Comment by iloveoof
13 hours ago
Distillation is a great thing for consumers. It improves competition and reduces the massive moats that OpenAI and Anthropic have in compute that would otherwise lead them to be duopolists. It’s also only fair that AIs trained on humanity’s wealth of knowledge for Pennie’s allow competition to train on humanity’s wealth of knowledge at market cost.
Distillation is only a great thing for consumers as long as you ignore all AI risks, which are what this post is about. If you don't, you have to weight greater access to better open-source models against greater exposure to risks caused by these models existing. Everything hinges on how major you think the risks will be.
The biggest AI risk, by far, is the concentration of power in a few companies, located in the US.
There is a lot of fear marketing about our text generators turning into Terminator. But other than the centralization of power, such fears are largely fiction. (Actual fiction, stuff like ai2027.)
And the labs know it: If Anthropic or OpenAI believed in their own narrative of being on the brink of world dominating superintelligence, they absolutely would not plan to IPO rn.
The slowdown narrative is probably just a hedge, or a face-saving way to lower expectations in case they can not keep improving at the same speed until they actually IPO.
I dunno, do you really want to bet that if you took a deliberately unaligned frontier model and asked it to permanently disable the US power grid, it would do a poor job of it?
What odds would you take on this bet?
I’m disturbingly close to 50/50.
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Yeah, we should give a limited copyright waiver for pre training, given that the model is released as open weight and allow labs to compete with RL on that basis.
He did actually specify that diffusion should be limited for authoritarian countries, which I appreciated. If his focus is really safety, distillation in countries that are bound by safety regulation should be fine
> bound by safety regulation should be fine
I do not believe this is a feature we can differentiate between the "good" and "bad" guys, as the US is currently under a poor safety regulation regime. Democracies can elect unethical people, write bad laws, and have uncertain enforcement. In example, the current US admin regularly lambasts Europe because they try to have stronger regulation.
yes but the mention of alignment is inside the "pacing within democracies" section
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