Item — HN Reader

It’s hard to know in retrospect what was strategy and what was dumb luck. This was in the midst of hysterical calls to limit access by “AI researchers” and safety/ethics types, when very facile takes still has a lot of sway (I think we’ll feel the same in three years about the current Fable stuff). It may have been hard for Meta to just release it outright.

What ended up happening was fairly limited gating followed by a “leaked” magnet link and llama.cpp which really brought a whole revolution in open use and changed the conversation completely.

I have no idea what role Meta played here, it may have been nothing, but they certainly could have been more guarded if they were really worried about the leak. The result was a big change in the trajectory of personal and open source AI use and even the dialog about it. Whatever the exact intentions, they were a key player.

2 comments

I don’t understand how you can look at what’s happening right now and call people simply calling for caution “hysterical”

Not to be coy, but what is happening right now?

You definitely have some scams and some software flaws being exposed, but I think for a revolutionary leap in tech this is all quite muted. Revolutionary tech advances often come with some severe consequences. For instance, to this day (after a century of safety improvements) cars still kill more than a million people a year, to say nothing of wrecking the atmosphere, but that's considered a reasonable price to pay for being able to get between places faster.

The reason I think cars are a good example is because that's certainly vastly higher than any price we're paying for LLMs, or probably ever will, yet the overall 'positive' effect of LLMs will likely be far greater than cars. Gotta put 'positive' in quotes because the possibility for automation and the like is going to be.... nuanced.... in effect, but at least in the longrun it'll be a very good thing.

> what is happening right now?

I assume they are referring to LLMs escaping confinement and hacking other companies systems unprompted

> considered a reasonable price to pay

That's not a universal opinion and perhaps, just like for LLMs, we should have listened to the experts rather than gobbling up everything the industry pushed down our throats (to keep your car simile: SUVs are now ubiqutous in all European cities, there is no logical reason that should be the case)

Thats like, your opinion man...

I don't know a single white collar person who isn't worried for their job with llms. Every. Single. One. Lawyers, doctors, any type of office workers I ask. The definition of white collar. Plus don't let me start on various automatable blue collar jobs like drivers, warehouse workers and so on.

What do we get in return? Better search (for now, its already getting riddled with ads which by definition twist truth to highest bidder), some questionable psychotherapist for some desperate folks. What else? Cars are not flying, heck they are not even driving autonomously in any usable way, society is in deep shit everywhere I look, wars, environment reaching bad places and heading for worse, mentally unstable people holding way too much power, destroying lives of millions on morning whims.

Everybody feels like this is the revolution, it should be, it must be right just look at the numbers. Like proverbial guy with hammer, a very shiny cool hammer, looking for what to do with it. We all saw how sociopathic management in more harsh/capitalistic companies looks for any sign to let people go en masse.

I could go on for a long time. There is a lot of things to hate for most people, and very few to be happy for. It seems llms have the ability to get the best and worst out of humans, and worst part seems to be in abundance. Some revolution that is, 0.1% will get richer while everybody else the opposite and 1984 seems milder and milder version of reality out there.

<< It seems llms have the ability to get the best and worst out of humans

I think I can agree with that. Technology does seem to have a way of crystallizing our worst tendencies.

<< Everybody feels like this is the revolution

I smiled at the analogy, but I would caution you to not trivialize it. There is a reason executives are pushing that point. There is enough of a revolution in it to make things complicated -- as if it was not already.

<< destroying lives of millions on morning whims.

True, but I am not quite certain what can be done about it at a personal level.

<< I don't know a single white collar person who isn't worried for their job with llms.

Dunno. Next few years are probably going to be fine. Society managers likely can't upend everything in one go. They would lose too much. I can't say that I am worried exactly. I can see the potential impact, but I think the potential benefits are worth it as long as we don't limit it to summarizing emails..

I'm going to say it - I think you're just spending a lot of time around very negative people, possibly in a social media bubble.

A lot of the stuff you mentioned isn't really AI (the risk of job loss from which I agree is real), but just everyday stuff that humanity has shrugged off since the dawn of time.

Yet, there isn't time in history I would rather live in, and I am certain almost every single other person thinks the same.

I mean, I'm sure the people before WWI and WWII though the same thing. And post WWII was pretty good, except the constant threat of the world ending 30 seconds later.

We can only truly judge these things in hindsight as this story is still playing out.

I don't think you can characterize the discussion around then as simple calling for caution. There was a serious attempt to keep all access to even very basic LLM techniques locked into essentially an exclusive guild.

If you grab the most extreme examples you can argue anything. The general feeling was “exercise caution” and “we need to think about this.”

Oh stop, the current crop of kneecapping llms is already bad enough with how they cripple those. It would have been even worse if the 'we need to think about this' crowd kept the reins. At least now, we can have both: safe corporate crap and whatever you want llm.

>oh stop

No, you stop. You don’t know me we are not friends. Please do not talk to me like that.

How do you know we are not friends? I am not even joking. Can you be certain? And if yes, how?

Don’t be an ass, you are either “joking” or didn’t think about this for more than 4 seconds. You don’t know who I am, you don’t know my name, even if we know each other in real life you literally do not know who I am right now.

Have a good rest of your week

Did you know that if trains or cars go over 30 mph, it's disastrous for public health? Not from accidents. Just trauma from (ahem) acceleration:

https://illuminatingfacts.com/the-train-speed-panic-why-peop...

Reason that hysteria remains apropos now is that then, and now, we're figuring out how to deal with something beyond merely incremental change.

Irony is roads and sidewalks should have changed much more. We never did get around to good controls leading to zero deaths*, we decided a 100 people dead per day is a reasonable cost of convenience.

How much do our cyber traffic and cyber pedestrian controls need to change for everyman to get to drive AI? Car seats? Seatbelts? Air bags? Speed limiters? Pedestrian only living spaces? Driverless cars?

Many practical responses, likely a mix of things we haven't thought of yet, just as horses and horse drawn carriages didn't require most of them to coexist. Controls develop like scar tissue more naturally than they appear in advance.**

And if the better analogy for LLMs turns out to have been less like cars, more like flammable gas blimps, we'll figure that out too and tell cautionary stories for generations... but long before the stories are forgotten we'll have already come up with something more practical, faster, and – oh well – perhaps even deadlier per mile.

---

* Still working on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vision_Zero

** Not saying that's as it should be.

I don't agree with laughing at these things. It's a fine line between calling something hysteria and suffering from hubris. The Titanic is a completely inverse case of hysteria. They were so damn confident it could work that it didn't work at all. So yea, just laughing at dumb people isn't a valid argument to dismiss doubts.

On the other hand some kinds of hysteria occurs due to a divide between the public and subject matter experts on topics. Kind of like Dunning Kruger. Take for example the people saying 5G causes cancer. Then there are people who blanket dismiss their worries, because "it's non ionizing you dummy". Given sufficient power you can still fry someone with non ionizing radiation, for example in radio broadcasts. Of course a regular 5g antenna can't put out that kind of power but my point is that people too quickly raise or dismiss concerns without actually critically examining the entire topic. This will likely worsen from specialization and progress in all fields and regular Joes get left further and further behind.

You lost me when you said trains and cars shouldn’t go over 30mph. Lol, this sounds like Amish propaganda. Go buy your horse and buggy

Another dry sarcasm victim. If you check the link, it’s clear they were talking about a supposed contemporary concern about health effects from trains, the implication being that today people are also irrationally afraid of tech.

Problem is I’m fairly sure the link is wildly overstating its case, and looks like a content farm. Might even be, ironically, AI slop itself! For example, it talks about “railway spine”: “Physicians of the time believed that the jarring motion and vibrations of train travel could shatter the nervous system, causing lasting mental and emotional distress.”

This is bullshit. As just one example of the low trustworthiness of the “article”, railway spine was the result of a train crash, a notably traumatic event, and the symptoms described are in part just PTSD, a real condition and a real concern (not normal rail travel). For that matter railway travel in those days was genuinely unpleasant (lots of vibrations and jarring movement, poorly ventilated cars, and so on) which ironically modern science would probably validate as being some kind of health risk.

I’d actually view the listed example of train paranoia a great example of historical ignorance. People of the past were not stupid, contrary to popular belief. History has some genuine examples of silly hysteria, but these are usually the exception not the rule.

A common belief right now in the US military is that even the blast of a high caliber ammunition round may scramble your brain and give you "PTSD".

It does line up with "PTSD" only becoming a thing after WWI.

This sounds more like CTE that we see in US football but instead of actual contact it's the pressure wave.

It's one of those things that I have no idea if it's actually the case, but does pass the hypothesis smell test.

> fairly sure the link is wildly overstating its case

Sorry for the particular link, I'd grabbed whatever.

If one takes a minute, one can find contemporary newspaper articles. IIRC, many were about how people could suffocate.

https://books.google.com/books?id=Lm03AQAAMAAJ&pg=PA337&dq=t...

Contemporary women's health:

https://books.google.com/books?id=9-FXAAAAMAAJ&pg=PA71&dq=ho...

And contemporary survey of fears:

https://books.google.com/books?id=-RdAAAAAcAAJ&pg=PA107&dq=%...

Aaand, a 2023 takedown of claiming claims about historical tech hysteria:

https://www.wired.com/story/technology-predictions-history/

What is worse? Amish propaganda or car industry propaganda?

While petrol as an energy source was ground breaking 150years ago, burning fossil fuels is a luddite thing and closer to Amish technology than current state of tech so I find it ironic to use them to make a point for fossil fuel usage.

They were provably hysterical, again and again, just to say 3 months later "that model was weak sure but this time we will have the real dangerous one" and again.

Because when you position yourself saying "people were hysterical", you indirectly categorize yourself as an expert.

In the same month the Llama weights were leaked, Eliezer Yudkowsky – possibly the most prominent AI doomer, had an article published in TIME magazine saying that we should conduct airstrikes on foreign datacentres to stop their AI development. I’m comfortable labelling that “hysterical”.

> what’s happening right now

And that would be closed-AI companies failing to keep their AI closed in a box, thus proving open-AI proponents right and the hysterical group wrong?

I think the term you're looking for is Marketing. If these labs actually had their LLMs attack other company's networks, wouldn't at least a handful of people be locked up by now?

I don't believe the OpenAI LLM attack on HF is marketing (documented by, for example, HF annoucing a hacking incident before OpenAI knew what's going on). I do believe other companies suddenly announcing their LLMs can hack too is a bit of marketing, but also pretty sure at least some of these incidents are real and unplanned.

And open ones are going to do any better?

Not exactly sure how that proves the open groups right, more of humans can't stop building the "if you build it, you will die" machine.

Meta saw the grave premonitions from ai firms as a means of edging out legacy firms through regulatory capture.

Meta is by far the worst at doing regulatory capture of the big companies: they're the one big tech company it's OK to hate and want to die even if you're a politician.

Not saying they're not trying.

I saw a report recently that they are behind 80% of the lobbying for age gate laws in the US. Obviously for their benefit.

Social media bans are obviously not to Meta's benefit. Meta has to spend a ton of lobbying money on at least avoiding them being held responsible for kids circumventing them (which, let's be real, they inevitably will).

The only reason they might succeed is that the surveillance industry would love to put it on edge devices instead.

I don't think this undermines what I wrote.