I agree, but considering the age of AI was ushered in with the largest and most complete theft of IP in human history, from inside the good 'ol USA, we shouldn't trust any LLM provider with critical information of any kind, and instead push even harder for better local models.
even companies that proclaim zero data retention have yet to produce a mechanism that makes me trust that claim
> all the data on how you have interacted with their models
1) there is a very non-zero chance that the US government also has that data from OpenAI and possibly Anthropic
2) unless you are asking the chinese models to draw up plans to overthrow the chinese government, it's extremely unlikely they would ever care.
while china has a track record of harassing it's own dissident citizens abroad, if you're not chinese and not trying to subvert their government (or are a high-ranking government official yourself), it's kind of silly to suppose they would ever care about you or what you do.
and if you have information they want for their own national development purposes, like EUV engineers, they are much more likely to offer you fabulous amounts of money instead of try to intimidate or threaten it out of you.
the difference is that Putin's hand was forced by age, (possibly) illness, and the last several decades of how he chose to run his country. Putin's power base is a relatively small group of elites and oligarchs who would happily snuff out the man who pushes them out of windows if they get too uppity, if they were given the chance. He needed the cover of war to maintain the fiction of his type of strongman "only I can save us" leadership.
Xi's power base is the simple fact that his leadership has transformed China into the #2, and now because of Trump possibly soon the #1 world superpower. He has also acted aggressively in the last decade to find and remove corruption and prevent individuals from accumulating the kind of wealth and influence that could threaten his power from outside official Party channels. Of course, as I'm not Chinese myself, I have no clue what the internals of Party politics actually look like. But as an outside observer it seems clear that Xi et. al. do not actually need Taiwan for anything other than national pride. They know the US would go to the mat to protect it as TSMC is extremely vital to US military power. And since China cannot compete in that arena and has too much to lose, they instead have focused on weakening the US from within, quite successfully of late.
By the time China finally takes Taiwan it will be with little fanfare and little consequence - they won't touch it until the US either has lost its military capabilities, or the US has its own internal chip industry. Anything else is an existential risk for the coastal cities that are China's entire economic advantage.
its science journalism tbh, the realities of climate change's impact is so spread out and complicated that it's difficult to communicate to a largely scientifically-illiterate audience. see the perennial confusion over cold heavy snow winters being an artifact of global warming due to increased energy in the weather systems causing more volatility instead of just a simple "everything is warmer now."
so journalists focus on Number, because Number is simple and understandable. even when Number is mostly or completely bogus.
my money is on: eventually frontier model dev and training becomes basic research funded by governments, and LLM operators become essentially private utilities a la ISPs, competing mostly on data center operational costs and occasionally new chip tech to run models cheaper
and governments will keep running massive data centers with classified frontier models for intelligence and propaganda purposes
This assumes that all areas of research are bottlenecked on human understanding, which is very often not the case.
Imagine a field where experiments take days to complete, and reviewing the results and doing deep thought work to figure out the next experiment takes maybe an hour or two for an expert.
An LLM would not be able to do 24/7 work in this case, and would only save a few hours per day at most. Scaling up to many experiments in parallel may not always be possible, if you don't know what to do with additional experiments until you finish the previous one, or if experiments incur significant cost.
So an AGI/expert LLM may be a huge boon for e.g. drug discovery, which already makes heavy use of massively parallel experiments and simulations, but may not be so useful for biological research (perfect simulation down to the genetic level of even a fruit fly likely costs more compute than the human race can provide presently), or research that involves time-consuming physical processes to complete, like climate science or astronomy, that both need to wait periodically to gather data from satellites and telescopes.
Ah, I see - thank you for the context! If you don't mind one more question - do you have to leave a substantial amount of cash in the Steam account in case of very late refunds? Or does Steam just send you an invoice or something?
digital music is not artificial scarcity, because it's not the copied bits that are the resource, it's attention. we only have so much time and attention for consuming media, and only so much attention and memory space in our brains for keeping track of where to find it. large budgets can easily dominate these channels and limit the average person's apparent choice.
this is what I mean when large players would outcompete smaller players in a digital marketplace with no copyright. the only way for this to work would be with a benevolent neutral 3rd party managing the marketplace, like Steam, so users can easily see when a large player is cloning a smaller players work - but even then it still depends on the good will of the general public to prefer the "original" artist which is not guaranteed.
the reform needs to happen at the layer where whether a copyright is valid or not is decided upon, not before (at the point of "should copyright exist") and not after (enforcement).
a world without copyright means those with the largest advertising budgets will reap nearly all the rewards from new IP created by small artists. BigCorp Inc. can just sit around and wait for talented musicians to post something interesting on soundcloud, for example, then just have their in-house people copy it and push it out to radio and streaming platforms via their massive ad budgets and favorable relationships for getting new material onto the waves immediately. meanwhile the original artist gets nothing.
the position of advocating against all copyright protections at all only makes sense for people who are already wealthy enough that they don't need proceeds from their art to survive.
If you read The Fine Article, you will see it's not actually about security, but about police corruption - pressuring business owners of a certain skin color to hire off-duty cops as security under threat of losing their business license, when white business owners didn't appear to have the same requirements to operate.
The business owner quoted in the article goes on to say that a lot of the time the cops they had to hire weren't even there - they had minimum pay requirements for every shift they "worked" even if they left early or just sat in their car doing nothing.
even companies that proclaim zero data retention have yet to produce a mechanism that makes me trust that claim