It doesn't matter why Chinese firms are stealing models and open sourcing them. The fact that they are doing it is a very, very good thing for basically everyone other than the people who paid to build the original models, but I've got no sympathy for them considering they stole all the content to train them in the first place. This is some kind of beautiful irony.
> it is a very, very good thing for basically everyone other than the people who paid to build the original models
It's not a good thing if you think there's more discovery and progress to be made, rather than cannibalising a fully mature field with cheaper alternatives. Drowning R&D early is not good for everyone.
Is leveraging an enormous capital advantage to strip-mine the Internet and sell it back to us cannibalism or not? Confused on this point. I think they are exploiting a loophole in copyright law (and kind of redefining the meaning of "derivative work" in my opinion, but hey I'm not a lawyer) that collectively we tolerate because the end result is so useful
I think that's a slightly different topic, but: a) strip-mining the internet is definitely the most misleading way to think about it. Strip mining means aggressively removing something to the area's detriment, and nothing has been removed. If all AI is turned off today the internet has not lost all of its natural resources, and silly phrases like that fuel inappropriate emotions and consequent conclusions and b) the internet is not being sold back to us - that is also a highly misleading phrase, if not an outright lie. The internet is still there and we can use it. No one is selling back to us what we already had. AI is not the internet cordoned off and resold.
What does further progress get us? Mass unemployment? Extinction? Pick your dark future science fiction?
The happy ending where we're all living in a garden of eden cared for by benevolent AI is hardly worth considering when you look at the cast of characters who are in charge of the world right now.
I don’t think many outside the US are actively hoping to be governed by Sam, Dario and Elon.
The "why" always matters in everything in life.
Can you please tell my, as someone who is neither Chinese nor American, "why" I should care if a Chinese company stole from another American company (that in turn stole from everyone) to give me a cheaper service that fits my use case?
> to give me a cheaper service that fits my use case?
Because they aren't giving you a cheaper service that fits your use case.
Best Case scenario, it's a trillion-dollar behemoth stealing from a billion-dollar behemoth so they can add their own explicit restrictions/weights on top to influence the masses.
There is no 'robin hood' here, any perceived value you get is clearly and explicitly tainted. "I don't care if it doesn't show me non-party-line results - It makes me a cheap UI !". Ethics/morals be damned.
> There is no 'robin hood' here, any perceived value you get is clearly and explicitly tainted. "I don't care if it doesn't show me non-party-line results - It makes me a cheap UI !". Ethics/morals be damned.
I can't tell if you are talking about Anthropic or Alibaba here.
and honestly that's my entire point. There is no Good Guy here.
In a world which already has the likes of Anthropic and OpenAI, having Chinese labs be a counter balance is decidedly better than the hypothetical where American companies had a global monopoly on LLMs.
If your argument is that all present LLM offerings are unethical then that is something I am sypmathetic to. That said, I am also unable to offer a conceivable roadmap to undoing the opening of the LLM Pandora's box so I tend not ground my arguments in anti-LLM advocacy; that would be very 2023 of me.
The whole AI industry was built upon stealing IP.
The extreme of this is to make IP laws irrelevant and that everything should be in the public domain.
Which maybe is not a bad outcome for humanity as a collective after all.
The main problem is how they accessed the IP, but then using it to train a model is fair use. But yeah, IP theft doesn't exist because nothing is stolen really: Hollywood studios still have their movies.
Um, yeah. They stole the IP and then they stored the pirated IP. It was literally stolen and stored on their servers. That proves that IP theft exists. It's not complicated.
I don't think that's true. Sometimes the 'why' is lost in time as no one's around to tell it, so we end up with a "if a tree falls in the woods and no one's around to hear it, does it make a sound?" scenario. It doesn't really matter. The thing now exists without a 'why.'