[HN Gopher] A CERN for Open Source Large-Scale AI
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A CERN for Open Source Large-Scale AI
Author : galaxyLogic
Score : 119 points
Date : 2023-04-09 11:50 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.openpetition.eu)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.openpetition.eu)
| amrb wrote:
| So they would have to buy the hardware require to support this
| project where CERN requires research and creates scientific jobs
| in the EU.
|
| I can see people may not like handing over a lot of money to
| Nvidia for 1000 cards, unless the hardware ML accelerators are
| shipping as an alternative.
| abetusk wrote:
| I'm absolutely in favor of the idea of open source AI, providing
| libre/free/open source code, libre/free/open source data and
| providing all other relevant digital artifacts under a libre/free
| license but I'm nervous about believing in some other
| organization that claims to be open but then rescinding their
| offer.
|
| I think this was precisely OpenAI's charter when it started [0]
| and now they've positioned themselves as paternalistic
| protectors, claiming to have peoples best interest at heart when
| limiting access the tools they've created. Even hugging face has
| weird licensing for many (most?) of their models [1].
|
| My apologies, but I don't trust LAION. I guess I would trust it
| more if they talked about which licenses they specifically would
| support, which they wouldn't and what the repercussions of
| violating their charter would be.
|
| [0]
| https://web.archive.org/web/20160220093339/https://openai.co...
|
| [1] https://huggingface.co/models?sort=downloads
| SanderNL wrote:
| Wants your full address. "Your data will be secure", until it is
| not. This is too much.
| lwn wrote:
| At the next step. It's a no go for me as well.
| rajandatta wrote:
| This petition is an excellent idea. We as humanity need to get
| closer to the edge if not ahead of AI Development to strive to
| ensure that a) the wealth and benefits can be generated for
| societies b) closed and unaccountable parties are not the sole
| custodians of such a powerful force.
|
| The idea of CERN has a lot of merit because of CERN's success as
| a multi-national institution. The model will need to be evolved
| for AI but that's why we need to start now.
|
| This is the start of a new phenomenon for our societies; not the
| end. It's better for its impact to be managed by society as a
| whole.
| stathibus wrote:
| On the contrary, it's totally unnecessary and the same level of
| effort will come about naturally from market and
| industry/academic incentives. Cern was needed because nobody
| would spend the money on high energy physics otherwise.
| nharada wrote:
| I support this, and even more so I believe this is necessary if
| we believe that academia should exist as a place for researchers
| to do work not motivated by profits. So many AI researchers have
| moved to work at big tech simply because the resources required
| for cutting edge ML are so vast.
|
| Having a giant collaborative project would make it much easier
| for universities to retain professors, attract PhDs/Post-docs,
| etc. They could do work that aims to benefit society as a whole,
| instead of just happening to benefit society when it's a lucky
| side effect of benefiting stockholders.
| novaRom wrote:
| The problem is interdisciplinary. We have to unite first and make
| a clear plan which should answer following questions:
|
| 1. How to get a stable non-monopolistic semiconductor industry
| with multiple players without critical dependencies on a single
| supplier
|
| 2. How to increase energy supply and stabilize energy prices
|
| 3. How to transform existing businesses, governments, and society
| in general to align them with AI-induced disruptive changes
| freakynit wrote:
| Can't we use kiclstarter or other fund raising sites to train a
| gpt-4 like powerful model?
| Tepix wrote:
| This shouldn't be a one-time affair
| pixl97 wrote:
| Corporations are raising billions (with a B) of dollars to
| create and develop AI models. With that money they are buying
| up every bit of compute they possibly can. I'm not sure what
| level of funding you're going to get in your actions, but it's
| not going to be anywhere close to the levels needed.
| oceanplexian wrote:
| I would avoid kickstarter for any AI related work, they made it
| clear after banning a few projects that they want to push their
| flavor of AI ethics on creators (e.g.
| https://updates.kickstarter.com/ai-current-thinking/). IMO we
| need an alternative infrastructure for organizing and funding
| these things, since it's clear Big Tech sees AI as a threat and
| wants to desperately shut it down.
| MrThoughtful wrote:
| Europe dug itself deep into a hole.
|
| At first, we missed the internet. Because of way too much
| regulation.
|
| Then we found ourselves using only US software and digital
| services.
|
| What did we do? We created more regulation. Way more regulation.
| Burying all hope Europe could ever get a foot in the door of the
| internet.
|
| Now we are about to miss AI.
|
| OpenAI, Microsoft, Google, Meta, Tesla, NVIDIA .. all AI players
| are in the US again.
|
| I don't think more governmental intervention is the right way.
|
| In fact, I think it is counterproductive.
|
| What _should_ we do?
|
| Well, it's a long process. We would have to get to a mindset that
| gives small entrepreneurs more freedom. Less bureaucracy and less
| regulation, step by step. I don't think it will happen. The
| reaction in Europe is always "more regulation". The thought of
| _removing_ some regulation is probably terrifying to our leaders.
| fancyfredbot wrote:
| Deepmind is headquartered in the UK (but owned and funded by
| Google). Graphcore are also UK based.
| YetAnotherNick wrote:
| > but owned and funded by Google
|
| I remember Demis Hassabis(Deepmind founder) said in some
| podcast that they had lot of troubles getting decent funding
| in Europe. In general it seems Europe has much less appetite
| for funding private research groups than US, which I think it
| boils down directly or indirectly to regulations.
| atleastoptimal wrote:
| This is true, it all comes down to money.
|
| Europe is as capable if not more capable of being the
| center of engineering, tech and software. However there is
| no huge hotbed of VC money that allows huge risks.
| tommoor wrote:
| So, from a regulatory perspective neither of these are in the
| EU either ;)
| hsjqllzlfkf wrote:
| [dead]
| anonylizard wrote:
| This. The EU prides itself in being the 'regulatory
| superpower'.
|
| Now the EU gets GDPR, while the US gets GPT-4. I cannot think
| of any influential EU AI companies, except for DeepL. While
| even the UK has two (Deepmind, Stability). I cannot see a more
| damning indictment of EU's tech policy than this.
|
| But this seems to be the future that Europeans want, aging,
| resentful of changes, yet somehow mass importing immigrants to
| serve the pensioners. Italy now has 50% GDP per capita compared
| to the US, I think it'll end up being 33% by 2050.
| bsaul wrote:
| please don't advocate _AGAIN_ for EU politicians to compete
| against silicon valley. They love to do that and fail miserably
| all the time (but only after having spent troves of money, of
| course)
| pelasaco wrote:
| at least the initiative isn't driven by politicians
| https://laion.ai/team/, but by subprime researchers trying to
| get their hands on the EU money. It's for sure better, but I'm
| afraid EU is broken.
| ljlolel wrote:
| Subprime?
|
| Weird way to describe this team, also tons of great
| researchers are in and from the EU.
|
| One person listed there:
|
| Robin Rombach Member. Stable Diffusion Trainer AI researcher
| with a focus on deep generative models. Author of VQGAN,
| Latent Diffusion, Stable Diffusion.
| pelasaco wrote:
| Yeah, subprime. You cannot compare them with the people who
| founded CERN https://home.cern/about/who-we-are/our-people.
| But maybe our understanding of subprime are different? I
| didn't want to offend them, for me subprime means "being of
| less than top quality", which means good, but not great.
| Great but not excellent. So yeah, they are good
| researchers, some of them are good software developers, but
| IMO, not enough to lead the CERN for open source large-
| scale AI.
| rizky05 wrote:
| [dead]
| TheRealNGenius wrote:
| [dead]
| moelf wrote:
| except CERN actually does a lot of things backwards in terms of
| technology (partly due to our unique needs for hardware, but
| absolutely no excuse for software).
|
| If what CERN is doing has even the remotest real-world
| application, CERN would have looked much less world-leading than
| it is today. European treaty is what made CERN viable -- because
| otherwise it's very hard to fund ultra long-term, almost no
| return projects.
|
| AI is the opposite of that and you probably don't want to have a
| CERN: plenty of $ flowing into AI project without government
| intervention && you don't want the slowness of CERN.
| seydor wrote:
| They can apply for a research grant, the EU does give a lot.
|
| But if it goes the way of the Human Brain Project, it will alter
| course next year and become 100 small projects
|
| Besides, our laws make it virtually impossible to train these
| models without getting sued. Not to talk about their output, a
| defamation lawsuit magnet.
|
| EU is pretty much locked out of the future of AI
| amrb wrote:
| Japan did have the VLSI project a group of there largest
| companies: https://youtu.be/bwhU9goCiaI?t=766
|
| For Europe I could see a bigger group of companies, schools and
| researchers working towards open models with funding. This would
| allow EU companies to be competitive with the US while not
| duplicating effort, more eyes on the problem too. Maybe alignment
| work could be a goal, since the driver is not profit at any cost
| this time.
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