Simon Willison: belief

Transcript context

…I, I do think that's true, Simon. You know, I wanna make just one defensive of Meadow, which is like, this is pretty amazing what they've released and they've, you know, given to the world, obviously it may benefit them commercially as well, but you know, it actually carries pretty substantial risks for them and actually think it's kind of a courageous act to, to release and, you know, so it, and it's the things like the training data. Safety that like really, you know, when you're, when you're meta and you have billions of, of active users, like you, you actually are taking a pretty big risk with these things. And, you know, regulatory bodies have their sights on you. So I, I do think you're right. I, I just, I, you know, for what it's worth, wanna I agree with, I agree with, it's actually a positive thing. I agree with everything you say, but at the same time, right now, I've got a whole bunch of models that I'm choosing to be to, to, that I'm trying to choose between, and I don't have the information I need to make the decision. I feel like at some point it's going to be a competitive advantage to put out a model with transparency of the data over, over what went into the data. Cause people will be able to use that model more effectively. But yeah, I completely understand these strategic challenges that I'm, I'm astonished that meta went ahead with this release. I never thought they'd, they'd take the risk of releasing something like this and someone use it for something bad and now they're on the front page, all of the, all of the papers for it. So yeah, I'm, I'm super excited about it on that front. I wanna ajo. Yeah. I know from the perspective of releasing something as open source as they did previously we didn't have commercial licensing, obviously. Now the big thing is we have commercial licensing, but the amount of people, I don't know if you guys noticed, but like the amount of people who signed, quote unquote in support of releasing these models, Paul Graham and Mark Andreesen, and like a bunch of other folks, like in addition to the model, they also released kind of a counterweight to the moratorium papers and all the AI safety stuff. Because there was a, an FTC pro, right? There was like some, some regulatory stuff talking about the previous releases of LAMA from, from a long time ago. And now not only they released like the, the, the, the quote unquote open source. So unless it doesn't, doesn't kick me off here. Not fully open source, but definitely we're able to use this commercially. But they also released kind of a industry leaders selling like the, the, the open source is needed. And I think that. That, like, gives a very strong counterweight to the M and the keep, keep it closed and don't release kind of thing. We saw, and it's very interesting. It comes from meta specifically. So in addition to the courageousness that they did, it looks like they're also kind of leading the industry in terms of like, this is how to do fully commercial again, quote unquote open source, not open source license, but this is how to release models in a, in a, in a safe way. So definitely joining the, the courage and the applauds for meta and the team.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.