I am not a big fan of ad hominem in general, but when the argument essentially is "you should surrender control to these people over major parts of society/economy because they are better than you and if you don't everybody dies" then it's appropriate to ask who are those people that are supposed to be our philosopher-kings?
AI safety advocates do not typically demand to be given personal political power, only for a set of preferred policies to be enacted, like anyone advocating for any political cause.
The question is who will be enacting and controlling those policies. Somebody like METR? That's the people. And yes, every regulatory body has these dangers - but the amount of control demanded for this body is quite unusual - it's full veto right over the whole industry.
For me this is probably the weirdest part of it. I have read HPMOR and was distinctly underwhelmed by its literary quality. I mean, it's not bad, but it's not serious literature. It's not even on the level of the original HP. It's a fanfic. Sure, it's a fanfic with a lot of fan service and geekery and so on, so the audience is targeted masterfully. But still, it's hard not to notice the numerous literary faults. I mean, "he actually thought through a lot of the plot points ahead of time" is a kind of praise, but not one that a decent literary work expects. That's like saying about a chess grandmaster that he actually knows how all the pieces move. I mean, sure, on the fanfic scene it's probably above median, but I've seen people making out of it some kind of epic revelation, akin to some kind of a sacred text. Completely undeservedly, in my opinion, and rather weird for a community that is so proud in it's objective and rational approach to things that put it into its very name.
You realize that people that don't care won't even know what Firefox is? Being a niche player and scaring away niche people is the most stupid strategy possible.
Being a small player and throwing away any hope of expanding your user base by building for people who will complain no matter what you do is, well, something!
Ah yes, the customers of Mozilla, who are certainly paying users and not just people whining and saying BACK IN MY DAYS IN THE LAST MILLENIUM IT WAS DIFFERENT.
Get over it gramps, things are changing. Mozilla spent ten years trying to mostly appeal to these people by staying very conservative, and it got them nothing but abuse and harassment from people not realising that staying stuck in the past is a death sentence for Mozilla.
You want to save Mozilla, burn down Google first. The ecosystem in which they are evolving isn't driven by them.
I solemnly proclaim I would pay reasonable money for a browser (Mozilla or otherwise) if their maker would truly try to make the best browser possible and succeed at least partially at it, instead of serving a thousand of agendas none of which is making the best browser possible. The sole reason why I am not Mozilla's customer is exactly that - because they do not see me as their potential customer and don't care about my needs. Of course, they are free to do that but the result is people like me aren't giving them their money. So they have to go to Google.
> You want to save Mozilla, burn down Google first.
Uhhh... 85% of mozilla's revenue comes from Google via the search deal. In a theoretical scenario where a genie waved a magic wand tomorrow and google went "poof", disappearing, mozilla would be in a dire emergency for lack of revenue.
It would. But Mozilla has zero long term survival chance in the current ecosystem. The economics are just not there, there cannot be more than one big browser in the way this system works.
Not really, but it's probably easier to make it on top of LLM than to make specially-purposed tool for it, if we talking in terms of time-to-market effort.
SQLite FTS could have done this a decade ago. We've had good local search capabilities for two decades and they either been underused or abandoned (e.g. Google Desktop, Yahoo! Search). This may be a reasonable projection of where AI is headed. You can do a lot locally but there is too much incentive to centralize around cloud infrastructure, then the privacy concerns make that prohibitive and we end up with what feels like a false choice of cloud or bust.
Maybe it's LLM hype that will bring more powerful capabilities to the desktop?
I think classification and clusterisation is more important than search per se. "Where did I see that article about that weird psychological effect where people remember things they haven't seen" is not resolved by direct search, but can be - with some work - helped by language models and NLP. One doesn't need full blown frontier LLM for that, but bare word indexing would probably not do either.
> that it's not some big American cloud company but a relatively small startup in France
How it's any better? Small companies can be bought by big companies. French government is as capable of trampling over their citizen's privacy the moment they feel they need it as US government is. And putting a squeeze on a small startup is way easier than on a major cloud company (not that either is particularly hard). Also, OpenAI used to be an idealistic non-profit one day too, then it started to smell trillions and all that went of of the window.
> is not going to be nearly as capable as an off-device inference system.
I rarely need PhD-level research into my browsing history. I'm not going to solve millennium problems on my bookmarks. The tasks that I will realistically need are well within capacity of most very basic local models. Maybe they'd be a bit slower, who cares.
>How it's any better? Small companies can be bought by big companies. French government is as capable of trampling over their citizen's privacy the moment they feel they need it as US government is.
It's better for Europeans because the company in question is European and so will not export their data to New Jersey. And because any success it has will presumably better benefit France and Europe.
> It's better for Europeans because the company in question is European and so will not export their data to New Jersey
There aren't many government institutions in New Jersey that would take a lot of interest in anything Frenchmen are doing. There are a lot of institutions in France that would be interested in anything Frenchmen are doing, if it contradicts what the French government wants to be happening. The main threat to citizen's privacy always comes from the government closest to them, the government overseas has its own citizens to worry about and pays much less attention to foreign citizens on foreign land. There could be exceptions, true, but as a rule, if you look into New Jersey, you'd sooner find mass surveillance of American citizens than mass surveillance of the French.
Same goes for commercial interests. If I want to run targeted ads in New Jersey, I want to have profiles of New Jersey people, not French people. So buying data from France in New Jersey would not be a routine occurrence, but buying local data would be.
Let's not pretend that EU data laws are not far more stringent and actually enforced than whatever the US has. Like sure, the government with a jury decision may acquire some person's data. But it's not getting sold to whichever-random-company-offered-the-highest.
Also, some shady TOS is also not enough to override the law in the EU, you have much more protection as a user here.
> But it's not getting sold to whichever-random-company-offered-the-highest.
Nothing in GDPR prevents transfer or selling of personal data. True, there are hoops to be jumped to do that, both in terms of consent and documentation, but let's not pretend a lot of people would read the welcome banner and refuse to interact with a service because its legalese says "we'll sell you data and if you don't want us to, go away". Yes, selling the data becomes more expensive because you need to hire the lawyers to produce those welcome pages and regulatory compliance paperwork, but large corps have enough money for lawyers.
> Also, some shady TOS is also not enough to override the law in the EU
It doesn't need to override anything, as the law does not prohibit data collection or transfer. It only describes the hoops that need to be jumped to achieve it.
It certainly does. You need to weigh the users privacy with your interests and can’t just put them aside. Noncompliance leads to quite large fines. You can easily find examples of fines given.
The DPA’s are short on capacity, sure, and large corps will try to fight the fines in court. But to describe it as “just hoops whilst allowing everything” is unfair.
> You need to weigh the users privacy with your interests and can’t just put them aside.
Who said anything about putting them aside? There would be a process and highly paid lawyers confirming that selling user data is only for the user's ultimate benefit, as it allows to provide awesome services to the users, and it all will be outlined in a 100-page privacy policy which you will be sure to read on each site you use, wouldn't you?
> But to describe it as “just hoops whilst allowing everything” is unfair.
Can you quote me the place where GDPR prohibits this? Not says something like "weigh user privacy" and "take adequate measures" and so on - which can always be resolved as "we weighed carefully and we took measures and we decided selling the data was awesome and users love it" - but explicitly and unambiguously prohibits the practice? If you don't find it - that description is exactly what it is.
> How it's any better? Small companies can be bought by big companies.
This. I've come to view a startup as a company without a business model, doing everything to get acquired by a mega corp that will finally squeeze the juice out of the userbase
(The lack of a viable business model applies to some mega corps too)
I am simply astonished by the leeway AI companies are given. If a company built a tool to hack their competitors and used it, there would be grave consequences. In fact, if a company built a tool that led to committing multiple felonies against other people, there would be consequences. But once LLMs are involved, turns out nobody is responsible for that - it's just happening, what you're gonna do, agents gonna agent. If you spill toxic chemicals, there would be cleanup costs and fines, and possibly civil and criminal liability to the people in charge. If you spill toxic code, well, nothing? I think it's time to impose some responsibility on them - they are creating these tools, they should be on the hook for everything these tools do.
A coalition of state attorneys general is investigating OpenAI, and Senator Josh Hawley recently launched a congressional investigation regarding the Hugging Face incident: https://x.com/HawleyMO/status/2098137180392604083
The problem IMO is the executive. The DOJ is declining to take any action against frontier companies (aside from possibly Anthropic) as the stance of the admin is that the companies are "critical for national security". For example, see the DOJ's request to dismiss the NAACP datacenters lawsuit against xAI: https://www.utilitydive.com/news/doj-intervenes-xai-data-cen...
Why anybody needs the DOJ? Each state has it's own police and their own AGs and their own criminal and civil court system. OpenAI is headquartered in California. California has never been shy of using their state resources to enact whatever regulations they want.
As for NAACP lawsuit, that's very confusing to me. First of all, why NAACP is doing that? Doesn't seem to do anything with defending civil rights. Second of all, they are suing xAI for using some gas turbines without some paperwork. Maybe it's true, maybe not, but that's something I have very little concern about - gas turbines is not the issue here. We know how to safely use gas turbines. Gas turbines are not going to uproot themselves and go wreak mayhem on the neighboring town. When we have a company that develops dangerous tools that can break the internet infrastructure, gas turbines' paperwork is not something that looks as the first priority issue to me.
That's insanely obtuse and bureaucratic response and has likely been designed as such. I mean, to claim that because _some_ domains can get unregistered, abruptly removing a whole class of domains "does not impact the life cycle of the domain" is entirely nonsensical. It's like saying because computers, being physical entities, may sometimes break, and all of them will break in finite time, it's entirely fine if all your computers shut down immediately and it has no impact on anything. This just sounds as "we don't care and you can't do anything about it, suck it up, peasant".
> The "customers" they are courting are security/privacy zealots who constantly want them "just work on the browser" but never seem to have an answer on how to pay for that.
We all know how that was paid for. Google. But instead of taking that money stream and investing it 100% into making it the best browser ever, they pursued a myriad of fancy distractions. Yes, making a sustainable browser project is hard. Making a sustainable browser project while being constantly distracted by side project and political activism [1] is even harder. I am not saying if Mozilla stayed focused the win would be guaranteed. But I am pretty sure doing it like they are doing it guarantees failure.
Mangione had a personal grudge, caused by illness, pain and personal interactions with US healthcare system, which can grind down and drive to insanity anybody. The above just reads as a mashup or angry reddit posts which contain generic "evil rich people" platitudes, with zero depth or factual support. It's just low effort ranting.
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