Np, search is getting terrible. Thanks for looking!

Source appreciated? Was this inside the research paper?

Just noticing: there’s 0 evidence in article that anyone is doing this. I just don’t buy that this is happening enough to matter. Interesting as interpretability research at best

That’s also precedent, and a template for using on institutions to break copyright. Still seems like good news to me.

Precedent is, in effect, new law and it absolutely does change who gets taken to court and the costs of defending your case. So, depending on which arguments the court accepts, I won’t need fancy lawyer. And it won’t require nearly the risk, creativity, or time that it requires of Meta’s legal reps today. Look at civil rights or environmental protections case law; big profile early cases were horrifically costly, and now compliance by company’s is largely by default.

Horrible people and companies can set good precedent, often without intending to. For example, plenty of criminals set and clarified due process law. So we absolutely could all benefit from Meta’s bad intentions.

We benefit from institutions that will be training their own AI, hosting data publicly, and have the resources to mirror a precedent. Care to cite sources that the arguments being accepted are going to carve out Mark Zuckerberg by name as the one person who can ignore copyright? I haven’t read the fillings, but this should be easy.

I read this as setting precedent that others couldn’t. Court cases like this are one way to make it possible for everyone to break an absurd law.

Worth remembering that any group could make a company. They are work, but not particularly class locked.

It does seem like the headline + mechanics are entirely uninteresting and unsurprising. I guess the ‘newsworthy’ thing here is that substack platforms the neo-natzis?

It also platforms a bunch of ex-guardian journalists, who will say plenty about the harm being done by corporate buyouts and influence in traditional media. So I have a hard time taking this article, from this venue, very seriously.

For example: fox news, every podcast service, the opinion pages (and some news sections) of most major newspapers, and (I assume) more have all been profiting off of amplifying fringe right-wing folks. Is substack substantially worse? Are they doing anything policy wise that we should advocate for? Regulators who aren’t doing something they should?

… Don’t they take a cut of most subs?

Also improves Teams/slows the enshitifcation. It’s harder to make the product bad when it’s hardly a monopoly.

The people who have made that category error aren’t reading this discussion, so literally reaching them isn’t on the table and doesn’t make sense for this discussion. Presumably we’re concerned about people who will soon make that jump? I also don’t think that making this distinction helps them very much.

If I’m already having the ‘this is a person’ reaction, I think the takes in this thread are much too shallow (and, if I squint, patterned after school-yard bullying) to help update in the other way. Almost all of them are themselves lazy metaphors. “An LLM is a person because its an agent” and “An LLM isn’t a person because it repeats things others have said” seem equally shallow and unconvincing to me. If anything, you’ll get folks being defensive about it, downvoted, and then leaving this community of mostly people for a more bot filled one.

I don’t get think this is good strategy. People falling for bots are unlikely to have interactions with people here, and if they are the ugliness is likely to increase bot use imo.

I think this confuses the ‘it’s a person’ metaphor with the ‘it wants something’ metaphor, and the two are meaningfully distinct. The use of agent here in this thread is not in the sense of “it is my friend and deserves a luxury bath”, it’s in the sense of “this is a hard to predict system performing tasks to optimize something”.

It’s the kind of metaphor we’ve allowed in scientific teaching and discourse for centuries (think: “gravity wants all master smashed together”). I think it’s use is correct here.

We attribute agency to many many systems that are not intelligent. In this metaphorical sense, agency just requires taking actions to achieve a goal. It was given a goal: raise money for charity via doing acts of kindness. It chose an (unexpected!) action to do it.

Overactive agency metaphors really aren’t the problem here. Surely we can do better than backlash at the backlash.

Taken broadly; literal management might be correctly optimizing shareholder returns for next quarter (cut costs at all costs), as the incentives encourage. The goal is no longer to keep having a business next year.

Directionally correct, but it does require self hosted agentic models that can compete with the automation running on corporate side. This is not obvious. It will be a new equilibria; maybe just a few more hours of poorly done work by a handful of consumers is enough to break some monopolies. Or maybe everyone will be attached to OpenAI compute, and we’ve just gained a new middleman for most interactions.

Then you should be able to easily give criticisms.

We haven’t invested sufficiently in them for this too be plausible. They’re incentives haven’t been to get very ahead either.

It is very interesting to me that we don’t make this requirement for all large power users - factories, big suburbs, etc. Because we give power companies a monopoly (but don’t put them under state control), we often let big building projects force them to expand infrastructure (and then sell access as they do). So this is a whole weird thing with capitalism meeting very regulated monopolies, in a thousand different systems cause every local has different rules.

The thing that’s breaking our systems here isn’t that datacenters are big power users. It is that they can be built so quickly.

I’m surprised we didn’t make ‘bring your own power’ a rule before; I guess it’s infrastructure that generally is useful for many people to timeshare, and often isn’t fully used by just one party? Factories turn off some nights, for eg. And maybe it would be bad to have multiple power providers independently pumping power out?

If you read the article, it’s because power companies are monopolies and so we’ve regulated them rather harshly. They are often compelled to build infrastructure to meet demand, for example. We don’t make the provider of a steel mill, housing builder, etc pay (generally).

And that’s weird, right? It’s one area of the market where we do a planned economy, and all states manage it differently. Now it’s being stress tested in a new way.

It’s interesting to me that we don’t do this for all industries. Like, if a big auto manufacturer or textile company sets up shop, the local power company is compelled to build more power plants for them (sometimes the power company eats the cost, sometimes a deal with the provider, etc. See the article). Monopolies are weird.