The support of OSS models on HN just days after finding out about the message board incident is so bizarre to me.

Other sites beckon.

Yes, I'm aware that the HN majority is a hyper-libertarian echo chamber that loves to outsource the problem of "technology hurting regular people" if it means they get to keep their toys/investments.

After all, who cares if abliterated extremely intelligent OSS models result in actual innocent people dying? That's <insert group here> problem. We need to be able to generate our uncensored furry fanfics, goddamnit!

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llukas 41 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

State actors, professional criminals will have same or better capabilities and do not hesitate to use them. On defense end we'll have only "pay bigcorp" option.

OSS models can help to fix infra especially for folks who would never do it themselves. We do not know yet what final effect would be and it doesn't seem sky is falling now or in near future.

"people dying and furry fanfics" is a scarecrow and distractor respectively, it would be awesome if more specific examples would be used in place.

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solenoid0937 36 minutes ago | parent [-]

> State actors, professional criminals will have same or better capabilities

State actors do but they are not unhinged enough to use this to cause massive loss of life, unlike random crazy people with access to a computer.

Professional criminals don't have access. Please explain exactly how you expect a professional criminal to get access to a non-safety-tuned Astra/Fable equivalent.

> OSS models can help to fix infra

You can work with the vendors of critical software to fix infra first, without giving every random crazy person access to something that creates cyber/bioweapons.

> "people dying and furry fanfics" is a scarecrow

You don't think people will die if OSS models make it easy to create a bioweapon, or make it easy to hack hospitals, infrastructure, and the like? Please explain your thinking.

It's very easy to order all of the raw material needed to create a virus, the challenge is in making a viable one. But models make this easy.

Same for cyber. Hospitals, emergency services, and infrastructure like power plants are not sufficiently hardened to withstand an attack from Fable-class models.

	▲	rescbr 11 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Criminals don't need Astra or Fable. Get a bunch of GPUs, a good enough open weight model and a custom harness. What the model doesn't have in its weights it can research the Internet. How do you think black hat hacking is being done right now? On bio: while it's easy to order all the raw material, there's the whole process of culturing bacteria/viruses/etc. that isn't trivial, and while a LLM might help in explaining stuff for rookies, there needs to be somebody physically working on it. It's not automatic. Once you get to this level, you'll find that any undergrad biologist or chemist can already make bio/chem weapons, and you don't see it happening. Terrorist groups already employ biologists or chemists that are supporters of their cause, no need for LLMs. On cyber: aside of the question of why critical infrastructure is on the Internet on the first place (ah yes, lowest bidders, people not caring enough, business not giving IT/OT budget, S in IoT standing for security etc), if the available models can't handle cyber tasks, how can you defend yourself? See the HF "attack" that HF had to use GLM-5.2 to investigate what happened. This is the best argument for open models. Unless of course, you are the AI model creator or somebody they authorized to use their sanctioned model/harness and want to create a moat for their business. This is FUD. Creation of business moats by fear.

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shwaj 30 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

The risks of open models are real.

However, I’d feel better about ceding control of AI to the government if they didn’t seem so intent on building an apparatus for surveillance/control.

Your “furry fanfic” is a somewhat pathetic scarecrow; this is a complicated topic.