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The AI Race Just Got Awkward

412 points · 463 comments · allisdust

  1. cmiles8 · · focus · HN ↗
    Why is it a problem that the Chinese labs are just distilling down Anthropic’s models? Aren’t Anthropic’s models not just distilling down other people’s work?

    Feels like Anthropic crying do as I say not as I do.

    1. jedberg · · focus · HN ↗
      What Anthropic is doing requires way more resources than what the Chinese labs are doing. So their complaint is that they do 95% of the work and the Chinese labs do the last 5% and call it their own.

      An argument can be made that Anthropic is also only doing the last 5% of the work (because the content they are training on was the other 95%) but that's a bit more philosophical.

      1. JackFr · · focus · HN ↗
        But the analogy still holds.

        The original authors of all the text, creators of the media and developers of the software did far more work than Anthropic.

        1. layer8 · · focus · HN ↗
          SOTA models cost hundreds of millions to train. Did creating the contents of the text corpus they were trained on really cost an equivalent of 20x as much (~10 billions)? I honestly don’t know, but I could imagine it having been significantly less.

          This isn’t meant as a moral argument, just musing about the relative cost comparison.

          1. Ar-Curunir · · focus · HN ↗
            Yes, duh! Human output across the millennia is worth much more than whatever is being invested in frontier labs.

            How is this even a question.

            1. bmacho · · focus · HN ↗
              They are solving unsolved math problems right now, so probably soon or very soon their output will be more valuable than all human recorded knowledge.
              1. mekael · · focus · HN ↗
                Pre vaccination smallpox killed hundreds of millions of people just in the twentieth century [0], the knowledge that allowed for the creation of just that vaccine is worth hundreds trillions of dollars in humans lives, let alone all of `the knowledge and experiences those people were involved in.

                The knowledge that created the Haber-Bosch process [1] helps to sustain the majority of the world's populous, add another five hundred trillion dollars for that just to start with.

                The creation of the printing press and all written information that allowed it to be built provided dissemination of knowledge beyond the ultra wealthy and is worth a non-finite amount of money.

                LLM's are cool math, but they are less than a rounding error in comparison to even the tiniest sliver of human knowledge and technological output.

                [0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov&#x2F;35143880&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov&#x2F;35143880&#x2F; [1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;cen.acs.org&#x2F;food&#x2F;agriculture&#x2F;The-industrialization-Haber-Bosch-process&#x2F;101&#x2F;i26" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;cen.acs.org&#x2F;food&#x2F;agriculture&#x2F;The-industrialization-H...

                1. DirkH · · focus · HN ↗
                  Shush, this is Hackernews. We all want to have our egos stoked that our industry is the most important in human history and that tech will transform and save us all. Go away with your historical analysis &#x2F;s
              2. Ar-Curunir · · focus · HN ↗
                What do you think mathematicians were doing for centuries before LLMs?

                And also, humans have been doing a lot more work than just mathematics...

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