And what then, is stopping governments from simply demanding you hand over a list of your customers? They will seek to enforce those currency controls you are subverting.
Your entire sales pitch here is based on a lack of transparency to "evil oppressive governments", whereas the US government (at least, once it gets it's shit together again in a few years), will just delete your company for helping the North Koreans evade sanctions if you don't have quite robust AML.
Firstly, do note that the original text is talking about use of AI, this one line doesn't seem to be about banning AI so much as banning a use.
Secondly:
The implied basis here is that AI isn't just a product, it's also a service. This isn't you buying a pencil, it's you commissioning the drawing. Most of these products are cloud based SaaS.
And there's also the matter that "it's just a tool" doesn't really apply to foreseeable problems. If a suspicious person shows up out of nowhere buying large quantities of fertilizer, you don't get to go "Well he could be using that fertilizer for anything, not my problem". (This is relevant to AI as pretty much all AI services already have heavy restrictions on their output, this isn't a bunch of researchers publishing a paper and having bad actors implement their own AI based on that. We have companies openly advertising deepfake services.)
Their way of squaring this circle has always been to whine about "AI safety". (the cultish doomsday shit, not actual harms from AI)
Sam Altman will proclaim that he alone is qualified to build AI and that everyone else should be tied down by regulation.
And it should always be said that this is, of course, utterly ridiculous. Sam Altman literally got fired over this, has an extensive reputation as a shitweasel, and OpenAI's constant flouting and breaking of rules and social norms indicates they CANNOT be trusted.
> Why is getting people to use AI seen as a good in itself?
Because user counts pump up the stock price. And that is all AI has.
Whether you believe the claims that inference is profitable or not (and there are good reasons to distrust them), AI does not live up to the financial hype.
AI cannot stand on it's own merits. It's not acceptable to let history run it's course and let the AI skeptics be shown wrong in due time. Because it'll dampen the hype, and perhaps these skeptics aren't so wrong. The people can't be educated into a healthy skepticism of AI, because they wouldn't use it enough.
It's readily obvious that the emperor has no clothes. The actions of the companies and executives involved betray their statements about how great AI is.
AI is forced into products, at deeply subsidized prices. You wouldn't do that if the tech is that big a deal. Apple charged premium prices for the iPhone.
Benchmarks are aggressively cheated. OpenAI funding FrontierMath and only giving a verbal agreement after having already broken so many of those is a joke. If the systems actually worked as promised there is no reason for this mess, and every reason in the world to gather accurate data on the generality of the intelligence.
And biggest of all: This entire mess has the implied framing of the Manhattan Project. That it's all a big race towards AGI, and whomever develops AGI will win capitalism forever. So important that they're getting support from the US government with their "Stargate" project. And until rather recently, everyone was making lots of noise about AI safety and the world-destroying dangers of letting someone else develop AGI.
In 1942 Georgii Flyorov figured out the Manhattan Project's existance from the sudden silence in nuclear fission research.
Today, despite stakes that are proclaimed to be even higher, all the big players will not shut up about their accomplishments. Everything is aggressively published and propagandized. Every single fart an AI model makes is spun into a research paper. You might as well mail the model weights directly to Beijing.
Those are not the actions of companies trying to win an R&D race. Those are the actions of companies pushing up their stock price by any means necessary.
I really wonder what "losing the AI race" (typically meaning USA vs China) is supposed to indicate.
They have a better LLM or something......and then what? A rogue chatbot takes over the world or something?
We're like two plus years into being a few months away from LLMs taking every office jobs, and I'm still at a total loss as to where this is all supposed to go or what I'm even supposed to be sold on.
None of this thread means anything at all, it's 90% nihilistic cynicism wedded to 10% regurgitating talking points from their training data.
The real high-school-sophomore smelling thing, which you'd miss through all the purple prose about the Manhattan Project, is "open research is bad and proves it's fake bunko crap...that the Chinese are stealing(!?)"
I've been here for 15 years and am shuddering to think there are commentators here who would start selling you "open is bad" the instant they had a soapbox to pound their chest on.
That’s not what they wrote and you misinterpreted it. The point was that if it were true what is being claimed — that we’re close to AGI and we (the US, or EU, or China, etc., depending on where you live) must create it first or someone else will beat us to it and there’s no recovery from that — then the current behaviour makes no sense.
So someone is lying somewhere, and the end result is pumping stock prices.
Sure, if we only admit things in its cinematic universe it makes sense. It's incoherent as soon as you take a step out of the trees into the forest. For instance, we also know there's a well-made and popular argument that OpenAI is closed.
It's bizarre to flatten it to "they're giving it away because it's worthless but they're lying and saying its worth something so their stock goes higher", even setting aside the questionable premises that relies on.
If you're a federal contractor: Congratulations you can now be discriminated against on the grounds of "race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, or national origin"
And as a reminder to the lurkers who don't do their homework: The rescinded EO is from 1965. This is not just "woke nonsense". I will also note that Elon Musk has recently made statements about white tech workers being "retarded" and needing to be replaced by immigrants. And he's just been put in charge of government efficiency.
Some states (CA, NY, IL, WA, OR come to mind) and many municipalities have additional explicit employment discrimination laws that cover much of these. Obviously it’s not at a federal level and will vary (much like the nonsense that shifting Roe v Wade unraveled). Not sure how that will play out exactly (I’m no legal expert).
The fact of the matter is, most employers aren’t naive and have always found legal proxy rationales to discriminate and prevent hiring or fire someone. If an employer doesn’t want to hire you or wants to fire you, they’ll find a way. That doesn’t mean these sorts of laws are entirely useless. Some employers are pretty stupid and through emotion vent out the real intentions in a recorded fashion, so these sorts of protections help there.
They also curb some of the language businesses choose to use, making them at least appear a little more professional, for example in this thread, by not calling their white workers “retarded” (not aware of this happening but it seems reasonable). They may think it, but they need to say “our current staff are inefficient” or something else of that nature. I like not being insulted based on my race, age, sex, orientation, etc. it sets some guidelines, even if you might detest me for those reasons I at least don’t have to listen to it daily. Now legally in many cases some might have to.
Yes. My concern is the opposite here; A lot of red states are gleefully following every whim of the Trump Administration, and we can expect their state-level equivalent rules (insofar they exist, which a fair amount of states already fail) to be revoked soon.
> The fact of the matter is, most employers aren’t naive and have always found legal proxy rationales to discriminate and prevent hiring or fire someone.
It's certainly a problem.
But secret and-or implied agreements to discriminate are less effective, and subject to obstruction by wilfully-ignorant staff. Where put into writing, you get things like Eric Schmidt creating evidence for the tech antipoaching cartel of the 2000s.
Letting companies get away with explicit & stated policies is much worse.
> for example in this thread, by not calling their white workers “retarded” (not aware of this happening but it seems reasonable).
Aren't there other laws and judgements in place that protect us from discrimination based on certain traits like race and religion, or has the entirety of the protection for the last 60 years been based upon this one executive order?
What the claimed motivation is does not matter; the order is gone in it's entirity now.
Frankly, it's just conservatives using "affirmative action" as a buzzword, because it really doesn't describe affirmative action as it's colloquially understood. "affirmative action" is followed by an immediate and explicit requirement of equal treatment.
> "(1) The contractor will not discriminate against any employee or applicant for employment because of race, color, religion, sex, or national origin. The contractor will take affirmative action to ensure that applicants are employed, and that employees are treated during employment, without regard to their race, color, religion, sex or national origin. Such action shall include, but not be limited to the following: employment, upgrading, demotion, or transfer; recruitment or recruitment advertising; layoff or termination; rates of pay or other forms of compensation; and selection for training, including apprenticeship. The contractor agrees to post in conspicuous places, available to employees and applicants for employment, notices to be provided by the contracting officer setting forth the provisions of this nondiscrimination clause.
Genuinely, this is just a lot of words to say "don't do a racism". The examples are on the level of "consider doing recruitment advertising outside of places visited primarily by white dudes"
It does seem Musk holds a lot of contempt for American Tech workers. It appears his demands for an extraordinary level of commitment as one of the reasons. I'm not sure there is any consideration for a work life balance. For a young person starting out, that may be acceptable. Perhaps it's why I never see anyone older than 30ish working for him.
He, and most of the executives like him, are just being idiots about this particular thing.
Our field is notoriously hard to quantify in terms of productivity. The metrics (Lines of Code, Velocity, etc) are all garbage. Rather than learning how to manage what they can't measure, they just latch onto hours of work.
They have no clue on how to make things more efficient so they just demand longer hours.
> I'm not sure there is any consideration for a work life balance.
There isn't. The entire idea of working long hours & long weeks immediately falls apart under the slightest interrogation.
Anyone who's done serious knowledge work knows it's physically tiring to actually use your brain, so much so that even doing it at full 100% throttle for merely 8 hours is farcical. Anyone can work for 12 hours a day if they're sitting on their ass barely doing anything.
This also readily shows in the stats. Japan ain't a productivity superpower. Despite the praise of Indian H1Bers, India sure ain't a productivity superpower either.
Long hours are just pointless virtue signalling. "Look how loyal to the company I am". Something the western world was suppose to be better than.
> For a young person starting out, that may be acceptable.
It's just desperation. With cost of living so high many don't have a choice. And this field's allergy to unionization hasn't made it better.
The few who proudly proclaim their ability to "work 80 hour weeks" are delusional.
Are you talking about his role censoring for the current, or for the former admin? His flip flopping shows such a lack of character. However, being selectively outraged because this time he is doing it for someone you disagree with, which a lot of people are, reveals the real motives.
ok so where do those who have been consistently mad at the people variously in power going back to 2016 or even 2008 go to complain? non-partisan free speech believers exist
I agree. I like nostr the most out of the similar attempts at creating a standards based multi client social graph. Not a huge fan of federated servers like Mastodon. Bluesky seems like it has some good parts with the @ protocol, but is quite bad at non-partisanship in practice.
People are gonna stay upset for quite a while. The billion dollar election manipulation campaign spanning Reddit/Tiktok/Youtube/Television was extremely effective. It convinced a very, very specific kind of person that the by-the-numbers worst candidate in modern history was going to win in an absolute landslide.
It will be years before these people realize how much the media was controlled from 2020-2024 specifically in favor of one political party. For a lot of people this was the first time it was extremely obvious and going back to Bush and Obama social media and the internet in general weren't considered "serious" political campaign locations. I certainly dont remember either Bush's or Obama's election being so insanely partisan to the point of calling one party Nazis. Of course there was vitriol but it was so tame compared to today.
>being so insanely partisan to the point of calling one party Nazis
Do you mean the party who just used the inauguration to have a senior government member throw nazi salutes? The party whose presidents first actions included pardoning dozens of members of fascist groups?
You can't really be choosing this moment to complain about calling these people nazis??
I was about to say Musk doesn't have an actual role in government but I guess an executive order has made DOGE real, by renaming US Digital Service the US Doge Service.
I think you need to make the argument about Nazis on its merits. Trump's people do much that fits the definition of fascism, many try to normalize or advocate for fascism, dictatorship, and even normalize Hitler. His most prominent member of government did a proto-Nazi salute (and don't say he's too dumb to know what it would look like).
And that paragraph would not be objectionable to many people in that political grouping.
Wow, that misinterpretation of "you can't yell fire in a crowded theatre" is really something. Do you think that's a smoking gun that he's shamelessly manipulating the audience, or is he really that dense (or, I suppose to be fair... is it an honest mistake - we all have blind spots)?
Everything about the "twitter files" was trumped up nonsense with cherry picked quotes used to misrepresent, all orchestrated by bad faith actors/liars
The Twitter Files a were releases of some internal memos and files from Twitter's operation prior to Musk's acquisition that document the policy machinations within the company and its interactions with the Biden administration.
Regardless, no private platform is forced to provide you a voice. You can set up your own site and set up your own servers if need be. People have been getting their ideas out there before social media and even when the mainstream media wouldn’t cover them.
That’s how the civil rights movement came to prominence.
> Regardless, no private platform is forced to provide you a voice.
That was a reasonable stance historically. Only the government had real power to control speech.
Now a tiny number of platforms have a huge amount of power. They should have an obligation not to censor, because between them they can virtually block all practically available channels of communication.
> There are church networks, civil groups, advocacy groups etc
Which are now largely dependent on social media and the like to reach people.
Church's somewhat less so because they do have services that people physically go to. Most campaign and advocacy groups work online, and for some social media is their main focus. They have to go where people are.
> They should have an obligation not to censor, because between them they can virtually block all practically available channels of communication
Absolute bullshit. It has never been easier in history to publish your own thoughts for the consumption of anyone who is interested in reading them. You can make your own website and put just about whatever you want on it. You can write and publish pamphlets or books with print on demand services. You can record audio or video with your phone and put it on your website or just send it directly to people. You can walk down to the town square and say pretty much whatever you want.
You absolutely don't need to be on Facebook or Twitter or ANY social networks to exercise your free speech. None of these companies has power over any means of communication other than their own platforms. You don't have to use their platforms.
No, its more like arguing that telecoms companies (especially ones with monopolies) should not be able to refuse service on grounds that they do not like views people express in their phone calls.
The NYT is a publication, social media are platforms.
Huh? When has Facebook ever implemented political censorship on behalf of Trump? I am not aware of a single case of such a thing even being requested, let alone granted. The scandals about government-directed social media censorship were under Biden's admin, not under Trump's.
> While users who type "#Democrat" or "#Democrats" see no results, the hashtag "Republican" returns 3.3 million posts on the social media platform.
> By manually searching Instagram for "Democrats", rather than clicking on a hashtag, users are greeted by a screen reading "we've hidden these results".
> "Results for the term you searched for may contain sensitive content," it says.
While I agree about Trump, Facebook has censored left-wing causes such as Palestinians. Zuckerberg's embrace of Trump, including possibly getting approval for Facebook's recent changes, raises many concerns.
No, it is true and has been covered in all major newspapers many times over. The Hunter Biden laptop story was censored due to warnings from the FBI, and Zuckerberg has repeatedly said that Facebook was pressured by the Biden administration to censor Covid-19-related content.
The FBI did not say anything about the Hunter laptop story to Facebook, they warned all social media companies that they had detected suspicious activity and that the companies should be aware of foreign disinformation ops
The laptop story was always nonsense anyway, because the chain of custody of the laptop was compromised, and forensic analysis of the hard drive showed that the contents had been modified after it was retrieved from the repair shop and so the content could not be trusted
Oh, come on. No, per the reporting, they didn't specifically mention the laptop, but they DID tell SM and tech companies to expect an imminent disinformation dump the week before the NYP published their story (which they'd been sitting on while working on verifying it), and gave enough of a characterisation of what that specific impending dump would contain that employees of the warned companies sent each other messages affirming that, yes, this was clearly the dump the FBI had warned them about. Then when they asked the FBI if this was indeed the Russian misinformation they'd just warned about, the FBI didn't deny it.
(Right? I have no insider information, here, but as far as I understand it none of the above is controversial.)
I don't know the exact content of the messages the FBI sent (I don't think they've been published), but on its face it seems perverse to me to characterise that sequence of events as the FBI not saying "anything about the Hunter laptop story" to Facebook. They presumably were referring to the Hunter laptop story, and Facebook correctly recognised that this was the case when the story broke, so in what sense are was the warning not "about" that story?
They didn't tell them to censor anything, they warned them that misinformation was coming, and FB on their own decided to temporarily suppress it from "Trending" before changing their mind. You're free to read all of the evidence. Zuck lied and tried to conflate the Instagram bug with the laptop story and/or the COVID stuff
Both of those claims are false, and Facebook's own internal communications showed that they did not censor any covid-related content. SCOTUS ruled that the govt asked them to filter out misinformation without putting any undue pressure on them, and Facebook declined to do so
I already posted the link refuting this nonsense with sources
"Mr Zuckerberg also said his firm briefly "demoted" content relating to Joe Biden's son, Hunter, ahead of the 2020 election, after the FBI warned of "a potential Russian disinformation" operation.
It later became clear that this content was not part of such an operation, Mr Zuckerberg said, and it should not have been temporarily taken down."
"Two and a half years ago, he went on Joe Rogan and said that the FBI had warned the company about the potential for hack and leak efforts put forth by the Russians, which Rogan and a whole bunch of people, including the mainstream media, falsely interpreted as “the FBI told us to block the Hunter Biden laptop story.”
Except that’s not what he said. He was asked about the NY Post story (which Facebook never actually blocked, they only — briefly — blocked it from “trending”), and Zuckerberg very carefully worded his answer to say something that was already known, but which people not listening carefully might think revealed something new:
The background here is that the FBI came to us – some folks on our team – and was like ‘hey, just so you know, you should be on high alert. We thought there was a lot of Russian propaganda in the 2016 election, we have it on notice that basically there’s about to be some kind of dump that’s similar to that’.
But the fact that the FBI had sent out a general warning to all of social media to be on the lookout for disinfo campaigns like that was widely known and reported on way earlier. The FBI did not comment specifically on the Hunter Biden laptop story, nor did they tell Facebook (or anyone) to take anything down."
"So, first, calling it “censorship” is misleading, because it’s just how you handle violations of your rules, which is why moderation is always a better term for it."
Got any sources that don't go in for such blatant gaslighting?
Well, Musk hypocrisy aside and assuming the scale of this intervention is the same on X as pre-acquisition and assuming it’s as egregious and petty as then, he won’t have the infrastructure to force his views across all social networks like the Biden administration did.
> The good news is that Facebook, X, and the Trump administration have publicly committed to, and signed executive orders to unravel that censorship complex.
> What if instead it was possible to feed the bots clearly damaging and harmfull content?
With all respect, you're completely misunderstanding the scope of AI companies' misbehaviour.
These scrapers already gleefully chow down on CSAM and all other likewise horrible things. OpenAI had some of their Kenyan data-tagging subcontractors quit on them over this. (2023, Time)
The current crop of AI firms do not care about data quality. Only quantity. The only thing you can do to harm them is to hand them 0 bytes.
You would go directly to jail for things even a tenth as bad as Sam Altman has authorized.
Not quite what the original commenter meant but: WE ARE.
A major consequence of this reckless AI scraping is that it turbocharged the move away from the web and into closed ecosystems like Discord. Away from the prying eyes of most AI scrapers ... and the search engine indexes that made the internet so useful as an information resource.
Lots of old websites & forums are going offline as their hosts either cannot cope with the load or send a sizeable bill to the webmaster who then pulls the plug.
Which is bad ... why exactly? Public TV largely works.
Meanwhile, existing privately owned social media & news in the US falling into the hands of single billionaires is showing itself to have been a terrible idea. They're all kowtowing to the incoming president, and it's increasingly looking like we'll be seeing the death of the first amendment on the internet.
Sure. Committees suck sometimes. ActivityPub as a standard has been design-by-committee'd to uselessness.
But it's so much better than the likes of Musk, Zuckerberg, or Bezos having unilateral control over the entire platforms and (soon) gleefully clamping down on free speech because Der Führer decreed that LGBT content must be censored. (And yes, I am being facetious. But if you think that this attack on free speech won't be expanded and expanded, you're a fool.)
And what then, is stopping governments from simply demanding you hand over a list of your customers? They will seek to enforce those currency controls you are subverting.
Your entire sales pitch here is based on a lack of transparency to "evil oppressive governments", whereas the US government (at least, once it gets it's shit together again in a few years), will just delete your company for helping the North Koreans evade sanctions if you don't have quite robust AML.