HN user
Thanks for the considered response.
I think this is a "vote with your wallet" sort of situation.
I agree a 100%.
is the value proposition good enough that people will put up with it? As of today, the answer is unfortunately yes
I don't fully agree with you here and I think the jury is still out on that.
In any case, I look forward to seeing international markets responding to the current situation.
Aw buddy, you seem to think I'm trying to hurt you. Furthest, thing from the truth.
I think you might have had enough HN for today. Take a nap and then eat a snack if you still feel cranky. The internet and all your cloud services will still be here when you want to play next.
(Well rested you'll also be able to string together a cogent argument but we're clearly struggling with bigger things here.)
That's true, I am less familiar with the workings of cloud services than some are (as relevant as that may be in a discussion about a client that users run on their local machines). However, it sounds like you do understand how cloud services work.
In interest of educating those less informed than yourself perhaps you could share with us why the reasoned points I've brought up are incorrect by actually addressing them?
If by a "finer-toothed comb" you mean telemetry then I don't quite see it as comparable to this situation.
Telemetry is disclosed in privacy policies, it can usually be opted out of and if not that, then it can be blocked by a firewall. Steganographically fingerprinting customer's network routing when they consented to your tool reading a txt file is a different problem. Anthropic has demonstrated capability and willingness to embed arbitrary obfuscated data in their comms streams and that's a dangerous precedent to set.
There are some commentors in this thread downplaying the severity of a service provider being less than transparent about exactly what their shipped tooling does on customer's machines.
That the provider's business needs necessitate the this behaviour doesn't justify their lack of honest disclosure. That honest disclosure would render the solution to their problem useless isn't my problem. If anything, that they thought this was acceptable makes me wonder what else they're harvesting from my machine? PII?
The cynic in me can't help but feel that the state of these comments reflects less on the commentor's views of this debacle but rather their feelings about AI/Anthropic/America/what-have-you.
Copying over my comment from elsewhere in this post:
Anthopic choosing to delay their models' invevitable distillation by competitors is their prerogative.
That they choose to implement it by fingerprinting my access patterns without first disclosing is where they shit the bed. It isn't "sneaky" it's straight up sneaky (and dishonest and unscrupulous while we're at it). That this particular instance is harmless doesn't give me much comfort. Who's to say they aren't harvesting PII?
That their actions make sense for their business isn't any reason for people to accept their deceitful, customer-hostile decisions.
Anthopic choosing to delay their models' invevitable distillation by competitors is their prerogative.
That they choose to implement it by fingerprinting my access patterns without first disclosing is where they shit the bed. It isn't "sneaky" it's straight up sneaky (and dishonest and unscrupulous while we're at it). That this particular instance is harmless doesn't give me much comfort. Who's to say they aren't harvesting PII?
That their actions make sense for their business isn't any reason for people to accept their deceitful, customer-hostile decisions.
I'm not sure I understand your point. What benefits does treating social/national governence as an industry bring to society? Besides the govt funds it operations through taxation in addition to debt.
Your unstated assumption that investments in AI were private and therefore beyond question simply isn't true.
The AI industry's profits depend to a large degree vast textual corpuses that they acquired and trained on in either straight up illegal or at the least in legally murky contexts; public and private knowledge form the backbone of these enterprises. Said industry then serves AI models to customers via data centers that again off load the cost of inference to the public.
Of course, AI companies could step up pay up their fair share and people will happily treat the prerogatives of private enterprise as private. But until then I think certain quarters of society will continue to believe, rightfully so in my opinion, that AI companies are on the hook for unacknowledged debt.
Of course morality doesn't inform law so the current situation isn't illegal despite how egregious it is. But the law can only attempt to deliver justice, it can't guarantee it. Which is why open, honest, collaborative discussions are important to have exactly now.
It doesn't generate private returns but investing in your worker population definitely nets returns for the public.
Also, some might say that upending the de facto copyright regime in favour of AI companies was an altruistic gift.
Right back at ya buddy. Nothing quite like seeing a braggart humbled :)
Well, I for one hope you are horribly wrong.
And something about this train of thought aligning with just the general quality of your comments gives me hope.
I see your comments scattered across this thread with most converging on this thesis: "The US govt will regulate away the ability of US corporations and individuals to use unsanctioned AI models."
Which is a fair thesis. I've seen you counter people's predictions of how they think things will pan as a consequence. But what I'd really like to hear is what you think happens (in the US and internationally) as a consequence of such regulations?
On the other I think asking someone for a citation to their rather strong claim isn't incorrect. Digging through unstructured HN comments isn't my idea of a good time and being sent off on a treasure hunt by fellow commentors isn't why I come to this website. Collaboration is how we move forward!
Why is the grievance petty?
Well you seem to clearly be in the know. Care to share?
I'm not sure I fully understand this "society as a dinner crowd" metaphor you're painting here - who is the govt here and what are taxes and most importantly what is the food everyone is eating?
How does the wealthy paying 40% of the income/consumption tax collected by the govt translate to them feeding 40% of population (which they don't)?
I had exactly this happen to me, suffered great monetary losses and had my identity stolen. I've learnt my lesson and have moved on to 1password.
At the end of it I couldn't help but reflect on my foolishness. I realised just how much better I would've felt if only it had been an American, Canadian, or European Googler who stole my data. It really is the worst when malicious entities are Chinese, Indian, or Pakistani. Just the worst!!! (/s)
I didn't realise that one could forcibly require a competitor to disclose trade secrets.
Now, INAL of course, but I would think this sort of mechanism would be quite gameable from both sides ( i) a wealthy competitor legally forcing a promising upstart to reveal source ii) a copycat working out some kind of arrangement where the code itself is licensed to them via shell company based overseas.)
I am curious how this will play out legally.
Surely UI enough isn't enough to prove that source code was plagiarised?
In the event Papermark chooses to sue how will the defendant defend themselves short of presenting their own (possibly) closed source?
There’s no reason we couldn’t decide that we want to err on the side of employing too many people.
One might bring up the personal consequences bourne by surplus employees who're then laid off during the unavoidable corrective phase - or is that not something society should care about? What are you optimising for?
I am quite sympathetic to your position. Seeing those who manage to evade accountability consistently paying a heavy personal price was immensely satisfying. But at the same time, I don't think it resulted in any structural changes that minimise the proportion of accountability-evaders plauging society.
Ideally of course everyone, irrespective of any immutable traits they may have, gets to enjoy a healthy, satisfying, and stable life with plently of avenues for upward mobility. Short of that ideal, a society which equally burdens the rich and poor with devastating, seemingly random, unavoidable life-chaning events is decidedly better than one which only affects the poor.
So for these reasons I don't advocate for the actions of "the kid" but I don't think the consequences of his actions were in any way "bad" per se.
Perhaps if the rank and file at a company see personal consequence for those in the topmost posistions (salary deductions, demotions, or firing) in response to such glaring fuck ups that might even help mitigate some of these morale issues.
In a world which already has the likes of Anthropic and OpenAI, having Chinese labs be a counter balance is decidedly better than the hypothetical where American companies had a global monopoly on LLMs.
If your argument is that all present LLM offerings are unethical then that is something I am sypmathetic to. That said, I am also unable to offer a conceivable roadmap to undoing the opening of the LLM Pandora's box so I tend not ground my arguments in anti-LLM advocacy; that would be very 2023 of me.
I think the issue is that information was expensive until the owners of capital gatekept knowledge itself. Now that information is cheap to reproduce they'd rather gatekeep the conduit to that knowledge and devalue knowledge itself rather than pay up in accordance with the very precedent that they set all along.
So what? You're a human (I'm assuming you are) and an LLM is not. The law ought to treat humans differently.
I am mostly economics illiterate but I understand a subsidy to be an economic concession given by the state to an entity which gives said entity a relative advantage compared to its peers.
In that sense (which could very well be bogus), letting a company violate individual IP of basically every human is less of an economic concession and more of unconsented to IP open season.
Even if one were to drop "economic" from "economic concession" and instead view a subsidy through the lens of a more general concession, one could say that the US Govt gave US AI companies a legal concession to sidestep the copyright protections of other US entities. But the US Govt should only get to undermine the copyright protection of other US entities - who gave American companies the right to violate the copyright of non-Americans?
Can you please tell my, as someone who is neither Chinese nor American, "why" I should care if a Chinese company stole from another American company (that in turn stole from everyone) to give me a cheaper service that fits my use case?
I recommend a book 'Silk Roads' by Peter Frankopan.
Thank you for the recommendation!
In fact you can look at China or India - future dominant powers, and guess which of their flaws will make them fall.
Are these flaws talked about in the book or are they something you've worked out since after you read the book?
I'm curious what's been your experience with Sarvam outside of Indic languages - Indian English (perhaps mixed with romanised indic verbiage) and also documents with complex layouts (figures, tables, etc).
I've been quite curious but hesitant about Indian offerings, particularly because they seem to be priced a little higher than what I would think they should be (I could be wrong and simply be misrembering though).
And the Chinese models rip IP just like everyone else before them.
The difference is the Chinese models return to the same system that they feed from (indirectly); people get access to model weights even if the entire model isn't open source. The same can't be said for OpenAI, Anthropic, Google etc (who also benefit from Chinese models and train on them).
Further, Chinese models are significantly cheaper and the comapnies aren't hostile to their customers.
Worth noting that I have long held the belief that if you put data out on the public sidewalk that you should have low to no expectation that it’s IP.
Except your beliefs aren't the cornerstone of modern jurisprudence. Why are models able to reliably produce replicas of Ghibli movies which go well beyond any example you listed?