Nat Friedman: uncertainty

Transcript context

…As somebody who has been involved in open-source your entire life, are you happy that this is the way that AI has turned out, or do you think that this is less than optimal? Well, I don't know. My opinion has been changing. I have increasing worries about safety issues. Not the hijacked version of safety, but some industrial accident type situations or misuse. We're not in that world and I'm not particularly concerned about it in the short term. But in the long term, I do think there are worlds that we should be a little bit concerned about where bad things happen, although I don't know what to do about them. My belief though is that it is probably better on the whole for more people to get to tinker with and use these models, at least in their current state. For example Georgi Gerganov did a four-bit quantization of the LLama model this weekend and got it inferencing on a M1 or M2. I was very excited and I got that running and it's fun to play with. Now I've got a model that is very good, it's almost GPT-3 quality, and runs on my laptop. I've grown up in this world of tinkerers and open-source folks and the more access you have, the more things you can try. And so I think I do find myself very attracted to that. That is the scientist and the ideas part of what is being shared, but there's also another part about the actual substance, like the uranium in the atom-bomb analogy. As different sources of data realize how valuable their data is for training newer models, do you think that these things will go harder to scrape? Like Libgen or Archive, are these going to become rate-limited in some way or what are you expecting there?…

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