jcoglanJun 3
zooming out a little bit, it does feel alarming to me that a lot of people whose stated politics are progressive or socialist or both are willing to give huge tech companies an easy ride for fully seizing the means of production for everyone, no matter where you personally work
Show threadSimon WillisonJun 3

@jcoglan what's the alternative?

It turns out LLMs are pretty easy to build now that we know how to do it. 5TB of data (not difficult to obtain) and a few millions of dollars in compute electricity turns out to do the job.

Show threadjcoglanJun 3
@simon I'm hearing "what's the alternative" a lot recently and if I took that attitude to very many things I would have to stop believing in anything
Show threadSimon WillisonJun 3
@jcoglan my chosen alternative is to try and teach people how to use these things productively and responsibly in a way that adds more value than it takes away
Show threadJan Lehnardt Jun 4

@simon @jcoglan I’m already getting stopped at “5TB data is easy to obtain” (without consent). There is no “responsibly” for me after that.

But even if it were, there are so many more things wrong with all this that I have a hard time understanding how anyone uses them at all outside of their manager tells them to because investments were made.

But that’s me, I’ve also never ridden an Uber. I must be holding things wrong.

Show threadRaphael LullisJun 4
@janl @simon @jcoglan serious question: what consent is required to scan every digitized work of art that is in public domain or to read the data from CommonCrawl?
Show threadJan Lehnardt Jun 4
@raphael @simon @jcoglan you are carving out an exception that is not relevant to my argument. It is extremely well documented that most popular LLMs have been trained on otherwise copyrighted materials and reproduce those in ways that is likely not covered by fair use (but I don’t have much hope for a legal argument, so moral it remains.
Show threadRaphael LullisJun 4

@janl @simon @jcoglan

But then your argument is not against LLMs in general, just this bad crop given by Big Tech.

Show threadJan Lehnardt Jun 4
@raphael @simon @jcoglan I struggle hard to separate the tool from the maker here. I think doing so is disingenuous even in the best light.
Show threadRaphael LullisJun 4

@janl @simon

I don't think the problem is in the tool itself. The troubling part to me is what @jcoglan
mentioned.

If all the "anti-AI" crowd focused their criticism and opposition on the corporations that are trying to monopolize and seek rent out of the whole world's information, it would be easier (I think) to gather more people on their side.

Show threadJan Lehnardt Jun 4
@raphael @simon @jcoglan and I think excepting the raw technology from this equation is not helping anyone but technologists who’d prefer not to be considering moral arguments 🤷‍♀️
Show threadRaphael LullisJun 4

@janl @simon @jcoglan

Call me an "Information wants to be free" maximalist if you want, but I have way less moral qualms about someone crawling all the internet and releasing an universally available LLM (open weights, no usage restrictions) than I have about anything coming out of, e.g, Apple.

Show threadJan Lehnardt Jun 4
@raphael I think we are done here.
Show threadRaphael LullisJun 4
@janl Sorry, did I touch a nerve here?
Show threadNot🐧A🐧Convicted🐧Felon
@raphael @janl
Jun 4 at 9:19amWeb