Output is a separate issue from training. Courts will never decide that a identical copy spit out by an LLM is non-infringing simply because it went through an LLM stage. Copyright laundering is wishful thinking by tech folks.
Then they will leave the huge advantage in cost to the competition, I mean their customers competitors.
Hard to fathom how US companies will not want to use the cheaper option when EU and Asian companies can.
a: If making it illegal fails, make it a Federal procurement requirement to use regulated models. Come up with an audit standard that only fits regulated models. Watch the preference trickle down.
Buying all the RAM can't work forever. Scarcity increases prices, high prices increase supply, improves RAM R&D budgets, and forces users to find ways to economize around low RAM availability.
It doesn't need to work forever. You just need to delay your competitors long enough that you can IPO to great fanfare, and then leave retail investors holding the bag. Founders and big investors get to cash out, everyone else gets screwed.
I doubt that works today. Look at SpaceX the fanfare lasted 3 days before most of the insiders could offload to the retail bag holders. That AI company had the benefit of being attached to the largest technical moat.
The existing AI companies can't even prevent their moat from being distilled by the Chinese token reselling industry.
> To William’s complete lack of surprise, the little cellar under the shed was much better built than the shed itself. But then, practically everywhere in Ankh-Morpork had cellars that were once the first or even second or third floors of ancient buildings, built at the time of one of the city’s empires when men thought that the future was going to last for ever. And then the river had flooded and brought mud with it, and walls had gone higher and, now, what Ankh-Morpork was built on was mostly Ankh-Morpork. People said that anyone with a good sense of direction and a pickaxe could cross the city underground by simply knocking holes in walls.
For a modern example, see the Raising of Chicago: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raising_of_Chicago. I think I've seen an image of what the old ground level looks like now, and / or that you can take tours there. There's probably loads of stuff buried there now.
My understanding of the Chicago case is that most of what the old "ground level" was is just sewers today. I heard some of it was railroad tracks and maybe some are still used for cargo-only trains, but most of Chicago wasn't really raised a full "floor" with enough headroom for interesting underground spaces.
Some of Cincinnati's underground exists from plans to build subway trains that never completed. I think that makes Cincinnati's particularly sad being that it constitutes a perpetually unfinished public works/public transportation project.
Relatedly to that, Atlanta also has a tiny underground leftover from passenger train lines that ended passenger travel decades ago (and so was turned into a mall, because America): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Underground_Atlanta
Old cities used to just level old buildings and build on top of the rubble.
But that doesn’t work if you need to support a skyscraper (not if you want it to stay upright), or dig a metro line, so new developments are now excavating the old rubble.
The people behind these funds are playing Monopoly IRL, and this in particular makes me very angry.
The UK high street has been a notable victim. Gradually, over the past couple of decades, company after company has been snapped up by PE. Not just shops, but restaurants too. Suddenly you realise that the 5 or 6 high street chains that were competing are now owned by the same fund. Quality collapses, prices rise, not just at one chain but everywhere. People stop going, the chain collapses, another empty unit, the fund moves on. It's easy to point at Amazon and internet shopping as having degraded the British high street, but there are several other factors, and PE is a big one.
You're only thinking from a consumer perspective. When it comes time to sell a business, original owner wants to retire or what not, most small businesses have a hard time finding a buyer. This forces the owner to continue working beyond their time or face destitution. Having a market where PE can snap up a small business is a god-send for these owners. It meets a market need.
As a consumer, there are many non PE owned restaurants and pubs you can frequent. While you might not be able to change the game, you can absolutely vote with your wallet. The small guys will thank you.
Same for Amazon vs going direct to the manufacturers, which is more often than not, China.
> Same for Amazon vs going direct to the manufacturers, which is more often than not, China.
That comes with a bunch of problems. Taxes, import duties and import refusals are the biggest one. With Amazon, at least as long as it's sold or fulfilled by Amazon, no matter what, you are going to get the product in a reasonable time frame (1-3 days IME).
Shipping... depends. If you're in bad luck, the seller doesn't ship Fedex or DHL, but Yanwen or another one of the usual bunch of "aggregators" that bundle weeks worth of shipment to forward it to the US or Europe and unbundle the shipments there.
Assuming your product shows up at your doorstep, legally, you are now the importer and fully responsible for anything related to that specific product - say, an electrical appliance that sets your house on fire. You can't hold anyone accountable but yourself.
And finally, if there's defects, you only have to deal with Amazon. Free shipment back, done. With anything straight out of China, you are now responsible for shipments.
I think if local models catch up with current SOTA then that might not happen. Either way, I'm don't think the long-term for OAI, Anthropic etc. really holds up.
Increasingly I see marketing as akin to LLM training. We are all being trained (by activating and reinforcing neural pathways in our meaty heads) to respond to certain stimuli in a certain way (e.g.: at the store, select _this_ brand of soap).
Some people do. I know my way around Photoshop very well, but do not use any advanced features. I tried using GIMP once and bounced off immediately, trying to do what I knew how to do in Photoshop was very hard, the learning curve felt very steep.
These days I use Photopea which meets my needs perfectly (but is not free software).
