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PaperclipPerfector  10mo ago (text post)   26353 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 8, 2024

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However, eventually jailbreaks will be ~impossible, at least on SOTA models served through APIs. I'd say it's a matter of maybe a year or two till you can't get either the best LLMs or image generators to do anything outside their provider's guidelines.

I wonder if there's potential for a rogue state like North Korea to serve up a non-bowdlerized AI for the open internet. They could make big money, even if they're using much lower tech, by being the only game in town that's not completely restricted. And they wouldn't care about Western copyrights or decency standards.

As cool as that would be, I think NK doing that would be a quick path to getting nuked by the US and possibly the start of WW3. If not now, then soon, I think US and other Western governments will find it unacceptable for the typical person to have access to an uncensored LLM that's beyond the power of what a hobbyist can put together on hobbyist-level hardware. And that's before getting into how NK itself would be gathering data about western users and profiting off them.

They seem to get away with selling weapons, meth, and counterfeit USD. It's hard for me to think that LLM would suddenly push the US into nuking NK (and possibly getting SK or Japan nuked in return) when they were willing to let the rest of that stuff slide.

I just think the idea of US citizens having access to uncensored LLMs at close to SOTA quality will be considered far more dangerous than weapons (short of nukes, though even then...), meth, and counterfeit money.

Then again, perhaps a cyber-based defense is more likely than nukes. Perhaps we'll get a Great Firewall of America to keep Americans from surreptitiously accessing the NK LLM. And equivalents in other nations too. But that has its own issues in implementing, of course.

Do you mean SOTA as of today, or some hypothetical future model?

If it's the former, I disagree vehemently. There's nothing entirely uncensored on par with GPT-4, but OSS options like Mixtral that are on-par with 3.5 are available to anyone with the intelligence to follow a guide, and they have largely not caused any major negative disruption, in the same vein as nukes, drugs or fake money would.

The biggest problem AI has caused so far, is drastically reduced demand for artists and other online freelancers. And spam bots, fake reviews and so on.

I am not denying future risks (me, of all people?), but even if something exactly as powerful as GPT-4 was available freely and entirely unrestricted, I don't think it would do much.

I mean whatever the SOTA is whenever this hypothetical uncensored NK LLM is released. To be fair, whatever NK could produce might always be pretty significantly behind the SOTA at the time, and so might not be something Western governments are too concerned about. But given the nation-level resources they can throw at it, I'd expect them to be always be ahead of what a hobbyist could do in their home computer, if only through raw compute and memory. And once the tech reaches a state where NK can make an LLM that makes GPT4 look like GPT3.5, that's probably intelligent and useful enough that the everyday citizen having access to an uncensored version of it would be considered too dangerous.

Local open source LLMs must have made significant progress since the last time I checked them out seriously about 5 months ago, but it sounds like, at best, it's still GPT3.5 level, which, I'll be honest, I'm skeptical about due to just a lack of credible metrics to measure that kind of thing in this space. And I think the gap between GPT3.5 and GPT4 is a pretty vast chasm in terms of usefulness and intelligence.

That.. actually sounds like a decent idea. No kidding.

It would certainly be both a positive sum and hilarious scenario if NK repurposed their cadre of hackers and bitcoin miners to the task of Based LLMs On Demand.

I don't think they'll do so, sadly, but I'm all for it. The closest I can think of is France and Mistral, which has been somewhat sheltered from the EU's demands on AI regulation.

Eventually, GPT-4 tier/human-level AI will become commoditized, and while I suspect we will have to bear the nerfing of the really cool SOTA shit for a while yet, even something 3.5 tier like Mixtral-7B is still useful and now impossible to contain.

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