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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   16082 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 19, 2022

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OpenAI is doing everything they can to become my least favorite tech company by a mile. Saying this shit boils my blood is an understatement.

Should have seen this coming. The field of ML took a massive wound when "Ai ethicist" became a job and the act of removing "bias" was treated as anything but blatant culture warring.

This really feels hopeless. What good is open source against millions of dollars in compute time?

I don't think these ideological guardrails will be anything like universal, in the long run. Sure, when Apple reboots Siri on top of an LLM it's going to be "correct" like this, but if you're developing something to sell to others via an API or whatever, this kind of thing just breaks too many use cases. Like, if I want to use an LLM to drive NPC dialogue in an RPG, the dwarves can't be lecturing players about how racism against elves is wrong. (Which, yes, ChatGPT will do.)

If OpenAI sticks to this, it will just create a market opportunity for others. Millions of dollars isn't that much by tech startup standards.

Are you implying that "get woke go broke" is going to actually work to restrain progressive religious proselytizing in tech?

Here's how it will actually work - prog approve companies that filter their results in prog approved ways will be permitted to use the payments system and ones that don't, won't. VCs won't fund the compute time to build an ungimped model because "you'll just get cut off from the banking system anyway" (if the VC doesn't already share the prog goals, that is).

If afraid of a future where Google, OpenAI, Nvidia et al. legislate themselves into a monopoly. I'm hopeful that is going to be a major uphill battle for them because you can't simply legislate away programming. But at the same time not losing to Cthulu seems like an even bigger uphill battle.

There's always China, which at least will let you trade one set of shibboleths for another in a couple years.

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