Mahlzeit

@Mahlzeit@feddit.de
1 Post – 97 Comments
Joined 12 months ago

In his book Zero to One, entrepreneur and venture capitalist Peter Thiel argues that modern scientific innovation is no longer groundbreaking.

I wasted a click.

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Ideally, they wouldn't be paying salaries? What?

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After reading the whole article, I still don't know what Uruguay wants to happen.

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Yes. Or maybe you dreamt it and were a bit confused on waking up. Perfectly normal and nothing to worry about.

Maybe relevant: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleep_paralysis

FunSearch (so called because it searches for mathematical functions, not because it’s fun)

I'm probably not the only one who wondered.

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That ought to satisfy all those who wanted "consent" for training data.

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People say that AI will kill us all by ordering too many paperclips.

So people try to make AI safe by stopping it from making images of nude people.

WTF is wrong with everyone? Am I stuck in the most boring Lewis Carroll story ever?

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They do not have permission to pass it on. It might be an issue if they didn't stop it.

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Spotify is Swedish.

Thanks.

Putting the El Observador article through translate

When a song in Uruguay is played on radio, television or at a party, the rights are collected by the General Association of Authors of Uruguay (Agadu) which retains the 60% of what is paid. The remaining 40% is divided equally between performers and record labels.

Spotify says that it already pays for the rights. This understanding would mean that the players in Uruguay should work out how that is to be split.

Spotify fears that the new law turns what they pay currently, simply into one share of the total, implying an extreme increase of the cost.

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The tech angle are the AI provisions? Can someone provide some context for that? Doesn't sound like much of a win for the little guy.

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“ooooh I can’t wait to see what they create”

My first thought was: "Isn't that obvious?"

My second thought was: "Wait. You can do that cheaper in Japan."

It's just a scam. Every couple years, some guys sell a ship to some naive libertarians.

The model cards for Stable Diffusion 1.5 and 2.1 estimate the CO2 emissions as 11.25 tons and 12 tons for training. XL lacks the info.

A transatlantic flight (round-trip) is about 1 ton per pax. So, while every little bit helps, ML is not where you can make the big gains in lowering emissions.

Looks like he wants to create a joint venture of several companies with a couple of independent consultants. Ok. Good luck. He doesn't owe the world any free labor. He can try to negotiate any kind of compensation scheme for his intellectual property. That's capitalism.

On a less capitalistic note: The EU provides a bit of government funding for FOSS development on account of the public benefit.

https://joinup.ec.europa.eu/sites/default/files/news/2022-04/Development%20of%20a%20Funding%20Mechanism%20for%20Sustaining%20Open%20Source%20Software%20for%20European%20Public%20Services.pdf

It's noteworthy that patent law is 20 years to this day. It has survived with its core fairly intact, the main change being that you can no longer get a patent for bringing an invention into the country. Today that is called piracy (poor China).

I believe that is because patents simply have to work for the whole country in encouraging progress. If cultural production is stifled, well... Who cares? The elites in the copyright industry benefit, and they have an outsize influence on public discourse.

This thread is interesting reading. Normally, people here complain about capitalism left and right. But when an actual policy choice comes up, the opinions become firmly pro-capitalist. I wonder how that works.

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I have never been able to understand Uber. They never invented anything new. Maybe there weren't e-hailing apps everywhere, but that's not so much better phoning for a taxi. The main thing they did was to spend an insane amount of money only to brush aside taxi regulations in the US and maybe some other countries. I have no idea how anyone expects to see a return on that "investment".

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If you generate images for an hour, it might be about the same as playing a game, depending on how fast you prompt.

But you're quite right. For most end users it's entertainment, so this is the proper context.

You mean like:

Warning! You will never be in a relationship with this model.

Yes. That seems like something people should know.

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Bit of a long story...

Some forms of intellectual property require registration. For example patents. Patents are supposed to encourage technological development by allowing inventors to monetize their work. There's a lot of justified criticism of that system but, on the whole, it seems to have worked.

Originally, US copyrights worked in exactly the same way, for the same purpose. The requirement to register for copyright was dropped in 1978. However, registration still plays a role in US law for some legal purposes.

So what happened to copyright?

Europe developed a different copyright tradition, in the 19th century, while it was stilled largely ruled by oppressive autocracies. The monarchs of the 19th century were not the overpaid figureheads that still exist in some countries.

Copyrights today last (usually) until 70 years after the author's death, while patents which underpin tech progress last (usually) only 20 years in total. You can see that this is very different. That copyright revolves around the death of a person shows how it is a personal privilege, as were normal in aristocracies. The purpose is to enable people to extract money without any consideration for the interests of society as a whole. It's about rent-seeking.

Nowadays, US content production (Hollywood, etc.) dwarfs that of Europe. The better copyright laws of the US may have something to do with that. Although the US has gradually shifted over to the rent-seeking European model, there are still some advantages left.

As the content producers in the US grew, the US gradually switched over to the rent-seeking model. I think this is largely because the content producers also gained more lobbying powers.

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IMO, we need to ask: What benefits the people? or What is in the public interest?

That should be the only thing of importance. That's probably controversial. Some will call it socialism. It is pretty much how the US Constitution sees it, though.

Maybe you agree with this. But when you talk about "models trained on public data" you are basically thinking in terms of property rights, and not in terms of the public benefit.

I wonder if that clause is legal. It could be argued that it legitimately protects the capital investment needed to make the model. I'm not sure if that's true, though.

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That's the thing. I don't see how there is sacrifice involved in this. I would guess that the average user here has personally more to lose than to gain from expanded copyrights.

Depends on your definition of "capitalism".

This is not supposed to happen in a market economy, as you have in developed countries. Many people define "capitalism" as being, more or less, that system.

A narrower definition of "capitalism" is private control of the means of production. In that sense, "capitalism" is at odds with a market economy, which is one reason why that private control is limited in many ways in developed countries.

Took em long enough.

I wonder if they used ChatGPT to create any of the training data.

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Which pirate party is that?

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So acquiring and distributing pirated materials like college textbooks and otherwise expensive software is one example.

That's an interesting example, because in threads on AI lawsuits there are many calls for expanding intellectual property, without any consideration for public benefit. It's such an outright doubling down on all the pathological aspects of capitalism. It made me look whether there are any equally concrete demands going the other way and eventually make this post.

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The models (ie the weights specifically) may not be copyrightable, anyways. There's no copyright on the result of number crunching. Once the model is further fine-tuned, there might be copyright, but it's still unlike anything covered by copyright in the past.

One analogy I have is a 3D engine. The engineers design the look of the typical output by setting parameters, but that does not create a specific copyright on the parameters. There's copyright on the design documents, the code, the UI, if any and maybe other stuff. It's not quite the same, though.

Some jurisdictions have IP on databases. I think that would cover AI models. If I am right, then that means that any license agreements that come with models are ineffective in the US.

However, to copy these models, you first need to get your hands on them. They are still trade secrets, so don't on leaks.

Part of the platform of the Swedish Pirate Party?

Can't find it in the Election Manifesto 2022, that they have in English. Sounds more like they want copyright to serve society, not to protect interests.

There is a project (AI Horde) that allows you to donate compute for inference. I'm not sure why the same doesn't exist for training. I think the RAM/VRAM requirements just can't be lowered/split.

Another way to contribute is by helping with training data. LAION, which created the dataset behind Stable Diffusion, is a volunteer effort. Stable Diffusion itself was developed at a tax-funded public university in Germany. However, the cost of the processing for training, etc. was covered by a single rich guy.

A year as cool as the one they were born in

A solution would be to save the chat log as a text file. An LLM might be able to turn it into FAQ format with little oversight. Of course, someone would still have to volunteer the work.

Obviously, Discord doesn't want that sort of thing since it lessens their hold on a community and the people in it. They could decide to cause trouble.

The situation today is that AI images are copyrighted (or not) just like any other images.

Given the power of the copyright industry, I doubt that this will be cut back. In the interest of society, it should be, but denying copyright to AI imagery is not the best place to do this.

The original intention of copyright was the same as that of patents: To encourage the creation of new works by making it possible to monetize them through licensing. AI images can be very expensive to make, depending on what goes into them. Without copyright on these images, we might miss out.

ETA: This purpose of copyright is given in the US Constitution (though it is older). US Americans could think about that. IP is property created to serve the public. That's the only justification for property to be found in that document.

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Very true. There's another possibility, though: That pay for certain employees (ie executives) is too high. It may not be included in 3, if the pay is normal. However, that "normal" may be considered immoral, and/or straight market failure,

The models are deliberately engineered to create "good" images, just like cameras get autofocus, anti-shake and stuff. There are many tools that will auto-prettify people, not so many for the reverse.

There are enough imperfect images around for the model to know what that looks like.

“I am Andrew Ryan, and I’m here to ask you a question. Is a man not entitled to the sweat of his brow? ‘No!’ says the man in Washington, ‘It belongs to the poor.’

How do Americans feel about this attitude?

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It's likely a reference to Yudkowsky or someone along those lines. I don't follow that crowd.

The term comes from an old theory that said that humanity started out in the Caucasus and spread from there, people becoming darker as they were exposed to more sun.

Not quite. The guy who coined the term, Blumenbach, believed that the Caucasians (in particular the Georgians) were the most beautiful and therefore must have been the original humans. Maybe "old theory" means the biblical belief that "Noah's Ark" stranded in the Caucasus Mountains. I don't know that Blumenbach used that as a justification. Biblical race doctrines defined races as descent from different sons of Noah.

The Caucasians are certainly far from the palest people on the planet. The south of the region is part of Turkey and Iran. Those are maybe the most well-known countries and the region and I'm sure that no one pictures very pale people. I remember an article about the considerable diplomatic and PR efforts that Turkey undertook in the early 20th century to be made a white country under US law. I wish I could recall the details.

I have been thinking the exact same.

Better movie comparison: A.I. Artificial Intelligence by Steven Spielberg

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So much this. Most people under 40 must have grown up with video games. Shouldn't they have noticed at some point that the enemies and NPCs are AI-controlled? Some games even say that in the settings.

I don't see the point in the expression "AGI" either. There's a fundamental difference between the if-else AI of current games and the ANNs behind LLMs. But there is no fundamental change needed to make an ANN-AI that is more general. At what point along that continuum do we talk of AGI? Why should that even be a goal in itself? I want more useful and energy-efficient software tools. I don't care if it meets any kind of arbitrary definition.