Not OP, but I looked her up:

She’s a “former Philippines mayor, accused of ties to Chinese criminal syndicates and money laundering” (Reuters). I guess the tech part is the SIM card thing?

I suppose that really depends. Are you making a reproduction of Citizen Kane, which includes cinematographic techniques? Then that’s probably a hard “gotta get a license if it’s under copyright”. Where it gets more tricky is something like reproducing media in a particular artistic style (say, a very distinctive drawing animation style). Like realistically you shouldn’t reproduce the marquee style of a currently producing artist just because you trained a model on it (most likely from YouTube clips of it, and without paying the original creator or even the reuploader [who hopefully is doing it in fair use]). But in any case, all of the above and questions of closeness and fair use are already part of the existing copyright legal landscape. That very question of how close does it have to be is at the core of all the major song infringement court battles, and those are between two humans. Call me a Luddite, but I think a generative model should be offered far less legal protection and absolutely not more legal protection for its output than humans are.

I never equated LLMs to intelligence. And indexing the data is not the same as reproducing the webpage or the content on a webpage. For you to get beyond a small snippet that held your query when you search, you have to follow a link to the source material. Now of course Google doesn’t like this, so they did that stupid amp thing, which has its own issues and I disagree with amp as a general rule as well. So, LLMs can look at the data, I just don’t think they can reproduce that data without attribution (or payment to the original creator). Perplexity.ai is a little better in this regard because it does link back to sources and is attempting to be a search engine like entity. But OpenAI is not in almost all cases.

SoRA is a generative video model, not exactly a large language model.

But to answer your question: if all LLMs did was redirect you to where the content was hosted, then it would be a search engine. But instead they reproduce what someone else was hosting, which may include copyrighted material. So they’re fundamentally different from a simple search engine. They don’t direct you to the source, they reproduce a facsimile of the source material without acknowledging or directing you to it. SoRA is similar. It produces video content, but it doesn’t redirect you to finding similar video content that it is reproducing from. And we can argue about how close something needs to be to an existing artwork to count as a reproduction, but I think for AI models we should enforce citation models.

Sure, and I think that these may even be useful and it warrants the cost. But it is to just say that this still isn’t simply running a couple light bulbs or something. This is a major draw on the grid (but likely still pales in comparison to crypto farms).

Note that most people would be better off using a model that’s trained for a specific task. For example, training image recognition uses vastly less energy because the models are vastly smaller, but they’re exceedingly excellent at image recognition.

It’s also the required energy to train the model. Inference is usually more efficient (sometimes not but almost always significantly more so), because you have no error back propagation or other training specific calculations.

Models probably take 1000 megawatts of energy to train (GPT3 took 284MW by OpenAI’s calculation). That’s not including the web scraping and data cleaning and other associated costs (such as cooling the server farms which is non trivial).

A coal plant takes roughly 364kg - 500kg of coal to generate 1 MWh. So for GPT3 you’d be looking at 103,376 kg (~230 thousand pounds, or 115 US tons) at minimum to train it. Nobody has used it and we’re not looking at the other associated energy costs at this point. For comparison, a typical home may use 6MWh per year. So just training GPT3 could’ve powered 47 homes for an entire year.

Edit: also, it’s not nearly as bad as crypto mining. And as another person says it’s totally moot if we have clean sources of energy to fill the need and the grid can handle it. Unfortunately we have neither right now.

And while we’re at it, let’s take into account the total wealth of your stock holdings when you realize gains. There’s no reason poor and middle Americans should pay the same tax on their capital gains as billionaires.

This is somewhat misleading. According to that Wikipedia page, just using the US estimates, Ukraine has had 70k deaths and Russia has had 120k+. While these are similar in that they both round to 100k perhaps, Russia has almost double the Ukrainian military personnel losses.

War is miserable, but I don’t think Ukraine is losing military personnel by nearly the same clip that Russia is.

This is such a bad look for Apple. Like we get it, you’re a trillion dollar dragon sitting on your horde. But like, dude, innovate instead of sitting there. You shouldn’t be afraid of side loading. Steam has shown that if your experience is the best, you can do fine. Apple just realizes they wouldn’t have the best App Store experience and would lose revenue. Tough shit.

MultiLogin is a Chromium feature that can be abused to compromise a user’s Google account. The “bug” was unveiled by a malware developer known as PRISMA in October 2023. The cyber-criminal shared details about a critical exploit designed to generate persistent cookies for “continuous” access to Google services, even after a user’s password reset.

Oof. Another good reason to use Firefox I guess?

Fish don’t really swim, they are flying through the water.

Solvents and other residues can off gas over weeks and months (or possibly longer) without any burning.

They’ll almost surely attempt this, but it will be much less clear cut on it. There’s federal law against discriminating on the basis of genetics, so they can’t explicitly charge more for it.

But you better believe it’ll be a component in a deep learning insurance adjustment model that charges you more and just tells you the model says so — I’d expect this to occur and a court case to happen.

This is only partially true. Due to things like Henrietta Lacks cells (HeLa cells for those working in cell culture), we actually have informed consent around this. They can’t just use your samples for not consented collection purposes (though in some cases, the further testing may fall under the original consent)

HHS rules note:

“If the tissues are identifiable, then subjects must provide consent for the secondary use and that consent must cover the elements of consent in 21 CFR 50.25.”

That really only applies to healthcare providers covered under FDA and HIPAA regs.

Obligatory not a lawyer etc.

Sure just like Hawaiian people could go back to the upper 48. You know just abandon their home, their livelihoods, their communities. No big deal surely to just give an aggressor nation whatever they want at the cost of all your worldly possessions.

Edit:

From before the paywalled section:

‘’’ “Suddenly, there is all this talk about underground shelters, about fleeing, and this makes this crisis feel more real. But if we leave, can we come back? Or will Yonaguni be wiped out?” asks Mr Otake, wondering if he will be able to hand down the business to his 14-year-old son. ‘’’

Later it mentions there are 1.4 million people in the potential war theatre zone. And yes the plan is to move them back to the mainland if they can, but that’s a monumental task to move that many people across disparate, disconnected islands, to say nothing of the potential impact of trying to integrate 1.4 million people into local communities.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41557-023-01346-3

Nature article.

It should be punishable by fine for science journalists to write about a science paper without citing the paper — I couldn’t find it linked anywhere in the article but do have some content blockers so perhaps it was just hidden by those. At any rate, interesting findings.

If taxes are robbery then using public infrastructure like roads without paying taxes is also theft.

Taxes exist because public goods are actually good, and benefit everyone. The sum of the parts is greater than the individual parts. Your taxes pay for roads and public transit which are used to get people to work to create wealth for a community. It turns out the thing that makes humans great is community and banding together. Taxes are a formal way of doing that.

Now, we need equitable taxes, but that would involve taxing the rich proportionally. This is economically sound because wealth doesn’t trickle down and the mega wealthy are, well, mega wealthy because they hoard wealth. That money would be better spent creating better roads, better public transit, better education, or in short, a better community. The prospect of a better community only upsets those who are not members of the community, because their insane wealth puts them in a different class, and those who think defending that class will somehow get them privilege. The only privilege we need is a better community.