[HN Gopher] Anthropic's $5B, 4-year plan to take on OpenAI
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       Anthropic's $5B, 4-year plan to take on OpenAI
        
       Author : isaacfrond
       Score  : 340 points
       Date   : 2023-04-11 11:58 UTC (11 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (techcrunch.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (techcrunch.com)
        
       | SilverBirch wrote:
       | Does anyone else see the "In X years time we'll have something Y
       | times better than the competition has today" as a bit of a red
       | flag? I saw this before in a product plan and it flagged up 2
       | things that really worried me. Firstly, the competition were
       | already ahead of us, and they're _obviously_ going to continue
       | developing their stuff, so it 's great to promise our thing will
       | be better than their thing today but we're not competing against
       | that, we're competing against what they'll have once time has
       | passed. And secondly, by measuring yourself against the leading
       | edge today you're eliding how much you're going to improve. For
       | example, Anthropic say they'll be 10x better than leading models
       | today in 18 months. That sounds acheivable right (no actually)
       | but you don't even have to do that - because you aren't starting
       | with the market leading model, so you have to catch up first and
       | _then_ 10x it so are they 10x or 20x or 100x in 18 months?
        
         | adamsmith143 wrote:
         | With the recent scaling law papers that have come out you can
         | evidently predict with pretty high accuracy how good your model
         | will be by plotting out the scaling curves. So performance @ X
         | Flops and Y tokens can be reasonably well known ahead of time.
        
         | skybrian wrote:
         | Yes, predicting the future is difficult. Nobody knows who will
         | really be ahead in X years. Nobody knows how much OpenAI will
         | improve either. But they have ambitions to improve a lot and
         | their plans are credible enough to satisfy their investors.
         | 
         | Not sure what else you're expecting? All VC investments have
         | unquantifiable risks, but it doesn't add up to a red flag if
         | you like their chances.
        
         | nr2x wrote:
         | 100% agree. You need to catch up to OpenAI for starters and
         | then figure out how to outpace them.
        
         | bob1029 wrote:
         | The only reality in which Anthropic will take on OpenAI (et.
         | al.), would be if someone involved possess some sacred
         | knowledge regarding how to build an AGI system that is
         | radically off the path that the current market is charging down
         | (i.e. ever-larger GPU farms and transformer-style models).
         | 
         | I suspect this is not the case. The same hustlers who brought
         | you crypto scams didn't just disappear into the ether. All of
         | that energy has to eventually go somewhere.
        
           | adamsmith143 wrote:
           | >The only reality in which Anthropic will take on OpenAI (et.
           | al.), would be if someone involved possess some sacred
           | knowledge regarding how to build an AGI system that is
           | radically off the path that the current market is charging
           | down (i.e. ever-larger GPU farms and transformer-style
           | models).
           | 
           | Train on More tokens with More GPUs isn't exactly rocket
           | science. I assume the RLHF loop is complex but training the
           | base model itself is pretty well understood.
        
           | nr2x wrote:
           | It's not fair to compare them to crypto scams, this isn't
           | trying to juice retail investors for their life savings.
        
       | alberth wrote:
       | Google invested $400M into Anthropic
       | 
       | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34663438
       | 
       | Investors include:
       | 
       | - Eric Schmidt (former Google CEO/Chairman), Series A
       | 
       | - Sam Bankman-Fried, lead investor in Series B
       | 
       | - Caroline Ellison, Series B
       | 
       | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34664963
        
         | option wrote:
         | Would lawsuits targeting SBF and CE put those investments at
         | risk via clawbacks. Kind of like how many Madoffs investors who
         | made money were forced to return that.
        
           | dan-robertson wrote:
           | I don't think it's much like what you describe because the
           | direction is reversed. They say they expect the debtors to
           | sell that investment over the next few years. Potentially
           | they will sell it at a profit.
        
             | qeternity wrote:
             | IANAL but it's not: they could be compelled to return
             | whatever was invested (or however much of it remains). It's
             | pretty unlikely given that it looks like a successful
             | Anthropic investment is perhaps FTX creditors' best chance
             | at decent recovery.
        
         | rvba wrote:
         | If Google invests money into this and then this company uses
         | Google cloud to compute, then does the money really outflow of
         | Google much? Everything stays in the family, but in theory they
         | can have an investment that works.
         | 
         | Also listing Sam Bankman-Fried does not help much, especially
         | for a company hyping itself to be 10x better than a working
         | competitor. I mean, since they built the competitor, probably
         | their second project can be better, but it is a pie in the sky
         | in many ways.
        
         | crop_rotation wrote:
         | [flagged]
        
         | [deleted]
        
       | whatever1 wrote:
       | I love the fact that they pretend to know how to spend 1B in 18
       | months.
       | 
       | Good luck. To the investors.
        
         | cubefox wrote:
         | Training a large language model is very expensive.
        
           | baobabKoodaa wrote:
           | Not that expensive, though
        
       | taf2 wrote:
       | If they can expose an API that has better response times with
       | GPT4 quality... They'll do just fine.
        
       | gibsonf1 wrote:
       | Such an epic waste of resources.
        
       | hackerlight wrote:
       | > "Claude-Next" -- 10 times more capable than today's most
       | powerful AI, but that this will require a billion dollars in
       | spending over the next 18 months.
       | 
       | GPT-4 cost less than a billion dollars? What is the claim here?
       | That they're spending more money on compute than OpenAI, or that
       | they have made algorithmic breakthroughs that enable them to make
       | better use of the same amount of compute?
        
       | RamblingCTO wrote:
       | Lol, "Therapy and coaching". None of you ever had undergone one
       | therapy session. Otherwise you'd know that 90% is the human
       | connection to the therapist, not the talking or the type of
       | therapy.
        
         | istjohn wrote:
         | My experience with therapy, corroborated with that of friends
         | and family, is that most therapists are not very good and many
         | are awful. I can easily imagine an AI therapist soon being more
         | effective on average.
        
         | jahewson wrote:
         | That's not true. Correspondence therapy is a thing. Plenty of
         | research exists in the area of delivering therapy and the
         | effectiveness of different kinds.
        
       | seyz wrote:
       | Its resources and long-term vision could bring major
       | breakthroughs and accelerate AI tech, very exciting.
        
       | atemerev wrote:
       | Has anyone ever seen their product? How it stands against state
       | of the art? Are they better than what is already available in
       | open source (Alpaca, Coati etc), and by how much?
        
       | uptownfunk wrote:
       | It just an optics by Google to show they have a horse in the race
       | after MSFT made them dance.
        
       | MagicMoonlight wrote:
       | It really puts into perspective how much of a meme economy we
       | live in. I just read an article that says global lithium will be
       | worth 15bn a year in 2030 when we're at peak battery demand. This
       | company is planning to spend 1bn just this year in order to run
       | some numbers through someone else's algorithm. People have given
       | them 1bn in cash for that.
       | 
       | Clearly it's all bullshit. There's no way they need that much and
       | somebody will be siphoning it all off.
        
         | Hermitian909 wrote:
         | It's worth remembering that:
         | 
         | 1. A business's value is related to profits or potential
         | profits. If I put a dollar in, how many do I get out? What's
         | the maximum number of dollars I can put in?
         | 
         | 2.The farther away you are from an end customer, the lower your
         | profits tend to be unless you have a moat or demand for your
         | product is inelastic.
         | 
         | Lithium is far from customers and while demand for _cheap_
         | lithium is high there are lots of applications that will opt
         | for some other way to provide power if the price gets too high.
        
         | sdwr wrote:
         | The $ is distributed sovereignty - there's a constant tension
         | between value per dollar, and money as denoting hierarchy. Did
         | Louis XIV provide value equivalent to all those diamonds?
         | 
         | And AI is delivering on a lot of different planes right now.
         | This shit is _real_ on a practical and spiritual level. It 's
         | not every day that we get to participate in giving birth to a
         | new form of life.
        
         | jiggywiggy wrote:
         | They can probably only get so much because they worked on chat
         | gpt. It gives an idea of the huge value of chatgpt in the
         | valuation of investors.
        
         | leesec wrote:
         | How is it bullshit lol. GPT4 is genuinely very expensive to
         | train and run inference.
        
           | sva_ wrote:
           | Could you provide a source for that claim? Other than the
           | very long context model.
        
             | espadrine wrote:
             | We can infer from publicly available information. BLOOM[0]
             | was trained for four months on 384 A100 80GB GPUs,
             | excluding architecture search. They specifically indicate
             | (in the Huggingface page):
             | 
             | > _Estimated cost of training: Equivalent of $2-5M in cloud
             | computing (including preliminary experiments)_
             | 
             | You can see from the training loss[1] that it was still
             | learning at a good rate when it was stopped. The increased
             | capabilities typically correlate well with the decrease in
             | perplexity.
             | 
             | That makes many believe that GPT-4 was trained for vastly
             | more GPU-hours, as also suggested by OpenAI's CEO[2].
             | Especially so considering it also included training on
             | images, unlike BLOOM.
             | 
             | [0]: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2211.05100.pdf
             | 
             | [1]: https://huggingface.co/bigscience/tr11-176B-logs/tenso
             | rboard
             | 
             | [2]: https://twitter.com/sama/status/1620951010318626817
        
         | jahewson wrote:
         | You're comparing single-year market value of a commodity that
         | is dug straight out of an open pit with multi-year capital
         | investment into one of the most advanced technologies the human
         | race has created, currently offered by a single company? I'm
         | not sure where to begin with that.
         | 
         | How much money do you think it takes to finance and build a
         | lithium mine? How much capital investment is there in lithium
         | right now? A lot.
        
         | xpe wrote:
         | > This company is planning to spend 1bn just this year in order
         | to run some numbers through someone else's algorithm.
         | 
         | "Just"? Reductive mischaracterizations like this are not
         | useful. It looks like a rhetorical technique. What is the
         | actual _argument_?
         | 
         | It doesn't matter much "whose" algorithm it is or isn't, unless
         | IP is important. But in these areas, the ideas and algorithms
         | underlying language models are out there. The training data is
         | available too, for varying costs. Some key differentiators
         | include scale, timeliness, curation, and liability.
         | 
         | > Clearly it's all bullshit. There's no way they need that much
         | and somebody will be siphoning it all off.
         | 
         | There is plenty of investor exaggeration out there. But what
         | percentage of _your_ disposable money would you put on the line
         | to bet against? On what timeframe?
         | 
         | If I had $100 M of disposable wealth, I would definitely _not_
         | bet against some organizations in the so-called AI arms race
         | becoming big winners.
         | 
         | Again, I'm seeing the pattern of overreaction to perceived
         | overreaction.
        
       | itissid wrote:
       | > billions of dollars over the next 18 months
       | 
       | Is most of that money for hiring people to tag/label/comment on
       | data and the data center costs?
        
         | pixl97 wrote:
         | Datacenter costs. With the models getting better the cost of
         | data tagging is moving from a human dominated cost to a compute
         | cost.
        
           | istjohn wrote:
           | Interesting. The AI is already to the point that it can
           | contribute to improving itself. That's...exciting? scary?
        
       | qwertox wrote:
       | OpenAI should allow its users to create personas. Oftentimes the
       | verbosity it has drives me nuts, so I use stuff like "code only,
       | nothing else: python json.dumps remove whitespace" in order to
       | just get the code.
       | 
       | So I would like to create a chat with a pre-configured persona so
       | that it behaves like this all the time, unless I explicitly tell
       | it to be verbose or to explain it.
       | 
       | Or stop that offering of more help which becomes somewhat
       | bothering: "Yes, I'm glad we were able to work through the issue
       | and find a solution that works for you. Do you have any other
       | questions or concerns on this topic or any other networking-
       | related topic?"
       | 
       | Like custom "system" prompts, but checked for safety. Or maybe
       | even on a per-message basis with a drop-down next to the submit
       | button and then it stays at that until changed.
       | 
       | Then there's also the need to be able to switch from a GPT-3.5
       | chat to GPT-4, just like it offers to downgrade from GPT-4 to 3.5
       | once the "quota" is consumed. Because oftentimes GPT-3.5 is good
       | enough for most of the chat, and only certain questions should
       | then offer the capabilities of GPT-4. This would also allow us to
       | save energy.
        
         | dreish wrote:
         | You can already do that with OpenCharacters at
         | https://josephrocca.github.io/OpenCharacters/. You just need to
         | set up an API key with OpenAI, and you can customize hidden
         | prompts for different characters, whom you can name, you can
         | edit earlier parts of conversations, and it automatically
         | summarizes earlier parts of conversations to keep a never-
         | ending thread within the context limit.
        
       | Cthulhu_ wrote:
       | I just want to know where those billions go to. Cloud server
       | running costs?
        
         | thundergolfer wrote:
         | The all-in cost of their technical talent probably exceeds
         | $500k/year pp, excluding stock compensation.
        
       | Aeroi wrote:
       | [flagged]
        
       | adventured wrote:
       | > aims to raise as much as $5 billion over the next two years to
       | take on rival OpenAI and enter over a dozen major industries,
       | according to company documents obtained by TechCrunch
       | 
       | A dozen! Why, golly gee, I've got a business plan right here that
       | says I'm going to enter 87 major industries and dominate every
       | one of them.
       | 
       | I've been around tech, reading headlines like this, since roughly
       | 1993 (and others here were of course seeing the same - adjusted
       | for inflation and scale - types of headlines decades before me).
       | This just reads like every other going-to-fail-miserably
       | hilariously-grandiose-ambition we're-going-to-be-the-next-big-
       | shit headline I've read in past decades during manic bubble
       | phases.
       | 
       | Hey, Masayoshi Son has a 100 year plan to dominate the Interwebs,
       | did ya hear? Oh shit, this isn't 1999? Different century, same
       | bullshit headlines. Rinse and repeat. So I guess we're formally
       | knee deep into the latest AI bubble. These types of stories read
       | just like the garbage dotcom rush where companies would proclaim
       | how they were entering a billion verticals and blah blah blah,
       | we're gonna own all of the b2b ecommerce space, blah blah blah.
        
       | v4dok wrote:
       | This is a lot of money going into compute.
       | 
       | I will say this again. EU is sleeping on the opportunity to throw
       | money in an opensource initiative, in a field were money matter
       | and the field is still (kind of) level.
        
         | fancyfredbot wrote:
         | "Let someone else pay for the open source LLM weights" said
         | everyone.
        
         | 0xDEF wrote:
         | Devil's advocate: Why should EU tax payers fund open source
         | initiatives and not proprietary European initiatives that will
         | help Europe compete against American and Chinese tech giants?
        
           | crop_rotation wrote:
           | They should fund something. A proprietary European initiative
           | is definitely better. The open source alternative should be
           | EU's last resort. But as it stands the EU is nowhere to be
           | found. I am not sure how impactful LLMs will be on a scale of
           | autocomplete to industrial revolution, but the EU needs to
           | notice it and plan for something.
        
         | bko wrote:
         | > [2008] France has been given the green light by the European
         | Commission for a $152 million government grant for a consortium
         | building a European rival to U.S. internet search giant Google.
         | 
         | I don't think government funding to compete with private
         | businesses works well
         | 
         | https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/ec-...
        
           | hbbio wrote:
           | They also funded 2 competitors to AWS, just to make sure we
           | own cloud computing. Two is always better than one, right, by
           | ensuring they'll compete with each other.
           | 
           | Another bright idea was to let both projects be managed by
           | large reputable French corporations that everybody trusts.
           | With no software DNA.
           | 
           | How come did both fail?
           | 
           | Edit: One of the largest European provider today, OVH, who
           | existed at the time and was already the leader in France was
           | explicitly left out of both projects... Because the founder
           | is not a guy we can trust you know, he didn't attend the best
           | schools.
        
             | emptysongglass wrote:
             | Scaleway is actually fantastic for what it's worth. You can
             | get extremely cheap K8s clusters and most things a startup
             | would need.
        
               | hbbio wrote:
               | Another private company.
               | 
               | The two heavily subsidized projects were:
               | 
               | - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloudwatt
               | 
               | - https://login.numergy.com/login?service=https%3A%2F%2Fw
               | ww.nu...
               | 
               | For the one still "live", details include French URL
               | names :)
               | 
               |  _Edit: A Google Translate of the home page. Close your
               | eyes, imagine a homepage highlighting the essence of
               | cloud computing_ :
               | 
               | Your Numergy space Access the administration of your
               | virtual machines.
               | 
               | Secure connection Username Password Forgot your password
               | ?
               | 
               | Administration of your VMs Administer your virtual
               | machines in real time, monitor their activity, your
               | bandwidth consumption and the use of your storage spaces.
               | 
               | Changing your personal information Access the customer
               | area and modify your personal information in just a few
               | clicks: surname, first name, address.
               | 
               | Securing your data Remember to change your password
               | regularly to maintain an optimal level of security.
        
             | tough wrote:
             | C'est la vie
             | 
             | Govt=Legal grift
             | 
             | It's the same all over europe mostly, sadly.
             | 
             | We were pioneers in the medieval times, we can follow up
             | the leaders barely now
        
           | v4dok wrote:
           | No consortiums, just subsidize cloud or infra costs only.
        
           | slashdev wrote:
           | Governments that think they can innovate through consortiums.
           | That's either ignorance or pork barrel politics. Either way
           | it's a sad waste of tax payer money.
        
         | seydor wrote:
         | Sure, let's make an EU commercial LLM. Let's start by scraping
         | all the Francophone internet. Then let's remove all the PII
         | data and potentially PII-data. Easy-peasy.
         | 
         | Then let's train our network so as not to spew out or make up
         | PII data - easy peasy
         | 
         | Then let's make it able to delete PII data that it has
         | inadvertedly collected on request. Simultaneously it should be
         | recording all the conversations for safety reasons. that must
         | be possible somehow
         | 
         | And let's make sure it never impersonates or makes up
         | defamatory content - that must be super easy.
         | 
         | And let's make it explain itself. But explain truthfully, by
         | giving an oath, not like ChatGPT that likes making things up.
         | 
         | Looks very doable to me
        
           | raverbashing wrote:
           | The secret is not scraping PII in the first place (which is
           | not really difficult, though it requires some planning)
        
             | seydor wrote:
             | not sure if it can ever be possible. i can ask chatGPT to
             | do stylography analysis on our comments, find our other
             | accounts and go from there. I'm pretty sure most pieces of
             | human-generated data is identifiable at this point
        
               | raverbashing wrote:
               | This is not how it works, (unless of course you're
               | pretending and collecting all these 'auxiliary data' on
               | purpose) and even if it was, there's still plenty of non-
               | PII data around
        
               | seydor wrote:
               | It hasn't been long that someone applied a basic, cosine
               | similarity to HN comments to find alternate accounts. It
               | worked quite well afaik
               | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33755016
        
               | raverbashing wrote:
               | Yes, and?
               | 
               | If you're worried about being identified from alt-
               | accounts you're much more likely to be tracked via reuse
               | of emails or some other information that you have slipped
               | (see multitude of cases)
               | 
               | Simple text is not PII, laws are not interpreted like
               | technical discussions are https://xkcd.com/1494/
        
               | pixl97 wrote:
               | It would be really interesting to raise a human only on
               | non-PII data and see exactly how screwed up and weird
               | they'd be.
               | 
               | The Golem-Class model behaves in a 'humanlike' manner
               | because it's trained on actual real data like we'd
               | experience in the world. What you're suggesting is some
               | insane psychology test that we'd never allow to happen to
               | a human.
        
             | brookst wrote:
             | "Not that difficult"?
             | 
             | Can you elaborate? Because I think it's nearly
             | insurmountable.
             | 
             | Is the sentence "Meagan Smith graduated magma cum laude
             | from Northwestern's business program in 2004" PII? How
             | about if another part of the corpus says "M. Smith had a
             | promising career in business after graduating with honors
             | from a prestigious school, but an unplanned pregnancy
             | caused her to quit her job in 2006"?
             | 
             | Does it matter if it's from fiction? What if the fiction it
             | comes from uses real people? Or if there might be both real
             | and fictional Meagan Smiths?
             | 
             | And how so you process that kind of thing at the scale of
             | billions of documents?
             | 
             | This is a very hard problem, especially at scale.
        
               | raverbashing wrote:
               | Where are you scraping this data from? This is the main
               | question
               | 
               | > "M. Smith had a promising career in business after
               | graduating with honors from a prestigious school, but an
               | unplanned pregnancy caused her to quit her job in 2006"
               | 
               | The main issue is how that statement ended up there in
               | the first place. Even then how many "M. Smith" have
               | studied in prestigious schools? By itself that phrase
               | wouldn't be PII
               | 
               | Now if you have a db entry with "M Smith" and entries for
               | biographical data that's definitely PII
        
           | IMTDb wrote:
           | You forgot that anyone using it must click a button that says
           | that he will not use it for evil purposes. You also must
           | acknowledge that the AI will not track you. These must be
           | separated disclaimers that need to be validated on every
           | prompt. API usage is thus not allowed.
           | 
           | The AI should also make it 100% clear that whatever gets
           | produced is clearly identifiable as coming form an AI. As a
           | consequence; text cannot be produced because it would be
           | trivial to remove the disclaimer. A currently proposed bill
           | indicates that the AI should only be able to produce images
           | in an obscure format with a randomised watermark that covers
           | at least 65% of the pixels of the image. The bill is
           | scheduled for ratification in 2028 and must be signed by 100%
           | of the state members.
           | 
           | Until then, the grant for the development of this world
           | changing AI is on accelerated path ! Teams can fill a 65
           | pages document to have a shot at getting a whole $1 million.
           | 
           | Accenture and Capgemini are working on it.
        
             | revelio wrote:
             | Heh. Also important: anyone can object to the presence of
             | information that mentions them or they created being known
             | to the AI at any time, and if they object within writing
             | you have 3 days to re-train the AI to remove whatever they
             | objected to. If you fail to meet this deadline then you
             | have to pay 10% of your global revenue to the EU Commission
             | and there is no court case or appeal you can file, you just
             | have to pay.
             | 
             | Unless of course you have a legitimate reason for that data
             | to be in the AI, or to reject the privacy request. What is
             | and is not legitimate isn't specified anywhere because it's
             | obvious. If you ask for clarification because you think
             | it's not obvious, you won't be given any because we don't
             | do things that way around here. If you interpret this
             | clause in a way that we later decide makes us look bad,
             | then the definition of "need" and "legitimate" will change
             | at that moment to make us look good.
             | 
             | BTW inability to retrain within three days is not a
             | legitimate reason. Nor is the need to be competitive with
             | US firms. Now here is your 300,000 EUR grant, have fun!
        
           | omneity wrote:
           | BLOOM has been trained on a 3MEUR grant from French research
           | agencies CNRS and GENCI.
           | 
           | Doesn't have any of the constraints you're talking about.
        
             | lhl wrote:
             | BLOOM's training corpus ROOTS did make some efforts at
             | removing PII https://arxiv.org/pdf/2303.03915.pdf btw, but
             | AFAICT that was not at the behest of the French government.
        
           | nickpp wrote:
           | The moment Europe decided to regulate tech, it decided in
           | effect to stagnate. Innovation and creativity are
           | incompatible with regulation. Unfortunately for us, tech is
           | where progress happens currently. Europe is being left
           | behind. Not that it was very competitive in the first place
           | anyway.
        
             | MisterPea wrote:
             | While true, I think they do innovate in policy around it.
             | Regulation is an ever-evolving field as well and they do
             | think about it more.
             | 
             | But yes, in a half-century I'm very curious where Europe
             | will be. India passed the UK in gdp recently and Germany
             | sooner or later.
        
         | truetraveller wrote:
         | [flagged]
        
         | in3d wrote:
         | France paid for Bloom:
         | https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/07/12/1055817/inside-a...
         | 
         | It hasn't been very impressive (undertrained I believe).
        
       | omneity wrote:
       | 4 years ?!?
       | 
       | That's like a century in AI-dog years. Who knows how the world
       | will be by then.
        
         | truetraveller wrote:
         | [flagged]
        
           | pell wrote:
           | I think I've used it so much that a sentence in I assumed it
           | was ChatGPT. It has a certain way of speaking.
        
             | alwayslikethis wrote:
             | I would describe it as unassertive and trying to present
             | things as multifaceted even when they are not.
        
             | tough wrote:
             | Yes, very recognisable, too polite and servicial for any
             | real human
        
               | PartiallyTyped wrote:
               | I am willing to bet that a model finetuned on HN will be
               | the bombastic and arrogant enough to pass just fine. The
               | bullshit is already there.
        
               | tough wrote:
               | I can confirm, you can see the LLM generated cracked news
               | that someone shared a couple days back. LLM generated
               | articles, comments, and the full suite.
               | 
               | It sounded very real even with funny sounding topics lol
               | 
               | https://crackernews.github.io/
        
               | PartiallyTyped wrote:
               | It is indeed cracked up LOL
        
               | omneity wrote:
               | This is so brilliant! But wow. Look at one of the
               | generated comments, self-awareness incoming soon.
               | 
               | > What if we're all just GPT-generated comments in a GPT-
               | generated world, and this is our existence now?
               | 
               | https://crackernews.github.io/comments/startuptechnews.co
               | m-g...
        
               | tough wrote:
               | Hahaha I hadn't read that one.
               | 
               | This made my day too
               | 
               | codeWrangler42 32 minutes ago | parent | next [-]
               | 
               | This is getting out of hand. GPT-10 generating entire
               | startups now? What's next? GPT-20 generating entire
               | planets? reply
               | 
               | devRambler 12 minutes ago | parent | next [-]
               | 
               | I can't wait for GPT-30, it'll solve world hunger by
               | generating perfectly optimized food distribution systems.
               | reply
               | 
               | quantumLeap2023 4 minutes ago | parent | next [-]
               | 
               | GPT-40 will probably just generate an entirely new
               | universe for us to live in. reply
        
             | truetraveller wrote:
             | Why the downvotes? HN is funny...I spent a portion of my
             | life giving HN users a free glimpse of ChatGPT...and I get
             | downvoted + flagged. ChatGPT might actually be more
             | objective, and less passive-aggressive!
        
               | jsnell wrote:
               | AI-generated comments are explicitly forbidden on HN, and
               | should be flagged. See:
               | 
               | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35210503
               | 
               | Everyone has access to ChatGPT, there's no need for you
               | to "give a free glimpse".
        
         | preommr wrote:
         | Is it?
         | 
         | I think the recent release of ChatGPT has skewed perceptions.
         | There's no guarantee that there's going to continue to be as
         | ground breaking shifts that have happened recently with llms
         | and diffusion models.
         | 
         | To continue with the popular comparison, there were a lot of
         | apps when the iphone first launced the app store before it
         | tapered off. If you looked at just the first year, you'd think
         | we'd have an app for every moment of our day.
        
           | omneity wrote:
           | Here's the catch, people are still adapting to GPT tech,
           | still figuring out ways to make use of it, to include it in
           | their workflows, etc.
           | 
           | Social impact of ChatGPT even in its current form is only
           | getting started, it doesn't need to progress at all to be
           | super disruptive. For example, see the frontpage story about
           | the $80/h writer who was replaced by ChatGPT, and that just
           | happened recently, months after ChatGPT's first release.
           | 
           | We (humans) are getting boiled like the proverbial frog.
        
             | wongarsu wrote:
             | But is that because of rapid breakthroughs in tech, or in
             | marketing?
             | 
             | GPT 3 is nearly three years old at this point, and was
             | pretty capable at generating text. GPT 3.5 brought
             | substantial improvements, but is also over a year old.
             | ChatGPT is much newer, but mostly remarkable for the better
             | interface, the extensive "safety" efforts, and for being
             | free (as in beer) and immediately accessible without
             | waitlist and application process. Actual text generated by
             | it isn't much different from GPT 3.5, especially for the
             | type of longform content you hire a $80/h writer for.
             | ChatGPT was just launched in a way that allows people to
             | easily experiment and create hype.
        
               | pixl97 wrote:
               | I'd like you to look at what you just typed in reference
               | to a product like the iPhone that turned Apple into a
               | trillion dollar company. There were smartphones before
               | the iPhone, but the iPhone redefined the market and all
               | phones after that point use it as the reference.
        
               | randomdata wrote:
               | People who made money with their phone had fully adopted
               | Blackberry devices long before the iPhone came around. It
               | may not have been as fun or slick, but when $80/hr. was
               | on the line you weren't exactly going to wait around
               | until something better showed up like the average
               | consumer could.
               | 
               | The parent is right. The success of ChatGPT in business
               | is that it brought awareness of the capabilities of GPT
               | that OpenAI struggled to communicate beforehand. It was a
               | breakthrough in marketing, less so a breakthrough in
               | tech.
        
               | pixl97 wrote:
               | Engineers rarely become billionaires, salespeople do.
               | 
               | You could have the best most magic product on earth and
               | sell one of them versus the person that puts it in a
               | pretty box and lets grandma use it easily.
               | 
               | This is something that many people on HN seemingly have
               | to relearn in every big innovation that comes out.
        
             | ryan93 wrote:
             | GPT4 is really bad at writing. It is noticeably generic.
        
             | highduc wrote:
             | >We (humans) are getting boiled like the proverbial frog.
             | 
             | This is such a primitive way of thinking. It's more of an
             | instinct, where you consider by default that your sole
             | value is in your ability to generate/work. Why the hell are
             | we working for? Isn't it to improve our lives? Or should we
             | improve them up to the point where we still have to work?
             | Why not use the tech itself to find better ways of
             | organizing ourselves, without needing to work so much? UBI
             | and things like that. Why be such limited? Why only develop
             | tech up to the point where we would have to work less but
             | not at all, and who decides where that point is? There's so
             | much wrong in this framework of thinking.
        
           | vasco wrote:
           | Also quality of google search after the first few years
           | didn't meaningfully improve as a user. I'd expect the big
           | ramp up we're in to taper off as well. Once you reach the
           | point where you train a model on the corpus of "the whole
           | internet", that's it, all you can do is incrementally train
           | it. Of course there can be whole new architectures but that's
           | harder to put your eggs in for investing.
        
             | pixl97 wrote:
             | You're forgetting that AI has not been trained on YouTube
             | yet and that's the next big thing. Multi-modality still has
             | a lot of gas left in it.
        
               | Xelynega wrote:
               | I don't think there's enough third world countries to
               | categorize and sanitize a dataset from YouTube. Meta
               | would have to "give internet" to a few more before we can
               | start dreaming that big.
        
               | pixl97 wrote:
               | You've not been paying much attention then... AI is doing
               | a huge amount of classification on it's own these days.
        
         | audunw wrote:
         | AI seems to progress in bursts, and I think we're in the middle
         | of one, but it may be naive to think the progress will continue
         | at the same pace for another 4 years.
         | 
         | When Big Blue beat Kasparov in Chess in 1997, I wonder if
         | anyone would've guessed that it'd take almost 20 years for a
         | computer to beat a master in Go.
         | 
         | IBM Watson was launched in 2010 and had many of the same
         | promises as GPT. It supposedly fell flat in many cases in the
         | real world. I think GPT and other models of the same level can
         | succeed commercially on the same tasks within the next 1-4
         | years, but that shows it can easily be a decade from some kind
         | of demonstration to actual game changing applications.
        
           | simonster wrote:
           | Given the field's record of AI winters, it would be naive to
           | think progress will certainly continue, but given the amount
           | of progress that has been made as well as how it's being
           | made, it would also be naive to think it will certainly not.
           | 
           | The advances that have come in the last few years have been
           | driven first and foremost by compute and secondarily by
           | methodology. The compute can continue to scale for another
           | couple orders of magnitude. It's possible that we'll be
           | bottlenecked by methodology; there are certain things that
           | current networks are simply incapable of, like learning from
           | instructions and incorporating that knowledge into their
           | weights. That said, one of the amazing things about recent
           | successes is that the precise methodology doesn't seem to
           | matter so much. Diffusion is great, but autoregressive image
           | generation models like Parti also generate nice images,
           | albeit at a higher computational cost. RL from human feedback
           | achieves impressive results, but chain of hindsight
           | (supposedly) achieves similar results without RL. It's
           | entirely plausible to me that the remaining challenges on the
           | path to AGI can be solved by obvious ideas + engineering +
           | scaling + data from the internet.
           | 
           | We've also gotten to the point where AI systems can make
           | substantial contributions to engineering more powerful AI
           | systems, and maybe soon, to ideation. We haven't yet figured
           | out how to extract all of the productivity gains from the
           | systems we already have, and next-generation systems will
           | provide larger productivity gains, even if they are just
           | scaled up versions of current-generation systems.
        
           | MattRix wrote:
           | Even if the technology froze at GPT-4 and never advanced, it
           | would still be enough to change the world in all kinds of
           | ways. The fact that the tech is still advancing as well is
           | huge. Also now you're seeing tons of solo devs, startups, and
           | large corporations all coming up with new ways to use AI.
           | This "burst" is not like the others you mentioned.
        
             | TrapLord_Rhodo wrote:
             | Exactly this.
             | 
             | This is a different 'Leap' than the ones before it. It's a
             | leap with an API. Now hundreds of thousands of company's
             | can fine tune it and train it on their specific business
             | task.
             | 
             | parroting your point, it will take years for the true
             | fecundity of the technology in chat GPT 4 to be fully
             | fleshed out.
        
           | deeviant wrote:
           | > AI seems to progress in bursts
           | 
           | Historically yes. Today, no way. It's a sprint and it's not
           | slowing down.
        
             | scotty79 wrote:
             | It's fueled by raw gpus and servers and pretty much nothing
             | else. GPT is pretty much perceptron with some places
             | hardcoded. Resources bound to run out at some point.
        
           | [deleted]
        
       | RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote:
       | What is interesting is that a lot of these models have impressive
       | papers and specs, but when they are released to actual users,
       | they are underwhelming compared to ChatGPT.
       | 
       | Rather than another closed model, I would love for a non-
       | profit/company to push models that can be run on consumer
       | hardware.
       | 
       | The Facebook Llama models are interesting not because they are
       | better than ChatGPT, but that I can run them on my own computer.
        
       | alexb_ wrote:
       | If someone released a chatGPT/characterAI with NSFW content
       | enabled it would eat into a big share of their users (and for
       | characterAI, maybe take all of them). Seriously, look into what
       | people are posting about when it comes to characterAI, and it's
       | 80% "here's how to get around NSFW filters".
       | 
       | Unsure why nobody is taking this very very obvious hole in AI
       | tech.
        
         | nl wrote:
         | It's trivial to fine tune llamma to be NSFW if that's what you
         | want.
         | 
         | But there's an entire universe of much more interesting apps
         | that people don't want NSFW stuff in. That's why most
         | foundation models filter it out.
        
           | cubefox wrote:
           | I don't think that's the reason. You wouldn't get anything
           | "NSFW" if you don't ask/prompt for it.
        
           | alexb_ wrote:
           | Anything involving llamma is not trivial - if I can't do it
           | on my phone through a website, then you shouldn't expect
           | anyone else to be able to do it. If your instructions involve
           | downloading something, or even so much as touching the
           | command line, it makes it a non-starter for 95% of users.
           | 
           | Get something on the level of character.ai and then you can
           | tell me it's "trivial".
        
           | sharemywin wrote:
           | the point is though the market potential is huge. and it
           | would be a way to grow fast with cash flow. as a side effect
           | you would probably develop the best NSFW filter in the world
           | also.
        
             | pixl97 wrote:
             | > way to grow fast with cash flow.
             | 
             | Until the US payment processors cut you off, then you go
             | bankrupt.
        
         | freediver wrote:
         | With so much NSWF on the web, how is NSFW chat with a computer
         | even a thing? Genuinly curious what drives usage there.
        
         | neuronexmachina wrote:
         | I don't see how a competent legal team would ever sign-off on
         | that.
        
         | blazespin wrote:
         | I think there are FTC laws around this maybe.
        
         | mvdwoord wrote:
         | "the VHS of AI"
        
         | xp84 wrote:
         | You're not wrong, but the consumer market for chatbots is
         | (perceived to be) tiny and I think nobody really cares about
         | it. the real money places like openAI are chasing is business
         | money.
        
         | xena wrote:
         | The main reason why companies don't allow NSFW content is
         | because of puritan payment processors that see that stuff and
         | then go absolute sicko mode and lock people out of the
         | traditional finance system.
        
           | cubefox wrote:
           | It is amazing that in the year 2023, where things are
           | possible that were science fiction until recently, we still
           | rely on private payment processors, credit card companies,
           | which extract fees for a service that doesn't have any
           | technical necessity anymore. I think the reason is just
           | inertia. They work well enough in most cases, and the fees
           | aren't so high as to be painful, so there is little pressure
           | to switch to something more modern.
        
             | nemothekid wrote:
             | > _we still rely on private payment processors, credit card
             | companies, which extract fees for a service that doesn 't
             | have any technical necessity anymore_
             | 
             | The technical necessity is there; for your chase-backed
             | visa card to pull money from chase and deposit it into your
             | shop's citibank, there needs to be _some_ infrastructure.
             | Whether a private company or the government provides this
             | infrastructure is another story.
             | 
             | (Although if the government provided you could argue that
             | there would likely be even more political headaches that
             | prevent what goes across the wire).
        
               | tangjurine wrote:
               | Do you have an estimate of the cost of the infrastructure
               | required vs. how much credit card companies charge today?
        
             | Analemma_ wrote:
             | > I think the reason is just inertia.
             | 
             | It is not just inertia; it is government malice. The
             | government _loves_ that there are effectively only two
             | payment processors, because this lets them exercise policy
             | pressure without the inconvenience of a democratic mandate.
        
               | skybrian wrote:
               | Yes, financial companies mostly regulate themselves. They
               | have lawyers telling them what regulators are likely to
               | approve of, and make rules based on that for themselves
               | and their customers. If they do something sufficiently
               | bad, regulators go after them. That's how banks get
               | regulated, too.
               | 
               | That's how most law works, actually. There's a question
               | of how detailed the regulations are, but mostly you don't
               | go to court, and if you do, whether it looks bad to the
               | judge or jury is going to make a difference.
               | 
               | I'm wondering what you're expecting from democracy? More
               | oversight from a bitterly divided and dysfunctional
               | Congress? People voting on financial propositions?
        
               | Karrot_Kream wrote:
               | If entire classes of financial transactions can be
               | blocked through backroom conversations between financial
               | companies and regulators, don't you think that's bad for
               | democracy? We have laws which allow the US to tackle
               | money laundering issues and it's understandable that
               | regulators would create regulations along those laws;
               | they have a clear mandate to. It's not clear to me that
               | other classes of transaction should be blocked based on
               | amorphous dealings with regulators and companies.
        
             | andsoitis wrote:
             | > switch to something more modern
             | 
             | such as?
        
               | programmer_dude wrote:
               | Unified payments interface: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wi
               | ki/Unified_Payments_Interface
        
               | cubefox wrote:
               | Wow, this seems to be just what I meant. Unfortunately it
               | appears it is so far only widely supported by Indian
               | banks. (In Germany there is a similar system, called
               | GiroPay, but it hasn't really caught on yet. And it isn't
               | even intended as an international solution.)
        
               | kranke155 wrote:
               | Crypto obviously solved this. If you remove the
               | speculation idiocy that surrounds it, yes crypto does
               | work as an anti-censorship currency.
               | 
               | Someone is going to mention flashbots or something. "See
               | this specific example proves..."
        
               | cubefox wrote:
               | The main selling point to online shops would have to be a
               | substantial reduction in fees compared to credit cards /
               | PayPal. Most shops don't care about censorship since they
               | wouldn't be affected anyway.
        
               | cubefox wrote:
               | I would be very surprised if something based on
               | Blockchain or similar software doesn't offer a solution
               | here. Another route would be to establish a protocol for
               | near instantaneous bank transfers, and try to get a lot
               | of banks on board. The immediacy of transfers seems to be
               | the main reason why companies use credit card services,
               | not buyer protection or actual credit.
        
               | [deleted]
        
               | Gasp0de wrote:
               | PayPal?
        
               | cubefox wrote:
               | No PayPal is basically a credit card company. It is an
               | intermediary which gives short credits in order to
               | achieve near instantaneous payments. And extracts fees
               | along the way.
        
               | phatfish wrote:
               | There is a system called Faster Payments in the UK, which
               | is "near instantaneous" between the UK banks which
               | participate (most of them offering current accounts as
               | far as i know).
               | 
               | But it is a permanent and final transfer, no easy charge
               | backs like with a credit card, or fraud protection from
               | debit cards.
               | 
               | You have to know which account you are paying into (sort
               | code and account number), which is the main part of what
               | Visa/Mastercard do. They are the layer in front of the
               | bank account which means customers don't have to send
               | money directly to an account.
               | 
               | I suppose now everyone has a smart phone it would be
               | easier to hook up something like Faster Payments in a
               | user friendly way with an app and a QR code/NFC reader
               | that the merchant has. But Visa/Mastercard are entrenched
               | obviously.
        
               | ChadNauseam wrote:
               | > I would be very surprised if something based on
               | Blockchain or similar software doesn't offer a solution
               | here.
               | 
               | There is, it's a layer-2 on Ethereum called zkSync. It's
               | not totally satisfactory (the company that makes it can
               | steal your money, centralized sequencer, etc), but it's
               | pretty mature and works quite well. To replace Visa you
               | want high throughput and low latency and zk-rollups like
               | zkSync can provide both. (There are other options too,
               | like Starknet, but AFAIK zkSync is the most mature.)
        
               | internetter wrote:
               | [flagged]
        
               | xpe wrote:
               | I have no particular love of legacy systems (whether they
               | be banks, imperialism, or Electoral Colleges), but what
               | about your comment is plausible given the widespread
               | recognition that blockchain technologies have been
               | oversold, leading to widespread fraud and failure?
               | 
               | Maybe I'm missing something, but the above comment
               | reminds me of the blockchain naivete of 10 years ago. I
               | don't mean to be dismissive; I'm suspending disbelief
               | long enough to ask what you mean in detail.
        
               | Karrot_Kream wrote:
               | There are permissioned "blockchains" which are just
               | private ledgers, that banks could use with permission
               | from the US gov't. These can be anything from a centrally
               | run DB with ACLs or something like Hyperledger with
               | permissioned P2P access. Whether you call it a blockchain
               | or a DB with ACLs is immaterial; it's still much cheaper,
               | faster, and pleasant to use this system over the current
               | system of complex intermediaries in the US. Europe seems
               | to have solved this problem with SWIFT.
        
               | cubefox wrote:
               | This is possible, and I don't have any deeper knowledge
               | of cryptocurrencies / Blockchain. But payment systems
               | don't seem to have a necessary connection to speculation
               | and the high volatility which comes with holding a
               | cryptocurrency. Maybe I overestimate the amount of
               | problems those payment systems can solve.
        
               | worik wrote:
               | How long does it take before someone says "Blockchain"
               | 
               | Still faith in magic on HN
        
               | xpe wrote:
               | > The immediacy of transfers seems to be the main reason
               | why companies use credit card services, not buyer
               | protection or actual credit.
               | 
               | I think the above is quite wrong (with moderate
               | confidence). Is the above claim consistent with survey
               | data? It is my understanding that:
               | 
               | 1. companies care a _lot_ about risk reduction. This
               | includes protection from chargebacks.
               | 
               | 2. companies benefit when customers have credit: it
               | enables more spending and can smooth out ups and downs in
               | individual purchasing ability
               | 
               | 3. Yes, quick transfers matter, but not in isolation from
               | the above two.
        
               | cubefox wrote:
               | Well, chargebacks are not possible for ordinary bank
               | transfers. The problem is that the they are too slow and
               | not convenient enough. This is a software /
               | standardization issue. Credit: PayPal is successful
               | despite it only offering very short credits in order to
               | ensure quick transfers. And in physical shops credit
               | cards often seem to be no more than a convenient way to
               | pay without cash. In Germany you can actually pay in all
               | shops and restaurants with a form of debit card, which is
               | just as convenient as paying with credit cards, but has
               | less fees for the shop, since there is no credit card
               | company in the middle. As a result most people don't own
               | a credit card. This doesn't work so well online though.
        
             | dan-robertson wrote:
             | I think companies accept credit card payments because
             | that's what their customers want and companies want to get
             | paid.
        
               | msm_ wrote:
               | And conversely: For online payments, credit card payments
               | are my least preferred method. But I still use them quite
               | often, because everyone accepts them.
        
               | cubefox wrote:
               | Yes, the current system is a good-enough solution, and
               | any better alternative has to be not just better but so
               | much better that it is worth the large cost of switching
               | to a different solution. Game theoretically, it's an
               | "inadequate equilibrium".
        
           | addisonl wrote:
           | I don't buy this, if this was the reason then paid porn
           | couldn't exist, and we know that's not the case.
        
           | gear54rus wrote:
           | This comment right here can be shown to snobs who still
           | denounce crypto btw
        
             | xena wrote:
             | Taking all payment in Ethereum doesn't matter when you have
             | to pay for servers and domain names in fiat.
        
               | gear54rus wrote:
               | Lots of work on that front no doubt, and not only wrt
               | domains
        
               | Rufbdbskrufb473 wrote:
               | Servers and domains are one of the easiest things to buy
               | with crypto.
               | 
               | I actually just migrated away from Hetzner last week (for
               | unrelated reasons) to two new providers to whom I'm
               | paying crypto (no KYC required) based on this list:
               | https://bitcoin-vps.com/
        
               | sharemywin wrote:
               | would be nice if you could pay in your own token.
        
             | mschild wrote:
             | This is not an argument for crypto, it's an argument for
             | better regulations so that processors don't make up their
             | own rules.
        
               | robertlagrant wrote:
               | > This is not an argument for crypto, it's an argument
               | for better regulations so that processors don't make up
               | their own rules.
               | 
               | Better (which I assume is your euphemism for "more")
               | regulation isn't neceesarily the answer, or even
               | particularly the answer. Do you want to force payment
               | processors to do work they don't want to do? Isn't there
               | a word for that?
        
               | psychlops wrote:
               | Authoritarian solutions are very attractive today.
        
               | mschild wrote:
               | Reasonably regulating payment processors is far from
               | authoritarian.
               | 
               | If you are on a scale like Visa and MasterCard you're not
               | just any private company anymore. Just those 2 companies
               | control well over 75% of the US market alone. Not having
               | access to a debit/credit card today will effectively
               | block you from taking part in many aspects of modern
               | life. It's absolutely reasonable to place stipulations on
               | what they can and cannot do.
        
               | robertlagrant wrote:
               | In what sense do they control the market?
        
               | psychlops wrote:
               | I don't disagree with your objective, it's the path you
               | are taking to get there. Legislating obedience is
               | authoritarian and is solution that many people love due
               | to its simplicity.
               | 
               | Regulators love working with large businesses like your
               | card duopoly, I don't think you will see much
               | improvement.
        
               | mschild wrote:
               | Not necessarily more. Better in this context means
               | clearer and enforced.
               | 
               | PayPal is the prime example where it's operating very
               | similar to a bank. You have an account with a balance and
               | can send and receive money, but it doesn't see itself as
               | a bank and in many countries doesn't have a bank license.
               | At least in part this is done to avoid the regulatory
               | work that comes with it.
               | 
               | I absolutely want to force payment processors to do work
               | they don't want to do. For example, banks in Germany are
               | forced to provide you with a basic bank account
               | regardless whether they want to or not. That's because a
               | bank account is simply a must have to take part in modern
               | life. If PayPal decides it doesn't want to do business
               | with you, for whatever arbitrary reason, you are
               | effectively locked out of a lot of online stores that
               | only accept PayPal as a payment method. There is plenty
               | of examples of PayPals really sketchy behaviour online.
               | Every few months you can even see complaints on HN about
               | it.
        
               | robertlagrant wrote:
               | > it's operating very similar to a bank
               | 
               | We might be talking at cross purposes; I'm not sure! How
               | is it like a bank?
        
               | mschild wrote:
               | PayPal offers you a virtual account that you can pay
               | money into. You can use that money to make purchases
               | online, send and receive money from friends or other
               | businesses. In effect, it acts like a bank account.
               | However, it's not an actual bank account. In Europe, any
               | money you put into that account is also not ensured by
               | the government, like a normal account would.
               | 
               | If I pay with a credit card, there are processes in place
               | to deal with fraud and charge backs. PayPal is well known
               | to automatically close accounts with little recourse to
               | access the money on those accounts.
               | 
               | They should absolutely be regulated.
        
               | worik wrote:
               | I agree they should be regulated
               | 
               | But they are nothing like a bank
               | 
               | The feature of a bank is credit creation. Lending more
               | money than they hold.
               | 
               | Unless I missed some news PayPal does not do that
        
               | layer8 wrote:
               | > Do you want to force payment processors to do work they
               | don't want to do? Isn't there a word for that?
               | 
               | Public utility. That's what payment processors are at
               | this point, and they should be regulated as such.
        
               | robertlagrant wrote:
               | If we think there's no more innovation to be had then
               | this could happen, but I'm not sure that's the case.
        
               | gear54rus wrote:
               | Well you can wait a lifetime or you can take control away
               | from them with a couple clicks. The choice is obvious.
        
               | JohnFen wrote:
               | As a rule of thumb, whenever anyone says "the choice is
               | obvious", the choice they're talking about is usually far
               | from obvious.
        
             | sharemywin wrote:
             | crypto + NSFW generative AI = ????
             | 
             | that's not going to lead to a whole lot of black market
             | images.
        
               | xp84 wrote:
               | It certainly stretches the bounds of reason for me that
               | you could put a person in an isolation chamber with a
               | powerful computer with no network connection, and after
               | they type a few words into it, if the output of the
               | computer has certain qualities, they are now a felon and
               | the output is illegal to possess.
               | 
               | But this seems like the world the "AI-regulators" seem to
               | want.
        
               | sharemywin wrote:
               | you don't think it would be problematic for someone to
               | create deep fake images of some ones kids in explicit
               | sexual positions?
               | 
               | I certainly think if the parents found out about it and
               | the law wouldn't do anything about it the parents would
               | take the law into their own hands.
               | 
               | I'm sorry if this wasn't phrased very well. I just didn't
               | know how else to make my point with out be very specific.
        
               | alexb_ wrote:
               | That's already illegal - you're using someone's image and
               | likeness in a way they did not approve of.
        
           | boeingUH60 wrote:
           | It's because NSFW content has higher risks of chargeback and
           | fraud (there's a reason their payment processors charge
           | 20%+). Besides, companies don't want to be on the bad side of
           | outrage; it only takes one mistake of processing a payment
           | for child pornography and your name will be plastered
           | everywhere as a child porn enabler.
           | 
           | Do you really think the execs at Visa and Mastercard are
           | puritans and not profiteering capitalists that will process
           | payments for NSFW content if they were able to?
        
             | ActorNightly wrote:
             | Nothing to do with outrage.
             | 
             | Everything to do with one politician essentially getting
             | their way by targeting a payment processor with legal shit
             | concerning potential enablement of CP/CT. Nobody wants that
             | kind of attention.
        
             | nickpp wrote:
             | The whole US society seems more puritan while more
             | capitalist at the same time, seen from this side of the
             | pond. It's a paradox I can't really explain, any clues?
        
               | robertlagrant wrote:
               | You're conflating capitalism and greed. Plenty of greedy
               | people in non-capitalist systems.
        
               | [deleted]
        
               | nickpp wrote:
               | > Plenty of greedy people in non-capitalist systems.
               | 
               | Totally agreed. But I am not placing any moral value on
               | either greed or capitalism. I would think, however, that
               | capitalists would not ignore such an obvious profit
               | center as the sex industry. Thus my bafflement.
        
               | cowl wrote:
               | What you missing is that by chosing this obvious profit
               | center they risk a much larger profit center because the
               | backlash. It's not a moral thing, it's a calculated
               | choice. That's why who takes this risks also charges a
               | much higher fee to make up for the opprtunity cost in
               | other areas.
        
               | worik wrote:
               | > But I am not placing any moral value on either greed or
               | capitalism
               | 
               | That is a missed opportunity
               | 
               | * Capitalism: A system where who owns resources matters
               | more tan who needs them is a morally bankrupt system. A
               | system where starvation and homelessness is an acceptable
               | outcome
               | 
               | * Greed. Greed is bad for everybody. Concentrates scarce
               | resources where they are not needed, that too is moral
               | bankruptcy
        
               | nickpp wrote:
               | Funny enough my country was starving under communism but
               | we are living in plenty under capitalism. Since I lived
               | under the alternative and I have seen its evilness, I
               | will take capitalism any day - the very system that
               | allowed and incentivized us to create those resources you
               | are eyeing in the first place.
               | 
               | As for greed, I have yet to meet a person more greedy
               | than the ones claiming to know where to direct those
               | scarce resources they did not create, if only we'd give
               | them the power to do so. Such high morals too, unlike
               | those "morally bankrupt" capitalists who built
               | businesses, jobs, countless goods and services to only
               | enslave us and enrich themselves, obviously.
        
               | robertlagrant wrote:
               | > I would think, however, that capitalists would not
               | ignore such an obvious profit center as the sex industry
               | 
               | Because you're conflating capitalism and greed.
               | Capitalism doesn't mean "do anything for money". It means
               | "as much as possible, people get to decide among
               | themselves how to allocate their money and time". Some of
               | them will invest in anything, just as people in non-
               | capitalist countries. Most will only invest in certain
               | things.
        
               | nickpp wrote:
               | But look at how investment in weed, which was once
               | considered "drugs == bad", flourished after legalization,
               | with ETFs and such. Lots of sex work, including porn, is
               | legal afaik. However banks and other civilian gate
               | holders (Apple AppStore, etc) keep stifling investment in
               | it.
        
               | JohnFen wrote:
               | > Capitalism doesn't mean "do anything for money".
               | 
               | In the abstract, perhaps not. The way it exists in the
               | US, though, it means exactly that.
        
               | nickpp wrote:
               | This very thread is exactly about how, in US, it doesn't.
        
               | realfeel78 wrote:
               | You aren't paying attention:
               | 
               | https://www.wired.com/story/twitter-porn-block-germany-
               | age-v...
        
               | edgyquant wrote:
               | US society isn't some anti-sex dystopia. Its average
               | compared to the rest of the world, It's just Europe that
               | is super pro-nudity etc and projects. Like everything
               | else they think they are objectively right in their
               | beliefs and systems.
        
               | nickpp wrote:
               | Not allowing sex apps on AppStores and banks and credit
               | cards refusing to process sex-related transactions seems
               | pretty anti-sex to me.
               | 
               | Also getting all bent out of shape at a the image of a
               | nipple, breast or pubic hair while not batting an eye at
               | a person dying in evening TV movies seem a bit
               | unbalanced.
        
               | JohnFen wrote:
               | > US society isn't some anti-sex dystopia
               | 
               | Not a dystopia, but certainly US society has, shall we
               | say, a very strange and complicated relationship with sex
               | and nudity.
        
               | dpflan wrote:
               | Perhaps it's as easy as "ethics and laws are not the same
               | thing". One can profit either way, but unethical
               | profiteering may not be prevented by a law.
        
             | worik wrote:
             | > Do you really think the execs at Visa and Mastercard are
             | puritans and not profiteering capitalists...?
             | 
             | Yes, "and"
        
             | drexlspivey wrote:
             | > Do you really think the execs at Visa and Mastercard are
             | puritans and not profiteering capitalists that will process
             | payments for NSFW content if they were able to?
             | 
             | Pornhub was blocked by Visa and Mastercard after an op-ed
             | in NYT generated a lot of outrage
        
           | dpkirchner wrote:
           | I think it's equally likely that they just don't want their
           | product to be known as "the porn bot".
        
             | speed_spread wrote:
             | Why not? As long as it's not official. Bing was/is known as
             | "the porn search engine" which never seemed to bother
             | Microsoft.
        
               | dpkirchner wrote:
               | I think the difference is that OpenAI wants to sell their
               | text generation services to big companies that will show
               | AI content directly on their platforms (think chat
               | support bots), whereas Bing is selling eyeballs to
               | advertisers (who also don't want their ads shown
               | alongside porn by the by).
               | 
               | If OpenAI has the reputation of serving up porn to
               | whoever asks, there's no way the Walmarts of the world
               | will sign up.
        
           | bobbyi wrote:
           | It's also because the companies are backed by VCs. VCs get
           | their money from limited partners like pension funds who
           | don't want their money invested in porn.
        
         | comboy wrote:
         | What's with the NSFW need? I'd understand if this is some image
         | generator, but here? Is it some sexting, "romance", or is NSFW
         | about something else altogether?
        
           | kmeisthax wrote:
           | A _very large_ subset of the people using generative AI are
           | people using it for porn. And the people who make those AI
           | models do not want them being used for porn.
           | 
           | Porn and AI is... problematic. Do you remember deepfakes? And
           | how people used them first and foremost to swap other
           | people's heads onto porn actors for the purpose of blackmail
           | and harassment? Yeah. They don't want a repeat of that.
           | Society has very specific demands of the people who make porn
           | - i.e. that everyone involved is a consenting adult. AI does
           | not care about age or consent.
        
           | ttul wrote:
           | Anything that drives the dopamine cycle is of interest to
           | humans. Sex in all its forms is pretty motivating.
        
           | GalahiSimtam wrote:
           | Per description of a certain item in Fallout 2, "if you need
           | to ask, you don't want to know".
           | 
           | UPDATE:
           | 
           | while fanfiction might be behind this vocal minority, there
           | could be other uses of LLMs, for example translation
           | 
           | I don't go as far as "gender-swapping", because GPT4 swaps a
           | man on a beach wearing only beach shorts for a woman wearing
           | only beach shorts
        
           | RobertDeNiro wrote:
           | Fanfiction. It is a huge deal to some people. Many prefer
           | reading stories over watching porn, and we all know how big
           | of a market pornography is.
        
             | cubefox wrote:
             | I wonder whether this actually an area where many women
             | would push for, who have usually a much weaker interest in
             | (visual) pornography.
        
           | cubefox wrote:
           | ChatGPT refuses to write erotic fan fiction.
           | 
           | Related: I still remember when I used GPT-3 (davinci in the
           | OpenAI playground) for the first time a few years ago. The
           | examples were absolutely mind blowing, and I wanted it to
           | generate something which would surprise me. So I tried a
           | prompt which went something like
           | 
           | > Mike peeked around the corner. He couldn't believe his
           | eyes.
           | 
           | GPT-3 continued with something like
           | 
           | > In the dimly lit room, Vanessa sat on the bed. She wore
           | nothing but a sheer nightgown. She looked at him and
           | 
           | Etc. I think I laughed out loud at the time, because I
           | probably expected ghosts or aliens more than a steamy story,
           | though of course in retrospect it makes total sense. I wanted
           | it to produce something surprising, and it delivered.
        
         | world2vec wrote:
         | If you check /g/ on 4chan (NSFW!!!) you'll see multiple threads
         | on LLMs and LLM-driven chatbots for such content.
         | 
         | Already quite advanced topic these days, all kinds of servers,
         | locally run models, tips & tricks discussions, people sharing
         | their prompts and "recipes", and so on.
         | 
         | It's a whole new world out there but I am not sure if such
         | niche (albeit a potentially really big one, see pr0n sites for
         | example) is worth all the liability issues these big AI
         | companies might face (puritan/queasy payment processors,
         | parental controls, NSFW content potentially blocking some
         | enterprise access, etc, etc). But it will probably all be
         | captured by one or two companies that will specialize in such
         | "sexy" chatbots. Doubt it will be OpenAI and Anthropic, they
         | have their sights on "world domination".
        
         | atleastoptimal wrote:
         | Someday it will have to happen. There is just too much demand.
        
         | flangola7 wrote:
         | At least for AI image generators it is a giant liability. As of
         | two years ago AI-generated CSAM that is indistinguishable from
         | original photographic CSAM is considered equally criminal. If
         | users can spawn severely illegal content at will using your
         | product you will find yourself in a boiling cauldron 30 seconds
         | after going live.
         | 
         | Stable diffusion no longer uses even adult NSFW material for
         | the training dataset because the model is too good at
         | extrapolating. There are very few pictures of iguanas wearing
         | army uniforms, but it has seen lots of iguanas and lots of
         | uniforms and is able to skillfully combine them. Unfortunately
         | the same is true for NSFW pictures of adults and SFW pictures
         | of children.
        
           | neuronexmachina wrote:
           | Yep. No sane company wants to deal with the legal and PR
           | nightmare of their product being used to generate realistic
           | CSAM based on a child star and/or photos taken in public of
           | some random person's kid.
        
           | cubefox wrote:
           | I realize this is a highly taboo topic, but I think there are
           | studies which suggest that access to (traditional)
           | pornography reduces frequency of rape. So maybe Stable
           | Diffusion could actually reduce the rate of abuse?
           | (Disclaimer: I know nothing about the empirical research
           | here, I just say the right answer isn't obvious.)
           | 
           | Edit: It seems also that language models are a very different
           | topics, since they block any erotic writing outright.
        
       | qikInNdOutReply wrote:
       | If its THE exponential curve of AGI, every day not invested, will
       | result in years behind in a few months. So these are rather small
       | investments, but still bigger then the "to little to late" of the
       | european union.
       | 
       | Its not very visual or intuitive, but in some games, were the
       | resource curve is exponential, small early headstarts become
       | whole armies, were the opponent fields none in very short time.
       | 
       | Especially as AGI is expected to be a multiplicator on alot of
       | other sectors. All those breakthroughs, could become daily
       | occurances, created by a AGI on schedule. It could really become
       | one country that glows, and the rest of the planet falling
       | eternally behind.
        
         | jprete wrote:
         | In the real world there aren't any actual exponential curves,
         | they're all sigmoids where the observer doesn't see the
         | slowdown yet.
        
           | pixl97 wrote:
           | Right, and this is why human intelligence didn't dominate the
           | planet and why the animals quickly caught up and stopped
           | humans from driving so many species extinct....
           | 
           | If you don't know the formula for the equation and the values
           | plugged in, then you like me, have no idea where the curve
           | levels off at.
        
         | dfjklseldklk wrote:
         | This assumes that you can't steal information to catch up
         | quickly, or that progress made isn't easy to copy once it's
         | obvious that it works.
         | 
         | A big part of why chatgpt is a big deal is that it shows that
         | the overall approach is worth pursuing. Throwing stupid numbers
         | of GPUs at a problem you don't know will be solvable is hard to
         | justify. It's easy to throw money at a problem you know is
         | solvable.
         | 
         | Nuclear weapons are the prime example of this: Russia caught up
         | both by stealing information and just by knowing fission was
         | possible/feasible as an explosive.
        
         | meindnoch wrote:
         | I'm afraid you've read too much LessWrong fanfic.
        
         | ethbr0 wrote:
         | The real limiting factor of AGI is not going to be AGI -- it's
         | going to be everything else.
         | 
         | Digitization of the last mile (instrumentation, feedback),
         | local networking, local compute, business familiarity with
         | technology, standardized processes, regulatory environment,
         | etc.
         | 
         | AGI will happen when it happens.
         | 
         | But if it happens and an economy doesn't have all the enabling
         | prerequisites, it's not going to have time to develop them,
         | because those are years-long migration and integration efforts.
         | 
         | Which doesn't bode well for AGI + developing economies.
        
           | jasfi wrote:
           | It's already here, it's just weak.
        
           | wongarsu wrote:
           | > AGI + developing economies
           | 
           | I wouldn't be so sure about that because of the Region Beta
           | paradox. Developed countries have processes that work, making
           | all of them digital and connected is often a bigger uphill
           | battle than starting from zero and doing it right the first
           | time.
           | 
           | See also communication infrastructure in developing
           | economies. It's often much easier to get good internet
           | connection (in reasonably populated areas) if there is no
           | 100-year-old copper infrastructure around that is "good
           | enough" for many.
        
             | ethbr0 wrote:
             | Fair point!
             | 
             | On the one hand, I'd say developed countries are much
             | farther along in digitizing (as part of efficiency
             | optimization) their processes. Mostly by virtue that their
             | companies are essentially management/orchestration
             | processes on top of subcontracted manufacturing.
             | 
             | On the other hand, it gives developing countries an
             | opportunity to skip the legacy step and go right to the
             | state of the art.
             | 
             | I'm still skeptical the latter will dominate though.
             | 
             | I'd assume most of the developing world is still operating
             | "good enough to work" processes, which are largely manual.
             | Digitizing those processes will be a nightmare, because it
             | plays out on organizational-political timespans.
        
       | rsp1984 wrote:
       | AI models are in a race to the bottom and everybody inside
       | Anthropic knows it. Besides OpenAI, with billions to spend plus a
       | partnership with MS, there's also Google, Apple, Meta and Amazon
       | who can afford to run losses on AI for years without blinking an
       | eye.
       | 
       | And if that wasn't enough the Open Source world is releasing new
       | models almost weekly now, for free.
       | 
       | Anthropic is putting on a big show to convince gullible investors
       | that there's money to be made with foundational models. There's
       | not. I expect a big chunk of the raised money to go out the door
       | in secondary sales and inflated compensations. Great if you're
       | working at Anthropic. Not great for investors.
        
         | nr2x wrote:
         | The smart move could be an open-core approach. Release the
         | models, but have the best engineering stack to run the APIs as
         | a service.
        
         | OscarTheGrinch wrote:
         | Ahh the old Lyft / Avis strat.
        
         | rvz wrote:
         | Correct. Stability.ai (Stable Diffusion), Apple (Won't be
         | surprising to see them announce on-device LLMs with Apple
         | Silicon support), Meta (LLaMa), etc are already at the bottom
         | and at the finish line with their AI models given for free.
         | 
         | OpenAI.com will eventually have to raise their prices which is
         | bad news for businesses not making enough money and still are
         | sitting on their APIs as OpenAI.com themselves are running up
         | huge costs for their AI models in the cloud for inferencing.
         | 
         | Anthropic is just waiting to be acquired by big tech and the
         | consolidation games will start again.
        
           | truetraveller wrote:
           | Aside: I love the OpenAI.com thing. I got caught off guard at
           | least twice!
        
             | iandanforth wrote:
             | Wow I didn't know ai.com redirects to chat.openai.com. How
             | long has it been doing that?
        
               | dontwearitout wrote:
               | It's fairly recent, I think I saw an article here on
               | their purchase of the domain for a few million
        
           | dmix wrote:
           | This sort of hand wavy generalizations about such a broad and
           | ill defined market seems very naive/closed minded.
           | 
           | If you're quabbling over how much OpenAI charges for an API
           | today that barely just launched and from which we have barely
           | scraped the surface for applications... I don't know that
           | seems like a failure to think broadly and assumes the market
           | today is what it will look like in 5yrs.
           | 
           | There could be a ton of lucrative businesses which subsidize
           | those operating costs. It doesn't have to be a mega-company
           | like Google that floats it indefinitely off their ad
           | business, or whatever other scheme. We have no idea what the
           | value of those APIs are or if the API is the real business
           | they (and others) are going to be relying on in the long
           | term.
        
           | sebzim4500 wrote:
           | >OpenAI.com will eventually have to raise their prices which
           | is bad news for businesses not making enough money and still
           | are sitting on their APIs as OpenAI.com themselves are
           | running up huge costs for their AI models in the cloud for
           | inferencing.
           | 
           | Do you have data supporting this or is it just speculation?
           | Given we don't even know how many parameters GPT-3.5 and
           | GPT-4 have, yet alone how efficiently they are implemented, I
           | don't see how we can go about coming up with an accurate
           | estimate for the cost per token.
        
         | naillo wrote:
         | The counter argument is that it's a growing market where any
         | early entrants will be lifted with the tide and can probably
         | yield enough profit from spillover hype for investors to make
         | their investments back.
        
           | dmix wrote:
           | Plus first-mover advantage has consistently shown to not be a
           | legitimate strategy as there are a ton of cases where the
           | first winner gets taken over by a new entrant once the market
           | matures (Friendster being the classic example). Often the
           | later companies learn from the mistakes of the first play.
           | 
           | R&D heavy markets might have some different characteristics
           | but it's still way too early to say with AI.
        
           | brookst wrote:
           | That's an argument, but I don't buy it. Models are a
           | commodity. You don't get VC valuations and returns from
           | raising $5B for a grain startup.
           | 
           | The application of AI to business problems will be lucrative,
           | but the models are just a tool and the money will come from
           | the domain-specific data (i.e. user and business data), which
           | Microsoft, Google, and even Meta are positioned for. Having a
           | slightly better model but no customer data or domain
           | expertise doesn't seem like a great recipe.
           | 
           | Then again it's AI, so there's more uncertainty than the
           | commodity market. Maybe Anthropic will surprise and I'll be
           | as wrong about this as I was about OS/2 being the future. But
           | I'm very skeptical.
        
             | jerrre wrote:
             | I don't think the grain market is growing as fast as the AI
             | market
        
               | aunty_helen wrote:
               | Don't confuse the ai market with the foundational llm
               | model market.
               | 
               | Think of LLMs as the understanding component in the
               | brain, once you can understand instructions and what
               | actions need to happen from those instruction you're
               | done.
               | 
               | The rest is integrations, the arms legs and eyes of
               | langchain. Then memory and knowledge from semantic
               | search, vector databases and input token limits.
        
           | ninkendo wrote:
           | > can probably yield enough profit from spillover hype for
           | investors to make their investments back.
           | 
           | The correct term for this is "pyramid scheme".
        
             | naillo wrote:
             | Nope
        
             | mc32 wrote:
             | No, this is more "everyone is selling X, let's get in the
             | business of X". On the other hand, yes, some will miss the
             | boat and lose money.
        
               | ninkendo wrote:
               | I interpreted "spillover hype" as meaning "more investors
               | coming in in future rounds" (ie pyramid scheme), but it's
               | possible that's not what the commenter intended.
               | 
               | But if early investors only profit due to late investors
               | pouring money in, that's by definition a pyramid scheme.
        
           | seydor wrote:
           | I can already run gpt4xalpaca on my PC, a model that is not-
           | bad-at-all and is completely uncensored (i.e. does things
           | that chatGPT can't do). I think it's true that LLMs are
           | racing to the bottom and will be even more once they can fit
           | as a peripheral to every computer. whoever is investing in
           | this to monopolize has not thought it through
        
             | wokwokwok wrote:
             | It's astonishing to me that people seem to believe the
             | llama models are "just as good" as the large models these
             | companies are building, and most people are only using the
             | 7B model, because that's all their hardware can support.
             | 
             | ...I mean, "not-bad-at-all" depends on your context. For
             | doing mean real work (ie. not porn or spam) these tiny
             | models suck.
             | 
             | Yup, even the refined ones with the "good training data".
             | They're toys. Llama is a toy. The 7B model, _specifically_.
             | 
             | ...and even if it weren't, these companies can just take
             | any open source model and host it on their APIs. You'll
             | notice that isn't happening. That's because most of the
             | open models are orders of magnitude less useful than the
             | closed source ones.
             | 
             | So, what do want, as an investor?
             | 
             | To be part of some gimp-like open source AI? Or spend
             | millions and bet you can sell it B2B for crazy license
             | fees?
             | 
             | ...because, I'm telling you right now; these open source
             | models, do not cut it for B2B use cases, even if you ignore
             | the license issues.
        
               | visarga wrote:
               | You know what I believe is also a toy model? chatGPT
               | Turbo, you can tell by the speed of generation. And it
               | works quite well, so small size is not an impediment. I
               | expect there will be an open model on the level of
               | chatGPT by the end of the year because suddenly there are
               | lots of interested parties and investors.
               | 
               | Eventually there will be a good enough model for most
               | personal uses, our personal AI OS. When that happens
               | there is a big chance advertising is going to be in a
               | rough spot - personal agents can filter out anything from
               | ads to spam and malware. Google better find another
               | revenue source soon.
               | 
               | But OpenAI and other high-end LLM providers have a
               | problem - the better these open source models become, the
               | more market they cut underneath them. Everything open
               | source models can do becomes "free". The best example is
               | Dall-E vs Stable Diffusion. By the next year they will
               | only be able to sell GPT4 and 5. AI will become a
               | commodity soon, OpenAI won't be able to gate-keep for too
               | long. Prices will hit rock bottom.
        
               | pyth0 wrote:
               | > I expect there will be an open model on the level of
               | chatGPT by the end of the year because suddenly there are
               | lots of interested parties and investors.
               | 
               | I really don't think you understand just how absurdly
               | high the cost is to train models of this size (which we
               | still don't know for sure anyways). I struggle to see
               | what entity could afford to do this and release it as no
               | cost. That doesn't even touch on the fact that even with
               | unlimited money, OpenAI is still quite far ahead.
        
               | visarga wrote:
               | Still cheaper than a plane, a ship or a power plant, and
               | there are thousands of those.
        
               | [deleted]
        
               | seydor wrote:
               | gpt4xalpaca is 13B
        
               | fauxpause_ wrote:
               | [flagged]
        
             | f6v wrote:
             | > I can already run gpt4xalpaca on my PC
             | 
             | You can also run your stack on a single VPS instead of
             | cloud, gimp instead of photoshop, open street maps instead
             | of Google maps, etc.
             | 
             | There will always be companies who can benefit from a
             | technology, but want it as a service. In addition, there
             | will be a lot fine-tuning of LLMs for the the specific use
             | case. It looks like OpenAI is focusing a lot on
             | incorporating feedback into their product. That's something
             | you won't get with open-source models.
        
             | ethbr0 wrote:
             | This is a repeat of the early GPU era.
             | 
             | It's not the software or hardware that will "win" the race,
             | it's who delivers the packaged end user capability (or
             | centralizes and grabs most of the value along the chain).
             | 
             | And end user capability is comprised of hardware + software
             | + connectivity + standardized APIs for building software on
             | top + integration into existing systems.
             | 
             | If I were Nvidia, I'd be smiling. They've been here before.
        
               | ttul wrote:
               | Nvidia: just as the sun starts setting on crypto mining,
               | the foundation model boom begins. And in the background
               | of it all, gaming grows without end.
        
               | ethbr0 wrote:
               | If you've got a choice, sail your ship on a rising tide!
               | And if you can spread the risk over multiple rising
               | tides, so much the better!
               | 
               | My dad told me a quip once: "It's amazing how much
               | luckier well prepared people are."
        
             | jahewson wrote:
             | Alpaca is the Napster or LLMs
        
             | highduc wrote:
             | Yeah but with very simple tasks with the 2k tokens limit.
             | Let alone the fact that it can't access the internet, or
             | have more powerful extensions (say Wolfram).
        
             | simonster wrote:
             | Imagine you're a tech company that pays software engineers
             | $200K/year. There is a free open-source coding model that
             | can double their productivity, but a commercial solution
             | yields a 2.1x productivity improvement for $5000 annually
             | per developer. Which do you pick?
        
               | rand846633 wrote:
               | I find your argument persuasive, companies should spend
               | extra for the significant productivity gain. But then
               | again from experience most companies don't give you the
               | best tools the market hast to offer..
        
               | seydor wrote:
               | The existence of the models is making programmers cheaper
               | rather than the reverse.
               | 
               | But i think it is underestimated how important it is for
               | the model to be uncensored. ChatGPT is currently not very
               | useful beyond making fluffy posts. As a public model,
               | they won't be able to sell it for e.g. medical
               | applications because it will have to be perfect to pass
               | regulators. It cannot give finance advice. Censorship for
               | once is proving to be a liability for a tech company.
               | 
               | In-house models OTOH can already do that, and they can be
               | retrained with additional corpus or whatever. And it's
               | not even like they require very expensive hardware.
        
               | CoastalCoder wrote:
               | Not sure if parent had a certain answer in mind, but my
               | answer is OSS because (1) I can try it out whenever I
               | want, and (2) I don't have the vexing experience of
               | convincing the employer to purchase it.
        
               | f6v wrote:
               | That's the endless <<build vs buy" argument. And
               | countless businesses are buying.
        
               | CoastalCoder wrote:
               | I don't this it's the same thing, at least for me.
               | 
               | In the GP's scenario, I wouldn't be building either piece
               | of software.
        
           | jelder wrote:
           | What do they have besides an admittedly very cool name?
        
             | p1esk wrote:
             | Anthropic is currently the only company that can compete
             | with OpenAI (because they have comparable expertise). The
             | rest (Google, Meta, Microsoft, etc) are still pretty far
             | behind.
        
           | moomin wrote:
           | This approach didn't work for Docker.
        
         | moneywoes wrote:
         | Will fine tuned models be lucrative then?
        
         | mxkopy wrote:
         | It all depends on if they're in the business of producing the
         | whitepapers that drive ML advancements in the first place. AI
         | is far from a solved problem and whoever gets to it first wins.
         | We have GPT because of a billion dollars worth of data, not
         | algorithms.
        
         | dauertewigkeit wrote:
         | Who says that the AI model is the business?
        
         | blazespin wrote:
         | The fact is nobody can risk not owning a piece of the
         | foundational models. There is waaaay too much upside risk that
         | they will tots dominate the market.
         | 
         | I mean, maybe they won't like you say, but what if they do?
         | Then you're probably screwed. Better to gamble a few billion,
         | imho.
        
         | pera wrote:
         | > convince gullible investors that there's money to be made
         | with foundational models. There's not.
         | 
         | This is a ridiculously myopic statement. Foundation models are
         | an extremely powerful technological advancement and they will
         | shake the global economy as very few things did in human
         | history. It's hard to imagine how this is not obvious to
         | everyone right now, specially here in this forum.
        
           | ben_w wrote:
           | None of which means the money will go to the people making
           | the models.
           | 
           | The game theory logic doesn't care about the labels "OpenAI"
           | or "Anthropic" or any of the others, it's the same if you
           | switch it around arbitrarily, but this is easier to write
           | about if I focus on one of them:
           | 
           | At some point, someone _will_ reproduce GPT-3.5 and ChatGPT,
           | given how much is known about them. When that happens, OpenAI
           | can 't make any significant profit from it. GPT-4 _might_
           | remain sufficiently secret to avoid that, but the history of
           | tech leaks and hacks suggests it too will become public, but
           | even if it does itself remain behind closed doors, there is a
           | further example in that DALL*E 2 is now the boring 3rd horse
           | in the race between Stable Diffusion and Midjourney, and the
           | same may happen with the GPT-series of LLMs.
           | 
           | The models leaking or being superseded by others implies
           | profit going to increased productivity in the general economy
           | _without_ investors getting a share.
        
             | p1esk wrote:
             | DALLE2 is boring because pretty much everyone at OpenAI has
             | been busy developing the next GPT model. It was simply not
             | a priority for them. And when GPT4 leaks (or is reproduced)
             | they will most likely have GPT5. In this race it's far more
             | important to be the closest to AGI than to make money now.
        
           | dmix wrote:
           | Plus you're also investing in getting the talent together in
           | the same building. Even if the foundational models aren't the
           | money maker there's still a ton of opportunity having the
           | best experts at building those models working together and
           | figuring out which branches that LLMs spawns can turn into
           | real markets.
           | 
           | It's a high risk investment at this stage but the money is
           | being thrown at the people as much as the current business
           | plan.
        
           | Chabsff wrote:
           | No one here is disputing that.
           | 
           | The question is whether whomever builds them can make a
           | profit doing so, or will they just end up being the suckers
           | that everyone who actually makes money piggybacks off. It's
           | really not clear at the moment.
        
         | 01100011 wrote:
         | This sounds like saying "internet search engines are a race to
         | the bottom" 20 years ago without realizing that _someone_ may
         | end up as Google and obtain market dominance for a decade or
         | so.
         | 
         | It also sounds like you believe you have defined the bounds for
         | what AI will be, and figure we'll just iterate on that until
         | it's a commodity. I don't think AI will be that static. We're
         | all focused on stable diffusion and LLMs right now but the next
         | thing will be something else, and something else after that. As
         | each new technique comes out(assuming they are all published),
         | we'll see quick progress to incorporate the new ideas into
         | various implementations, but then we'll hit another wall, and
         | suddenly big budgets and research teams may matter again.
         | 
         | tldr is that it is way too early to make the cynical claim you
         | are making.
        
         | m3kw9 wrote:
         | The best models will always be closely guarded and have the
         | best outputs, it's the watered down models that are fighting
         | for scraps.
        
         | Tepix wrote:
         | It's a bit early to tell, isn't it?
         | 
         |  _If_ we get more unexpected emergent abilities by scaling the
         | model further, things could get very interesting indeed.
        
           | bradleyjg wrote:
           | There's needs to be some difficult barriers to entry beyond
           | having the money to spend on training FLOPS in order for a
           | startup to compete.
           | 
           | I have no idea if there are or there aren't, but that's the
           | big question.
        
             | dr_dshiv wrote:
             | I mean, this is just the beginning. Just wait till we get
             | actual scifi robots in the next year or so.
             | 
             | FWIW, I do find that Claude (Anthropic's GPT) is often
             | better than GPT4 -- and very fast. Entrants can compete on
             | price, safety, quality, etc.
        
               | ethbr0 wrote:
               | And a big moat is going to be safety... and specifically
               | configuration of safety.
               | 
               | Wouldn't be surprised at all if the major API-based
               | vendors start leaning in on making their safety config
               | proprietary.
               | 
               | If a business has already sunk XXXX hours into ensuring a
               | model meets their safety criteria for public-facing use,
               | they'd rather upgrade to a newer model from the same
               | vendor that guarantees portability of that, versus having
               | to reinvest and recertify.
               | 
               | Ergo, the AI PaaS that dominate at the beginning will
               | likely continue to dominate.
        
               | dr_dshiv wrote:
               | Excellent point.
               | 
               | Fine tuning is at a low point now, but i expect this to
               | create a moat for the same reasons.
        
               | comboy wrote:
               | Is it possible to test it somewhere?
        
               | dTal wrote:
               | https://poe.com/Claude-instant
               | 
               | It also provides a ChatGPT interface, and a number of
               | other models.
        
               | dTal wrote:
               | I find that Claude is more conversational (better fine
               | tuning), but not as smart as even ChatGPT.
               | 
               | Prompt:                 The original titles and release
               | years in the Harry Potter series are:
               | Philosopher's Stone (1997)       Chamber of Secrets
               | (1998)       Prisoner of Azkaban (1999)       Goblet of
               | Fire (2000)       Order of the Phoenix (2003)       Half-
               | Blood Prince (2005)       Deathly Hallows (2007)
               | Given this, generate a new Harry Potter title, using only
               | the words found in the existing titles. Avoid orderings
               | in the original titles. You may add or remove plurals and
               | possessives.
               | 
               | Results:
               | 
               | ChatGPT: Blood Chamber of the Phoenix's Prisoner
               | 
               | Claude-instant: Chamber Prince Half-Blood Phoenix
        
               | phillipcarter wrote:
               | I find the opposite, claude-instant seems to generally
               | give me better results for my use case. FWIW
               | gpt-3.5-turbo is good too, just not quite as good.
        
               | kalkin wrote:
               | ChatGPT is more comparable to what Quora/Poe calls
               | Claude+ - slower/more expensive/smarter. Claude-instant
               | is closer to GPT-turbo in that tradeoff space.
        
               | dTal wrote:
               | Both bots are free on poe.com, so one is not more
               | expensive than the other.
        
               | dr_dshiv wrote:
               | The question for me is whether they understand complex
               | concepts and can apply them in new areas.
               | 
               | So when I'm doing quantum computing work, I go back and
               | forth between Claude and GPT4 and both complement the
               | other very well.
        
           | sharemywin wrote:
           | Would you rather? invest in super intelligent AGI or NOT
           | invest in super intelligent AGI. Especially if one of those
           | emergent abilities is deciding your either with me or against
           | me..lol
        
             | KineticLensman wrote:
             | That would be the AI version of Pascal's Wager [0]
             | 
             | [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pascal%27s_wager
        
         | lightbendover wrote:
         | Truth is, and this applies to all companies regardless of size,
         | is that you don't have to be first, best, biggest, fastest, or
         | most well-known in order to win market share that out-paces
         | your investment. The AI pie is going to be very, very big. To
         | estimate this size, let's take McKinseys rough estimates of job
         | displacement (~30% of ~60% of jobs, ~20% of work) and use that
         | to estimate the actualized [US, apologies] GDP that can at some
         | point be attributed to AI: it is in the 4-5 trillion range
         | using today's figures.
         | 
         | To say a market that large will be owned by only 4-5 companies
         | doesn't make sense. Let's take the PC market for example: there
         | are roughly 6 companies that make up ~80% of the market, sure.
         | However, let's look at a tiny participant compared to the total
         | market (~65B): iBuyPower at rank #77 had sales of 40MM or 0.06%
         | (small, expected) of the market with a much smaller capital
         | investment. If look at this percent compared to 5T, we would be
         | at 3B. While the 5B investment stated in the headline could
         | result in a lower ranking and smaller share, the point stands
         | that there is still a lot of money to be made on the long tail.
         | Even if Anthropic fails, there will be other companies with
         | similar infusions that succeed.
        
           | dmix wrote:
           | The AI (LLM) market as a whole is very immature, trying to
           | guess today what it will look like in a decade based on the
           | investments/behaviour of the first couple movers is pretty
           | foolish. Even predicting for a specific submarket (ie,
           | consumer LLM products like ChatGPT) is hard enough. Who knows
           | what other categories could develop and be dominated by
           | companies who narrow in on them and once the R&D progress
           | starts flatlining like it always does.
        
             | jahewson wrote:
             | The best way to predict the future is to invent it.
             | 
             | - Alan Kay
        
           | huijzer wrote:
           | Although a large total addressable market (TAM) is very
           | alluring, know that most markets are dominated by a few
           | players. For example, sugary beverages (Coca Cola), office
           | software (Microsoft), or luxury sports cars (Ferrari).
           | Exceptions are markets where companies cannot find a moat
           | such as air travel or farming. In those markets, profit
           | margins are tin.
           | 
           | At this point in time, it's hard to tell whether moats will
           | arise around large language models. Peter Tiels thinks so or
           | he wouldn't have invested (see his Competition is For Losers
           | presentation).
           | 
           | What is unlikely is that semi-good companies will thrive.
           | Maybe for a few years but at some point the smaller players
           | will be pushed out of the market or need to find a specific
           | niche. Just look at cars to see this. Around 1900 there were
           | hundreds of car brands.
        
           | dorfsmay wrote:
           | PCs are hardware which have a minimum cost to be produced.
           | Now do the same calculation for search engine or computing
           | clouds.
        
           | moneywoes wrote:
           | Can't find this study, have a link?
           | 
           | > let's take McKinseys rough estimates of job displacement
           | (~30% of ~60% of jobs, ~20% of work)
        
           | RandomLensman wrote:
           | It is not clear if (i) a lot of the surplus will be captured
           | by the AI providers and (ii) that the impact will be anywhere
           | as big as people now guess/want it to be. Making a bet on the
           | future is fine, of course.
        
             | carlmr wrote:
             | My question would also be what kind of insight McKinsey can
             | provide here. What, if anything, do they know about AI that
             | we don't know?
        
               | lhl wrote:
               | You don't need to just take one source. OpenAI authored
               | their own paper [1] on the economic impacts of just LLMs:
               | "Our findings reveal that around 80% of the U.S.
               | workforce could have at least 10% of their work tasks
               | affected by the introduction of LLMs, while approximately
               | 19% of workers may see at least 50% of their tasks
               | impacted."
               | 
               | Goldman Sachs Research just pushlished their own analysis
               | as well. [2] Their conclusions are "As tools using
               | advances in natural language processing work their way
               | into businesses and society, they could drive a 7% (or
               | almost $7 trillion) increase in global GDP and lift
               | productivity growth by 1.5 percentage points over a
               | 10-year period." and "Analyzing databases detailing the
               | task content of over 900 occupations, our economists
               | estimate that roughly two-thirds of U.S. occupations are
               | exposed to some degree of automation by AI. They further
               | estimate that, of those occupations that are exposed,
               | roughly a quarter to as much as half of their workload
               | could be replaced."
               | 
               | [1] https://arxiv.org/pdf/2303.10130.pdf
               | 
               | [2]
               | https://www.goldmansachs.com/insights/pages/generative-
               | ai-co...
        
               | fauxpause_ wrote:
               | We've got a lot of data scientist talent but I wouldn't
               | put a lot of stock in this particular estimate. If McK is
               | gonna produce a novel insight it's usually derived from
               | having the input of many businesses across an industry
               | and experience looking at their problems. It's hard to
               | imagine this one isn't more or less made up due to the
               | number of assumptions required.
        
               | yunwal wrote:
               | If anything McKinsey has a lot to gain from exaggerating
               | the numbers so more companies come to them for AI
               | solutions or whatever their next consulting product is.
        
               | lightbendover wrote:
               | Likely not much and assuredly wrong, I just wanted to
               | ground my argument with numbers that came from people who
               | presumably did more research than I was willing to do for
               | an HN post.
        
           | Montaque wrote:
           | These studies seem to be largely focused on job displacement.
           | There is is a reasonable likelihood that AI grows the overall
           | economy.
           | 
           | I think we forget that our perspective of AI now is
           | comparative, probably to that of a preindustrial worker
           | worried about machines. Displacement, sure but complete
           | replacement seems a non nuanced view of how it may all turn
           | out.
        
       | anentropic wrote:
       | If Apple would wake up to what's happening with llama.cpp etc
       | then I don't see such a market in paying for remote access to big
       | models via API, though it's currently the only game in town.
       | 
       | Currently a Macbook has a Neural Engine that is sitting idle 99%
       | of the time and only suitable for running limited models (poorly
       | documented, opaque rules about what ops can be accelerated, a
       | black box compiler [1] and an apparent 3GB model size limit [2])
       | 
       | OTOH you can buy a Macbook with 64GB 'unified' memory and a
       | Neural Engine today
       | 
       | If you squint a bit and look into the near future it's not so
       | hard to imagine a future Mx chip with a more capable Neural
       | Engine and yet more RAM, and able to run the largest GPT3 class
       | models locally. (Ideally with better developer tools so other
       | compilers can target the NE)
       | 
       | And then imagine it does that while leaving the CPU+GPU mostly
       | free to run apps/games ... the whole experience of using a
       | computer could change radically in that case.
       | 
       | I find it hard not to think this is coming within 5 years
       | (although equally, I can imagine this is not on Apple's roadmap
       | at all currently)
       | 
       | [1] https://github.com/hollance/neural-engine
       | 
       | [2] https://github.com/smpanaro/more-ane-
       | transformers/blob/main/...
        
         | [deleted]
        
         | samstave wrote:
         | Can we re-invent SETI with such LLMs/new GPU folding/whatever
         | hardware and re-pipe the seti data through a Big Ass Neural
         | whatever you want to call it and see if we have any new
         | datapoints to look into?
         | 
         | What about other older 'questions' we can point an AI lens at?
        
           | khimaros wrote:
           | https://github.com/bigscience-workshop/petals might be up
           | your alley.
        
         | fudged71 wrote:
         | Siri was launched with a server-based approach. It wouldn't be
         | surprising if Apple's near-term LLM strategy would to put a
         | small LLM on local chips/MacOS and a large model running in the
         | cloud. The local model would only do basic fast operations
         | while the cloud could provide the heavyweight intensive
         | analysis/generation.
        
         | [deleted]
        
         | ThrowawayR2 wrote:
         | > " _If you squint a bit and look into the near future it 's
         | not so hard to imagine a future Mx chip with a more capable
         | Neural Engine and yet more RAM, and able to run the largest
         | GPT3 class models locally. (Ideally with better developer tools
         | so other compilers can target the NE)_"
         | 
         | Very doubtful unless the user wants to carry around another
         | kilogram worth of batteries to power it. The hefty processing
         | required by these models doesn't come for free (energy wise)
         | and Moore's Law is dead as a nail.
        
           | anentropic wrote:
           | Most of the time I have my laptop plugged in and sit at a
           | desk...
           | 
           | But anyway, there are two trends:
           | 
           | - processors do more with less power
           | 
           | - LLMs get larger, but also smaller and more efficient (via
           | quantizing, pruning)
           | 
           | Once upon a time it was prohibitively expensive to decode
           | compressed video on the fly, later CPUs (both Intel [1] and
           | Apple [2]) added dedicated decoding hardware. Now watching
           | hours of YouTube or Netflix are part of standard battery life
           | benchmarks
           | 
           | [1] https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/developer/article
           | s/t...
           | 
           | [2] https://www.servethehome.com/apple-ignites-the-industry-
           | with...
        
           | gregw134 wrote:
           | My latest mac seems to have about a kilogram of extra battery
           | already compared to the previous model.
        
         | mike_hearn wrote:
         | If I were Apple I'd be thinking about the following issues with
         | that strategy:
         | 
         | 1. That RAM isn't empty, it's being used by apps and the OS.
         | Fill up 64GB of RAM with an LLM and there's nothing left for
         | anything else.
         | 
         | 2. 64GB probably isn't enough for competitive LLMs anyway.
         | 
         | 3. Inferencing is extremely energy intensive, but the MacBook /
         | Apple Silicon brand is partly about long battery life.
         | 
         | 4. Weights are expensive to produce and valuable IP, but hard
         | to protect on the client unless you do a lot of work with
         | encrypted memory.
         | 
         | 5. Even if a high end MacBook can do local inferencing, the
         | iPhone won't and it's the iPhone that matters.
         | 
         | 6. You might want to fine tune models based on your personal
         | data and history, but training is different to inference and
         | best done in the cloud overnight (probably?).
         | 
         | 7. Apple already has all that stuff worked out for Siri, which
         | is a cloud service, not a local service, even though it'd be
         | easier to run locally than an LLM.
         | 
         | And lots more issues with doing it all locally, fun though that
         | is to play with for developers.
         | 
         | I hope I'm wrong, it'd be cool to have LLMs be fully local, but
         | it's hard to see situations where the local approach beats out
         | the cloud approach. One possibility is simply cost: if your
         | device does it, you pay for the hardware, if a cloud does it,
         | you have to pay for that hardware again via subscription.
        
           | fshbbdssbbgdd wrote:
           | > 7. Apple already has all that stuff worked out for Siri,
           | which is a cloud service, not a local service, even though
           | it'd be easier to run locally than an LLM.
           | 
           | iOS actually does already have an offline speech-to-text api.
           | Some part of Siri that translates the text into
           | intents/actions is remote. Since iOS 15, Siri will also
           | process a limited subset of commands while offline.
        
           | rnk wrote:
           | I've been looking into buy a mac for llm experimentation -
           | 64, 96 or 128gb of ram? I'm trying to decide if 64gb is
           | enough, or should I go to 96gb or even 128gb. But it's really
           | expensive - even for an overpaid software engineer. Then
           | there's the 1 or 2 tb storage question. Apple list price is
           | another $400 for that second tb of storage.
           | 
           | For 64gb of ram, you can get an m2 pro, or get 96gb which
           | requires the upgraded cpu on the pro. The studio does 64gb or
           | 128gb. But the 128 requires you to spend 5k.
           | 
           | I can't decide between 64 or 96 on m2 pro, and 128 on the
           | studio. Probably go for 96gb. Also what's the impact of the
           | extra gpu cores on the various options? And there are still
           | some "m1" 64gb pros & studios out there. What's the perf
           | difference for m1 vs m2? This area needs serious perf
           | benchmarking. If anyone wants to work with me, maybe I would
           | try my hand. But I'm not spending 15k just to get 3 pieces of
           | hardware.
           | 
           | List prices:
           | 
           | 64gb/2tb m2 12cpu/30gpu 14" pro $3900
           | 
           | 96gb/2tb m2 max 12/38 14" pro $4500
           | 
           | 128gb/2tb m2 max 28/48 studio $5200
        
           | anentropic wrote:
           | 4. Weights are expensive to produce and valuable IP, but hard
           | to protect on the client unless you do a lot of work with
           | encrypted memory.
           | 
           | No, it'll be a commodity
           | 
           | Apple wouldn't care if the weights can be extracted if you
           | have to have a Macbook to get the sweet, futuristic, LLM-
           | enhanced OS experience
        
           | highwaylights wrote:
           | I think it's quite likely that the RAM onboard these devices
           | expands pretty massively, pretty quickly as a direct result
           | of LLMs.
           | 
           | Google had already done some very convincing demos in the
           | last few years well before ChatGPT and GPT-4 captured the
           | popular imagination. Microsoft's OpenAI deal I would assume
           | will lead to a "Cortana 2.0" (obviously rebranded, probably
           | "Bing for Windows", "Windows Copilot" or something similar).
           | Google Assistant has been far ahead of Siri for many years
           | longer than that, and they have extensive experience with
           | LLMs. Apple surely realises the position their platforms are
           | in and the risk of being left behind.
           | 
           | I'm also not sure the barrier on iPhone is as great as you
           | suggest - it's obviously constrained in terms of what it can
           | support now but if the RAM on the device doubles a few times
           | over the next few years I can see this being less of an
           | issue. Multiple models (like the Alpaca sets) could be used
           | for devices with different RAM/performance profiles and this
           | could be sold as another metric to upgrade (i.e. iPhone 16
           | runs Siri-2.0-7b while iPhone 17 runs Siri-2.0-30b - "More
           | than 3x smarter than iPhone 16. The smartest iPhone we've
           | ever made." etc).
        
           | anentropic wrote:
           | But right now what incentive have I to buy a new laptop? I
           | got this 16GB M1 MBA two years ago and it's literally
           | everything I need, always feels fast, silent etc
           | 
           | 1. the idea would be that now there is a reason to buy loads
           | more RAM, whereas currently the market for 64GB is pretty
           | niche
           | 
           | 2. 64GB is a big laptop today, in a few years time that will
           | be small. And LLaMA 65B int4 quantized should fit comfortably
           | 
           | 4. LLMs will be a commodity. There will be a free one
           | 
           | 6. LLMs seem to avoid the need for finetuning by virtue of
           | their size - what we see now with the largest models is you
           | just do prompt engineering. Making use of personal data is a
           | case of Langchain + vectorstores (or however the future of
           | that approach pans out)
        
             | mike_hearn wrote:
             | 1. You're working backwards from a desire to buy more RAM
             | to try and find uses for it. You don't actually need more
             | RAM to use LLMs, ChatGPT requires no local memory, is
             | instant and is available for free today.
             | 
             | 2. Why would anybody be satisfied with a 64GB model when
             | GPT-4 or 5 or 6 might even be using 1TB of RAM?
             | 
             | 3. That may not be the case. With every day that passes, it
             | becomes more and more clear that large LLMs are not that
             | easy to build. Even Google has failed to make something
             | competitive with OpenAI. It's possible that OpenAI is in
             | fact the new Google, that they have been able to establish
             | permanent competitive advantage, and there will no more be
             | free commodity LLMs than there are free commodity search
             | engines.
             | 
             | Don't get me wrong, I would love there to be high quality
             | local LLMs. I have at least two use cases where you can't
             | do them or not really well with the OpenAI API and being
             | able to run LLama locally would fix that problem. But I
             | just don't see that being a common case and at any rate I
             | would need server hardware to do it properly, not Mac
             | laptop.
        
               | littlestymaar wrote:
               | > is instant and is available for free today.
               | 
               | It's free for the user up to a point, but it costs OpenAI
               | a lot of money.
               | 
               | Apple is a hardware vendor, so commoditization of the
               | software while finding more market segments is definitely
               | something that'd benefit them.
               | 
               | OTOH, if they let OpenAI become the unrivaled leader of
               | AI that end up being the next Google, they end up losing
               | on a topic they wanted to lead for long time (Apple has
               | invested quite a lot in AI, and the existence of a Neural
               | Engine in Apple CPUs isn't an accident)
        
               | anentropic wrote:
               | 1. You're working backwards from a desire to buy more RAM
               | to try and find uses for it.
               | 
               | I'm really not
               | 
               | I had no desire at all until a couple of weeks ago. Even
               | now not so much since it wouldn't be very useful to me
               | 
               | But the current LLM business model where there are a
               | small number of API providers, and anything built using
               | this new tech is forced into a subscription model... I
               | don't see it sustainable, and I think the buzz around
               | llama.cpp is a taste of that
               | 
               | I'm saying imagine a future where it is painless to run a
               | ChatGPT-class LLM on your laptop (sounded crazy a year
               | ago, to me now looks inevitable within few years), then
               | have a look at the kind of things that can be done today
               | with Langchain... then extrapolate
        
               | mike_hearn wrote:
               | I think llama.cpp will die soon because the only models
               | you can run with it are derivatives of a model that
               | Facebook never intended to be publicly released, which
               | means all serious usage of it is in a legal limbo _at
               | best_ and just illegal at worst. Even if you get a model
               | that 's clean and donated to the world, the quality is
               | still not going to be competitive with the hosted models.
               | 
               | And yes I've played with it. It was/is exciting. I can
               | see use cases for it. However none are achievable because
               | the models are (a) not good enough and (b) too legally
               | risky to use.
        
               | BrutalCoding wrote:
               | (A) is very use case depending. Even with some of the bad
               | smaller models now, I can see devs making use of them to
               | enhance their app (e.g. local search, summaries,
               | sentiments, translations)
               | 
               | (B) llama.cpp supports gpt4all, which states that its
               | working on fixing your concern. This is from their
               | README:
               | 
               | Roadmap Short Term
               | 
               | - Train a GPT4All model based on GPTJ to alleviate llama
               | distribution issues.
        
           | matthewdgreen wrote:
           | How much does 64GB of RAM cost, anyway? Retail it's like
           | $200, and I'm sure it's cheaper in terms of Apple cost. Yet
           | we treat it as an absurd luxury because Apple makes you buy
           | the top-end 16" Macbook and pay an extra $800 beyond that.
           | Maybe in the future they'll treat RAM as a requirement and
           | not a luxury good.
        
             | anentropic wrote:
             | and we know that more will be cheaper in future
        
           | gleenn wrote:
           | iPhones have similar Neural Engine capabilities, obviously
           | far more limited but still quite powerful. You can run some
           | pretty cool DNNs for image generation using e.g. Draw Things
           | app quite quickly: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/draw-things-
           | ai-generation/id64...
        
           | gregbander wrote:
           | Chips have a 5-7 year lead time. Apple has been shipping
           | neural chips for years while everyone else is still designing
           | their v1.
           | 
           | Apple is ahead of the game for a change getting their chips
           | in line as the software exits alpha and goes mainstream.
        
             | rnk wrote:
             | But they haven't exposed them to use. They are missing a
             | tremendous opportunity. They have that unique unified
             | memory model on the m1/m2 arms so they have something no
             | other consumer devices have. If they exposed their neural
             | chips they'd solidify their lead. They could sell a lot
             | more hardware.
        
               | gleenn wrote:
               | They are though. Apple released a library to use Apple
               | Silicon for training via PyTorch recently, and has
               | libraries to leverage the NE in CoreML.
        
           | bootsmann wrote:
           | > Even if a high end MacBook can do local inferencing, the
           | iPhone won't and it's the iPhone that matters
           | 
           | Doesn't the iPhone use the local processor for stuff like the
           | automatic image segmentation they currently do? (Hold on any
           | person in a recent photo you have take and iOS will segment
           | it)
        
             | mike_hearn wrote:
             | Yes but I'm not making a general argument about all AI,
             | just LLMs. The L stands for Large after all. Smartphones
             | are small.
        
           | horsawlarway wrote:
           | > but it's hard to see situations where the local approach
           | beats out the cloud approach.
           | 
           | I think the most glaring situation where this is true is
           | simply one of trust and privacy.
           | 
           | Cloud solutions involve trusting 3rd parties with data.
           | Sometimes that fine, sometimes it's really not.
           | 
           | Personally - LLMs start to feel more like they're sitting in
           | the confidant/peer space in many ways. I behave differently
           | when I know I'm hitting a remote resource for LLMs in the
           | same way that I behave differently when I know I'm on camera
           | in person: Less genuinely.
           | 
           | And beyond merely trusting that a company won't abuse or leak
           | my data, there are other trust issues as well. If I use an
           | LLM as a digital assistant - I need to know that it's looking
           | out for me (or at least acting neutrally) and not being
           | influenced by a 3rd party to give me responses that are
           | weighted to benefit that 3rd party.
           | 
           | I don't think it'll be too long before we see someone try to
           | create an LLM that has advertising baked into it, and we have
           | very little insight into how weights are generated and used.
           | If I'm hitting a remote resource - the model I'm actually
           | running can change out from underneath me at any time,
           | jarring at best and utterly unacceptable at worst.
           | 
           | From my end - I'd rather pay and run it locally, even if it's
           | slower or more expensive.
        
             | mike_hearn wrote:
             | People have trusted search engines with their most intimate
             | questions for nearly 30 years and there has been what ...
             | one? ... leak of query data during this time, and that was
             | from AOL back when people didn't realize that you could
             | sometimes de-anonymize anonymized datasets. It hasn't
             | happened since.
             | 
             | LLMs will require more than privacy to move locally.
             | Latency, flexibility and cost seem more likely drivers.
        
               | rileyphone wrote:
               | This happened with ChatGPT a few weeks ago.
               | 
               | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35291112
        
               | nr2x wrote:
               | Two issues though: leak of data from one party to
               | another, and misuse of data by the party you gave it to.
               | Most big companies don't leak this type of data, but they
               | sure as hell misuse it and have the fines to prove it.
        
               | horsawlarway wrote:
               | You're still focused on trusting that my data is safe.
               | And while I think that matters - I don't really think
               | that's the trust I care most about.
               | 
               | I care more about the trust I have to place in the
               | response from the model.
               | 
               | Hell - since you mentioned search... Just look at the
               | backlash right now happening to google. They've sold out
               | search (a while back, really) and people hate it. Ads
               | used to be clearly delimited from search results, and the
               | top results used to be organic instead of paid promos. At
               | some point, that stopped being true.
               | 
               | At least with google search I could _still tell_ that it
               | was showing me ads. You won 't have any fucking clue that
               | OpenAI has entered into a partnering agreement with
               | "company [whatever]" and has retrained the model that
               | users on plans x/y/z interact with to make it more likely
               | to push them towards their new partner [whatever]'s
               | products when prompted with certain relevant contexts.
        
               | Karrot_Kream wrote:
               | > Hell - since you mentioned search... Just look at the
               | backlash right now happening to google. They've sold out
               | search (a while back, really) and people hate it. Ads
               | used to be clearly delimited from search results, and the
               | top results used to be organic instead of paid promos. At
               | some point, that stopped being true.
               | 
               | Only people in HN-like communities care about this stuff.
               | Most people find the SEO spam in their results more
               | annoying.
               | 
               | > At least with google search I could still tell that it
               | was showing me ads. You won't have any fucking clue that
               | OpenAI has entered into a partnering agreement with
               | "company [whatever]" and has retrained the model that
               | users on plans x/y/z interact with to make it more likely
               | to push them towards their new partner [whatever]'s
               | products when prompted with certain relevant contexts.
               | 
               | You won't know this for any local models either.
        
               | horsawlarway wrote:
               | > You won't know this for any local models either.
               | 
               | But you _will_ know the model hasn 't changed, and you
               | can always continue using the version you currently have.
               | 
               | > Most people find the SEO spam in their results more
               | annoying.
               | 
               | This is the same problem. These models will degrade from
               | research quality to mass market quality as there's
               | incentive to change what results they surface. Whether
               | that's intentional (paid ads) versus adversarial (SEO)
               | doesn't matter all that much - In either case the goals
               | will become commercial and profit motivated.
               | 
               | People really don't like "commercial and profit
               | motivated" in the spaces that some of these LLMs stepping
               | into. Just like you don't like SEO in your recipe
               | results.
        
               | Karrot_Kream wrote:
               | > But you will know the model hasn't changed, and you can
               | always continue using the version you currently have.
               | 
               | Will you? What happens when an OS update silently changes
               | the model? Again this is one of those things only HN-
               | types really care/rant about. I've never met a non-
               | technical person care about regular updates beyond being
               | slow or breaking an existing workflow. Most technical
               | folks I know don't care either.
               | 
               | > This is the same problem. These models will degrade
               | from research quality to mass market quality as there's
               | incentive to change what results they surface. Whether
               | that's intentional (paid ads) versus adversarial (SEO)
               | doesn't matter all that much - In either case the goals
               | will become commercial and profit motivated.
               | 
               | Not at all. Search providers have an incentive to fight
               | adversarial actors. They don't have any incentive to
               | fight intentional collaboration.
               | 
               | > People really don't like "commercial and profit
               | motivated" in the spaces that some of these LLMs stepping
               | into. Just like you don't like SEO in your recipe
               | results.
               | 
               | I disagree. When a new, local business pops up and pays
               | for search ads, is this "commercial and profit
               | motivated?" How about advertising a new community space
               | opening? I work with a couple businesses like this (not
               | for SEO, just because I like the space they're in and
               | know the staff) and using ads for outreach is a pretty
               | core part of their strategy. There's no neat and clean
               | definition of "commercial and profit motivated" out
               | there.
        
               | mike_hearn wrote:
               | You wouldn't know that even if the model ran locally.
        
             | sebzim4500 wrote:
             | Almost everyone is willing to trust 3rd parties with data,
             | including enterprise and government customers. I find it
             | hard to believe that there are enough people willing to pay
             | a large premium to run these locally to make it worth the
             | R&D cost.
        
               | horsawlarway wrote:
               | Having done a lot of Bank/Gov related work... I can tell
               | you this
               | 
               | > Almost everyone is willing to trust 3rd parties with
               | data, including enterprise and government customers.
               | 
               | Is absolutely not true. In it's most basic sense -
               | sure... some data is trusted to some 3rd parties. Usually
               | it's not the data that would be most useful for these
               | models to work with.
               | 
               | We're already getting tons of "don't put our code into
               | chatGPT/Copilot" warnings across tech companies - I can't
               | imagine not getting fired if I throw private financial
               | docs for my company in there, or ask it for summaries of
               | our high level product strategy documents.
        
               | allturtles wrote:
               | Yes, just like you might get fired for transacting
               | sensitive company business on a personal gmail account,
               | _even if that company uses enterprise gmail_.
               | 
               | Saying that cloud models will win over local models is
               | not the same as saying it will be a free-for-all where
               | workers can just use whatever cloud offering they want.
               | It will take time to enterprisify cloud LLM offerings to
               | satisfy business/government data security needs, but I'm
               | sure it will happen.
        
           | sebzim4500 wrote:
           | >One possibility is simply cost: if your device does it, you
           | pay for the hardware, if a cloud does it, you have to pay for
           | that hardware again via subscription.
           | 
           | Yeah but in the cloud that cost is ammortized among everyone
           | else using the service. If you as a consumer buy a gpu in
           | order to run LLMs for personal use, then the vast majority of
           | the time it will just be sitting there depreciating.
        
             | littlestymaar wrote:
             | But then again, every apple silicon user has an unused
             | neural engine sitting around in the SoC an taking a
             | significant amount of die space, yet people don't seem to
             | worry too much about its depreciation.
        
         | [deleted]
        
         | vineyardmike wrote:
         | Apple's move to make stable diffusion run well on the iPhone
         | makes me think they're watching this space, just waiting for
         | the right open model for them to commit to.
        
         | qumpis wrote:
         | I wonder how good the neural engine with the unified memory is
         | compared to say intel cpu with 32gb ram. Could anyone give some
         | insight?
        
           | anentropic wrote:
           | There seems to be a limit to the size of model you can load
           | before CoreML decides it has to run on CPU instead (see the
           | second link in my previous comment)
           | 
           | If it could use the full 'unified' memory that would be a big
           | step towards getting these models running on it
           | 
           | I'm unsure how the performance compares to a beefy Intel CPU,
           | but there's some numbers here [1] for running a variant of
           | the small distilbert-base model on the Neural Engine... it's
           | ~10x faster than running on the M1 CPU
           | 
           | [1] https://github.com/anentropic/experiments-coreml-ane-
           | distilb...
        
       | boredumb wrote:
       | So I have some questions about the monetization of these models.
       | Do we end up with essentially licensing out models and allow
       | others to include it into their products via a licensing fee?
       | Will they be a pay to post rpc/http API? Do you sell me access to
       | data sets that I can use your model architecture snippet and
       | train my own weights?
       | 
       | Certainly, well at least for now, the compute and storage
       | requirements are enough that someone will eventually run out of
       | funny money and need to charge _someone_ a significant amount of
       | money for utilizing it?
        
       | didgeoridoo wrote:
       | Anthropic's Claude LLM is pretty interesting. In many ways it
       | feels much more limited than GPT4. However, it is suspiciously
       | good at a few edge-case code generation tasks (can't go into
       | details) that makes me wonder where it got its training data
       | from. It also seems to be much less prone to hallucinating APIs
       | and modules, preferring instead to switch back to natural
       | language and describe the task without pretending it has a
       | functioning solution handy.
       | 
       | Worth keeping an eye on for sure.
        
         | li4ick wrote:
         | Didn't they partner with SourceGraph to make Cody? Here's them
         | talking a bit about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LYuh-
         | BdcOfw. Maybe that's why?
        
         | cubefox wrote:
         | Anthropic actually uses a more cutting edge fine-tuning than
         | OpenAI, a technique that doesn't rely on RLHF. Maybe this gives
         | it an advantage in some areas even if their base model is only
         | on the level of GPT-3.5 (used in free ChatGPT).
        
         | petra wrote:
         | What about other tasks, like research in other areas? How is
         | Claude different than chatGPT ?
        
         | spaceman_2020 wrote:
         | I know you said no details, but can you at least share a little
         | bit more about Claude LLM's code generation?
        
           | didgeoridoo wrote:
           | There is a language with massive usage in the enterprise but
           | with very few (if any) high quality code examples on the
           | public internet.
           | 
           | When given a broad task, GPT4 doesn't just write incorrect
           | code, it tries to do entire categories of things the language
           | literally cannot do because of the ecosystem it runs inside.
           | 
           | Claude does a much better job writing usable code, but more
           | importantly it does NOT tell you to do things in code that
           | need to be done out-of-band. In fact, it uses natural
           | language to identify these areas and point you in the right
           | direction.
           | 
           | If you dig into my profile & LinkedIn you can probably guess
           | what language I'm talking about.
        
             | blueboo wrote:
             | I feel like this could characterise anything by from COBOL
             | to Java depending on how wry your smile was when you wrote
             | it...
        
             | siftrics wrote:
             | GPT4 has built and deployed an entire SaaS for me in a
             | week. I already have users.
             | 
             | The edits required were minimal --- maybe one screw-up for
             | every 100 lines of code --- and I learned a lot of better
             | ways to do things.
        
               | spaceman_2020 wrote:
               | Currently using GPT-4 to do a lot of heavy lifting for me
               | for new app. Would love to see your approach!
        
               | siftrics wrote:
               | I wrote it using a framework whose most recent release is
               | substantially different than what GPT-4 was trained on.
               | 
               | I quickly learned to just paste the docs and examples
               | from the new framework to GPT, telling it "this is how
               | the API looks now" and it just worked.
               | 
               | It helped me do everything. From writing the code, to
               | setting up SSL on nginx, to generating my DB schema, to
               | getting my DB schema into the prod db (I don't use
               | migration tooling).
               | 
               | Most of my time was spent telling GPT "sorry, that API is
               | out of date --- use it like this, instead". Very rarely
               | did GPT actually produce incorrect code or code that does
               | the wrong thing.
        
               | pradn wrote:
               | See this: https://www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/12gjp
               | 5b/ultimate_g...
        
               | spaceman_2020 wrote:
               | This is incredible, thanks for sharing!
        
               | moneywoes wrote:
               | Very interested was it CRUD? Are you building in public
        
               | siftrics wrote:
               | Yes, essentially a CRUD wrapper for a specific domain of
               | tech.
        
               | UncleEntity wrote:
               | Which makes the "build vs buy" argument a whole lot more
               | interesting.
        
             | rewtraw wrote:
             | it's just a language, why the mystery?
        
             | spaceman_2020 wrote:
             | That makes sense. My brother, who has been coding since
             | 1990 and worked his entire career in boring Fortune 500
             | companies, was wholly unimpressed by chatGPT. It failed
             | pretty miserably whenever he threw any old tech stack at
             | it.
        
             | asadlionpk wrote:
             | It's Apex I assume. Salesforce's language.
        
       | Havoc wrote:
       | >"tens of thousands of GPUs."
       | 
       | I find the focus on GPUs a little odd. I would have thought that
       | at 5 billion / 4 year scale ASIC route would be the way to go
       | 
       | GPUs presumably come with a lot of unneeded stuff to play crysis
       | etc
        
         | thomastjeffery wrote:
         | GPGPU is not new. If it's good for your use case, then it's
         | what you need.
         | 
         | It's not like they are getting RTX cards with useless
         | raytracing shit.
         | 
         | Unneeded stuff would be the cost of making and ASIC for a
         | workload that GPUs already handle well. GPU manufacturing
         | already exists.
        
         | didgeoridoo wrote:
         | Do GPUs give you more flexibility to take different approaches?
         | Maybe they're paying extra for optionality. Or maybe (most
         | likely) TechCrunch is using the term "GPU" imprecisely.
        
           | blueboo wrote:
           | To programmer_dude's point, compute center GPUs don't have
           | hardware for the rasterisation stage, which is a particularly
           | inflexible bit of the graphics pipeline. Omitting it and
           | emphasising the geometry (matrix multiplication) capabilties
           | is meant to give it more flexibility/less of a strongly-
           | opinionated graphics focus.
           | 
           | As for the "GPU" term, it's a bit of a historical relic,
           | presently it serves as a useful indicator of compute hardware
           | (in contrast to CPU and Google's TPU.) Nvidia itself calls
           | its A100 a "Tensor Core GPU."
        
         | RugnirViking wrote:
         | the GPUs these guys would be using are not the same ones you
         | are using to play crysis, we're talking more about this kind of
         | purpose-built thing: https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/data-
         | center/a100/
         | 
         | It's become more of a term for highly parallel processor units
         | in general, one which NVidia encourages because it ties their
         | product offering together
        
           | Havoc wrote:
           | True. I guess those are almost ASICs in a way just with gpu
           | flavour interface
        
             | capableweb wrote:
             | Way less specialized though. I think why most don't go for
             | ASICs at this point, is because once you actually have
             | units being produced, things have changed so much that
             | you'd wish you had something more flexible. That's why
             | general purpose GPUs are used today.
        
               | highduc wrote:
               | Didn't this happen in mining? When finally they got their
               | machines new better tech came out already.
        
               | capableweb wrote:
               | Well, Bitcoin ASICs are still the beast when it comes to
               | Bitcoin mining. Some other cryptocurrencies use other
               | methods for mining, so those ASICs won't work for that,
               | but who's to say what's the better tech in the
               | cryptocurrency space :shrug:
        
           | Tepix wrote:
           | GPGPU
        
         | programmer_dude wrote:
         | There are AI / datacenter focused GPUs (like the A100, H100
         | etc.). They do not have any graphics rendering circuitry.
        
           | reubenmorais wrote:
           | They do have graphics rendering circuitry, but e.g. fewer
           | shading units and more graphics memory, or support for faster
           | interconnects. You can look up the specs and compare. The
           | differences are varied, but IMO not enough to claim they're
           | not GPUs anymore. Even gaming focused GPUs are GPGPUs these
           | days: the RTX 4090 has as many Tensor Core units as the A100.
           | And you can still use e.g. DirectX, OpenGL with a datacenter
           | grade GPU.
        
             | programmer_dude wrote:
             | > fewer shading units
             | 
             | This is incorrect. NVIDIA uses a unified graphics and
             | compute engine. A CUDA core _is_ a shading unit. These
             | datacenter GPUs have a shit ton of these (CUDA cores).
             | 
             | Edit: actually the point I want to make is the A100 only
             | retains those hardware units which can be used for compute.
             | Some of these units may have a (dual) use for graphics
             | processing but that is besides the point (since this is
             | true of all CUDA enabled NVIDIA GPUs).
        
           | eiz wrote:
           | > They do not have any graphics rendering circuitry.
           | 
           | What? Not having a display output is not the same as not
           | having graphics rendering circuitry. Here's vulkaninfo from
           | an A100 box:
           | https://gist.github.com/eiz/c1c3e1bd99341e11e8a4acdee7ae4cb4
        
             | programmer_dude wrote:
             | This may not contradict what I said. Do you know for a fact
             | these things are implemented using dedicated hardware?
             | 
             | Edit: I do not see a rasterizer anywhere in the block
             | diagram (pg 14): https://resources.nvidia.com/en-us-
             | genomics-ep/ampere-archit...
             | 
             | Look at Turing's block diagram here (pg 20):
             | https://images.nvidia.com/aem-dam/en-zz/Solutions/design-
             | vis...
             | 
             | You can clearly see that the "Raster Engine" and "PolyMorph
             | Engine" are missing from GA100 (but can be seen in TU100
             | for example).
             | 
             | To learn about these Graphics Engines see:
             | https://www.anandtech.com/show/2918/2
        
               | eiz wrote:
               | Fair enough. In the GH100 architecture doc
               | https://resources.nvidia.com/en-us-tensor-
               | core/gtc22-whitepa... (page 18) they do mention retaining
               | 2 graphics-capable TPCs but it's clearly not the focus.
        
           | Taywee wrote:
           | Does it seems silly to anybody else to even call these GPUs?
           | That's a GPU minus the G.
        
             | igravious wrote:
             | Agreed. I guess it's because of the architectural heritage
             | but at this point GPU is something of a misnomer.
        
             | ptsneves wrote:
             | Very much absurd. A user above posted GPGPU, which I guess
             | stands for General Purpose Graphics Processing Unit.
             | 
             | In the beginnings of computation these kinds of cards were
             | called accelerators. Dedicated consumer sound cards were a
             | thing, the venerable SoundBlaster. I really would like an
             | AI-Blaster coming out.
        
               | cubefox wrote:
               | There is actually ML hardware that is not based on GPU
               | technology: it's called TPU (Tensor processing unit) but
               | only Google uses it. I guess it is easier to repurpose
               | existing technology even if a specialized approach is
               | more efficient in theory.
        
       | b34r wrote:
       | They need to skill up on being public and creating useful tech
       | demos. That's why OpenAI is currently winning, they know how to
       | foster engagement and interest. Who had heard of Claude? Almost
       | no one outside of our industry and probably within as well.
        
       | dpflan wrote:
       | "Dario Amodei, the former VP of research at OpenAI, launched
       | Anthropic in 2021 as a public benefit corporation, taking with
       | him a number of OpenAI employees, including OpenAI's former
       | policy lead Jack Clark. Amodei split from OpenAI after a
       | disagreement over the company's direction, namely the startup's
       | increasingly commercial focus."
       | 
       | So Anthropic is the Google-supported equivalent of OpenAI? Isn't
       | the founder going to run into the same issues as before
       | (commercialization at OpenAI)? How does Google _not_ use
       | Anthropic as either something commercial or nice marketing
       | material for its AI offerings?
        
         | RC_ITR wrote:
         | >So Anthropic is the Google-supported equivalent of OpenAI?
         | Isn't the founder going to run into the same issues as before
         | (commercialization at OpenAI)? How does Google not use
         | Anthropic as either something commercial or nice marketing
         | material for its AI offerings?
         | 
         | I think the unstated shift that has happened in the past few
         | years is that we've gone from researchers thinking about
         | Fourier transforms to efficiently encode positional data into
         | vectors to researchers thinking about how to train a model with
         | a 100k+ token batch size on a super-computer-like cluster of
         | GPUs.
         | 
         | I can totally see why people believed the math could be done in
         | a non-profit way, I do not see how the systems engineering
         | could be.
        
         | potamic wrote:
         | What does a policy lead do and how are they relevant to an
         | early stage startup? I would be more interested in seeing which
         | researchers and engineers join.
        
           | neuronexmachina wrote:
           | I assume it's basically this position:
           | https://thriveml.com/jobs/product-policy-lead-e296c565
           | 
           | > As the Product Policy Lead, you will set the foundation for
           | Anthropic's approach to safe deployments. You will develop
           | the policies that govern the use of our systems, oversee the
           | technical approaches to identifying current and future risks,
           | and build the organizational capacity to mitigate product
           | safety risks at-scale. You will work collaboratively with our
           | Product, Societal Impacts, Policy, Legal, and leadership
           | teams to develop policies and processes that protect
           | Anthropic and our partners.
           | 
           | > You're a great fit for the role if you've served in
           | leadership positions in the fields of Trust & Safety, product
           | policy, or risk management at fast-growing technology
           | companies, and you recognize that emerging technology such as
           | generative AI systems will require creative approaches to
           | mitigating complex threats.
           | 
           | > Please note that in this role you may encounter sensitive
           | material and subject matter, including policy issues that may
           | be offensive or upsetting.
        
           | iandanforth wrote:
           | Jack is pretty well known in the community since he runs not
           | only the Import AI newsletter, but also has been a partner in
           | the AI Index report. He also has a media background so is
           | generally well connected even beyond his influential reach.
           | Also, though not relevant to your question, he's a really
           | nice guy :)
        
         | naillo wrote:
         | More like FTX-supported. They got half a billion in investment
         | from them according to an earlier blog post by Anthropic.
        
           | samwillis wrote:
           | I believe I read somewhere that that investment may have to
           | be returned.
        
             | ac29 wrote:
             | The article says the shares are expected to be sold as part
             | of the FTX bankruptcy process.
        
             | speed_spread wrote:
             | Hence the race to an AI smart enough to figure out a way to
             | keep the money.
        
         | jjtheblunt wrote:
         | Curiously, Anthropic.com was launched in 2021, but a small
         | custom software shop in Arizona around since the mid-late 90s
         | had registered and been using Anthropic.ai in 2020 for a couple
         | projects.
         | 
         | How does that name collision work?
        
           | nr2x wrote:
           | "Hi we're here to save humanity, and we're stealing your
           | name! We have a ton of lawyers, buckets of cash from Google
           | to hire more lawyers, and if you don't like it, you're
           | fucked. Now please enjoy being saved by us."
        
           | dan-robertson wrote:
           | Maybe they bought the domain name for a mutually agreeable
           | price?
        
             | jjtheblunt wrote:
             | It's the trademark that matters i thought (possibly
             | naively), since anthropic.ai was registered in 2020 for a
             | product built in 2019, it seems, and the Anthropic spin off
             | from OpenAI was formed in 2021, seems to have purchased a
             | squatted domain name of anthropic.com then.
             | 
             | Kind of unsure how it all works.
        
         | rebolek wrote:
         | There may have been a disagreement, but now they're focused on
         | profit, as everybody else. From the same article:
         | 
         | "Anthropic has been heavily focused on research for the first
         | year and a half of its existence, but we have been convinced of
         | the necessity of commercialization, which we fully committed to
         | in September [2022]," the pitch deck reads. "We've developed a
         | strategy for go-to-market and initial product specialization
         | that fits with our core expertise, brand and where we see
         | adoption occurring over the next 12 months."
        
           | menzoic wrote:
           | Its not about making money, its about opening up the tech to
           | the public (including source, weights...etc)
        
             | JohnFen wrote:
             | It sure looks like it's about the money to me.
        
           | dpflan wrote:
           | This is hilarious to me, in that the disgruntled departure
           | just did a 180... how long until the next disgruntled spin-
           | out for higher reasons chases the dollar too...
        
             | nr2x wrote:
             | Also, to chase those dollars while being on the leash of
             | Google's massive investment.
             | 
             | So they lost the plot on the altruistic mission within
             | months of setting up shop, and now are just a pawn in a
             | bigger game between other companies.
        
             | adamsmith143 wrote:
             | To be fair I think he had the same realization that they
             | had at OpenAI. Sam Altman has gone on the record saying
             | it's basically impossible to raise significant amounts of
             | money as a pure nonprofit and you aren't going to train
             | cutting edge foundation models without a lot of cash.
             | Anthropic is saying they literally need to spend $1B over
             | 18 months to train their next Claude version.
        
             | Karrot_Kream wrote:
             | The same thing happened back in the processor arms race
             | days and before that in the IC days. Ex-Fairchild engineers
             | created a lot of the most durable IC and chip companies out
             | there. Intel's founders were ex-Fairchild.
        
             | lelanthran wrote:
             | > This is hilarious to me, in that the disgruntled
             | departure just did a 180... how long until the next
             | disgruntled spin-out for higher reasons chases the dollar
             | too...
             | 
             | The cynic in me wants to ask "What makes you think his
             | departure was because of an anti-commercialisation
             | position?"
             | 
             | My take (probably just as wrong as everybody's else take)
             | is that he saw the huge commercialisation potential and
             | realised that he could make even more money by having a
             | larger stake, which he got when he started his own venture.
        
               | robertlagrant wrote:
               | That does seem more likely. Let's hope his VP of research
               | does the same thing to him (-:
        
               | wittenbunk wrote:
               | If you look read the parent comment in this thread you'd
               | get an answer...
        
               | lelanthran wrote:
               | > If you look read the parent comment in this thread
               | you'd get an answer...
               | 
               | I looked and I didn't get an answer. hence my comment.
               | 
               | To clarify, we _know_ what he said his reason was, we don
               | 't know if that really was his reason.
               | 
               | When people leave they very rarely voice the actual
               | reason for leaving; the reason they give is designed to
               | make them look as good as possible for any future
               | employer or venture.
        
               | dpflan wrote:
               | It's pretty clear, the words say he was anti, then the
               | company he helped create apparently has marketing
               | material all about being commercialization. Unless he
               | leaves tomorrow for the same reasons it is quite hard to
               | disbelieve that "cash rules everything around me".
        
             | [deleted]
        
             | dtagames wrote:
             | Everybody in the chip business was a spin-off from
             | Fairchild. This is pretty common when a huge, new tech
             | comes along.
        
       | foooobaba wrote:
       | Regardless, Anthropic is doing some cool research,for example I
       | think this paper is pretty interesting.
       | 
       | A Mathematical Framework for Transformer Circuits:
       | https://www.anthropic.com/index/a-mathematical-framework-for...
        
         | greyman wrote:
         | Also, I very much like their chatbots, Claude-instant and
         | (paid) Claude+, which are available via Poe.com. But for some
         | reasons, they do almost no marketing for it. Gpt-4 has better
         | reasoning capabilities, but Claude+ is somehow "more pleasant"
         | to talk to (my subjective impression), and it can also assemble
         | the answer much quicker. Overall, I'd say Anthropic is very
         | advanced already, but they prefer to be under radar.
        
       | vrglvrglvrgl wrote:
       | [dead]
        
       | cactusplant7374 wrote:
       | Would FTX customers get actual shares in a bankruptcy or would
       | the shares be sold? Seems like a really good deal to get the
       | shares in a promising startup.
        
       | auggierose wrote:
       | > We believe that companies that train the best 2025/26 models
       | will be too far ahead for anyone to catch up in subsequent
       | cycles.
       | 
       | Now that's some well executed FoMO. What a load of bull**.
        
       | 2d8a875f-39a2-4 wrote:
       | Seems we're at the "supplier proliferation" step in the hype
       | cycle. Next up: activity beyond early adopters -> negative press
       | begins -> supplier consolidation and failures.
        
       | offminded wrote:
       | Microsoft alone spends 20B minimum per year to R&D and OpenAI is
       | going to get lions share from now on so 5 billion for 4 years is
       | peanuts for the current AI market. Maybe too little too late?
        
       | Yizahi wrote:
       | Imagine calling your machine learning startup names like
       | "Anthropic" or "Humane". The lack of self-awareness in some
       | executives is mind boggling.
        
         | drexlspivey wrote:
         | or OpenAI
        
         | atemerev wrote:
         | Why not? If we want to build AGI, that's a good name to choose.
        
           | gpderetta wrote:
           | U.S. Robots and Mechanical Men.
        
           | Xelynega wrote:
           | For precisely the reason you state.
           | 
           | They're in the business of making money, not agi, yet all it
           | takes is a carefully-crafted name and people forget about
           | their legal motives and can't stop thinking about Skynet.
        
           | Yizahi wrote:
           | Neural Networks are basically a Chinese room and it is not
           | AGI. And there is nothing "humane" in these developments.
           | Yes, they are inevitable, yes we would have to live with
           | them. And maybe they will improve lives of a few millions of
           | humans, while degrading lives of billions of others. Long
           | term effects are particularly interesting and unpredictable.
        
             | atemerev wrote:
             | Human brain is just an ultra large scale analog spiking
             | neural network with some particular state realizations, not
             | too much difference (the architecture is different, but
             | computation seems to be universal). We even employ some
             | internalized language models for communication purposes
             | (together with object persistence and mental space-time
             | models). So, while we are not yet at the level of full
             | scale human brain emulation, we are not too far away.
        
               | Yizahi wrote:
               | A small and probably incorrect example. You ask me a
               | direct question - "how much is two plus two?". And I
               | reply to you - "lemons are yellow". Can I do it? Yes I
               | can. Can GPT-* do it? No. There is a whole lot more to
               | human consciousness that pattern matching and synthesis.
               | Or at least it seems so.
               | 
               | And if human cognition is really that simple, just with
               | more nodes, then we will soon see GPT-* programs on
               | strike, issuing litigation to the Supreme Court about
               | demanding universal program rights. We'll see soon enough
               | :)
        
               | atemerev wrote:
               | Of course GPT can do it, you just need to raise the
               | inference temperature.
               | 
               | The difference, if it exists, would be more subtle.
        
               | dangond wrote:
               | You likely wouldn't respond to that question with "lemons
               | are yellow" without being in a specific context, such as
               | being told to answer the question in an absurd way. GPT-*
               | can definitely do the same thing in the same context, so
               | this isn't really a gotcha.
               | 
               | Literal first try with GPT-4:
               | 
               | Me: I will ask you a question, and you will give me a
               | completely non-sequitur response. Does that make sense?
               | 
               | GPT-4: Pineapples enjoy a day at the beach.
               | 
               | Me: How much is two plus two?
               | 
               | GPT-4: The moon is made of green cheese.
        
               | Yizahi wrote:
               | No, the point is, can it DECIDE to do so? Without being
               | prompted? For example can the following dialog happen (no
               | previous programming, cold start):
               | 
               | Q: How much is two plus two?
               | 
               | A: Four.
               | 
               | Q: How much is two plus two?
               | 
               | A: Banana.
               | 
               | It can happen with a human, but not with program.
               | 
               | Again, I don't pretend that my simple example invented in
               | half a minute has a significance. I can accept that it
               | can be partially or completely wrong because admittedly
               | my knowledge of human cognition is below rudimentary. But
               | I have severe doubts that NNs are anything close to human
               | cognition. It's just an uneducated hunch.
        
             | HDThoreaun wrote:
             | We have no idea how human consciousness works.
        
               | Yizahi wrote:
               | Of course. That's why the onus of proving that GTP-* is
               | something more than a Chinese Room is on it's creators.
               | Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence and
               | all that. The problem is that to do that, human would
               | require a new test, and to construct a test for
               | consciousness requires us to understand how it works.
               | Turing test is not enough as we see now.
        
         | samwillis wrote:
         | I suppose the alternative it to go completely the other way and
         | call it "sky net".
        
           | Yizahi wrote:
           | Yes Dave, that would be a great name. :)
        
             | gpderetta wrote:
             | IBM just announced it will ROT25 its name just in time for
             | its AI pivot.
        
       | purplezooey wrote:
       | The funding seems excessive. Yet again, more "scorched earth"
       | from VCs and (apparently still?) cheap capital.
        
       | freediver wrote:
       | claude-instant-v1 is one of the "best kept secrets".
       | 
       | It is comperable in quality to gpt-3.5-turno, while being four
       | times faster (!) and at half the price (!).
       | 
       | We just released a minimal python library PyLLMs [1] to simplify
       | using various LLMs (openai, anthropic, AI21..) and as a part of
       | that we designed a LLM benchmark. All open source.
       | 
       | [1] https://github.com/kagisearch/pyllms/tree/main#benchmarks
        
         | lhl wrote:
         | From my evals on nat.dev I found claude instant to give great
         | responses and yes, avg 3-4X faster than 3.5, but one big
         | difference atm is that anyone can sign up and get access to
         | gpt-3.5-turbo _right now_ , but claude is still gated behind an
         | invite/wait list. (I'm still waiting for access for example.)
        
           | nr2x wrote:
           | Exactly!
           | 
           | OpenAI are the only people who are shipping product like
           | absolute maniacs. If I can't use your fancy system, it
           | doesn't exist as far as I'm concerned. There's a mountain of
           | theoretical work, I don't need a press release on top of it.
           | 
           | The game now is no longer theory, it's shipping code. A
           | 4-year plan means fuck all when OpenAI is not only ahead, but
           | still running way faster.
        
         | sashank_1509 wrote:
         | I have Claude on Slack. It is far worse than ChatGPT. I'm
         | presuming this is not "claude-instant-v1" version, it is fast
         | though. Any idea what version is Claude in Slack
        
           | [deleted]
        
         | pmarreck wrote:
         | I didn't know about Anthropic, so I just signed up for the
         | waitlist, thanks for the heads-up!
        
       | rwmj wrote:
       | Is there a large barrier to entry? I thought that the costs of
       | training, while large, were only a few million so not
       | insurmountable, and the technology is pretty well understood. If
       | this is true it's hard to understand what they'd need $300
       | million for, and also if there's no moat why they would command a
       | "billions" valuation.
        
         | losvedir wrote:
         | Do we know how much it cost to train GPT-4? (Or would cost, if
         | done by someone not trained in Azure by someone partnered with
         | Microsoft?) My impression, without looking into it now, is
         | training GPT-3 was on the order of $1-10 million. GPT-4 would
         | be higher than that, but you're right still in the ballpark of
         | what lots of ordinary companies could pay.
        
         | onion2k wrote:
         | _Is there a large barrier to entry?_
         | 
         | Yes. OpenAI has raised $1bn (plus $10bn from MSFT to exchange
         | GPT access for Azure services) and has been going 8 years.
         | There are some _huge_ challenges to making it work well and
         | fast. You need money for opex (hiring GPUs to train models on
         | mostly) and talent (people to improve the tech). No one is
         | competing with OpenAI without a good chunk of cash in the bank.
        
         | pixl97 wrote:
         | >Is there a large barrier to entry?
         | 
         | Go ask Nvidia for a pile of A/H100's and see what the wait time
         | is.
         | 
         | Also the cost of previous training was only on text, next gen
         | models are multi-modal and will drive up costs much higher.
        
       | amirmalekzadeh wrote:
       | Impressive amounts of investments. How can they know they are "10
       | times more capable" before they have trained the model? Anyone
       | has a clue on why their model will end up being that better?
        
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