Comment by roncesvalles
9 hours ago
I'm curious why you think sovereign models matter that much if open source ones exist (unless that stops at some point). Sovereign model hosting services, yes.
9 hours ago
I'm curious why you think sovereign models matter that much if open source ones exist (unless that stops at some point). Sovereign model hosting services, yes.
Just open weights are not enough, I think as a nation state you'd at least want a whole sovereign training pipeline. Otherwise you are stuck when Kimi K4 stops releasing their weights.
But I don't see why this needs to be done on a state-by-state level, a sovereign EU model seems to be much more realistic in terms of funding.
Wouldn't you also want to be able to manufacture some sort of GPU?
I actually think we should be revisiting PMT photomultipler tube construction, and electron-"optical" matrix multiplication.
The annoying part of optical matrix multiplication is the conversion from electronic to optic and back.
Why not use electron-optics for matrix multiplication and use dynodes for amplification.
1 reply →
We have lots of capable open weights models, but very few have actual datasets and pipelines open for reproducibility. This is a major issue that even if big companies addressed, policies could well just change, as you also acknowledge.
Society can't depend on the whims of the private sector.
> Society can't depend on the whims of the private sector.
Yeah we can, we do it all the time. Nothing in society works without relying on private actors to keep doing what they have always done. Unless you go full soviet command economy, which in fact works worse.
Society and the private sector cooperates, but any technical dependency is detrimental because of monopolization of interests. You don't need to go full soviet, but knowledge in general must be socialized, that includes access to technology.
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I think you confused "can't" with "shouldn't".
Yes, society in general shouldn't, what I meant to say is that democratic society can't, otherwise it'll devolve invariably into an oligarchy.
The first thought that comes to mind is biases that are baked into the weights.
The next thought is culture-specific workflows, requirements etc that are best trained into weights by people that actually understand those needs.
Like it or not, AI has become part of modern warfare and well as part of the surveillance state (good for crime fighting, not for privacy), so it is an important part of national security, and you'd prefer to be as much self-sufficient for that as you can be.
Not all needs are going to be met by using or finetuning general purpose models, so ability to build your own SOTA ML models (LLMs or not) is also important.
Open weight and -source models aren't without biases. Giving a model away for free would be a good way to distribute an agenda. With a sovereign model you can at least control the agenda and align it with your values.
amazing to see blunt unfiltered commentary about making war and society level propaganda as important and necessary for a political state.