need a metric tonne of
               | PCIe bandwidth if you are constantly shuttling data in
               | and out of the GPU, e.g. in a game or exceedinyl large
               | training sets of computer vision data. A little latency
               | of a few hundred milliseconds moving data to your GPU in
               | a training session that will take hours if not days to
               | complete is neither here nor then. I suspect this model,
               | with a little tweaking, will run just fine on an eight
               | way RTX A5000 setup, or a five-way A6000 completely
               | unhindered. That puts the price around $20,000 to
               | $30,000. If I put two more A5000s in my machine, I
               | suspect I could figure out how to get the model to load.
               | 
               | It also sounds like they haven't optimized their model,
               | or done any split on it, but if they did, I suspect they
               | could load it up and have it infer slower on fewer GPUs,
               | by using main memory.
        
         | arathore wrote:
         | If by running models you mean just the inference phase, then
         | even today you can run large family of ML models on commodity
         | hardware (with some elbow grease, of course). The training
         | phase is generally the one not easily replicated by non-
         | corporations.
        
         | pgt wrote:
         | The Move to the Edge is one of the strongest trends in
         | technology. So, yes. I would never best against it.
         | 
         | (applies to computing and other technologies like power
         | production and agriculture)
        
           | user3939382 wrote:
           | When I see AWS, cloud, and server side rendering frameworks
           | it seems like we're moving the other way in some sense.
        
             | ubercore wrote:
             | There's a strong trend to push to the edge of the cloud
             | though -- cloudfront workers, deno.deploy, etc
        
         | Comevius wrote:
         | That's definitely the future, personalized entertainment and
         | social interactions will be big. I could watch a movie made for
         | me, and discuss it with a bunch of chat bots. The future will
         | be bubbly as hell, people will be decaying in their safe places
         | as the hellscape rages on outside.
        
           | pydry wrote:
           | I get the feeling that creative sci fi used to kind of help
           | inoculate us against these kinds of future but it seems like
           | there's much less of it than there used to be.
           | 
           | "Black mirror" was good but it's not nearly enough.
        
           | Peritract wrote:
           | > I could watch a movie made for me
           | 
           | We're a long, long way from this. Stringing words/images
           | together into a coherent sequence is arguably the easy bit of
           | creating novels/films, and computers still lag a long way
           | behind humans in this regard.
           | 
           |  _Structuring_ a narrative is a harder, subtler step. Our
           | most advanced ML solutions are improving rapidly, but often
           | struggle with coherence over a single paragraph; they 're not
           | going to be doing satisfying foreshadowing and emotional
           | beats for a while.
        
             | [deleted]
        
             | axg11 wrote:
             | > We're a long, long way from this.
             | 
             | We're probably 18 months away from this. We're probably
             | less than 5 years away from being able to do this on local
             | hardware. AI/ML is advancing faster than most people
             | realise.
        
             | thatwasunusual wrote:
             | > Structuring a narrative is a harder, subtler step.
             | 
             | You can say that about many movies/series made entirely by
             | humans today. :)
        
             | fumblebee wrote:
             | Maybe. But I think a lot of folks have a short term memory;
             | it was not so long ago that Word2Vec and AlexNet were SOTA.
             | Remember when the thought of a human besting a world-class
             | player at Go was impossible? Me too.
             | 
             | We've come ludicrously far since then. That progress
             | doesn't guarantee that innovation in the space will
             | continue at its current pace, but it sure does feel like
             | it's possible.
        
             | natly wrote:
             | We're probably a long way away from narrative, but dall-e
             | for video is probably only a year or two away from now
             | (they're probably training the model as we speak).
        
             | importantbrian wrote:
             | I actually wouldn't be surprised if the technology catches
             | up to this faster than we realize. I think the actual
             | barrier to large scale adoption of it will be financial and
             | social incentives.
             | 
             | A big reason all the major studios are moving to big
             | franchises is that the real money is in licensing the
             | merch. The movies and TV shows are really just there to
             | sell more merch. Maybe this will work when we all have high
             | quality 3d printers at our desks and we can just print the
             | merch they sell us.
             | 
             | The other big barrier is social. A lot of what people
             | watch, they watch because it was recommended to them by
             | friends or colleagues, and they want to talk about what
             | other people are talking about. I'm sure that there will be
             | many people who will get really into watching custom movies
             | and discussing those movies with chatbots, but I bet most
             | people will still want to socialize and discuss the movies
             | they watch with other humans. FOMO is an underestimated
             | driver of media consumption.
        
             | jb_s wrote:
             | For many movies, sure.
             | 
             | I'm pretty sure the Marvel franchise is shat out by an
             | algorithm.
        
               | orbital-decay wrote:
               | You jest, but it really is the case. When your movie has
               | a goddamn board of directors, you can be 100% sure it
               | will be A/B tested until it transmutes the surrounding
               | air into gold.
        
           | rasz wrote:
           | You really dont want to live in Mindwarp (1992 Bruce Campbell
           | movie) or in this !114! year old short story
           | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Machine_Stops
        
             | dTal wrote:
             | The Machine Stops is _eerily_ prescient - or perhaps just
             | keenly observant of trends visible even at the time - but
             | in fairness the humans in it are not _socially_ isolated,
             | as such; they do not converse with bots, but rather with
             | each other. The primary social activity in the The Machine
             | Stops is the Zoom meeting.
             | 
             | I do not look forward to the day when that story becomes an
             | _optimistic_ view of the future.
        
               | mrguyorama wrote:
               | That story is already an optimistic view compared to our
               | own: They have no ads
        
         | unixhero wrote:
         | Yes, the vision is that everyone has an AI cube in their house.
        
           | shaky-carrousel wrote:
           | Then, we'll hack all those cubes to build an AGI.
        
         | psychoslave wrote:
         | I don't know for you, but most of my online interactions are
         | text based. Context of interpretation matter far much than the
         | form of the content. If you know it's easy to fake text
         | exchanges, you might be more careful about text origin, and
         | other contextual hints. Even it's the syntax imitate your
         | children verbal oddities, you may not necessarily run to comply
         | thoughtlessly to an unusual demand you just receive by SMS from
         | their phone number. Trust and check.
        
         | Byamarro wrote:
         | It could be possible with analog chips. I.e. ones that Mythic
         | works on.
        
           | redox99 wrote:
           | I'm not sure why you got downvoted. Yes, ASICs (either analog
           | or digital) that have some model hardcoded in would probably
           | make it feasible, but it won't be programmable which is the
           | interesting part.
        
             | trasz wrote:
             | Totally not my field, but why wouldn't they be
             | programmable? Analog FPGA's already exist.
        
               | redox99 wrote:
               | Yes, true. I was referring to the Mythic ones the other
               | comment mentioned which are only for inference of a
               | specific model.
        
         | dav_Oz wrote:
         | The bots/machine vs human reminds me of that famous experiment
         | from the 30s in which Winthrop Kellogg[0], a comparative
         | psychologist, and his wife decided to raise their human baby
         | (Donald) simultaneously with a chimpanzee baby (Gua) in an
         | effort to "humanize the ape". It was set out to last 5 years
         | but was relatively quickly abrupted after only 9 months. The
         | explicit reason wasn't stated only that it successfully proved
         | the hereditary limits within the "nature vs nurture" debate of
         | a chimpanzee, the reticent statement reads as follows:
         | 
         | > _Gua, treated as a human child, behaved like a human child
         | except when the structure of her body and brain prevented her.
         | This being shown, the experiment was discontinued_
         | 
         | There have been a lot of speculation as to other reasons of
         | ending the experiment so prematurely. Maybe exhaustion. One
         | thing which seemed to dawn on the parents - if one reads
         | carefully - is that a human baby is far superior at _imitating_
         | than the chimpanzee baby, frighteningly so, that they decided
         | to abort the experiment early on in order to prevent any
         | irreversible damage in the development to their human child
         | which at that point had become far more similar to the
         | chimpanzee than the chimpanzee to the human.
         | 
         | So, I would rephrase "the internet is dead" into "the internet
         | becomes increasingly undead" because humans condition
         | themselves in a far more accelerated way to behave like bots
         | than bots are potentially able to do. From the wrong side this
         | could be seen as progress when in fact it's _opposite
         | progress_. It sure feels like that way for a lot of of people
         | and is a crucial _reciprocal_ element often overlooked
         | /underplayed (mostly in a benign effort to reduce _unnecessary_
         | complexities) when analyzing human behaviour in interactions
         | with the environment.
         | 
         | [0]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winthrop_Kellogg#The_Ape_and
         | ...
        
           | r3trohack3r wrote:
           | A tangentially related thought:
           | 
           | Actors attempt to imitate humans. "Good acting" is
           | convincing; the audience believes the actor is giving a
           | reasonable response to the portrayed situation.
           | 
           | But the audience is also trying to imitate the actors to some
           | degree. Like you point out, humans imitate. For some subset
           | of the population, I'd imagine the majority of social
           | situations they are exposed to, and the responses to
           | situations they observe, are portrayed by actors.
           | 
           | At what point are actors defining the social responses that
           | they then try to imitate? In other words, at what point does
           | acting beget acting and how much of our daily social
           | interactions actually are driven by actors? And is this world
           | of actors creating artificial social responses substantially
           | different than bots doing the same?
        
             | dvirsky wrote:
             | Someone wrote once about how Wall Street people started
             | behaving like the slick image projected of them in movies
             | in the 80s, namely of Michael Douglas; before that they
             | were more like the "boring accountant" type.
        
             | jdsully wrote:
             | This is a common phenomena where the fake is more
             | believable than the real thing due to over exposure of the
             | imitation.
             | 
             | Famously the bald eagle sounds nothing like it does in tv
             | and the movies and explosions are rarely massive fireballs.
             | For human interaction it's much harder to pin down cause
             | and effect but if it happens in other cases it would be
             | very surprising to not happen there.
        
             | dougmwne wrote:
             | This is famously theorized by postmodernism. See:
             | https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulacra_and_Simulation
        
           | boplicity wrote:
           | Case in point: recently, I've noticed that I'm getting more
           | and more emails with the sign off "Warm regards." This is not
           | a coincidence. It is an autosuggestion from Google. If you
           | start signing off an email, it will automatically suggest
           | "Warm regards." It just appears there -- probably an idea
           | generated from an AI network. There are more and more of
           | these algorithmic "suggestions" appearing every day, in more
           | and more contexts. This is true for many text messaging
           | programs: There are "common" replies suggested. How often do
           | people just click on one of the suggested replies, as opposed
           | to writing their own? These suggestions push us into
           | conforming to the expectations of the algorithm, which then
           | reinforces those expectations, creating a cycle of further
           | pushing us into the language use patterns generated by
           | software -- as opposed to idiosyncratic language created by a
           | human mind.
           | 
           | In other words, people are already behaving like bots; and
           | we're building more and more software to encourage such
           | behavior.
        
             | alephxyz wrote:
             | Those suggestions appear in Google chat too and even if you
             | don't click on them, the simple fact of reading the
             | suggestion makes you much more likely to type it yourself.
             | There's clearly a priming effect to it.
        
               | yoyopa wrote:
               | depends on your personality
        
               | jcelerier wrote:
               | nope, just being exposed to text influences you whether
               | you want it or not
        
               | Izkata wrote:
               | They're saying it might influence you to type something
               | different. Some of us are just contrary.
        
               | Dylan16807 wrote:
               | Sometimes. Good luck keeping that up the majority of the
               | time something tries to influence you.
        
               | AlecSchueler wrote:
               | On average, it doesn't. This is why advertising and magic
               | work.
        
               | bgroat wrote:
               | I'm a magician and a developer by training.
               | 
               | Now primarily employed in a marketing capacity.
               | 
               | Over my career I've worked with: - Doctors - Lawyers -
               | Engineers - Fund managers - Academics (hard and soft
               | sciences) - Mentalists/Hypnotists
               | 
               | All of them believed that they're specific training and
               | temperament made them immune from simple persuasion
               | techniques and that they were purely rational actors.
               | 
               | None of them struck me as any more rational/more
               | independent thinkers than anyone else off the street
        
               | xcambar wrote:
               | It is typical to rate yourself above your actual self.
               | 
               | Even when someone rates oneself down like when saying of
               | themself that they're dumb, ugly or whatever, they
               | generally mean it in a lesser fashion than for any other
               | peer they'd attribute as such.
        
               | ClumsyPilot wrote:
               | But its not above, its ascribung a mythical ability that
               | does not exist - we don't talk about people who think
               | they are psycic as optimistic, we call them crazy.
               | 
               | these guys are similar, except it's common belief.
        
             | remram wrote:
             | Those suggestions are very few so I suspect they were hand-
             | picked.
        
               | mattnewton wrote:
               | I don't know if this is how it still works, but early
               | attempts were modeled as classification problems with
               | hundreds of hand picked completions. Can't predict
               | something really bad if it isn't in your prediction list.
               | This limits the surface of bad things to cases of tone
               | mismatch like "sounds great" when talking about someone
               | grieving a loss or something.
        
               | orbital-decay wrote:
               | Doesn't GMail collect the data in some form of federated
               | learning nowadays, like GBoard does? Federated learning
               | does seem to be able to create the unintended positive
               | feedback loop, converging on a single phrase and causing
               | the users to lock themselves in a bubble.
        
             | codeviking wrote:
             | Which is why it's important for folks to start applying AI
             | to more interesting (but harder, more nuanced) problems.
             | Instead of making it easier for people to write emails, or
             | targeting ads, it should be used to help doctors, surgeons
             | and scientists.
             | 
             | The problem is that these problems are less profitable. And
             | that the companies with enough compute to train these types
             | of models are concerned about getting more eyeballs, not
             | making the world a better place.
        
               | wskinner wrote:
               | The problem is not that those problems are less
               | profitable. The problem is a combination of 1. Those
               | problems are much harder 2. The potential harm from
               | getting them wrong is much larger
        
               | codeviking wrote:
               | Yup, I definitely agree that they're harder (and noted
               | this). But I'm not sure I agree with your second point.
               | Or rather, I think there's some nuance to it.
               | 
               | Sure, using AI to treat people without a human in the
               | loop would clearly do harm. But using AI as an assistant,
               | to help a doctor make the right diagnosis, seems like
               | it'd do the opposite. It'd help doctors serve a larger
               | patient population, make less mistakes, and probably
               | equate to less harm in the long run.
               | 
               | Anyway, I think we can all agree that using AI for
               | anything other than ad targeting is a net win.
        
           | jazzyjackson wrote:
           | thanks for the awesome analogy, I always had the sinking
           | feeling that the bots are finding it increasingly easy to fit
           | in among the humans because the humans on social media act
           | increasingly like bots.
           | 
           | "monkey see, monkey do"
        
           | [deleted]
        
           | gigglesupstairs wrote:
           | Wow this is such a mind bending perspective. Thanks for
           | sharing it.
        
           | alcover wrote:
           | Nice post! But to me your analogy does not really stand :
           | bots _are_ the ones catching up with human conversation in an
           | "accelerated way", feeding on a corpus that predates them.
           | Bots are not an invariant nature that netizens imitate.
        
           | iforgotpassword wrote:
           | It's the commonly believed reason; the child starting to take
           | on habits from Gua, like noises when she wanted something,
           | and the way monkeys scratch themselves. No authoritative
           | source for it though, it's what I've been told during a
           | lecture back in college, and I think PlainlyDifficult
           | mentions it too in their video about it.
           | 
           | https://youtu.be/VP8DD9TGNlU
        
           | deathemperor wrote:
           | My mind is blown. Thanks for sharing. Especially with the
           | movie analogy. I'm a very movie person and I imitate my
           | personality traits a lot based on characters on movies...
        
           | freewizard wrote:
           | So maybe the Turing Test is not about AI are smart enough,
           | but about how stupid humans become?
        
             | rexpop wrote:
             | Not stupid; imaginative and agreeable.
        
               | bgroat wrote:
               | These are also the elements that make a good hypnosis
               | subject.
               | 
               | I can't put a dumb person under.
               | 
               | I need someone with an active imagination who wants to
               | work with me (for best results)
        
         | time_to_smile wrote:
         | Comments like this make me feel like I'm losing my mind.
         | 
         | I think it's far more likely that in 10 years we'll all become
         | more used to rolling blackouts, and fondly remember we all used
         | to be able to afford to eat out, and laugh over a glass of
         | cheap gin about how wild things were back in the old days
         | before things got really bad.
         | 
         | 10 years ago was a much more exciting and hopeful time than
         | today. I remember watching Hinton show off what deep learning
         | was just starting to do. It was frankly more interesting that
         | high parameter language models. Startups were all working on
         | some cool problems rather than just trying to screw over
         | customers.
         | 
         | That's just technology. Economically, socially and ecologically
         | things looks far brighter in 2012 than they do now, and in 2032
         | I suspect we'll feel the same about today, but far more
         | dramatically.
         | 
         | We've already pass the peak of "things are getting better all
         | the time!" but people are just in denial about this.
        
         | zackmorris wrote:
         | Unpopular opinion: something will stop egalitarian power for
         | the masses. I had high hopes for multicore computing in the
         | late 90s and early 2000s but it got blocked every step of the
         | way by everyone doubling down on DSP (glorified vertex buffer)
         | approaches on video cards, leaving us with the contrived
         | dichotomy we see today between CPU and GPU.
         | 
         | Whatever we think will happen will not happen. A less-inspired
         | known-good state will take its place, creating another status
         | quo. Which will funnel us into dystopian futures. I'm just
         | going off my own observations and life experience of the last
         | 20 years, and the way that people in leadership positions keep
         | letting the rest of us down after they make it.
        
           | ur-whale wrote:
           | You're an optimist.
           | 
           | Before any of the things you describe happen, most states
           | will mandate the equivalent of a carry permit to be able to
           | freely use compute for undeclared and/or unapproved purposes.
        
           | nradov wrote:
           | In what sense is the dichotomy between CPU and GPU contrived?
           | Those are designed around fundamentally different use cases.
           | For low power devices you can get CPU and GPU integrated into
           | a single SOC.
        
         | ggktk wrote:
         | I'm predicting that the upcoming Mac Pro will be very popular
         | among ML developers, thanks to unified memory. It should be
         | able to fit the entire model in memory.
         | 
         | Combine that with the fact that PyTorch recently added support
         | for Apple silicon GPUs.
        
           | tehsauce wrote:
           | upcoming mac pro will have pretty poor ML performance when
           | compared to even an old nvidia gpu sadly.
        
             | uniqueuid wrote:
             | Although memory capacity may matter more than speed for
             | _inference_. As long as you 're not training or fine
             | tuning, the mac pro / studio may be just fine _.
             | 
             | _ apart from the fact that you can 't use any of the many
             | nvidia-specific things; if you're dependent on cuda,
             | nvcuvid, AMP or other things that's a hard no.
        
         | TuringNYC wrote:
         | >> I have to wonder if 10 years down the line, everyone will be
         | able to run models like this on their own computers.
         | 
         | Do you mean _train_ or _run_? My assumption was all these
         | models could be run on most computers, probably with a simple
         | docker container, as long as there is sufficient RAM to hold
         | the network, which should be most laptops  > 16gb ram.
         | 
         | Speaking of which, anyone have recommendations on pre-trained
         | docker containers with weights included?
        
         | tiborsaas wrote:
         | I think there will be a trend where model's size will shrink
         | due to better optimization / compression while hardware specs
         | keep increasing.
         | 
         | You can already see this with Chinchilla:
         | 
         | https://towardsdatascience.com/a-new-ai-trend-chinchilla-70b...
        
         | natly wrote:
         | I know it's a sort of exaggerated paranoid thought. But like
         | these things do all come down to scale and some areas of the
         | world definitely could have the amount of compute available to
         | make dall-e level quality full scale videos which we might be
         | consuming right now. It really does make you start to wonder at
         | what point we will rationally be able to have zero trust that
         | not everything we watch online is fabricated.
        
           | thelamest wrote:
           | Historically, hard-to-falsify documents are an anomaly, the
           | norm was mostly socially conditional and enforced trust.
           | Civilizations leaned and still lean on limited-trust
           | technologies like personal connections, word of mouth, word
           | on paper, signatures, seals, careful custody etc. I agree
           | losing cheap trust can be a setback, just want to point out
           | we're adaptable.
        
         | lostmsu wrote:
         | Running the models like this on own computer is already
         | possible with DeepSpeed. I think it even supports training
         | albeit it would be extremely slow.
         | 
         | https://www.deepspeed.ai/
        
         | nonrandomstring wrote:
         | > one has to wonder what's real and what isn't.
         | 
         | And whether it really matters. That's the bigger question.
         | 
         | I think, for most of us, it does matter. But we're not sure why
         | and what a loss of human reality would really mean.
         | 
         | For a few who wholeheartedly embrace it there's some resonance
         | with the psychedelic/60s creed that sees this as some kind of
         | "liberation".
        
         | simonh wrote:
         | It's more likely, if not inevitable that these things will
         | become ubiquitously available remotely, like Siri and Alexa.
         | It's access that's important, not hosting.
        
       | lukestateson wrote:
       | 1. Yandex supports the Russian Terrorist regime.
       | 
       | 2. Yandex News service ignores the genocide currently happening
       | in Ukraine.
       | 
       | 3. Yandex Search engine hides the pictures of Bucha and Irpin
       | massacre as well as Kharkiv and Mariupol destruction.
       | 
       | Yandex using whitewashing tactics via open source.
        
       | htrp wrote:
       | > It was tested on 4 (A100 80g) and 8 (V100 32g) GPUs, but is
       | able to work with different configurations with [?]200GB of GPU
       | memory in total which divide weight dimensions correctly (e.g.
       | 16, 64, 128).
       | 
       | so we looking at crazy prices just for inference. RIP to the
       | first guy's cloud billing account who makes this public
        
         | jhoelzel wrote:
         | so err the cheapest A100 i could find was EUR 10.579,79 .
         | 
         | Suddenly that 3090 i wanted to get, does not seem so
         | expensive....
        
       | [deleted]
        
       | [deleted]
        
       | jamix wrote:
       | Doing a Yandex image search for "Bucha" tells me all I need to
       | know about Yandex.
        
         | orbital-decay wrote:
         | What does it tell you? I'm seeing mostly pictures of
         | destruction and mass graves for both Bucha and Bucha.
        
           | OneLessThing wrote:
           | If you read the resulting articles you'll find a few of them
           | suggest that all the deaths were staged or committed by
           | Ukrainians. Headlines like "The truth is out there..." or
           | "Global lies..." are examples. There still are many results
           | from mainstream western media on the other hand.
           | 
           | Google, in contrast, has zero results implying the deaths
           | were staged or committed by Ukrainians.
        
       | ketzu wrote:
       | Seeing those gigantic models it makes me sad that even the 4090
       | is supposed to stay at 24GB of RAM max. I really would like to be
       | able to run/experiment on larger models at home.
        
         | EugeneOZ wrote:
         | Can Apple Silicone's unified memory be an answer?
        
         | josu wrote:
         | For the people that didn't click on the link:
         | 
         | >but is able to work with different configurations with
         | [?]200GB of GPU memory in total which divide weight dimensions
         | correctly (e.g. 16, 64, 128).
        
         | MrBuddyCasino wrote:
         | Wondering if Apple Silicon will bring arge amounts of unified
         | main memory with high bandwidth to the masses?
         | 
         | The Mac Studio maxes out at 128GB currently for around $5K, so
         | 256GB isn't that far out and might work with the ~200GB Yandex
         | says is required.
        
           | Havoc wrote:
           | Perhaps on quantity. Substantially slower though around ~3x
           | from what I can tell...substantial roadblock if you're
           | training models that take weeks.
        
             | MrBuddyCasino wrote:
             | I meant for inference, not training. People just want to
             | run the magic genies locally and post funny AI content.
        
               | Havoc wrote:
               | ah right - gotcha
        
         | out_of_protocol wrote:
         | Take a look at Apple's M1 Max, a lot of fast unified memory. No
         | idea how useful though
        
           | postalrat wrote:
           | Apple is selling M1's with > 200gb ram? Have a link so I can
           | buy one?
        
           | jeroenhd wrote:
           | What's the difference between Apple's unified memory and the
           | shared memory pool Intel and AMD integrated GPUs have had for
           | years?
           | 
           | In theory you could probably assign a powerful enough iGPU a
           | few hundred gigabytes of memory already, but just like Apple
           | Silicon the integrated GPU isn't exactly very powerful. The
           | difference between the M1 iGPU and the AMD 5700G is less than
           | 10% and a loaded out system should theoretically be tweakable
           | to dedicate hundreds of gigabytes of VRAM to it.
           | 
           | It's just a waste of space. An RTX3090 is 6 to 7 times faster
           | than even the M1, and the promised performance increase of
           | about 35% for the M2 will means nothing when the 4090 will be
           | released this year.
           | 
           | I think there are better solutions for this. Leveraging the
           | high throughput of PCIe 5 and resizable BAR support might be
           | used to quickly swap out banks of GPU memory, for example, at
           | a performance decrease.
           | 
           | One big problem with this is that GPU manufacturers have
           | incentive to not implement ways for consumers GPUs to compete
           | with their datacenter products. If a 3080 with some memory
           | tricks can approach an A800 well enough, Nvidia might let a
           | lot of profit slip through their hands and they can't have
           | that.
           | 
           | Maybe Apple's tensor chip will be able to provide a
           | performance boost here, but it's stuck on working with macOS
           | and the implementations all seem proprietary so I don't think
           | cross platform researchers will really care about using it.
           | You're restricted by Apple's memory limitations anyway, it's
           | not like you can upgrade their hardware.
        
             | zaptrem wrote:
             | Apple gets significant latency and frequency benefits from
             | placing their LPDDR4 on the SoC itself.
        
           | thereddaikon wrote:
           | Unified memory is and always has been a cost cutting tactic.
           | Its not a feature not matter how much manufacturers who use
           | it try to claim it is.
        
         | perryizgr8 wrote:
         | Nvidia deliberately keeps their consumer/gamer cards limited in
         | memory. If you have a use for more RAM, they want you to buy
         | their workstation offerings like RTX A6000 which has 48G DDR6
         | RAM or A100 which has 80G.
        
           | justinlloyd wrote:
           | What NVIDIA predominantly does on their consumer cards is
           | limit the RAM sharing, not the RAM itself. The inability for
           | each GPU to share RAM is the limiting factor. It is why I
           | have RTX A5000 GPUs and not RTX 3090 GPUs.
        
         | Voloskaya wrote:
         | If you don't care about inference speed being in the 1-5sec
         | range, then that should be doable with CPU offloading, with
         | e.g. DeepSpeed.
        
           | qayxc wrote:
           | 200+ GiB of RAM still sounds like a pretty steep hardware
           | requirement.
        
             | justinlloyd wrote:
             | Oh yeah, that $750 for 256GB of DDR-4 is going to totally
             | break the bank.
        
               | kfrzcode wrote:
               | Damn I didn't know ram was so cheap
        
             | Voloskaya wrote:
             | If you have an nvme deepspeed can offload there as a second
             | tier once the RAM is full.
             | 
             | 175 GB aggregate on both RAM and nvme is in the realm of
             | home deep learning workstation.
             | 
             | As long as you aren't too fussy about inference speed of
             | course.
        
         | thejosh wrote:
         | It's also a power issue. The 4090 sounds like you're going to
         | need a much, MUCH higher PSU than you currently use.. or it'll
         | suddenly turn off as it uses 2-3x the power.
         | 
         | You'll need your own wiring to run your PC soon :-)
        
           | melenaboija wrote:
           | I think it is a stupid question, but does the power
           | consumption needed by processors to infer compared to human
           | brains demonstrate that there is something fundamentally
           | wrong for the AI approach or is it more physics related?
           | 
           | I am not a physicist or biologist or anything like that so my
           | intuition is probably completely wrong but it seems to me
           | that for more basic inference operations (lets say add two
           | numbers) power consumption from a processor and a brain is
           | not that different. It's like seeing how expensive it is for
           | computers to infer for any NLP model, humans should be
           | continuously eating carbs just to talk.
        
             | agalunar wrote:
             | Around room temperature, an ideal silicon transistor has a
             | 60 mV/decade subthreshold swing, which (roughly speaking)
             | means that a 10-fold increase in current requires at least
             | a 60 mV increase in gate potential. There are some
             | techniques (e.g. tunneling) that can allow you to get a bit
             | below this, but it's a fairly fundamental limitation of
             | transistors' efficiency.
             | 
             | [It's been quite a while since I studied this stuff, so I
             | can't recall whether 60 mV/decade is a constant for silicon
             | specifically or all semiconductors.]
        
             | visarga wrote:
             | The AI is much faster than the brain, if you batch requests
             | the cost goes down.
        
             | googlryas wrote:
             | > but it seems to me that for more basic inference
             | operations (lets say add two numbers) power consumption
             | from a processor and a brain is not that different
             | 
             | Sure it is - it is too hard to figure it out based on 2
             | numbers number, but lets multiply that by a billion - how
             | much energy does it take a computer to add two billion
             | numbers? Far less than the energy it would take a human
             | brain to add them.
        
           | PartiallyTyped wrote:
           | I bought a 1500w psu soon after the previous crypto collapse
           | for around $150, one of the best purchases I did.
        
           | Dylan16807 wrote:
           | The RAM is not using all that much of the power, and I think
           | that scales more on bus width than capacity.
        
       | justinzollars wrote:
       | What is the TLDR on this model? What exactly does it do? Its not
       | clear from the source examples.
        
       | [deleted]
        
       | braingenious wrote:
       | This is one of the funniest threads I've ever seen on this
       | website. People are yelling at eachother about the CIA and the
       | legitimacy of Israel and Assange and the definition of fascism
       | and... anything that pisses anybody off about international
       | politics in general. In a thread about a piece of software that's
       | (to me and likely many others) prohibitively expensive to play
       | around with.
       | 
       | Anyway I hope somebody creates a playground with this so I can
       | make a computer write a fan fiction about Kirby and Solid Snake
       | trying to raise a human baby on a yacht in the Caspian Sea or
       | whatever other thing people will _actually_ use this for.
        
       | option wrote:
       | Did they bias it toward ru propaganda talking points?
       | 
       | Edit: I would like to see more details in addition to size and
       | languages (en, ru) about training data. For example, did they use
       | their own Yandex.news (a cesspool of propoganda)?
        
         | dang wrote:
         | You've made a version of this comment 3 times in this thread
         | now. It's shallow and flamebaity, and the repetition just adds
         | noise and does no good, so please don't keep doing that. I
         | understand the strong feelings, but the rules still apply--in
         | fact that's when they apply most.
         | 
         | https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
        
           | option wrote:
           | Thanks for reminder, I deleted other two comments which were
           | more flamebaity. My overall point still stands - they did not
           | give any details other than size on the training data. This
           | is crucial (I train LLMs for a living)
        
       | lukestateson wrote:
        
         | dang wrote:
         | You've posted 7 highly repetitive comments taking this thread
         | straight into flamewar hell. That's not what this site is for,
         | and destroys what it is for. If you'd please review
         | https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to
         | the rules, we'd appreciate it.
         | 
         | Hijacking top comments when flamebait hasn't succeeded in
         | setting an entire thread on fire yet is particularly abusive.
         | 
         | We detached this subthread from
         | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31853016.
        
         | [deleted]
        
         | cockhole_desu wrote:
        
         | [deleted]
        
         | narrator wrote:
         | Back on topic, are you in favor of releasing language models if
         | it means we won't be able to prevent the Russians from using
         | them for propaganda for example?
         | 
         | As long as we're going on tangents, according to the Zach
         | Vorhies leak, Google censors lots and lots of topics for
         | blatantly political reasons[1].
         | 
         | [1]https://www.breitbart.com/tech/2021/08/19/google-
         | whistleblow...
        
         | xpl wrote:
         | _> Yandex Search engine hides the pictures of Bucha and Irpin
         | massacre as well as Kharkiv and Mariupol destruction_
         | 
         | That's just not true, try it yourself. It just does not display
         | the _latest_ images by default (though it 's easily turned on
         | in the filter settings), and that's why on the very day the
         | news appeared on the Internet, people went crazy about that
         | Yandex somehow "hides the truth"...
         | 
         |  _> Yandex News service ignores the genocide currently
         | happening in Ukraine_
         | 
         | That is actually required by the Russian regulations on news
         | aggregator services. Yeah, those regulations are unfair and
         | oppressive, but it's the local law to which Yandex must comply.
         | And by the way, they're going to get rid of that toxic asset:
         | https://techcrunch.com/2022/04/28/yandex-sells-news-zen-vk
         | 
         | (I suppose they can't just shut it down because the government
         | threatens to nationalize Yandex in response)
         | 
         |  _> Yandex supports the Russian Terrorist regime_
         | 
         | Can you please show any public statement from Yandex from which
         | one could derive that?
        
           | lukestateson wrote:
           | > That is actually required by the Russian regulations
           | 
           | Russian Terrorist Regime *
        
           | SXX wrote:
           | > That is actually required by the Russian regulations on
           | news aggregator services.
           | 
           | I Was Just Following Orders (c)
           | 
           | Yandex could just shut down Yandex.News service completely
           | years ago without repercussions. They choose not to.
        
             | xpl wrote:
             | _> without repercussions_
             | 
             | That comes from where? The repercussions could have been
             | very severe. The Russian government easily takes over and
             | seizes control over "rogue companies". Russia is not a free
             | country, my friend.
        
               | SXX wrote:
               | I am from Russia (though moved to Turkiye once war began)
               | and I do have several friends working at Yandex on
               | different positions including some quite high in
               | management. So I well aware about their reasoning behind
               | keeping working at Yandex.
               | 
               | Basically even today after war has began and tens of
               | thousands were killed on both sides some of people
               | working there still hold the illusion that they could
               | continue to live in their bubble and continue to innovate
               | in Russia like nothing happen. So no, they are not some
               | poor IT company opressed by the government. Every
               | employee who wanted to immigrate was able to move abroad.
               | 
               | 6-10 years ago Yandex can certainly shut down their news
               | service without being seized. Back in 2008-2012 one of
               | Yandex co-founders and ex-CTO Ilya Segalovich was often
               | visitor of street protests almost until his death in 2013
               | and this did not caused company to be seized.
        
           | The_Colonel wrote:
           | > I suppose they can't just shut it down because the
           | government threatens to nationalize Yandex in response
           | 
           | They can destroy equipment, safely delete all the code
           | repositories etc. beforehand, thus rendering the company
           | useless before the nationalization. But $$$ is more
           | important.
           | 
           | > Can you please show any public statement from Yandex from
           | which one could derive that?
           | 
           | Yandex pays tens/hundreds of millions in taxes and thus
           | finances the war.
        
             | xpl wrote:
             | _> Yandex pays tens /hundreds of millions in taxes and thus
             | finances the war._
             | 
             | So what? You shut down the business with 20k employees, on
             | the grounds that you do not agree with local regulations or
             | because the government did bad? That is as far from reality
             | as it gets.
             | 
             |  _> But $$$ is more important_
             | 
             | Yeah, I think preserving the company is more important than
             | that proposed suicide move (that wouldn't have worked
             | anyway because the company is just too huge).
             | 
             | It's not just money, it's people, it's culture, it's all
             | the great projects the company does.
        
               | The_Colonel wrote:
               | > It's not just money, it's people, it's culture, it's
               | all the great projects the company does.
               | 
               | What about people killed by the Russian army, sponsored
               | by Yandex?
               | 
               | I guess those matter less than the company culture,
               | right?
        
               | xpl wrote:
               | The Russian army is not sponsored by Yandex. The money
               | comes from selling natural resources... and mostly to
               | Europe, surprise. It's about $1 billion per day. Tax
               | money from private companies is nothing compared to that.
               | So Europe is sponsoring the war way more than Yandex.
               | 
               | Let's then shut down the Europe, right? You can say --
               | look, they're trying hard to get rid of Russian
               | resources. But Yandex is also trying hard to become less
               | dependent on Russian economy -- they try to
               | internationalize their business. And all that "canceling"
               | of Yandex really doesn't help (it does the opposite in
               | fact).
        
               | The_Colonel wrote:
               | > The Russian army is not sponsored by Yandex.
               | 
               | It is.
               | 
               | > So Europe is sponsoring the war way more than Yandex.
               | 
               | That's unfortunately true. The dependency is real, and it
               | will take a long time to get rid of it.
               | 
               | > And all that "canceling" of Yandex really doesn't help
               | (it does the opposite in fact).
               | 
               | Cancelling Yandex completely, as in forcing it to
               | collapse, would help a lot. Yandex services (together
               | with VK) are extremely important in the Russian society
               | and economy, and their collapse would weaken Russia and
               | its ability to wage (military/economic) war a lot. As
               | such, this would be the best course of action (as
               | mentioned before, burn the equipment, delete the code).
        
               | xpl wrote:
               | _> Cancelling Yandex completely, as in forcing it to
               | collapse, would help a lot._
               | 
               | It's just a wishful thinking. It wont "collapse", it
               | would just become controlled by government, and then it
               | _truly_ becomes the instrument of the evil, so that not
               | only News, but every service Yandex provides will serve
               | the government needs. They will recruit soldiers through
               | Yandex services, they make Yandex develop AI-controlled
               | tanks and whatnot. Every thing that Yandex doesn 't do
               | now (because they do not actually support the war) --
               | they will make it to do.
               | 
               |  _> their collapse would weaken Russia and its ability to
               | wage (military /economic) war a lot_
               | 
               | Of course not, because the Russian army and the military
               | industrial complex is in no way dependent on the search
               | engine and the food delivery service Yandex provides. You
               | can destroy those, sure. People lifes get slightly worse,
               | and then competitors catch up (there is a lot of
               | competition to Yandex in Russia and they are not going to
               | fade away).
        
               | The_Colonel wrote:
               | > It's just a wishful thinking. It wont "collapse", it
               | would just become controlled by government
               | 
               | That's why part of my suggestion is to burn the
               | equipment/infrastructure and delete the code.
               | 
               | > They will recruit soldiers through Yandex services,
               | they make Yandex develop AI-controlled tanks and whatnot
               | 
               | And the only thing stopping them now from doing that is
               | that Yandex is not nationalized. Yeah, sure.
               | 
               | > Of course not, because the Russian army and the
               | military industrial complex is in no way dependent on the
               | search engine and the food delivery service Yandex
               | provides.
               | 
               | Yandex provides many services, it's much like google -
               | maps, translation, drive, mail etc. etc. Bringing it down
               | would cripple many private and economic activities.
               | Russia can't sustain waging wars if they don't have an
               | economy and disgruntled population.
               | 
               | With the exception of VK, there isn't really any step-in
               | competition to Yandex. Even if there was, losing all your
               | data in e.g. mail/drive will have significant
               | consequences.
        
               | xpl wrote:
               | _> Russia can 't sustain waging wars if they don't have
               | an economy and disgruntled population._
               | 
               | Russia can wage wars on natural resource selling alone,
               | it only needs to keep the gas and oil flowing through the
               | infrastructure. All those private companies' activities
               | the government sees mostly as a distraction, it doesn't
               | give a damn about them (until they get in the way). They
               | don't matter much.
               | 
               | It's very much unlike the Western economies where the
               | private companies drive the economy. Russia is more like
               | a giant oil and gas pipe with military industrial complex
               | around that.
               | 
               |  _> exception of VK, there isn 't really any step-in
               | competition to Yandex_
               | 
               | If we talk about city services (taxi, delivery, online
               | shopping) there are lots of other players.
               | Search/mail/social -- then yeah, apart from VK not many.
               | And VK is in fact state-owned. Yandex is not. So if
               | Yandex leaves the scene, the only game in town would be
               | state-owned. This only reinforces the evil regime.
               | 
               |  _> That 's why part of my suggestion is to burn the
               | equipment/infrastructure and delete the code._
               | 
               | It's pretty unrealistic. You can do it in small company,
               | easy. In a huge decentralized company I don't know how
               | one could even pull that off. There simply isn't a way to
               | "delete all the code", nor a single place you could burn
               | all the servers. It just doesn't have a kill switch. And
               | the moment you try that, the government swoops in and
               | goodbye the company.
               | 
               |  _> And the only thing stopping them now from doing that
               | is that Yandex is not nationalized. Yeah, sure._
               | 
               | If Yandex gets nationalized, the government will replace
               | the management and the uncooperative employees. Most of
               | them would just leave the day it happens. It won't be
               | Yandex anymore of course. That is essentially the same as
               | killing the company, but worse, as the remnants could
               | still be used for evil.
        
       | m00dy wrote:
       | well, I can call this "the real open ai".
        
       | JeopardyJJJ wrote:
        
         | drno123 wrote:
         | Who controls Google? What did Google do to stop the inasion of
         | Iraq? Will Google take responsibility for silent support od war
         | in Iraq?
        
           | csee wrote:
           | Your comparison fails a test of facts. Yandex actively
           | censors any perspective not approved by the Kremlin. Google
           | does not do anything comparable to this.
        
             | tremarley wrote:
             | Google absolutely does the same thing.
        
               | baisq wrote:
               | Not to mention that Yandex does it in Russia because the
               | law forces them to, while Google does it happily just to
               | maintain the political status quo, of which they are a
               | part of.
        
               | SXX wrote:
               | Google does not show government propoganda on search
               | engine front page. If Yandex wanted to shut down their
               | news aggregator they could have done it.
        
               | ptnxlo wrote:
               | Care to elaborate?
        
               | londons_explore wrote:
               | There is lots of content Google bans/hides. Copyrighted
               | content, Adult content, child pornography, official
               | secrets, etc.
               | 
               | I don't think thats so different from other countries
               | which also have a (partially overlapping) list of whats
               | not allowed.
               | 
               | Normally, when people think about that they say "well
               | pictures of naked children are morally wrong, whereas
               | talking about LGBTQ stuff is fine". But people in other
               | parts of the world might have different morals and might
               | think the other way around.
        
               | waffleiron wrote:
               | Also google specifically bans content that:
               | 
               | - Disparage or belittle victims of violence or tragedy.
               | 
               | - Deny an atrocity.
               | 
               | - We don't allow content that promotes terrorist or
               | extremist acts, which includes recruitment, inciting
               | violence, or the celebration of terrorist attacks.
               | 
               | Now I don't think these are bad rules, but they are rules
               | that very much depend on the official narrative. A
               | terrorist to one is a freedom fighter to another. These
               | are rules that can be applied as wanted.
               | 
               | https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/10622781
        
               | [deleted]
        
           | hgazx wrote:
        
         | f311a wrote:
         | Please ask the model to answer these questions.
        
       | obituary_latte wrote:
       | What are some use cases for something like this? I understand it
       | says "generating and processing text", but is it a replacement
       | for OCR? Or something else?
        
         | vbezhenar wrote:
         | Chat bots I guess. Or with voice engines - phone bots.
        
         | jorgemf wrote:
         | No, it is more like generating a conversations, translating
         | text, summarization texts, writing code, etc.
        
           | DennisP wrote:
           | If I wanted to use it for summarization, what would I have to
           | do?
        
             | gwern wrote:
             | Postfix "tldr:" to the text being summarized. (Even GPT-2
             | could do that.)
        
       | londons_explore wrote:
       | The download fails because the vocab file link returns HTTP
       | 403... :-(
       | 
       | https://yalm-100b.s3.yandex.net/vocab/voc_100b.sp
       | 
       | EDIT: It seems fine if you download with a browser useragent not
       | CURL... I guess I just got hit by some anti-bot thing they have
       | accidentally have turned on.
        
         | brobinson wrote:
         | curl -A Chrome -O
         | https://yalm-100b.s3.yandex.net/vocab/voc_100b.sp
        
         | uniqueuid wrote:
         | Try opening the inspector in firefox, selecting the download
         | request and using "copy as CURL". That gives you a working curl
         | command.
        
       | sandGorgon wrote:
       | is this the first GPT-like models which is fully opensource ?
       | none of the others are right ?
        
         | littlestymaar wrote:
         | Aren't eleutherai's model so?
        
           | sandGorgon wrote:
           | doesnt seem the code is there - pretrained models are there.
           | https://github.com/kingoflolz/mesh-transformer-jax/#gpt-j-6b
           | 
           | https://huggingface.co/EleutherAI/gpt-j-6B
           | 
           | isnt that so ?
        
             | p1esk wrote:
             | The code is there: https://github.com/EleutherAI/gpt-neox
        
       | manishsharan wrote:
       | Is there a way for developers, who do not have AI/ML background,
       | to get started using this ? I have been curious about GPT-3 but I
       | do not have any AI/ML experience or knowledge. Is there a
       | "approachable" course on Coursera or Udemy that could help me get
       | started with technologies like GPT ?
        
         | rripken wrote:
         | I would not start with this model. Its impractically large.
         | 
         | Start here: https://www.vennify.ai/gpt-neo-made-easy/
        
         | lostmsu wrote:
         | https://www.deepspeed.ai/
        
       | amai wrote:
       | Is that the model used by the russian government to generate fake
       | news?
        
         | Destiner wrote:
         | You don't need ai for that, tons of ppl here in russia will do
         | it for pennies.
        
       | keewee7 wrote:
       | Weird that Yandex developers gets so much hate for being Russian
       | when some of the Yandex founders and management have lived in
       | Israeli settlements.
       | 
       | The former Yandex CEO literally moved to Israel to escape Western
       | sanctions.
       | 
       | How many companies have to annually dispel rumors that they're
       | moving their HQ to Israel? Yandex is shady as fuck but not
       | because they're Russian.
        
         | dTal wrote:
         | What have Israel connections got to do with shadiness? What are
         | you insinuating?
        
           | dicknuckle wrote:
           | Settling land that was recently taken from Palestinian
           | families by force, often (literally) knocking the existing
           | houses over with a bulldozer. In my opinion, that's a moral
           | red flag to participate in such an atrocity.
        
             | [deleted]
        
             | dTal wrote:
             | What has Yandex got to do with any of that? Is everyone who
             | lives in a country that commits atrocities "shady as fuck"?
             | 
             | <edit>: reading closely I see that the initial allegation
             | did use the word "settlement", and indeed that would
             | constitute ethically questionable behavior. However, a
             | sibling comment refutes this.
        
               | DrewADesign wrote:
               | I think you're missing that the commenter was talking
               | about Israeli _settlers_ rather than Israelis in general?
               | The settlers are controversial because they live in areas
               | Israel occupied during the 6 day war in 1967. Much of the
               | world considers their presence illegal, though Israel
               | disputes that. Many, if not most, would consider living
               | in these settlements a deliberate political provocation.
               | 
               | *edit: you hadn't posted your edit yet. I have no idea if
               | the allegation is truthful.
               | 
               | *edit again: Why do downvoters think I'm wrong?
        
             | marcinzm wrote:
             | Have you seen what America has done in the Middle East the
             | last 20 years? If you want to make a moral point then you
             | should start there instead of trying to grind whatever axe
             | you have against Israel.
        
               | maleldil wrote:
               | Why does it have to be mutually exclusive? The thread is
               | about Israel, so they're pointing out Israel's crimes.
               | You can be critical of multiple governments
               | simultaneously.
        
         | theplumber wrote:
         | >> when some of the Yandex founders and management have lived
         | in Israeli settlements.
         | 
         | So now you have one more reason to say Yandex is bad for the
         | world.
        
         | [deleted]
        
         | huma wrote:
         | Not for being Russians, but for active participation in
         | censorship by tweaking their news aggregation to show only hand
         | picked government approved sources
        
           | postalrat wrote:
           | Exactly what google has been doing the past year or two.
        
           | memorable wrote:
           | Is there a source for this? I'm curious.
        
             | SXX wrote:
             | Just read about Yandex.News which display censored news
             | sources on Yandex frontpage that millions of people visit.
             | There is really no hidden censorship here - they just
             | follow Russian law that literally whitelist exclusively
             | press controlled by the state.
             | 
             | They show Kremlin propoganda on their front page which
             | makes Yandex part of Kremlin propoganda machine. They could
             | have shut down news agregator, but they choose not to.
        
             | proxysna wrote:
             | https://www.kommersant.ru/doc/4975254
             | 
             | https://www.moscowtimes.ru/2022/04/18/yandeks-ubral-
             | izpoisko...
             | 
             | https://zona.media/news/2021/12/25/oiya
             | 
             | https://www.rbc.ru/politics/07/09/2021/613709739a79476fd52e
             | 1...
             | 
             | They are complying with russian censorship laws and it's
             | gotten so bad that they are planning to sell the news
             | service altogether to VK which is far worse than Yandex
             | when it to how eager they are to enforce these laws and to
             | work with cops.
             | 
             | https://www.kommersant.ru/doc/5258943
        
         | Reubachi wrote:
         | I've no horse in this race, so please don't take this the wrong
         | way,
         | 
         | Escaping western sanctions by moving to Israel + Being a
         | Russian shill are usually mutually inclusive, not exclusive
         | things.
        
         | yonixw wrote:
         | Bad comment. First, can you please name the founder? Because
         | according to wiki Ilya Segalovich never lived in Israel and
         | Arkady_Volozh lives in Tel Aviv (Not a settlement). Both
         | Jewish, so why present it as some "must-be-hidden-cause"
         | connection with Israel?
         | 
         | Also, nothing shady from Israel side in term of sanctions. They
         | have a large Jewish community in both Russia and Ukraine and
         | need to be on good term with both to have their gov helping in
         | supporting (or evacuating) them. Not to mention Russia has
         | heavy presence in Syria which borders Israel. A conflict with
         | Russia without anything like a NATO back is out of the
         | question.
        
           | OmicronCeti wrote:
           | >Elena Bunina, who is Jewish, is stepping down from her role
           | as CEO of Yandex LLC, 'Russia's Google,' amid the war in
           | Ukraine. Sources confirm she is in Israel and has no
           | intention of returning to Russia
           | 
           | https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/tech-
           | news/2022-04-06/ty-...
        
             | [deleted]
        
             | yonixw wrote:
             | It doesn't say she lives in a settlement. Or have any
             | special treatment from Israel or influence on Israel in
             | term of sanctions.
        
           | keewee7 wrote:
           | Many people consider all of Israel to be an illegitimate
           | Western colonial settler state in the Middle East.
        
             | starik36 wrote:
             | Those "many people" are likely ignorant and/or antisemitic.
        
             | yonixw wrote:
             | Then they have some explaining to do. As they are very
             | wrong, from a historical/archaeological point view [1].
             | 
             | [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Jews_and_J
             | udais...
        
               | brailsafe wrote:
               | > Then they have some explaining to do. As they are very
               | wrong, from a historical point view [1]
               | 
               | Kind of explains the general vibe of relations between
               | everyone in that area historically
        
               | VictorPath wrote:
               | The relevant Wikipedia page is
               | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khazars
        
               | yonixw wrote:
               | Did you read it? It literally has a "Use in antisemitic"
               | section. Can you have any bigger red flag?
               | 
               | > Use in antisemitic polemic
               | 
               | > conspiracy theorist, David Icke, who states that the
               | Israelians falsely claim to be descendants of the
               | Biblical Jews
               | 
               | I don't really care about conspiracy theorists. Mainly
               | because they ignore 2000 years of accepted archeology.
        
               | nashashmi wrote:
               | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Thirteenth_Tribe#Geneti
               | c_r...
               | 
               | This led me to look up similar information. Another
               | article [1] looks into this a little more deeply.
               | 
               | I feel there is a resurgence of despising European
               | dominance over the last 200 years and Israel is just
               | another point here. Thus, we have material hypothesizing
               | the illegitimacy of European Jews when the Jews of other
               | ethnicities may have better acceptance in the region.
               | (But all of this is just a vague hypothesis.)
               | 
               | [1] https://www.science.org/content/article/tracing-
               | roots-jewish...
        
           | generalizations wrote:
           | > Bad comment.
           | 
           | >> Be kind. Don't be snarky. Have curious conversation; don't
           | cross-examine. Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer,
           | including at the rest of the community.
        
         | the_duke wrote:
         | > The former Yandex CEO literally moved to Israel to escape
         | Western sanctions.
         | 
         | That somehow doesn't support the point your are trying to make
         | at all...
        
         | lotusmars wrote:
        
       | edf13 wrote:
       | Wonder what the split is between Russian and English in the
       | model?
        
         | londons_explore wrote:
         | Open the vocab file (from the script in the download directory)
         | and you can get a pretty good idea.
         | 
         | Looks to be approximately 50/50 from my random scrolling
         | through the list.
        
           | f311a wrote:
           | That's because English and Russian have pretty similar
           | vocabulary size. Vocabulary does not reflect the size of the
           | data.
        
             | londons_explore wrote:
             | In this case, it does, because the vocab is not a list or
             | words, but a list of tokens. Each token _may_ be a word,
             | but it might also be a phrase or part of a word. The tokens
             | are generated to be optimal on the input data - ie. for a
             | given vocab size to minimize the number of tokens to
             | represent it.
             | 
             | Therefore, the size of the vocab gives a good guide to the
             | size of the data, since if there was 10x more english
             | language data then the optimal distribution would be to
             | dedicate more token space to english than russian.
        
       | ma2rten wrote:
       | I am one of the people who worked on Google's PaLM model.
       | 
       | Having skimmed the GitHub readme and medium article, this
       | announcement seems to be very focused on the number of parameters
       | and engineering challenges scaling the model, but it does not
       | contain any details about the model, training (learning rate
       | schedules, etc.), or data composition.
       | 
       | It is great that more models are getting released publicly, but I
       | would not get excited about it before some evaluations have been
       | published. Having a lot of parameters should not be a goal in and
       | of itself. For all we know this model is not well trained and
       | worse than Eleuther AI's 20B parameter model, while also being
       | inconveniently large.
        
         | rllearneratwork wrote:
         | Given that Yandex is a crucial part of Russian propaganda arm,
         | we should consider the whole range of possibilities from:
         | 
         | * Good. This is great researchers helping community by sharing
         | great work. (which is what I'd like to assume before I have any
         | proof of the contrary)
         | 
         | * Bad. This very expensive training has been approved by Ya
         | leadership (which is under Western personal sanctions) because
         | they've secretly built in RU's propaganda talking points into
         | the model. Such as "war in Ukraine is not a war but special
         | operation" etc.
        
           | whimsicalism wrote:
           | Should we assume language models released by Twitter have
           | injected content praising Hunter Biden?
        
             | rllearneratwork wrote:
             | No. read my message again. As I said, we should assume good
             | intention first until proven otherwise.
             | 
             | But we should have better tools to test for
             | biases/toxicity. Perspective API is great tool for toxicity
             | detection. But I'm not aware of any "propoganda" detection
             | tool.
        
               | [deleted]
        
         | javajosh wrote:
         | _> this announcement seems to very focused on number of
         | parameters_
         | 
         | And yet your own project headline is "Pathways Language Model
         | (PaLM): Scaling to 540 Billion Parameters for Breakthrough
         | Performance"[0].
         | 
         | 0-https://ai.googleblog.com/2022/04/pathways-language-model-
         | pa...
        
           | panda-giddiness wrote:
           | 1. The OP did not criticize the headline; they criticized the
           | content. If you read the article that you linked, you would
           | find that they do, in fact, evaluate the performance of the
           | model.
           | 
           | 2. 540 billion parameters is notable for its size, which is
           | likely why they lead with that particular headline.
        
           | gwern wrote:
           | The difference is PaLM was extensively benchmarked and it
           | performed as well as it should, which is to say, amazingly
           | well. The irony here is that you should instead be invoking
           | that _other_ ~500b model, Nvidia 's Megatron-530b, which was
           | undertrained, only cursorily evaluated (no interest in any
           | new capabilities or even examining old ones like inner
           | monologues) and promptly forgotten by everyone after the
           | headlines about being the largest dense model:
           | https://arxiv.org/abs/2201.11990#microsoftnvidia
        
       | MichaelRazum wrote:
       | It's just crazy how much it costs to train such models. As I
       | undestand 800 A100 cards would cost about 25.000.000 without
       | considering the energy costs for 61 days of training.
        
         | semitones wrote:
         | https://coreweave.com/ offers some of the cheapest GPU compute
         | out there
        
         | refulgentis wrote:
         | 16,000,000 at MSRP
        
         | StevenWaterman wrote:
         | Lambda labs will rent you an 8xA100 instance for 3 months for
         | $21,900. That would put it at around $2m
        
           | MichaelRazum wrote:
           | Still a bit to expensive for my sideproject ; ) To be honest
           | it seems only big corp can do that kind of stuff. By the way
           | if try to do hyper parameter tuning or some exploration in
           | the architecture it becomes guess 10x or 100x more expensive.
        
             | bmcahren wrote:
             | AWS has them in US-EAST1 for $9.83/hr spot with 96 CPU
             | cores, 1152GB of ram, 8 A100s with 320 GB of RAM, 8TB of
             | NVME, and 19 Gbps of EBS bandwidth to load your data
             | quickly.
             | 
             | https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/instance-types/p4/
             | 
             | p4d.24xlarge
             | 
             | An alternative is the p3.16xlarge for 8 V100s with 256GB of
             | GPU RAM but you might as well get the A100s since it's only
             | $0.50/hr cheaper
        
       | narrator wrote:
       | I love Yandex. They are the best search engine by far for
       | politically controversial topics. They also release a language
       | model to benefit everyone even if it says politically incorrect
       | stuff. They also name their projects "cocaine" probably to
       | perhaps to prevent western competitors from using them.
       | 
       | You look at OpenAI and how they don't release their models mainly
       | because they fear "bad people" will use them for "bad stuff."
       | This is the trend in the west. Technology is too powerful, we
       | must control it! Russia is like... Hey, we are the bad guys
       | you're talking about so who are we keeping this technology from?
       | The west has bigger language models than we do, so who cares.
       | Also their attitude to copyright and patents, etc. They don't
       | care because that's not how their economy makes money. Cory
       | Doctorow's end of general purpose computing[1] and locked down
       | everything is very fast approaching. I'm glad the Russians are
       | around and aren't very interested in that project.
       | 
       | [1]https://csclub.uwaterloo.ca/resources/tech-talks/cory-
       | doctor...
        
         | risyachka wrote:
         | >> They are the best search engine by far for politically
         | controversial topics
         | 
         | FYI, they are Russian subject that follows ALL their censorship
         | laws (and oh boy do they have a lot of it).
         | 
         | >> probably to perhaps to prevent western competitors from
         | using them The irony here. All yandex products are exact copies
         | of western, adjusted to local market.
        
           | cpursley wrote:
           | Actually they're not, some of the Yandex products are
           | actually better and pretty innovative (ignoring the political
           | stuff). Maps and Go are especially good. Ditto with Russian
           | banking apps, they out American bank apps to shame.
        
             | jhgb wrote:
             | Wait, so you're saying it's a Russian company breaking
             | Russian laws and getting away with it?
        
         | abra0 wrote:
         | >They are the best search engine by far for politically
         | controversial topics.
         | 
         | This is an interesting take given the political censorship in
         | Russia (for some ineffable reason much harsher now than it used
         | to be 4 months ago) and cases like
         | https://twitter.com/kevinrothrock/status/1510944781492531208.
        
           | narrator wrote:
           | Search Google and Yandex for "2020 election fraud." The
           | results are VERY different. The Zach Vorhies leak shows that
           | Google regularly does blatant censorship for political
           | purposes.[1]
           | 
           | [1]https://www.breitbart.com/tech/2021/08/19/google-
           | whistleblow...
        
             | skrebbel wrote:
             | I don't know man, "thegatewaypundit.com" as a top reputable
             | source? seems to me like it's not "honest two-sided
             | results" but just, well, a rather random mix of result of
             | widely varying quality. Mad Altavista vibes!
             | 
             | What I'm trying to say is that even if you believe that
             | "was the 2020 US election stolen?" is worth debating, which
             | it isn't, the yandex results are shit.
        
               | narrator wrote:
               | If you get all your information through mainstream
               | channels, and you don't want to see anything
               | contradicting those channels then you should continue to
               | use Google because they explicitly implement the
               | algorithms on controversial topics to prefer mainstream
               | news sources[1]. What I mean by "better" in terms of
               | controversial searches is that on controversial matters,
               | it will rank the searches the same way it does for all
               | other searches. I mean yeah, I don't have access to the
               | internal code base of Yandex, but it certainly feels more
               | organic.
               | 
               | [1]https://www.breitbart.com/tech/2019/05/12/study-the-
               | cnn-sear...
        
               | zaptrem wrote:
               | Why link to Breitbart of all places instead of the
               | original source?
               | 
               | https://www.cjr.org/tow_center/google-news-algorithm.php
               | 
               | Btw Wikipedia's first few sentences on Breitbart are not
               | inspiring
               | 
               | > Its journalists are widely considered to be
               | ideologically driven, and much of its content has been
               | called misogynistic, xenophobic, and racist by liberals
               | and traditional conservatives alike.[10] The site has
               | published a number of conspiracy theories[11][12] and
               | intentionally misleading stories.[13][14]
        
               | narrator wrote:
               | This is the association fallacy, which is, unfortunately,
               | how most people determine what to believe these days.
               | 
               | An absurd example of this fallacy would be, Wikipedia,
               | which you cite, has articles that indicate tobacco
               | smoking may cause disease. The nazis were also anti-
               | smoking[1]. Therefore Wikipedia is Nazi propaganda and
               | you should not trust anything on there.
               | 
               | [1]https://www.amazon.com/Nazi-War-Cancer-Robert-
               | Proctor/dp/069...
        
             | alphabetting wrote:
             | Google: 118M results. Top link is the best resource on
             | verified election fraud cases.
             | 
             | Yandex: 9M results. The top two links are pretty suspect.
             | Top link promotes Dinesh D'Souza's 2000 Mules documentary
             | in the banner which at best is a one-sided take on election
             | fraud. At worst, very misleading.
             | 
             | https://i.imgur.com/n5a9LOd.png
        
         | chinathrow wrote:
         | Is this sarcasm?
        
         | jhgb wrote:
         | > This is the trend in the west. Technology is too powerful, we
         | must control it!
         | 
         | I take it that you're either too young or too untraveled to be
         | aware of the level of state control of technology in "the
         | east". Xerographic machines, mimeographs, and other similar
         | reprographic devices used to be highly controlled machinery
         | behind the Iron Curtain. This is absolutely not something
         | exclusive or even peculiar to "the west".
        
       | lukestateson wrote:
        
         | denysvitali wrote:
         | I don't want to defend them, but I'm genuinely curious: aren't
         | they maybe doing it because the opposite will cause them huge
         | legal issues?
        
           | lukestateson wrote:
           | They can protest, they can boycott, they can disagree, they
           | can tell the truth.
           | 
           | But... They chose to obey.
           | 
           | It's the choice that matters.
        
             | denysvitali wrote:
             | From what I've seen, telling the truth in authoritian
             | countries doesn't end up well.
             | 
             | To the best of my knowledge, they are a Russian company -
             | it's not like they can just tell the truth and move away
             | from Russia that easily, so I think (and hope?) they're
             | just playing a political game.
             | 
             | What would Google do in their position? Idk
        
           | fabrika wrote:
           | They will simply have their company taken away from them.
           | 
           | Nevertheless, they had many years before the war to start
           | marking their news as 'Official'. Or sell the news service.
           | They certainly could have done so. This would have solved
           | their image problems.
        
             | lukestateson wrote:
             | It's already taken away.
        
           | jeroenhd wrote:
           | This is often overlooked and it's a fair point in defence of
           | the people working for Yandex. You can't judge someone just
           | for working for Yandex or even most Russian companies. The
           | people who have voiced concern are already out of the company
           | and it's perfectly reasonable that the rest would like to
           | keep their jobs, especially in uncertain economic times with
           | all these sanctions against Russia.
           | 
           | However, this also implies that Yandex, as a company, cannot
           | be trusted. It's not the researcher's fault, but they simply
           | aren't allowed to work in a way that doesn't reinforced the
           | Russian government's bias. As usual, the Russian government
           | is the real villain here, but its authoritarian rule
           | "infects" any company and country it has control over.
           | 
           | It can be assumed that the people working for Yandex are also
           | victims of their abusive government, but that doesn't change
           | the fact that their work is unlikely to be trusted outside
           | the Russian sphere of influence.
        
         | 2a0c40 wrote:
         | Any similarity to our news and search services is pure
         | coincidence
        
           | timeon wrote:
           | There is hardly any.
        
       | joshsyn wrote:
       | Yandex > Google.
        
       | lumost wrote:
       | To add a voice of skepticism. The recent rush to open source
       | these models may be indicative that the tens of millions that's
       | spent training these things has relatively poor roi. There may be
       | a hope that someone else figures out how to make these
       | commercially useful.
        
         | MivLives wrote:
         | We're using these at where I work (large retail site) to help
         | make filler text on generated articles. Think the summary blurb
         | no one reads at the top. As for why we're writing these
         | articles (we have a paid team that writes them too), the answer
         | is SEO. This is probably the only thing I've seen done with a
         | text model in production usage. I'm not 100% sure what model
         | they're using.
        
           | BonoboIO wrote:
           | Content made for machines. Probably a billion dollar
           | industry.
        
             | fab1an wrote:
             | Content made for machines serving humans made by machines
             | pretending to be human
        
             | jquery wrote:
             | Made by machines, for machines. It's poetic.
        
           | tobr wrote:
           | Sorry but every part of that sounds so terrible.
        
           | jandrese wrote:
           | You just know that some Amazon listings are written by GANs.
        
           | varispeed wrote:
           | I hate this so much. These tools are getting better, so often
           | you realise only half way through that you are reading AI
           | text. Then you have to flush your brain and take a mental
           | note, to never visit that site again.
        
         | lostmsu wrote:
         | They did not publish benchmarks about quality of the models,
         | which is very suspicious.
         | 
         | I personally squinted hard when they said removing dropout
         | improves training speed (which is in iterations per second),
         | but said nothing about how it affects the performance (rate of
         | mistakes in inference) of the trained model.
        
           | jasonphang wrote:
           | I agree that the lack of benchmarks makes it hard to
           | determine how valuable this model is. But on the topic of
           | dropout, dropout has been dropped for the pretraining stage
           | of several other large models. Off the top of my head:
           | GPT-J-6B, GPT-NeoX-20B, and T5-1.1/LM.
        
         | HeavyStorm wrote:
         | Maybe training it is not that expensive?
         | 
         | I know from practice that it takes a really really long time to
         | train even a small nn (thousands of params) , so you'll need a
         | lot more hardware to train one with billions... But, it's
         | expensive to buy the hardware, not necessarily to use it. If
         | you, for some reason, have a few hundred GPU lying around, it
         | might be "cheap" to do the necessary training.
         | 
         | Now, that's not your point - cost != price. But, still...
        
         | vgel wrote:
         | My guess is they're mostly vanity projects for large tech
         | companies. While the models have some value, they also serve as
         | interesting research projects and help them attract ML talent
         | to work on more profitable models like ad-targeting.
        
         | gfodor wrote:
         | An equally plausible frame is that once a technology becomes
         | replicated across several companies, it makes sense to open
         | source it since the marginal competitive advantage are the
         | possible resultant external network effects.
         | 
         | I don't _know_ if that 's the right way to think about the open
         | sourcing of large language models. I just think we really can't
         | read too much into such releases regarding their motivation.
        
         | dandiep wrote:
         | There are tons of commercial uses for these models. I've been
         | experimenting with an app targeted toward language learners
         | [1]. We use large language models to:
         | 
         | - Generate vocabulary - e.g. for biking: handlebars, pedals,
         | shifters, etc
         | 
         | - Generate translation exercises for given topic a learner
         | wants to learn about - e.g. I raised the seat on my bike
         | 
         | - Generate questions for the user - e.g. What are the different
         | types of biking?
         | 
         | - Provide more fluent ways to say things - I went on my bike to
         | the store -> I rode my bike to the store
         | 
         | - Provide explanations of the difference in meaning between two
         | words
         | 
         | And we have fine tuned smaller models to do other thing like
         | grammar correction, exercise grading, and embedded search.
         | 
         | These models are going to completely change the field of
         | education in my opinion.
         | 
         | 1) https://squidgies.app - be kind it's still a bit alpha
        
         | mumblemumble wrote:
         | From what I've seen, using these huge models for inference at
         | any kind of scale is expensive enough that it's difficult to
         | find a business case that justifies the compute cost.
        
           | f311a wrote:
           | Yandex uses it for search and voice assistant
        
           | Voloskaya wrote:
           | Those models aren't trained with the objective of being
           | deployed in production. They are trained to be used as
           | teachers during distillation into smaller models that fit the
           | cost/latency requirements for whatever scenario those big
           | companies have. That's where the real value is.
        
         | MasterScrat wrote:
         | HuggingFace will soon release their BigScience model:
         | https://twitter.com/BigScienceLLM/status/1539941348656168961
         | 
         | "a 176 billion parameter transformer model that will be trained
         | on roughly 300 billion words in 46 languages"
         | 
         | So anything smaller than that will become worthless. May be a
         | factor, companies have a last chance to make a PR splash before
         | it happens.
         | 
         | Read more about it:
         | https://bigscience.huggingface.co/blog/model-training-launch...
        
           | rahidz wrote:
           | Not necessarily, only ~30% of the database is in English, so
           | it likely won't be as good as a smaller model trained solely
           | or mostly on English words.
           | 
           | https://bigscience.huggingface.co/blog/building-a-tb-
           | scale-m...
        
       | pembrook wrote:
       | Side note: Yandex search is awesome, and I really hope they stay
       | alive forever. It's the only functional image search nowadays,
       | after our Google overlords neutered their own product out of fear
       | over lawyers/regulation and a disdain for power users.
       | 
       | You can't even search for images "before:date" in Google anymore.
        
         | [deleted]
        
         | whywhywhywhy wrote:
         | Yandex Image Search is today is what Google Image Search should
         | have been.
         | 
         | End of the day I'll use what actually gets the job done.
         | 
         | Same goes for OpenAI and Google AI. If you don't actually ever
         | release and let others use your stuff and end paralyzed in fear
         | at what your models may do then someone else is gonna release
         | the same tech, and at this rate it seems like that'll be
         | Chinese or Russian companies who don't share your sensibilities
         | at all, and their models will be the ones that end up
         | productized.
        
           | jowday wrote:
           | The "ethical concerns" thing is just a progressive-sounding
           | excuse for why they're not going to give their models away
           | for free. I guarantee you those models are going to be
           | integrated into various Google products in some form or
           | another.
        
           | SXX wrote:
           | OpenAI should just rebrand since nothing they do is actually
           | open.
        
             | daniel-cussen wrote:
             | You know 100 years ago you could just buy uranium openly?
             | Leo Szilard hustled up 200 kilograms, pleted, in the 30's.
        
               | SXX wrote:
               | What does it have to do with OpenAI branding?
               | 
               | Their "moral" reasoning behind not publishing models is
               | simply laughtable because they do sell API access to them
               | to anyone who can pay. And "bad guys" generally have
               | money.
        
               | sanxiyn wrote:
               | They can (and do) revoke API access from bad guys. They
               | can't do that to downloaded models. Look, I don't like
               | what OpenAI does, but "API access, but no model download"
               | _makes sense_ if you are worried about misuses.
        
               | 2Gkashmiri wrote:
               | >if you are worried about misuses
               | 
               | why is morality into this? is this the same discussion of
               | car manufacturers not selling cars to certain people
               | because they are worried about misuse?
        
               | sanxiyn wrote:
               | Automotive companies, in fact, have product liability.
               | It's about liability, not morality.
        
               | 2Gkashmiri wrote:
               | when you release a project into the wild under a
               | permissive license, aren't you essentially washing
               | yourself from any "liability" ?
               | 
               | > MIT " IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT
               | HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER
               | LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR
               | OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE
               | SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE."
               | 
               | don't commercial licenses have same/similar wording so
               | what liability are you talking about?
        
               | daniel-cussen wrote:
               | So they do that because they're doing it for free.
               | Otherwise they couldn't be generous with their work--
               | those licenses are about permitting the generous intent.
        
               | ggktk wrote:
               | Bad actors still can get access to such models. It even
               | makes them more dangerous than it would if everyone had
               | access to them.
               | 
               | Here's an alternative: progressively release better and
               | better models (like 3B params, 10B, 50B, 100B) and let
               | people figure out the best way to fight against bad
               | actors using them.
        
               | sanxiyn wrote:
               | > It even makes them more dangerous than it would if
               | everyone had access to them.
               | 
               | This is the sort of argument that proves guns would be
               | less dangerous if everyone had access to them.
        
               | prometheus76 wrote:
               | "An armed society is a polite society" - Robert Heinlein
        
               | adamc wrote:
               | "It even makes them more dangerous..." needs to be
               | demonstrated, not asserted.
        
               | SXX wrote:
               | Every company out there says it will "revoke API access
               | for misuse", but do they have transparency reports? Who
               | do they even consider bad guys and what do they consider
               | as misuse?
               | 
               | I would be totally on their side if their reasoning was
               | that they dont publish models to compete with FAANG more
               | efficiently and get more income for their research, but
               | this moral reasoning just sounds completely fake because
               | bad actors do have funding to train their own models.
        
               | sanxiyn wrote:
               | OpenAI published "Lessons Learned on Language Model
               | Safety and Misuse" in March.
               | https://openai.com/blog/language-model-safety-and-misuse/
               | It also promised "forthcoming publication".
               | 
               | Examples of "real cases of misuse encountered in the
               | wild" include "spam promotions for dubious medical
               | products and roleplaying of racist fantasies".
               | 
               | Yes, some bad actors can train their own models, but
               | OpenAI can't do much about that either way. It is
               | doubtful whether spam promoters of dubious medical
               | products can, at least for a while.
        
               | true_religion wrote:
               | It would be better for misuse to be criminalized and
               | taken care of by national governments, rather than leave
               | it to for-profit companies to decide what is or isn't
               | "misuse".
               | 
               | Personally, I think using AI to manufacture
               | advertisements on demand is misuse... but will Google
               | agree with me?
        
               | remram wrote:
               | Maybe they should rename to SafeAI, if their concern is
               | controlling access.
        
               | JacobThreeThree wrote:
               | Good point. The issue is not the policy per se, it's the
               | fact that their name is not accurate.
        
           | gaudat wrote:
           | This reminded me of a shitpost comparing Google and Yandex.
           | 
           | https://desuarchive.org/g/thread/78144754/#78145600
        
           | sereja wrote:
           | IMO the main reason these companies don't release their
           | models is not ethical concerns but money:
           | 
           | - NVIDIA sells GPUs and interconnect needed for training
           | large models. Releasing a pretrained LM would hurt sales,
           | while only publishing a teaser paper boosts them.
           | 
           | - Google, Microsoft, and Amazon offer ML-as-a-service and
           | TPU/GPU hardware as a part of their cloud computing
           | platforms. Russian and Chinese companies also have their
           | clouds, but they have low global market share and aren't
           | cost-efficient, so nobody would use them to train large LMs
           | anyway.
           | 
           | - OpenAI are selling their models as an API with a huge
           | markup over inference costs; they are also largely sponsored
           | by the aforementioned companies, further aligning their
           | interests with them.
           | 
           | Companies that release large models are simply those who have
           | nothing to lose by doing so. Unfortunately, you need a lot of
           | idle hardware to train them, and companies that have it tend
           | to also launch a public cloud with it, so there is a
           | perpetual conflict of interests here.
        
         | hdjjhhvvhga wrote:
         | > Google overlords neutered their own product out of fear over
         | lawyers/regulation
         | 
         | What kind of lawyers/regulation do you have in mind? If
         | anything, I'd find the opposite: lawyers and copyright holders
         | should be grateful for such a tool that - when it was still
         | working - allowed you to trace websites using your images
         | illegally.
         | 
         | Now they all use Yandex for this purpose, with relatively good
         | results.
        
           | rascul wrote:
           | Maybe the view image link removal in 2018.
           | 
           | https://www.theverge.com/2018/2/15/17017864/google-
           | removes-v...
        
           | thereddaikon wrote:
           | IIRC it was mostly from groups like Getty images. They and
           | other image licensing companies didn't want google showing
           | their images in search results. They claimed it was copyright
           | infringement and given the absolute state of IP law in the US
           | they could have made Google's life very difficult.
        
             | hdjjhhvvhga wrote:
             | We're talking about reverse search, right? (Because
             | "normal" image search still kind of works, it's reverse
             | search that is completely broken.) In this case, you
             | already have the copyrighted image, and if you find out
             | that the same image is on Getty Images, then all the better
             | as you can check it license. Also, it's better for GI as it
             | gives them more exposure, and the kind of companies who use
             | GI are very unlikely to pirate images.
        
             | omniglottal wrote:
             | Couldn't compliance with a robots.txt file have prevented
             | all of this?
        
           | 323 wrote:
           | You misunderstood parent post. It's about Google not being
           | sued for discrimination.
           | 
           | https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-
           | intersect/wp/2016/08...
           | 
           | https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/apr/08/does-
           | goog...
           | 
           | https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-10-19/google-
           | qu...
           | 
           | https://theconversation.com/googles-algorithms-
           | discriminate-...
        
             | hdjjhhvvhga wrote:
             | Oh I see. What I'm looking for is the reason why they broke
             | the reverse image search. It was working well many years
             | ago but some time after that they switched it to some
             | strange image classifier (I upload an image of an apple to
             | find exactly the same image to track its license of origin,
             | and it says "possibly an image of an apple" - oh thank you
             | Google I didn't know that.)
        
               | hooby wrote:
               | Tineye works reasonably well, for finding exactly the
               | same image (including different resolutions, crops, etc.)
               | 
               | https://tineye.com/
        
               | tablespoon wrote:
               | > Tineye works reasonably well, for finding exactly the
               | same image (including different resolutions, crops, etc.)
               | 
               | Tineye is definitely better than Google with crops, etc.
               | Google reverse image search seems to have more data, but
               | it seems much less able to recognize even basic
               | modifications to the input.
        
               | busymom0 wrote:
               | Do they at least tell you the type of Apple it is?
        
             | tablespoon wrote:
             | > You misunderstood parent post. It's about Google not
             | being sued for discrimination.
             | 
             | Who's suing them and on what grounds? If they made changes,
             | it's probably for PR reasons, not legal ones.
             | 
             | Also not all of these seem "fixed" e.g.:
             | 
             | > https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/apr/08/does-
             | goog...
             | 
             | Article from 2016, but results look very similar today: htt
             | ps://www.google.com/search?q=unprofessional+hair&source=l..
             | .
        
               | visarga wrote:
               | They used to have in their AI ethics department some of
               | the most anti-AI progressives. They picked on everything
               | - biased training data, discriminatory usage, consuming
               | too much energy to train, models are just stochastic
               | parrots, etc. while forgetting to mention any effort to
               | mitigate the problems (of course these are real concerns
               | and being under intense research) Now these critics are
               | fired, but Google must have learned to fear them.
               | 
               | If they let everyone use the latest models, critics could
               | uncover ugly biases in 10 minutes. Then Google would have
               | to do damage control. These models are very suggestible.
               | You can induce them to make fools of themselves.
        
         | psyc wrote:
         | I regularly use it for a sample of what Google and Bing are
         | intentionally omitting.
        
         | whoami_nr wrote:
         | FWIW, https://same.energy/ seems to work fine for me
        
           | jeanlucas wrote:
           | A 500 days old product in beta? I hope they do well.
        
             | Kye wrote:
             | Extended betas used to be Google's thing.
        
         | memorable wrote:
         | I agree with this. When I am still addicted to porn, Yandex
         | Image is the only one that seems to find relevant and useful
         | links.
        
       | upupandup wrote:
       | Does anybody want to crowd fund the training?
        
         | qwertywert_ wrote:
         | Already trained, but still need some ~200GB GPU mem to run the
         | model.
        
       | schizo89 wrote:
       | I hope one day it will be possible to run this kind of models at
       | home.
        
         | lannisterstark wrote:
         | I was about to comment exactly the same thing. Stuff like this
         | makes me feel so much behind because there's no way I can run
         | this lol.
        
           | f6v wrote:
           | They hardware they mention can be rented from cloud
           | providers. It's just that it's not very cheap.
        
         | irthomasthomas wrote:
         | I think that unlikely. Barring some breakthrough that takes us
         | beyond the limits of silicon.
        
           | haswell wrote:
           | Couldn't the same thing be said about most things we do on
           | our phones these days?
           | 
           | Won't incremental advancement cover this eventually? (i.e. no
           | major breakthrough required, just patience).
        
         | Akronymus wrote:
         | Well, it used to be impossible to render on anything not a
         | mainframe in a reasonable time.
         | 
         | The day will come when we will be able to.
        
         | rocgf wrote:
         | When it will be possible to run this at home, the big companies
         | will have models way bigger than this...
        
           | rapnie wrote:
           | Or maybe the AI will own big companies that build bigger
           | models for it. /s
        
         | albertzeyer wrote:
         | If your disk has enough space to store the model, I think in
         | theory you could run them, using the disk to store states. But
         | it will be slow. I'm not sure how slow though, and also if
         | anyone has implemented this. It actually should not be too
         | difficult.
        
           | redox99 wrote:
           | Disk makes no sense considering RAM is pretty cheap. But even
           | then RAM is way too slow (and the communication overhead way
           | too high). You probably get like a 100x slowdown or more.
        
             | lostmsu wrote:
             | I think you are overestimating compute and I/O for this
             | model. If you assume it is RAM bandwidth bound, with a
             | single channel top DDR4 you will get inference time as a
             | low multiple of 7 seconds (200GB/25GBs). In a workstation
             | you can have 8 channels.
        
               | justinlloyd wrote:
               | 12-channels in mine. 24-channels on some configurations,
               | though I think that is the upper limit at this time, with
               | a maximum density of 512GB per channel.
        
               | lostmsu wrote:
               | Is it multisocket?
        
         | cal85 wrote:
         | Speaking of which... I built a gaming PC a few years ago but I
         | never use it these days. I want to install Linux on it and
         | start playing around with machine learning.
         | 
         | Can anyone recommend any open source machine learning project
         | that would be a good starting point? I want one that does
         | something interesting (whether using text, images, whatever),
         | but simple/efficient enough to run on a gaming PC and see some
         | kind of results in hours, not months. I'm not sure what I want
         | to do with ML yet, I just know I'm interested, and getting
         | something up and running is likely to enthuse me to start
         | playing and researching further.
         | 
         | My spec is: GeForce RTX 2080 Ti (11GB), a 24-core AMD Ryzen
         | Threadripper, and 128GB RAM. I'd be willing to spend on a new
         | graphics card if it would make all the difference. I am a
         | competent coder and familiar with Python but my experience with
         | ML is limited to fawning over things on HN. Any recommendations
         | gratefully received!
        
           | schizo89 wrote:
           | I would recommend auditing Stanford courses in following
           | order:
           | 
           | 1. CS231n Machine Vision https://www.youtube.com/playlist?lis
           | t=PLkt2uSq6rBVctENoVBg1T...
           | 
           | 2. CS234 Reinforcement Learning https://www.youtube.com/watch
           | ?v=FgzM3zpZ55o&list=PLoROMvodv4...
           | 
           | 3. CS330 Meta Learning https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0rZtSw
           | NOTQo&list=PLoROMvodv4...
           | 
           | Those will get you on track with general concepts about
           | reasoning, AI engineering and concepts of learning itself
           | 
           | Language models for me a bit of headache because there're in
           | different domain on intersection with linguistics and
           | humanities but here's a good course
           | 
           | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rha64cQRLs8&list=PLoROMvodv4.
           | ..
           | 
           | Those are all free and high-quality but require a lot of
           | brain power
        
         | Hendrikto wrote:
         | If you live in a datacenter, it already is!
        
           | alexpotato wrote:
           | You already have access to thousands of machine now from your
           | home computer.
           | 
           | Naval Ravikant put it best here:
           | https://twitter.com/naval/status/1002106977273565184
        
       | kome wrote:
       | I agree, yandex is a great search engine
        
         | lotusmars wrote:
         | Well you can have it in the West. We'd prefer something
         | separate from Kremlin.
        
           | zeofig wrote:
           | We can have what, a great search engine? Maybe if you have a
           | time machine to 2003
        
             | lotusmars wrote:
             | Just take it to America from us, thank you. Along with VK.
             | Great search engine and a social network. Full of backdoors
             | for thugs and corrupt police, censorship and other lovely
             | stuff... but you'll probably say that Google is full of it
             | too, because you had no experience of living in Russia.
        
               | honkler wrote:
               | and you haven't had experience of living in the states.
        
               | dash2 wrote:
               | This comment needs expansion. Tell us your experience of
               | police brutality and corruption in the US.
        
               | honkler wrote:
               | Lmao. Just read the news my man.
        
             | speed_spread wrote:
             | 2003 certainly didn't have a better search engine. It only
             | had a much smaller, open and un-SEO-biased Internet, making
             | the indexing job correspondingly easier.
        
         | dang wrote:
         | We detached this subthread from
         | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31847666 since it turned
         | into a tedious generic flamewar.
        
         | bgandrew wrote:
         | no it's not. they straight up serve kremlin, promoting kremlin
         | fake news and silencing russian opposition (not much to silence
         | but still). they can have whatever functionality they like, I
         | still won't use it in billion years.
        
           | joshsyn wrote:
           | What a hyperbolic emotional liar incapable of reasoning...
        
           | aeyes wrote:
           | They sold the news platform, it looks like a step towards
           | having their company less associated with Kremlin content
           | moderation:
           | 
           | https://www.reuters.com/technology/yandex-sells-news-
           | content...
           | 
           | They do business in other countries and for that it is best
           | for the business to appear as neutral as possible. We don't
           | know how much they fiddle with the search results and ranking
           | but this still looks quite neutral to me:
           | https://yandex.com/search/?text=russo+ukrainian+war
        
           | carlhjerpe wrote:
           | You know that some people use search engines for other things
           | than news right?
        
           | ok123456 wrote:
           | yes russia bad. thank you for your contribution to this
           | discussion.
        
             | squarefoot wrote:
             | Every country is or has been bad in some context in
             | different times, because doing the interests of your
             | country often translates into doing harm to some others.
             | Yandex is a really nice search engine and I agree it's
             | excellent for image searches compared to Google results
             | polluted with Pinterest links and other cancerous SEO
             | rubbish. But does Yandex echo propaganda for the Kremlin?
             | Yes of course, as do Google and most of the others for
             | their advertisers and governments, albeit to some different
             | degrees. The usual approach when someone or some company
             | with a controversial public image does something good with
             | apparently no strings attached should be "Timeo Danaos et
             | dona ferentes", that is, take the gift but don't trust
             | them, mo matter if they're called Google, Microsoft, Yandex
             | or whatever. Their purpose is of course to associate the
             | Yandex brand, and therefore Russia, to something perceived
             | as good, have more people use it, so that more users will
             | be exposed to their filtered news. Just be aware of that,
             | take the good and ignore the rest.
        
             | timeon wrote:
             | > yes russia bad
             | 
             | that is the point
        
             | cmsj wrote:
             | Yeah we definitely shouldn't worry about the political
             | sympathies/vulnerabilities of the web services we use as
             | the foundations of our shared knowledge...
        
               | ok123456 wrote:
               | Do you have the same level of concern about the leverage
               | Five-Eyes intelligence agencies have over Facebook and
               | Google?
        
               | lotusmars wrote:
               | There's a world of difference between Five-Eyes and being
               | harrassed, mobbed, jailed, having a "Z" and "traitor"
               | spray painted on your apartment door or being murdered.
               | 
               | By conflating those two clearly means you don't
               | understand what's going on Russia and its Putin-
               | controlled satellites like Belarus.
        
               | carlhjerpe wrote:
               | There's a world of difference between living in Russia
               | and using Yandex to search for how to kill Putin and
               | living in the west and using Yandex to search for how to
               | spin up a FastAPI server.
               | 
               | By conflating those two clearly means you don't
               | understand that everyone isn't in the same situation as
               | yourself.
        
               | colordrops wrote:
               | Julian Assange anyone? Gary Webb? Michael Hastings?
               | 
               | And you've got Abby Martin and Chris Hedges who've had
               | much of their content removed by YouTube. Chris Hedges is
               | even a Pulitzer prize winner.
        
               | marshray wrote:
               | You've named three people, and some YouTube videos.
               | 
               | On the other side, the FSB has deported 1.3 million
               | innocent Ukrainian civilians to concentration camps.
               | (number is from official Russian sources)
        
               | lizardactivist wrote:
               | How do you feel about western-owned web services?
        
               | lotusmars wrote:
               | People in Russia felt much safer using iCloud, Gmail or
               | Google Drive. Of course they comply to some requests by
               | Kremlin or police. But Yandex or VK just give information
               | straight away often times without much procedure.
        
               | honkler wrote:
               | the same way I feel much comfortable using Yandex in
               | united states. Google and Facebook feed their data to
               | NSA.
        
               | riku_iki wrote:
               | Any proof of that?
        
               | [deleted]
        
               | ChuckNorris89 wrote:
               | Snowden's leaks are not enough for you?
        
               | riku_iki wrote:
               | What proof Snowden provided about Google and FB feeding
               | data to NSA exactly?
        
               | waffleiron wrote:
               | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM#The_slides
        
               | riku_iki wrote:
               | There is no clarity on these slides if collection
               | happened proactively or it was a way to transfer
               | information for FISA warrants.
        
               | waffleiron wrote:
               | You asked for proof of the following:
               | 
               | > Google and Facebook feed their data to NSA.
               | 
               | We know that at least some companies were ordered to
               | handover all data, continuously [1].
               | 
               | edit: I think we have enough evidence that I would assume
               | that it's valid for the other companies on the slides,
               | and if it's not true you'll have to provide some proof of
               | that.
               | 
               | edit 2: [2]
               | 
               | > It searches that database and lets them listen to the
               | calls or read the emails of everything that the NSA has
               | stored, or look at the browsing histories or Google
               | search terms that you've entered, and it also alerts them
               | to any further activity that people connected to that
               | email address or that IP address do in the future."
               | 
               | > Greenwald explained that while there are "legal
               | constraints" on surveillance that require approval by the
               | FISA court, these programs still allow analysts to search
               | through data with little court approval or supervision.
               | 
               | > "There are legal constraints for how you can spy on
               | Americans," Greenwald said. "You can't target them
               | without going to the FISA court. But these systems allow
               | analysts to listen to whatever emails they want, whatever
               | telephone calls, browsing histories, Microsoft Word
               | documents."
               | 
               | > "And it's all done with no need to go to a court, with
               | no need to even get supervisor approval on the part of
               | the analyst," he added.
               | 
               | edit 3:
               | 
               | > Equally unusual is the way the NSA extracts what it
               | wants, according to the document: "Collection directly
               | from the servers of these U.S. Service Providers:
               | Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, AOL, Skype,
               | YouTube, Apple." [3]
               | 
               | [1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jun/06/nsa-
               | phone-reco...
               | 
               | [2] https://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2013/07/glenn-
               | greenwal...
               | 
               | [3] https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/us-
               | intelligenc...
        
               | riku_iki wrote:
               | You brought two links on:
               | 
               | - phone calls surveillance in Venezuella: no Google no FB
               | mentioned
               | 
               | - plain words of some reporter without any evidence
               | provided, no Google no FB mentioned
        
               | waffleiron wrote:
               | Weird how there is limited hard evidence of a secret,
               | illegal government program... It's a lot more than I've
               | seen than evidence for the claims of Yandex proactively
               | sharing data with the Russian government.
               | 
               | Also where do you see Venezuela?
        
               | riku_iki wrote:
               | So, no proof, no evidence. Ok.
               | 
               | > It's a lot more than I've seen than evidence for the
               | claims of Yandex proactively sharing data with the
               | Russian government.
               | 
               | The difference is that checks and balances are much
               | stronger in US, and such activities can be successfully
               | investigated and government sued.
               | 
               | As an example, your verizon case was successfully
               | challenged:
               | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klayman_v._Obama
               | 
               | In Russia, court system works in manual mode from
               | Kremlin.
               | 
               | > Also where do you see Venezuela?
               | 
               | I misread, you are right.
        
               | waffleiron wrote:
               | > The difference is that checks and balances are much
               | stronger in US,
               | 
               | You say that after we were talking about the NSA
               | literally spying on US citizens, and without any proof?
               | C'mon, are you really going to badger me about not having
               | having the exact "hard evidence", and not even read my
               | sources or provide ANY evidence yourself.
               | 
               | edit: Yes, it got challenged AFTER needing to be leaked
               | by a whistleblower that still can't return to his home.
        
               | riku_iki wrote:
               | > Yes, it got challenged AFTER needing to be leaked by a
               | whistleblower that still can't return to his home.
               | 
               | Good chance is that whistleblowing would be protected in
               | this specific case.
        
               | waffleiron wrote:
               | Yes no,
               | 
               | > Snowden was charged with theft, "unauthorized
               | communication of national defense information" and
               | "willful communication of classified communications
               | intelligence information to an unauthorized person,"
               | according to the complaint. The last two charges were
               | brought under the 1917 Espionage Act.
        
               | ok123456 wrote:
               | The Espionage Act has no whistleblower protection. If the
               | courts were allowed rule honestly and without political
               | entanglements, there's no way the Espionage Act is
               | constitutional at prima facia.
        
               | riku_iki wrote:
               | "Yes no" what?
               | 
               | Government can charge him with whatever they want, it is
               | up to court to decide if charges are valid.
        
               | ChuckNorris89 wrote:
               | _> So, no proof, no evidence._
               | 
               | Do you really expect the US government to literally
               | publish their illegal surveillance operations on
               | Wikipedia as proof?
               | 
               | Snowden's leaks and his statements should be enough to
               | understand the big-tech surveillance apparatus aids the
               | government under the table.
        
               | dekhn wrote:
               | You misunderstand. The NSA went out of their way to tap
               | Google's lines outside of the US, which made the
               | leadership at Google _furious_. It accelerated the work
               | to encrypt international fiber (I think many people were
               | really bothered by the tcpdump of a bigtable RPC
               | containing a user ID). I was at a conference shortly
               | after an saw a SVP rip an NSA rep to pieces.
               | 
               | If Google is doing anything that is required of them
               | legally as a US corp, I don't have a problem with that.
        
               | waffleiron wrote:
               | That's what Google claims, however the leaked slides
               | claimed "direct access".
               | 
               | edit: Does it really matter if they setup an FTP server
               | instead of direct access, when we know a request can
               | literally ask for "all" data (see Verizon).
               | 
               | > When required to comply with these requests, we deliver
               | that information to the US government -- generally
               | through secure FTP transfers and in person," Google
               | spokesman Chris Gaither told Wired, among other news
               | outlets. [1]
               | 
               | [1] https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/0
               | 6/googl...
        
               | dekhn wrote:
               | right, you're discussing the mechanism by which Google
               | shares information with the US government- when required
               | by law.
               | 
               | These systems don't give access to "all" data. Telephone
               | companies are different- AT&T had a long standing, off
               | the books agreement with US intelligence agencies (see
               | Idea Factory for a fact-based discussion of what AT&T
               | did) to share large amounts of information illegally.
        
             | simonh wrote:
             | It's not that Russia Bad, it's that if you know a search
             | engine will serve you censored, biased results that makes
             | it an unreliable search engine.
        
               | Thiez wrote:
               | And someone upthread claimed their image search was so
               | great in comparison to google... because google also
               | censors their results. They just censor different things.
        
               | lotusmars wrote:
        
               | carlhjerpe wrote:
               | People using duckduckgo bangs often use different search
               | engines for different topics.
               | 
               | I usually try ddg first, if it's tech I use Bing, if it's
               | local I use Google.
        
               | ushakov wrote:
               | Yandex users already assume it is censored and biased
               | 
               | they continue to use it however, because it gives them
               | the expected results most of the time
        
               | daniel-cussen wrote:
               | Compared to whom!? Who will serve you uncensored,
               | unbiased results!? Like run your own crawler, dude grep,
               | go to the library, come on!
        
               | eloff wrote:
               | Only if you're searching for censored things.
        
           | afroboy wrote:
           | Literally what google doing in favor of USA.
        
             | relaunched wrote:
             | Huge difference. Google does it for money. Yandex does it
             | to enable an autocracy and to maintain their ability to
             | operate.
        
               | honkler wrote:
               | and how do you know google does not do it to maintain
               | their ability to operate? That's the whole point of deep
               | state, no?
        
               | turdit wrote:
        
             | colordrops wrote:
             | You're going to get downvoted, but Eric Schmidt worked
             | regularly with the state department, and google employees
             | were involved in spurring the color revolutions.
             | 
             | Julian Assange detailed this in a newsweek article before
             | his name and body were smeared into the ground:
             | 
             | https://www.newsweek.com/assange-google-not-what-it-
             | seems-27...
             | 
             | Oh, but they say he's not trustworthy, or that it's a
             | conspiracy theory that he was intentionally smeared. Well,
             | the CIA and their contractors have been doing it for over a
             | decade, even before he was unfairly accused of helping
             | trump:
             | 
             | https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2011/02/the-
             | ridiculous-p...
             | 
             | Google is an arm of the state department, no doubt.
        
               | azinman2 wrote:
               | I think you ran out of tinfoil this one is so large.
        
               | spaniard89277 wrote:
               | Yeah first thing we hear of US gov using tech companies
               | for spionage and data mining. So much tinfoil yadda yadda
        
             | nosianu wrote:
             | I doubt that anything like this happend to Google execs in
             | the US:
             | 
             | "Putin's agents reportedly threatened a top Google
             | executive in Moscow with a 24-hour ultimatum - Take down
             | Russia protest vote app or go to prison" --
             | https://www.businessinsider.com/russia-agents-threatened-
             | goo...
             | 
             | Not yet at least, the political climate may deteriorate to
             | that point, especially when it's about elections, given
             | recent revelations.
             | 
             | Still, at least right now it looks to me - and I have
             | visited Russia and Ukraine several times in the past and
             | still have indirect connections (to people heavily involved
             | in business there) - that there still is considerable more
             | freedom from the government and its wishes for people and
             | companies in the West.
             | 
             | If you publicly criticize a US politician you may get some
             | hate messages, but at least they are from private citizens
             | and you don't have FBI agents knocking on your door
             | threatening you with prison. In Germany some rogue police
             | were found to send threatening messages, but as soon as it
             | was discovered the government acted against it. Also in
             | Germany there even were public rallies from pro-Russian
             | folks, now try that in Moscow with pro-Ukraine banners...
             | Russia even bans the colors yellow and blue, even when they
             | have nothing whatsoever to do with Ukraine and are just
             | decorative: "Russians Strip Yellow and Blue From the
             | Nation's Streets Over Ukraine War" --
             | https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2022/04/27/in-photos-
             | russians...
        
               | waffleiron wrote:
               | > you don't have FBI agents knocking on your door
               | threatening you with prison.
               | 
               | Correct, it's DHS.
               | 
               | https://twitter.com/_secondthought/status/133274617257067
               | 725...
        
               | bpodgursky wrote:
               | You know people online can just say things, right?
        
               | ginjas wrote:
               | >You know people online can just say things, right?
               | 
               | You know that if this was FSB instead of DHS, and it was
               | me saying instead of you, you would be calling me a
               | 'Russia Shill' or a 'KGB agent', right?
        
               | bpodgursky wrote:
               | I reject the false equivalence of the DHS and FSB. Not
               | gonna both-sides this, sorry.
               | 
               | Russia is an authoritarian militaristic state, and the US
               | is a flawed liberal democracy. So yes, my priors are
               | different. That's life.
        
               | gre wrote:
               | The United States has over 750 military bases in 80
               | countries. Which state is the militaristic state?
        
               | ginjas wrote:
               | >I reject the false equivalence of the DHS and FSB. Not
               | gonna both-sides this, sorry.
               | 
               | lmao mkay. Not identical, but very similar. It's not even
               | 'Alex Jones'-tier to say this. I think you forget you are
               | if you are under US or (even NATO). YOU WILL hear
               | propaganda from your side, as the Russians do. It's
               | NORMAL. We live under control of a hegemon with self-
               | interests.
               | 
               | May I have to remind you of these? And tell me the
               | difference between these and Russian spookery:
               | 
               | >Assange was being hunted down by the US worldwide
               | (https://diem25.org/exactly-10-years-ago-wikileaks-
               | released-a...)
               | 
               | >https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Mockingbird
               | 
               | >https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Northwoods
               | 
               | >https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM
               | 
               | I could go on, but the point was made already.
               | 
               | Edit: So yes, it's actually 'both sides'
        
               | dang wrote:
               | Would you please stop posting flamewar comments and using
               | HN for ideological battle? We ban accounts that do those
               | things, and you've already been doing it repeatedly.
               | 
               | If you wouldn't mind reviewing
               | https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and
               | taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart,
               | we'd be grateful.
        
               | bpodgursky wrote:
               | Yeah, you could go on, but you get paid per post, not per
               | word.
        
               | ginjas wrote:
               | Unmasked as a shill for saying that great powers engage
               | in propaganda, false flagging and dissent crushing.
               | 
               | I have no skin in the game. War, no war, it doesn't
               | matter to me the outcome of this war to be honest.
               | 
               | EDIT: But if you are all moral highground, answer me
               | this:
               | 
               | Why did the US goad Ukraine into taking a hostile stance
               | against a neighbouring (and somewhat rival) great power?
               | Whas this to the interest of Ukranians? Or to the
               | geopolitical interests of US?
               | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=93eyhO8VTdg
        
               | bpodgursky wrote:
               | I don't accept that you can make this case:
               | 
               | "Why did you, W, goad X into expressing their sovereignty
               | against Y? Didn't you know that Y would react with
               | violence? That makes W the bad guy"
               | 
               | No, Y is always on the wrong side; you can't use the
               | threat of violence and then claim via realpolitik that
               | the other side was in the wrong. "Moral high ground"
               | means you act out of principle, not political
               | convenience. In this case, Ukraine didn't want to be in
               | the Russian sphere, so we supported them.
               | 
               | And now yeah, the US is paying a lot of money and
               | inconvenience to support Ukraine. Gas will be more
               | expensive, we're spending tens of billions on weapons.
               | But that's because it's the right thing to do; not every
               | decision is a realpolitik game about maximizing revenue
               | from vassal states (which I hope Russia will learn
               | someday).
        
               | ginjas wrote:
               | what I meant for the goading part was this:
               | 
               | Ukraine has self interests. Everyone has. But not
               | everyone can actualize those, due to reality. The reality
               | is that Ukraine neighbours a powerful hegemon.
               | 
               | Since international relations are anarchistic (due to not
               | being a supra-entity that has authority over states
               | [authority!=international courts bullsh*]), Ukraine
               | hasn't any right (to its sovereign, that does not exist)
               | to be sovereign. It has to go out and look for itself.
               | 
               | Ukraine thought that had the US/NATO back, that made it
               | act in a more reckless way (kind of when you rely on your
               | big brother type stuff). It escalated 'till it decided it
               | wanted to join NATO. It was goaded.
               | 
               | >you can't use the threat of violence and then claim via
               | realpolitik that the other side was in the wrong.
               | 
               | who says? That's your problem. You lack the 'anarchistic'
               | framework of geopolitics.
               | 
               | Now, realpolitik-wise, Ukraine's self-interests (of being
               | more independent of Russia thru NATO) did clash with
               | Russia's self-interests of being safe (and probably made
               | Russia have a expansionary Casus Belli).
               | 
               | I feel that the US triggered and amplified the war, thru
               | regime change in Ukraine (yep, maidan was a coup),
               | recognizing aspirations of UA to NATO, making Zeleskyy
               | too comfy to be more harsh in negotiations (where he had
               | no leverage, cuz Ukraine's power small vs Rus.),
               | ultimately resulted in unnecessary deaths, just for the
               | purpose of sphere of influence expansion.
               | 
               | >so we supported them.
               | 
               | Even if it's reckless and could trigger something like
               | this?
               | 
               | Also, I will play the 'reversed roles card' again. This
               | time with a REAL example. Cuba. Was. The. Same. Thing.
               | 
               | That's why this
               | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Northwoods and
               | this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monroe_Doctrine.
               | 
               | US has the same pattern as Russia. It's actually
               | incredible how close these are.
        
               | dang wrote:
               | You broke the site guidelines badly here. The rules apply
               | regardless of how wrong another comment is or you feel it
               | is. We've had to warn you about this kind of thing a lot.
               | If you keep doing it, we're going to end up having to ban
               | you, so please stop.
               | 
               | https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
        
               | mjhay wrote:
               | Not everyone who questions US foreign policy is a paid
               | Russian agent.
        
               | bpodgursky wrote:
               | No. But most 2-week-old accounts are.
        
               | waffleiron wrote:
               | I don't think it's that far fetched that DHS shows up to
               | someone who is opposed to the US government and is a self
               | identifying communist.
               | 
               | The same DHS who bans immigrants that are or have been
               | members of a communist party [1].
               | 
               | [1] https://www.uscis.gov/sites/default/files/document/po
               | licy-ma...
        
               | roenxi wrote:
               | > I doubt that anything like this happend to Google execs
               | in the US:
               | 
               | It seems plausible; we don't know what gets done under
               | the FISA court but it would presumably involve companies
               | like Google. Some suited agent of the US government
               | turning up at Google HQ and threatening jail time under
               | some FISA warrant if some pro-Trump something doesn't
               | disappear off Google.
               | 
               | That'd be a scandal but not the worst abuse of the secret
               | court system. It hasn't exactly covered itself with glory
               | since inception. They already spy on basically everyone
               | and that is a lot worse than some light censorship.
        
               | capdeck wrote:
               | > Take down Russia protest vote app or go to prison
               | 
               | What about Canadian truckers? Didn't Trudeau call them
               | terrorists, took their trucks, donations, bank accounts
               | and driver licenses... There is no right to protest
               | anywhere, don't kid yourself.
        
               | marshray wrote:
               | The Canadian truck protesters were allowed to shut down
               | the center of the city, blast their horns 24 hours a day,
               | and shut down a major international trade route. They
               | were permitted to do this for _weeks_ before the citizens
               | got sick of it and demanded action from their government.
               | 
               | They gave protest a bad name.
               | 
               | Your conclusion that "There is no right to protest
               | anywhere" is simply ridiculous.
        
               | ginjas wrote:
               | >Your conclusion that "There is no right to protest
               | anywhere" is simply ridiculous.
               | 
               | BLM rioters did this, and more. Violence + Property
               | damage + Corporate Backing + gov backing. They didn't had
               | their donation money seized,and almost no resistance to
               | establish order.
        
             | d23 wrote:
             | I would assume this could go unsaid, but apparently it
             | needs to be said somewhere in this thread: there is zero
             | comparison between the US and an autocratic dictator who
             | attempts to kill and then jails his opposition, runs
             | fraudulent elections, kills journalists, and invades
             | sovereign countries. Zero. None. Zero.
             | 
             | Zero.
             | 
             | Get it?
             | 
             | None.
             | 
             | Zero.
        
               | ginjas wrote:
               | I mean, if your only criteria is the intensity of the
               | quality, then kinda.
               | 
               | But... :
               | 
               | (persecuted journalist)
               | 
               | >https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-61839256
               | 
               | >https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2013/07/usa-must-
               | not-...
               | 
               | (jails its opposition)
               | 
               | >https://eu.usatoday.com/storytelling/capitol-riot-mob-
               | arrest...
               | 
               | >"hatespeech" (newspeak)
               | 
               | >fraudulent elections: funny how the concerns that 'half'
               | of the US had with elections were dismissed. Especially
               | when conditions were different, by using a method usually
               | agreed (until now, cuz narrative) prone to tampering. So
               | much for free and fair elections.
               | 
               | So _Zero_ huh?
        
           | ushakov wrote:
           | can you name any Russian company that doesn't?
           | 
           | obeying to Kremlin is just an aspect of running business in
           | Russia
           | 
           | the only option would be not to operate in Russia at all.
           | Yandex can't do this, because their audience is primarily in
           | Russia
        
             | lotusmars wrote:
             | Well they've made their choice and silenced our protest and
             | opposition, and later spewed pro-war anti-Ukrainian
             | propaganda using country's largest media (Yandex News).
             | 
             | If you're profiteering from our suffering and choose
             | Kremlin's needs over ours, don't be suprised then when we
             | tell you to shove your AI models and your search.
        
               | joshsyn wrote:
               | Who's we? I am not in this together. So change it to "I".
               | I don't care about you lot... lmao
        
               | ushakov wrote:
               | they're selling Yandex News to VK (Mail.ru)
        
               | lotusmars wrote:
               | It's still working as usual and they announced the
               | transition after 8 years of warmongering and blacklisting
               | all opposition resources. And only when sanctions hit.
               | 
               | Now they scramble to present a whitewashed image to
               | Western public. They will probably put themselves forward
               | as great contributors to open source.
        
               | [deleted]
        
             | orbital-decay wrote:
             | Not really, it's very different for Yandex in particular.
             | Along with several other companies like Vimpelcom, they
             | started the "Safe Internet League", an organization which
             | exploited the _think of the children_ argument to build the
             | censorship regime from scratch. They practically created
             | the original censorship laws, or participated in the
             | creation, when they were in the best position to resist the
             | government (and had the incentive to do so). As an example,
             | Telegram successfully resisted the censorship while having
             | _much_ less leverage, much later.
             | 
             | Of course Yandex likes to pose as the victim of censorship,
             | but the truth is that they are the censors themselves.
             | They've been steamrolled by a runaway process they helped
             | to create.
        
             | blackhaz wrote:
             | Which doesn't excuse them at all. They are full-on
             | supporting the war machine and bloodshed and bear
             | responsibility.
        
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