I use reddit a fair bit and am well aware how often they are completely off the mark or missing the bigger picture. However after trying to analyze this tweet for an hour or so I don’t blame them at all.
The tweet is contradictory, inflammatory and extremely biased.
If the central point is that China’s motive for open source is to scare off investment in frontier training then it is baffling that he specifically lays out China’s reason for open source -
“I suspect the reason they are is 75% explained by strategic blindness/lack of AGI-pilledness (the CCP is very Yann Lecun-y in its views of AI). The other 25% or so is their lack of compute for customer inference”
-And doesn’t mention that motive at all. To be clear, this particular argument seems to be on the more solid side. However, it’s presented amongst other arguments that either don’t make any sense, are outright false or rely on anacdotal evidence.
Now, that rant was mostly a protest against Dean Balls communication style and your phrasing of his commication as having a central point, the actual argument is very interesting.
If Open Source is catching up to frontier - > Profit incentive to train frontier models collapses - > leads to frontier training runs requiring government funding - > slows down frontier Ai development.
So his argument is trying to get accelerationists to go against open source for short term pain, long term gain. Now even if we are accelerationists and think that the faster Ai progresses the better, it’s not clear that he’s correct. From my understanding open source accelerates development by sharing algorithmic improvements or similar such things, which could componsate for the slowing down of training run funding. Also there will still be massive incentive for government funded training runs due to strategic importance and possible future ASI. It seems the US military is suffiently AGI pilled at this point to refuse to cede the lead to China, even if the models aren’t shared with the public.
There’s also the argument that China is intending to switch to closed source as soon as they have an actual frontier model (which is what I personally believe) in which case the argument once again collapses.
Which basically leads me to conclude his arguments are all baseless posturing which is basically what the reddit threads were saying in the first place. Happy to hear your thoughts on this.
Well said. A few of your disagreements with me were from poor writing on my part. I meant to narrow Ball’s central point to paragraph #4 since Reddit focused on that. And China’s motive was my own thought based on paragraph #4, though you are absolutely right Ball has his own view there. Otherwise, we are agreed. Looks like Ball and I both have some work to do in writing clearly!
I use reddit a fair bit and am well aware how often they are completely off the mark or missing the bigger picture. However after trying to analyze this tweet for an hour or so I don’t blame them at all.
The tweet is contradictory, inflammatory and extremely biased.
If the central point is that China’s motive for open source is to scare off investment in frontier training then it is baffling that he specifically lays out China’s reason for open source -
“I suspect the reason they are is 75% explained by strategic blindness/lack of AGI-pilledness (the CCP is very Yann Lecun-y in its views of AI). The other 25% or so is their lack of compute for customer inference”
-And doesn’t mention that motive at all. To be clear, this particular argument seems to be on the more solid side. However, it’s presented amongst other arguments that either don’t make any sense, are outright false or rely on anacdotal evidence.
Now, that rant was mostly a protest against Dean Balls communication style and your phrasing of his commication as having a central point, the actual argument is very interesting.
If Open Source is catching up to frontier - > Profit incentive to train frontier models collapses - > leads to frontier training runs requiring government funding - > slows down frontier Ai development.
So his argument is trying to get accelerationists to go against open source for short term pain, long term gain. Now even if we are accelerationists and think that the faster Ai progresses the better, it’s not clear that he’s correct. From my understanding open source accelerates development by sharing algorithmic improvements or similar such things, which could componsate for the slowing down of training run funding. Also there will still be massive incentive for government funded training runs due to strategic importance and possible future ASI. It seems the US military is suffiently AGI pilled at this point to refuse to cede the lead to China, even if the models aren’t shared with the public.
There’s also the argument that China is intending to switch to closed source as soon as they have an actual frontier model (which is what I personally believe) in which case the argument once again collapses.
Which basically leads me to conclude his arguments are all baseless posturing which is basically what the reddit threads were saying in the first place. Happy to hear your thoughts on this.
Well said. A few of your disagreements with me were from poor writing on my part. I meant to narrow Ball’s central point to paragraph #4 since Reddit focused on that. And China’s motive was my own thought based on paragraph #4, though you are absolutely right Ball has his own view there. Otherwise, we are agreed. Looks like Ball and I both have some work to do in writing clearly!