> Saying it again: If a business releases a model, we have a right to demand that it is useful for us because we're the business' costumers
Open models == free == no customers. For open foundational models, yours sounds like a demand that someone else invests millions in training a foundation model of your liking, but you're not motivated enough to fine-tune your copy of the model for hundreds or thousand of dollars?
If you're not paying for the "censored" proprietary models, you are not a customer either. If you are a paying customer of "censored" models, and would like them to change, remember businesses have the right to choose who they want as customers - and they can decide they don't want the "uncensored" market segment. I'd love a $25,000 electric Ferrari too, but Ferrari is not about that.
In your example, it doesn't have to be Ferrari specifically. Someone could make an equivalent product at a lower price even.
But I have something else to say about your comment. It's that nothing is entirely free. Google lets us use their search service, but we're paying with something else than money.
When a business "gives away" an open model "for free" it's only on their self-interest, and this does not free them of the expectations/responsibilities with their costumers. No matter what form that self-interest takes, we're still their costumers even if it's not money.
So if they release an open model subpar with what we expect, they're gonna end up losing.
What makes you their customer? Are you offering them money for access to the uncensored model you say you want?
Do you have some business that you’re going to be able to build that tests on access to an uncensored model, and their failure to offer that to you is preventing them from getting paid by you to provide the underlying technology for your venture?
Because on the other hand there is a state lottery over here who absolutely is willing to pay someone money for a safe, censored model. They are an actual paying customer with a real use case and cash to back it up.
Of course, it turns out the AI they ended up using didn’t (if this story holds up) actually meet their expectations with respect to safety and alignment - but let’s be clear: they wanted a safe, censored model.
I find it hard to believe that the market for uncensored models - LLMs that occasionally output 4chan style racist tirades, diffusion models that occasionally generate pornography - is actually worth addressing, compared to offering models which don’t do those things.
Well I think that's for the market to decide, yes? If state intervention is out of the question, obviously.
> but let’s be clear: they wanted a safe, censored model.
That's absolutely right.
Of course businesses have their right to release AIs with censorship, and we as costumers have a right to challenge that and ask for a product that is actually useful to us.
Saying it again: If a business releases a model, we have a right to demand that it is useful for us because we're the business' costumers.
If those demands aren't met by a business, another business should be able meet them in open competition. And this only happens when open uncensored models are not banned by law.