Even if it's just open weights and not "true" open source, I'll still give Meta the appreciation of being one of the few big AI companies actually committed to open models. In an ecosystem where groups like Anthropic and OpenAI keep hemming and hawing about safety and the necessity of closed AI systems "for our sake", they stand out among the rest.
Unfortunately, there are a number of AI safety people that are still crowing about how AI models need to be locked down, with some of them loudly pivoting to talking about how open source models aid China.
Plus there's still the spectre of SB-1047 hanging around.
They've been working on AI for a good bit now. Open source especially is something they've championed since the mid 2010s at least with things like PyTorch, GraphQL, and React. It's not something they've suddenly pivoted to since ChatGPT came in 2022.
BD's success or lack thereof with Atlas is to be seen, given that the electrically actuated one is so recent and they're backed by Hyundai who've show desire in driving down the cost.
The bottleneck for bioterrorism isn't AI telling you how to do something, it's producing the final result. You wanna curtail bioweapons, monitor the BSL labs, biowarfare labs, bioreactors, and organic 3D printers. ChatGPT telling me how to shoot someone isn't gonna help me if I can't get a gun.
As said every time this "why are we automating creativity when menial jobs exist?" response comes up:
1) Errors in art programs messing up is less worrisome than a physical robot. One going wrong makes extra fingers in a picture, the other potentially maims or kills you.
2) Moravec's Paradox. Reasoning requires little computation versus sensorimotor and perception.
3) Despite 1 and 2, we are constantly automating menial jobs!
Yeah, ChatGPT is such a clinical name for a consumer facing app. Especially considering how easy AI stuff is to anthropomorphize. Google had the right idea with Bard and Gemini.
No one, not the most screen addicted teenager nor the smarmiest snake-oil beauracrat, is gonna stand by ANYONE that suggests we need to remove ALL computers from society. Even the people critical of AI and social media are more than fine with computers and smartphones.
The safety movement really isn't as organized as many here would think.
Doesn't help that safety and alignment means different things to different people. Some use it to refer to near term issues like copyright infringement, bias, labor devaluation, etc. While others use it for potential long term issues like pdoom, runaway ASIs and human extinction. The former sees the latter as head in the cloud futurists ignoring real world problems, whiles the latter sees the former as worrying about minor issues in the face of (potential) catastrophe.
Pretty sure they do. I follow a few of these safetyist people on twitter and they absolutely argue that companies like OpenAI, Google, Tencent and literally anyone else training a potential AGI should stop training runs and put them under oversight at best and no one should even make an AGI at worst.
They just go after open source as well since they're at least aware that open models that anyone can share and use aren't restricted by an API and, to use a really overused soundbyte, "can't be put back in the box".
Wish this wasn't as common as it turned out to be sadly. Best thing to hope for is that the ability to train models continue to get cheaper and more accessible over time. Figuring out how to go from tens/hundreds of millions of images needed for a foundation model to thousands or hundreds would be a start.
Companies move slow, especially as they get bigger. Just because a google engineer wants to yoink some open source inferencing innovation for example, doesn't mean they can just jam it into Gemini and have it rolled out immediately.
The unfortunate truth of a lot of weapon bans is that they happen when civilian anger or fear outstrips military need, and are therefore less likely to be argued for. No army really argues for hollowpoints nowadays, because of their terrible penetration. When a "banned" weapon suddenly finds a use, countries will ignore regulations or were never privy to them in the first place. Such as Ukraine finding extensive use of cluster weapons to counter Russian assault infantry.
Chemical and biological weapons fit the first category, since they're almost useless in a military context since they're incredibly difficult to control or incubate, and end up being mostly terror weapons. It's why bans of them are far more complete, whereas nuclear disarmament is practically a nonstarter.
AI and especially AI weapons seem like the second category. Where many will call for a ban, but many will ignore it because they provide such an advantage to the workforce or on the battlefield.
The bottleneck for bioterrorism isn't AI telling you how to do something, it's producing the final result. You wanna curtail bioweapons, monitor the BSL labs, biowarfare labs, bioreactors, and organic 3D printers. ChatGPT telling me how to shoot someone isn't gonna help me if I can't get a gun.
But by being alternate history, you're already conditioning the audience to expect divergences and that presents a great opportunity to explore more varied alternatives that were being thrown around in the post-Apollo era. The Sea Dragon alone shows they were willing to expand audience expectations. They could've played around with ideas like the National Launch System (https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0a/Shuttle_...) and different kinds of lunar tugs.
I mean, James Cameron could've gone with generic sci-fi brick or saucer spaceships for Avatar, but instead gave us the beauty that was the ISV Venture Star, which introduced a lot of people to hard sci-fi design aesthetics.
I had some gripes with the way the timeline developed later on (like why in a world where Saturn Vs and Sea Dragons are getting launched, are space shuttles exactly like our world getting made? And getting launched to the moon?) but overall I do appreciate the serious take at an alternate history work on mainstream television.
