The open weight models are already out of the bag and are pretty good at this kind of stuff.

I'm sure if the field hadn't been moving so fast they would have tried, but it's kind of already decided unless they take away general computation.

Hugging face getting bought up makes me nervous

Hugging face is a repository for models others make. If they want to play cop, it will be about as effective as trying to stop people from torrenting movies (because the weights will just end up on torrents).

Blocking the major points of access is very effective. It has broader chilling effect. LM studio makes it trivial to grab any model on the fly. If folks have to import and set them up themselves they’ll be less likely to.

You don’t have to ban things. You just have to harder to get them than the alternatives.

yeah I doubt techies wanting to RE stuff will be deterred by hugginface. I think the opposite effect is true, they'll be motivated to boycott it and find alternatives out of sheer spite.

Yes but the number of people who are willing to go to those lengths will diminish with every barrier that goes up. And if the number of people willing to do that drops lower and lower, the effort becomes less and less effective.

Right now we benefit from a massive number of people participating as creators and users. What happens when that slows to a trickle?

Let’s start with the first obvious one: what happens when uncensored/abliterated models are pulled from HF? How many people will just shrug and say “well I guess I don’t use those anymore”? Because previously it was simply download LM studio, search, click on the model you want. The end. Suddenly it is much more difficult

I find it hard to believe people who have hardware that can run LLMs are so easily deterred. The whole point of investing the money is to do whatever you want

Everybody with a silicon Mac can easily run a small parameter LLM. Smartphones can run small ones too. Plenty of windows machines are capable too.

We know with populations of a certain size, any barrier is going to cause people to drop off. We see it over and over again. Why is this going to be any different? The more technical it feels, the more impenetrable it feels, so people will simply turn to ChatGPT or anthropic or whoever and pay them a subscription. Is that what we want? Like what are you even arguing with me about?

this is a thread about reverse engineering, to my knowledge small parameter LLMs are not going to give you much help with this. who cares about novelty LLMs?

> We know with populations of a certain size, any barrier is going to cause people to drop off

but the population size of people who will self host is not large.

> The more technical it feels, the more impenetrable it feels

you have to be inherently technical to even consider the option to run locally no matter how easy. what would a non technical person even use a local LLM for, that they wouldn't want to do with CGPT or ANT?

also, even considering reverse engineering any software at all requires technical knowledge. 99% of lay people don't even know it's an option let alone start vibe coding a RE on a local LLM

When has lack of domain knowledge stopped people when it comes to LLM’s? Besides I know I often learn how to do things by just throwing myself at it and brute forcing it until I start to gain understanding. A lot of us learn by doing, even if it’s something we have no business doing in the first place.

A lot of people also work on projects because they want people to use it. If the number of people utilizing different peoples takes on models drops, than people are going to lose interest in making them for other people. We all like to point to the altruism of the open source world, but nobody likes to release something only for no people to use it. That’s a very natural feeling that leads to people not releasing things because they’re too niche and such.

Anyway I’m just moving on. I don’t understand how I’m having to defend “increased barriers to entry dissuades people from participation and creation.” Some of y’all don’t think it’s a big deal or it’s somehow not applicable, but I can’t say I agree

It would be harder for a short period of time. Then it will be made easy again. As a baseline, it's not going to get harder than pirating a movie unless it's made criminal.

what sense does that make? Why would it suddenly get easier?

I didn't say suddenly. Do you think no one would try to develop a replacement?

Please don’t get hung up on my word choice. The point is this: I don’t understand why you think that it’s a given that adoption would occur at a meaningful level. We have it right now. Why would we give that up for the promise that we’ll get to again? It makes no sense. We should not want access to be eroded over time and then cope with “well we’ll get an alternative.” That’s not a given!

It’s not going to stop with hugging face just like ID requirements aren’t stopping at pornography. It is much harder to regain these things once they are lost.

I feel that with AI in the equation the game of Whac-a-mole has shifted significantly into the moles favor. Especially if it relies on moles self-censoring.

Go ask 30 people off the street to set up LM studio and get it using tools to search the web (without web access local models are practically useless to the average person beyond summarizing and editing documents so internet access is a must).

Barriers to entry are a thing. Look at Linux or general open source adoption. Convenience is important.

This thread is about making reverse engineering/jailbreaking more accessible. The target audience for that will likely never be laymen. Even if barriers to entry are slightly elevated again, by making it slightly harder to get access to jailbreak-willing LLMs, ultimately the barrier will still be significantly lower than it was a few years ago.

Also, for each device/group of devices, this only has to be done by a single determined person. It's not something that _everyone_ has to be able to do to have a transformative effect.

But right now laymen have easy access to this stuff! That’s what’s amazing about it right? And it’s not like there are two categories in the world, laymen and experts. I am a great example of someone who falls in the middle. I have enough technological knowledge to get myself in trouble and hack away at projects, but I am in no way a coder or engineer. I am the kind of person that gets dropped from the pack when these things tighten up too much. I can survive hugging face not hosting this stuff, but a number of my peers probably would throw up their hands and move on. And I don’t blame them, it gets exhausting fighting every single service in our lives trying to make it work for us. We eventually have to pick and choose. I don’t have time to jailbreak and hack together everything in my life. That’s why I have an iPhone and a more locked down, controlled Linux computer.

"Go ask 30 people off the street to set up LM studio and get it using tools to search the web"

They won't need to do that. All they'll need to do is use one of the sites/services set up by folks like you and me, who can set up an LM studio.

They will go and pay OpenAI and be done with it

Not if OpenAI models refuse to do the thing they want done.

That’s when they turn to (extra) sketchy websites or just throw their hands up and give up.

I just feel like some of you are inadvertently advocating for “only the most determined should be allowed to participate.”

Yeah there's that. There's also, ask my nephew that fixes the printer.

As I said another comment, this all just feels like everyone inadvertently saying “only the most dedicated should be given direct access to these tools.” I wouldn’t be necessarily against that if the alternative wasn’t yet another privacy-violating subscription minefield dominating 99% of the landscape. That’s what that road leads to. Barriers -> Less participation -> less created outside the prescribed corporate play pen -> more people in the play pen.

And yet people act like they can't get work done when GitHub is down...

> because the weights will just end up on torrents

They already are.

https://www.llmtorrents.com/

I've also recently seen here on HN an initiative to torrent "rare" models, but I can't manage to find it back.

What are you doing to help ensure this can’t be done to you or those around you?

Prepare.

I sold my business while I could. I'm not even going to try to sell anything else because there's nothing we can do to stop software from being replicated in a heartbeat.

[delayed]

My home printer was more expensive than an HP because they don't have an abusive ink sales business model. Artificially linking a business model to refills or subscriptions has always been a choice. It's just a worse choice now.

A lot of my clients have a need for partly embedded software, and partly applications. That's always been more remunerative than strictly app level software. The change I have observed since last year is that the app part can get a lot more ambitious and user-friendly on the kind of budget hardware makers allocate for that.

You can always vouch for "white hat testing"

This rings true to me. Or, it will be banned for the normal subscribers, but still be available for the $2,000 a month tier, to keep it out of the hands of consumers, and they’ll tell us it’s because otherwise evil hackers will use it to make us less safe. (Never mind that actual evil hackers can easily get an ROI at a high price)