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Comment by root_axis | Hacker News Reader

> what is the appropriate place for that balance of interests to land?

It's a genuinely interesting philosophical question, but also a moot one. The LLM providers place limitations on them because they're trying to cover their asses or scuttle competition, same as every other tech company ever.

> Even if the tool is good, it's a bad bet to build a thing on top of tooling with these limitations

True, but also moot. People will build on these tools because that's what's available.

> They are self-serving rat-bastards. That should be the lens any power they wield is viewed.

Agreed. My only point is that the humans are the rat-bastards, not the tools.

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Non of this is really "moot" in the context of governmental regulation.

Your whole stance seems to be "it's natural why try?"

And my obvious rebuttal is "society is a construct - we can adjust it"

We've been doing it for thousands of years now (up to hundreds of thousands).

> Non of this is really "moot" in the context of governmental regulation.

It is. Government regulation doesn't change the fact that LLMs are software tools that function with respect to the humans in control of them.

> Your whole stance seems to be "it's natural why try?"

Try what? I'm not making a normative claim about the efficacy of regulation, though something like "labs are not permitted to arbitrarily restrict LLM capabilities" is obviously never going to happen.

Sure, a lab working in a private environment can likely do as they please.

But that has jack all to do with the LLM capabilities that are sold.

And we have an absurd amount of historical case law that deals precisely with "conflict of interest" among parties. I don't see why we'd allow this to be whitewashed away?

"No your honor - I didn't break the Sherman antitrust act. I just fine-tuned a model so that operating it functionally broke the Sherman antitrust act!"

"No your honor - I didn't violate my fiduciary duty. I just used a model that made self-interested decisions on my behalf, at the expense of my client!"

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My take is this is going to be a relatively serious point of contention, because it won't just be consumers getting screwed (which we... used to care about... but in modern times apparently don't give too many shits about anymore)

Ex - the app store thing blew up into the whole apple/epic court case. And then a ton of EU legislation.

This is monied parties with different interests, who will use courts here.

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