Very important opinion piece from Cory Doctorow again. The trend was clear of an epistemic crisis brewing and generative AI basically put it on steroids. This is a real blow to our civilisation.
This truly makes me sad... The level of cynicism required to destroy rare books is just beyond me. All this to squeeze the last human made tokens available with no real gain in sight.
Funny, I was using that exact same term recently: "brute-force driven development". It describes fairly well how the harnesses work.
This is a very good declaration and call to actions from the mathematics field. I wish we'd have something well thought out like this for computer science and software engineering as well.
Interesting study which measures our propensity to be more confident while being more wrong when using LLMs to answer questions. Those models really tap into our cognitive bias to mistake linguistic fluency for competence.
If you still don't think data centres have a water consumption problem, especially since the LLM weapon race... Think again.
In other words: the security boundaries of coding agents are very porous and not where you expect. Handle with extreme care until they have a proper security model.
The hardware prices are nuts right now... and there's no end in sight yet.
Those systems based on LLMs really create crazy security issues as soon as they're allowed to interact with other systems.
There's clearly an issue with the security and privacy practice of those companies...
The web scraper situation isn't getting better... How long can the open web still hold?
Really this kind of AI push is a bad move for employers, especially when interacting with FOSS communities so much. This forces people to pass the ethical issues onto volunteers...
The data set is rather small but the trend is really bad. So much reviewer time wasted due to AI slop... this time on the Flathub side.
How is going this social experiment at scale? Not well I'd say... And some in those cohorts will end up in positions of power, that's when it'll become really "interesting" I guess.
You sure you can trust those systems? It's proprietary software and they're clearly on a slippery slop. For something so security sensitive this is concerning.
Interesting paper (go to the full one for all the details) which shows that with the current architecture it's really hard if not impossible to make safe systems with LLMs. This gives interesting insights in the weird form of proto-cognition those models exhibit.
More reasons why the whole "data centers in space idea" is stupidly dangerous and likely unreachable.
Remind me how your built your models in the first place? Yeah right...
Very sobering opinion piece. For all the talks about a China / USA race, it feels more like two flavors of the same dystopia. The race is just here to justify acting against their own population interest. The result is then the increase in illiberal fixations and nihilistic world views. This can't end well.
Some news from the Apertus project, they released smaller models. Interesting work.