With tariffs signed, Trump warns of ‘pain’ to come for Americans
hotspur @ Hotspur @lemmy.ml Posts 0Comments 194Joined 2 yr. ago
Yeah ok, I do basically agree with you. It’s not an accurate equivalency, yet. We’re trending bad though. I’d say the example of Stephen Miller sort of accidentally hinting that they shut down USAID because they all donated to the Harris campaign had some chilling implications for example. He could just be assuming that, since that’s a safe assumption for populous urban areas generally, but they could also have cross checked lists of employees against political contributions.
Haha ok I missed that part. It doesn’t do image gen does it? I think just released a different model that does that.
Well yeah, almost certainly. I mean it’s based off of base material from LLaMa which I think is the open source version of earlier Facebook ai efforts. So it definitely used copyright material for training. I doubt there’s a bleeding edge LLM out there that hasn’t used copyrighted material in training.
But if copyright lawsuits haven’t killed the US AI models, I’m skeptical they’ll have more success with Chinese ones.
Haha this is so amusing. I’ll take that though over the blind confidence you get out of so many other products I guess.
I’m gonna take a second stab at replying, because you seem to be arguing in good faith.
My original point is that online chatbots have arbitrary curbs that are built in. I can run GPT 2.5 on my self host machine, and if I knew how to do it (I don’t) I could probably get it to have no curbs via retraining and clever prompting. The same is true of the deepseek models.
I don’t personally agree that there’s a huge difference between one model being curbed from discussing xi and another from discussing what the current politics du jour in the western sphere are. When you see platforms like meta censoring LGTBTQ topics but amplifying hate speech, or official congressional definitions of antisemitism including objection to active and on-going genocide, the idea of what government censorship is and isn’t becomes confusing.
Having personally received the bizarre internal agency emails circulating this week encouraging me to snitch out my colleagues to help root out the evils of DEIA thought in US gov’t the last week has only crystallized it for me. I’m not sure I care that much about Chinese censorship or authoritarianism; I’ve got budget authoritarianism at home, and I don’t even get high-speed rail out of the bargain. At least they don’t depend on forever wars and all of the attendant death and destruction that come with them to prop up their ponzi-scheme economies. Will they in the future, probably? They are basically just a heavily centralized/regulated capitalist enterprise now, so who knows. But right now? Do they engage in propaganda? Cyber-espionage? Yes and Yes. So do we, so do you, so does everyone who has a seat at the geopolitical table and the economy to afford it.
The point of all of this isn’t US GOOD CHINA BAD or US BAD CHINA GOOD. The article is about the deepseek models tearing out the floor of US dominance in AI. Personally, having deployed it and played with it, yeah. None of these products are truly useful to me yet, and I remain skeptical of their eventual value, but right now, party censorship or not, you can download a version of an LLM that you can run, retrain and bias however you want, and it costs you the bandwidth it took to download. And it performs on par with US commercial offerings that require pricey subscriptions. Offerings that apparently require huge public investment to keep afloat.
Wow what even is beehaw, I had no idea. At least China is honest about what they’re doing. The amount of bad faith in these replies is insane.
If you’re a shill, fine, good job. But if you’re not, have you paid any attention to the real world around you? We spent the last year enabling genocide, and the best fruits of our over-hyped tech and intellectual innovation factories are being revealed as the bullshit that most people always understood them to be.
The fact that you can accuse me of being dishonest, while providing no basis or evidence, while multiple federal agencies are under a strict gag order from any communication or purchasing with outside contacts… I mean really?
Like are you guys just another CIA adjacent cutout that believes in identity politics and SSRIs but has zero ability to critically assess the actual world around them?
You say Chinese state censorship is an understood quantity. Could be. But I’d say that my points about equivalencies are to illustrate that what we think is true, is often much more grey. I’ve been to China, and while I was impressed and shocked at how much more advanced it was than I expected, I also couldn’t imaging living there. It doesn’t change the fact that a stagnant late-stage capital mafia state that lives off defense contracting is performing ooorly against a centrally controlled capitalist state that has set different priorities (that’s right boy, deepseek-r1 is a side project of a…. CHINESE HEDGE FUND). It’s value neutral. But if you dismiss reality based on a conception of political censorship that I doubt you’ve deeply engaged with, enjoy.
The so called free market certainly didn’t seem to take much reassurance in deepseek being compromised by communist censorship this morning though. Probably because the deepseek news isn’t exceptional because of China, or what it is, but because of what it isn’t, compared to the bloated tech carcasses that the US has pinned its hopes on.
If you’re going to accuse China of state censorship, then I suppose you are also vehemently opposed to the censorship we apply to our media, social media and “AI” platforms, and since you dislike the lack of journalistic integrity in this article for pointing out that state censorship you would support similar caveats being added to articles about OpenAI, Meta, X in regards to how they handle issues like Gaza, Culture War topics and coverage of political candidates?
It’s fair to bring up comparisons when your critique is claiming an imbalance in portrayal between the “realities” of ai development in China and the US.
There’s a strong argument that any consumer facing chatbot AI is “censored”. I’ve had chatGPT clam up in bizarre ways after it misinterprets what I’m asking. It just depends on company owning the product and what they view their legal exposure to be.
Also, we are applying huge govt subsidies to ai industry based on thin value evidence at this very moment. And we provide subsidies for many of our industries to help prop them up, sometimes to hugely bad effect. It’s what countries do to build, maintain and win industrial arms races.
Deepseek-R1 is open source and you can download it and run it offline. I’m not a power user but was able to get a functioning offline version of the 32B distill model running on a spare machine I had in a hour or so from scratch. I used online deepseek for most of the process to provide instructions and troubleshoot. I can’t comment on how amazing it is, other than to say so far it’s felt about as good as my interactions with GPT4 on the free chatGPT tier. In both cases I remain skeptical about their deep business use outside of certain areas.
From what I’ve read, you can use the base, and methodology and train your own new model if you have the technical ability and desire (rumor is meta AI has shelved their WIP and adopted deepseek as their new basis). This would imply that if you wanted to be able to talk to your LLM about topics like Taiwan, you could absolutely set up a model that would do that.
How long before deepseek is banned by US gov for being too good—-wait sorry I mean a security risk?
The people they’re discussing are on a detail loan from another agency, so they’re just going back to their original posts with their parent agencies. Whole thing is still shitty and stupid, but there’s been clear messaging that they’re going to rotate all of them regardless, so probably not worth resisting, you just go back to your original job.
TLDR The US is a mafia-esque arms dealer / financial scam that masquerades as a “moral democracy”. Capital won in America, and this is what happens.
Each person is not a member of a society or community, but is a competitor. We are atomized, severed from our families and communities and increasingly told we are commodities ourselves. This strategy works in favor of central power as it actively works to erode the ties between people, and that makes them isolated and unable to band together as easily.
Sure there’s individualism and other toxic mythologies that play some part, but the country has increasingly become a corrupt business that serves its board of directors and not its employees. I’m sure there are countless moments where you could make an argument that this process went into overdrive, for me it’s around Regan and after and the various policies that led to destruction of unions, led to offshoring and functionally turned the US into a financialized service economy. Maybe that’s just coincidence and the real cause was the collapse of the USSR, like I said there’s probably many moments/causal events one could make a reasonable argument for.
What we have now: some clown dimension right wing that would like to legalize sport hunting immigrants and the homeless while fire sale busting out the entire US govt, and a bloodless “liberal” center-right that merely wants to criminalize, imprison and then work for profit the people the right would like to sport-hunt, while funneling money to their friends and family. Both are fine with genocide, provided the weapons proceeds end up in the correct place. Those two political fronts represent a section of the populace that is likely less than .01%.
Once you strip out all of the PR about democracy, freedoms, etc, the US really does fit pretty well as the single biggest threat to continued existence on earth: massive nuclear stockpile on a hair trigger, massive globe spanning network of carbon emitting and resource extracting enterprises, attempting to develop ai with minimal safeguards and autonomous weapons, etc.
There are other countries that do some or all of these things, but in aggregate, the US is, for now, gotta be the single largest threat. Possibly another country will take up this mantle in the future.
All that said, I’m not convinced at this point that it can be avoided. It may just be what happens one way or another with humans at these kinds of scales, or a natural progression of technology snuffing itself out. Doesn’t make it any nicer to contemplate though.
Yeah I basically agree with your point about the unpleasant logic behind such a move, and would only add that Greenland looks appealing if you’re trying to lock down the arctic from both sides of the continent—US has good arctic frontage on Alaska, and Greenland would bookend Canada and allow US more flexibility in countering Russia and expanding oil extraction.
I was trying to think about where this suddenly came from, and the first thing that kept popping up was Trumps current obsession with drill baby drill, the arctic is the last frontier for potentially easy extraction once all the ice melts and Canada, US and Russia have already been playing footsie there for a decade under the guise of science and commercial traffic trying to lay claim to stuff that was ignorable before.
Like some dude got in his ear and convinced him the future is in the arctic. It also adds some further explanation to Trump “joking” about making Canada a state. If it was just economic hardball / a new trade deal, they could leave it at tariffs and the like, but they keep saying they want to make it a state…
All of that makes me sick to my stomach, but as you say there is logic to it.
That’s a great info dump, thanks for posting.
Yeah that’s a fair point—like it’s fine as a brainstorming tool, but I’d never trust… uhh life and death details to it. And as OP mentioned, you can easily answer many of the questions with a web search.
It’s so amusing, I’m not a demolitions expert (tbh I would have thought an SF guy would have had better knowledge there, or at least better sources to go to) but the idea of trusting anything chatGPT said to help you lay out a plan like that… seems ludicrous.
Not sure, but one thing I do know: sewage treatment plants aren’t distilling the water before it it gets back into service. Guessing that would be very energy intensive at scale.
Right, or that back then they just didn’t care if you drank the battery because there wasn’t a hugely well-developed culture of lawsuits like we have now. Those fuckers in 1914-1950 were definitely down for a battery party, no doubt. The ones that made it now think that everyone had common sense because only the ones that did made it through.
They have been uniquely open about their plans to make economic experience worst for most people, but even so, I still suspect it will end up badly for them. We might say “hey the voters were informed” but a.) they almost certainly assumed that it would not be them who felt pain and b.) the voting public as a mass consciousness tends to operate on fairly simple stimulus-response dynamics, and the most important of those dynamics is the “feel bad about economy> vote out incumbent” pathway. So basically just, you can be honest about nuking the economy and promise some promised land on the other side, but if said promise land does not materialize well before elections, you’re probably cooked.