According to openAI's own @deanwball:
Even OpenAI isn't buying this distillation talk:
I’m struggling to understand this perspective. Is he using the words accelerationist/decelerationist in a sense other than the obvious one?
EDIT: I searched his twitter history and discovered that his argument is basically “if you drive down costs, then OpenAI will have less money to invest in development, slowing down the overall rate of AI progress.” IMO this take betrays an overwhelmingly stupid degree of exceptionalism, but I guess that’s what I’d expect from someone working at OpenAI.
Every company wants that!
if open models are good enough then it doesn't matter, if they aren't then there's probably a return available in investing there.
that sounds great to me. anything that slows down the pace and gives us a chance to prepare for, at best, massive job displacement, and at worst, robots turning us all into paperclips.
"I am personally surprised the Chinese state continues to allow the open sourcing of models this good, given potential risks" what risks?
I suspect the reason they are is 75% explained by strategic blindness/lack of AGI-pilledness (the CCP is very Yann Lecun-y in its views of AI). Confused what this means
Open-weight models are inherently decelerationist, and I'm continually surprised to see the so-called "accelerationists" so excited about open-weight models. Confused again.
One probable outcome of an open-weight-model-dominant world is full AI communism, which is precisely what China proposes: rather than a market product, AI is a "public good" which will ultimately be provided by the state as a kind of "digital public infrastructure." This future strikes me as a dystopian hellscape, but I've never met an open-weight models advocate who doesn't ultimately concede this is where things end. I don't understand this at all.
Can someone in the know please use plain layman's terms to explain what this tweet is about?
I think it's referring to the belief that LLMs are not the path towards AGI, and that LLM's, while useful, are not going to have the impact that the American labs believe it will have.
The Silicon Valley people like this openai guy, high on their own supply, are convinced they are building some machine god that will either bring about the end of the human race or utopia, they therefore cannot understand why the Chinese (or any other normal person on earth) are not afraid of chatbots and have other things on their minds.
I mean, what an appalling way to live. To take themselves so seriously and simultaneously be terrified of what they're building. If we are really seeing the collapse of the bubble now, I wonder what's going to happen to these clowns when their AI god fails... what will they move on to next?
I assume they mean the risk of opening up "forbidden" knowledge to the masses without adequate control, which the CCP hasn't historically been known to do.
> I suspect the reason they are is 75% explained by strategic blindness/lack of AGI-pilledness (the CCP is very Yann Lecun-y in its views of AI). Confused what this means
Yann Lecun is a pioneer in the field of AI and Meta's former AI head. He is famously anti-LLM, and considers the entire technology a dead end to achieving human-level AI. The author is saying the CCP has similar views (that LLMs aren't going to get exponentially better/lead to AGI) which is leading them to not control these models as tightly as they otherwise would.
> Open-weight models are inherently decelerationist, and I'm continually surprised to see the so-called "accelerationists" so excited about open-weight models. Confused again.
"AI accelerationists" = people who want AI to progress. According to the author these people should not celebrate open models because open source = less commerical value in LLMs = less investment into the field (because how are companies going to get returns?), and this will ultimately lead to slower growth.
The last bit is about government controlling AI vs commercial companies. According to the author the former is a dystopian hellscape.
IMO even if you think his points make sense, his job title ("head of strategic futures @openai") means they should all be taken with a massive grain of salt.
Writer seems to have no clue how IP actually functions in China