If you think this does anything to the models, you have not understood the difference between training and inference…

I mean, you are trying to get chips delivered to you. Which will make them horribly soggy from their own steam too…

I thought that was mainly Belgians…

Huh? Have you read the news in the last couple years?

Saying that museums aren’t in the business of current politics is somewhat naive.

At a minimum, current politics is crashing into the museum’s business every other week. Most obvious recent example is Trump vs the Smithsonian.

But it’s by no means the only recent case of politicians trying their hand at historical revisionism, or making partisan issues out of science.

The discussion has grown stale, and the point remains.

You have your argument about what libertarians should think, and there’s plenty enough that disagree with you.

Including Murray Fucking Rothbard of all people.

You’re really mixing up a lot of stuff. For instance, the fact that something can be sold doesn’t mean it’s a form of property. It means that it can be owned, that there can be property over it.

But listen, you don’t have to convince me that Libertarians are in favor of copyright. You have to convince Murray Rothbard.

Indeed most of your examples are not property. You don’t call then property. (Except kicking the customer out of a restaurant)

Of course libertarians love contracts, and love property, but in that ideology the most important thing about contracts is that they’re voluntary, and negotiated between the parties. Which copyright isn’t really.

And I didn’t say that libertarians oppose copyright. Obviously, many don’t. I said that it’s possible for libertarians to oppose copyright without this being in open contradiction with the rest of their ideology.

I do know the relevant bits of Python. Learning basic Python is just marginally harder than shouting at the screen, and adding numpy and some pyqt on top of that was also not impossible.

It was simply an example of a field where LLMs are having a lot of success, all the more reasons that this should be done as efficiently as possible rather than using the same 10 trillion parameters model that is used for everything else.

Secondly, I have heard positive things from people using LLM for instance to review their code, and they found it very very helpful, without the soul sucking effects of having it write all their code.

That I would happily try on my own code, but not in Dario’s cloud. And the price to get a local rig right now is way too high.

There is a significant distinction. If I have an apple in my hand, I can eat it. If I eat it you don’t. I can’t make it two apples to give you one. We can’t all be eating the same apple. The physical good is finite. Whether there is or isn’t the state, that’s a fact.

In this sense, some people call property a natural right, even though anyone who starts with that usually gets way too far way too quickly.

Intellectual property is different. With intellectual property you have a right over every copy of a work, that exists or will exist, made by you or anyone else. And you can sell a book away, without a EULA or strings attached, and retain rights over it. None of these exists without a law, and without a state.

But it weren’t for copyright, we could make copies of a book, and give them to people who’ll make more copies, and so exponentially until we all have a copy.

Copyright also covers derivative works. Can you imagine somebody asserting rights over the cider you made with the apples he sold you?

As far as I can tell property has existed in all complex societies I’m aware of. Intellectual property is a recent invention.

I’m not at my sharpest, but I hope you see that there is a very fundamental difference between physical property, and intellectual property. In general, this is not controversial.

That’s a little simplistic. From a legal perspective copyright is a state enforced monopoly. Perfectly reasonable for a libertarian to reject it.

In the same way, someone on the left could view it similar to the English enclosures. Taking for a private something that should be in common.

Ideologically speaking it can be perfectly plausible to reject the current overdone copyright regime from either perspective.

And by the way Doctorow talks about collective bargaining and unionizing like the whole time.

I can also recommend you a great book by a Chicago economist that argues against copyright on lassez faire grounds, closer to the libertarian position, but really well supported with a trove of historical case studies.

Intellectual property is not a property, it’s a state-enforced monopoly over the production of a certain good i.e. the copies of a work.

It’s perfectly reasonable for a libertarian to reject that (Not all libertarians do, but some do).

There are many things that are capital intensive, and we don’t hold their product to be particularly special (cars, drugs)

That being said, it’s true that we consider information to be a special case.

But what you say is a problem for the “deep research” use of chatbots, or the “AI summaries” of search engines.

But the same could well be said about search engines themselves. That still didn’t get the level of hysteria that LLMs get. AI summaries on search should go away though, they destroy the viability of the websites they source information from.

I would like a truly open (incl. open training) model, that could be produced through public funding by a large collaboration of academics and private parties.

I also believe that once we give up on this “machine god” nonsense, there is a lot to be gained in highly optimized, sector specific, lightweight models, which will be less capital intensive to produce. If I need help writing python code, I don’t a model that can translate Japanese into Hungarian.

I don’t always agree with Doctorow, but at least he’s not as naive as you make him sound, and he’s not a coward.

He’s a bit of a traditional socialist in his way of thinking, putting most of his attention on the underlying material and economic mechanisms of a phenomenon, rather that the ideological and cultural aspects of it.

For instance, he thinks that many of the harms are side effects of the hype. To him, for instance, putting illustrators out of work is not a business model and can’t justify the money that’s spent on this. It’s just an ad to attract more investment. If the bubble pops, then this will be significantly reduced.

If you expected Doctorow to get very upset over copyright, you clearly have no idea who he is. But he also literally has a book titled “Information Doesn’t Want to Be Free”.

He thinks model training is most likely fair use (probably true) even if the way the data are obtained violates copyright, and that giving more copyright to the authors will do nothing to mitigate this (near certainly true).

And since the output of LLMs is not copyrightable except for the part of human labor that goes into improving and editing it, relying heavily on LLMs is a dead end for publishers, because then everyone can steal their work (not totally sold on this one).

And finally, if we reject the hype, I find it hard to not consider LLMs to be a technology like any other. How can you buy in the exceptionalism and reject the hype?

Do Satya Nadella and Sundar Pichai strike you as extremely white names?

Edit: to be clear, some of those people are really quite racist… But I am not so sure that’s such a determining factor in the larger sector.