> like they've repeatedly pursued).

source?

Many, many, many public policy positions; for a clear-cut example, they eventually supported SB 1047 [1] which would have banned open-sourcing any model trained with over 10^26 FLOPS (i.e. what Anthropic reportedly used to train Mythos). Their "Responsible Scaling Policy" [2] — a set of policy proposals that includes recommendations for government regulation — specifically calls out requiring "third-party controls" on model weights to prevent access; for developers to prevent "modification of models" such as fine-tuning (obviously impossible for open-source or open-weight models); prevent usage of model weights in "Automated R&D in key domains" which they specifically call out AI development as a key domain (again, obviously impossible for open-source); etc etc.

They want to ban open-source AI and are not shy about it.

1: https://campustechnology.com/articles/2024/08/26/anthropic-a...

2: https://www.anthropic.com/responsible-scaling-policy

Deeply concerning. How likely is this to become reality?

America has somehow managed to hang on to the right to encryption, despite plenty of well-heeled opponents, so it's possible to hang on to the right to open-source models. But it'll take a lot of vocal support, since there's strong incentive for Anthropic to try to cajole the government into banning competition (and they've already crossed that particular Rubicon, whereas OpenAI to my knowledge hasn't and at least still releases some open-source models like gpt-oss-120b).

The nuance is not what they propose, but why, even according to them, they propose this. Honestly the proposals are appalling, but biosafety arguments are not immediately dismissible. Ultimate cyber threats we can handle by rewinding society 50 years back. We can’t undo a novel genetically engineered virus.

I mean arguably, we _could_ create conditions in which it is much less likely for people to start developing such a novel genetically engineered virus.

If you think about the factors that lead to people wanting to do such a thing, they're almost always tied to (perceived) inequality, (perceived) injustice or similar in some way.

I do believe that we could greatly reduce a whole bunch of such risks by just stopping to squeeze people as hard as we do right now.

But that would require a major refactoring I guess.

> ...ch less likely for people to start developing such a novel genetically engineered virus.

only people that would do this would be crazy bc it cant be controled after release.

Yes but ethical responsibilities are entirely irrelevant, because that crazy person would still bioweapon you, and you kinda do not want that.

So regardless of if they're evil/bad/crazy or not, you still want to have that not happen. Hence the systemic perspective instead of the focus on the individual.

Open source doesnt matter if you still need to make 100k year to have your own mediocre model.

There is no magic compression. There is no magic post training. Your phone or laptop will never do what you think its going to be able to.

There are limits to what consumer hardware will ever be able to run, in its current form. Open source isn't going to save us if they gatekeep access to hardware, which idk if you've been paying attention. They dont plan on making consumer grade hardware more powerful, they want to rent that power to you.

Technological serfdom is coming if they get their way.

You don't need to be able to self-host it. It's fine to pay someone else for it. If it's open-source, competition will ensure inference providers support it well enough, and if an open-source provider is dumb enough to nerf their model for (useful) coding tasks, there's plenty of incentive for inference companies to do some lightweight finetuning to restore the capability.

I disagree, I think being able to self-host it to some extent is very important.

Personal computing democratized the means of (software) production and enabled real upward class mobility for a lot of people.

The efforts happening now are threatening to completely lock up the ability to compute locally, seizing the means of production from us. That must not happen.

your parent said "You don't need to be able to self-host it", you countered with "I disagree, I think being able to self-host it to some extent"

Bro, I don't know what you're disagreeing with, the two statements can and should be true at the same time. It's not only unnecessary but also impossible for everyone to self-host, for the vast majority this isn't a necessity and it shouldn't be. Actually being stuck on self-hosting for all is mighty silly from economics standpoint, pushing on it can ruin the entire enterprise.

But being able to self host? Sure why not, if you insist and are ready to suffer... knock yourself out, but that's a socially insignificant act which doesn't scale, good only as a backup option.

Because "you don't need to be able to self-host it" is a constraint, I'm arguing that you DO need to be able to self host it, not that difficult. Every thing being rented out instead of available for ownership is nothing but neofeudalism, which we are rapidly spiraling into.

> pushing on it can ruin the entire enterprise.

I'm supposed to feel sorry for the trillion dollar corporations that hoovered up all of human knowledge, for profit, and are now the direct reason why 32GB of RAM is now $500 instead of $90, all while renting compute back out to us, making it more and more expensive to actually own hardware, a fundamental privilege that enabled all of this technology in the first place?

Let the "enterprise" be ruined. It'll be for the better.

> Let the "enterprise" be ruined. It'll be for the better.

Maybe my choice of words was a bit confusing, I actually had in mind the "enterprise" of making sure people have access to capable and uncensored models. As far as the enterprises you dislike, I don't use them, I do use hosted models but not theirs.

> I'm supposed to feel sorry for the trillion dollar corporations that hoovered up all of human knowledge, for profit, and are now the direct reason why 32GB of RAM is now $500 instead of $90, all while renting compute back out to us, making it more and more expensive to actually own hardware, a fundamental privilege that enabled all of this technology in the first place?

No disagreement here, I've been writing about it for months now. There's a lot to say about it but it's a long discussion that will have to be focused on economics and politics, something HN isn't fond of.

All I can say, is that you're right, the goal is to have abundant and cheap hardware and a lot of other things too. But in order to get there we will have to learn to pick, choose and support hosted models that care about our freedom to know things.

Ah, that makes sense now thank you. I had assumed by enterprise you were referring to OpenAI/Anthropic/etc.

> Technological serfdom is coming if they get their way.

I'm deeply concerned about this. We're seeing all these moves towards remote attestation, identity verification. Now we're being literally priced out of hardware...

It does make you wonder about the "E" part of the EA cultists who infest that particular company.