This (purported) leak is incredibly scary if you're worried about AI risk due to AI capabilities developing too fast.
Firstly, it suggests that open-source models are improving rapidly because people are able to iterate on top of each other's improvements and try out a much larger number of experiments than a small team at a single company possibly could.
Secondly, it suggests that data size is less important than you might think from recent scaling laws, as you can achieve high performance with "small, highly curated datasets". This suggests a world where dangerous capabilities are much further distributed.
Thirdly, it proposes that Google should open-source its AI technology. Obviously, this is only the opinion of one researcher and it currently seems unlikely to occur, but if Google was to pursue this path, this would lead to a significant shortening of timelines.
I'm worried that up until now, this community has been too focused on the threat of big companies pushing capabilities ahead and not focused enough on the threat posed by open-source AI. I would love to see more discussions of regulations in order to mitigate this risk. I suspect it would be possible to significantly hamper these projects by making the developers of these projects potentially liable for any resulting misuse.
The Information had a good scoop recently. They said recently:
⚫ OpenAI’s losses roughly doubled to around $540 million last year as it developed ChatGPT and hired key employees from Google, according to three people with knowledge of the startup’s financials.
The previously unreported figure reflects the steep costs of training its machine-learning models during the period before it started selling access to the chatbot. Furthermore reports online indicate that ChatGPT costs approximately $700,000 a day just to run, or more.
Even as revenue has picked up—reaching an annual pace of hundreds of millions of dollars just weeks after OpenAI launched a paid version of the chatbot in February—those costs are likely to keep rising as more customers use its artificial intelligence technology and the company trains future versions of the software.
⚫ Reflecting that capital drain, CEO Sam Altman has privately suggested OpenAI may try to raise as much as $100 billion in the coming years to achieve its aim of developing artificial general intelligence that is advanced enough to improve its own.
⚫ A leak out of Google claims that they have no moat against open-source LLMs that could one day overtake them. (Read semianalysis on Sustack for this scoop). simonwillison and LessWrong have blogged about this too.
What is clear is few of even the best Generative A.I. startups today, will even be around in 2030. They will have failed to make money. Which makes all the hype and hubris a bit of a head fake.
Microsoft's investment in OpenAI isn't likely to age well given the pace of innovation in LLMs. Very few companies or even Nation states can easily bear the costs of developing this stuff and they will get disrupted by new tech here rather easily. That won't be a problem for the Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence (BAAI).
This (purported) leak is incredibly scary if you're worried about AI risk due to AI capabilities developing too fast.
Firstly, it suggests that open-source models are improving rapidly because people are able to iterate on top of each other's improvements and try out a much larger number of experiments than a small team at a single company possibly could.
Secondly, it suggests that data size is less important than you might think from recent scaling laws, as you can achieve high performance with "small, highly curated datasets". This suggests a world where dangerous capabilities are much further distributed.
Thirdly, it proposes that Google should open-source its AI technology. Obviously, this is only the opinion of one researcher and it currently seems unlikely to occur, but if Google was to pursue this path, this would lead to a significant shortening of timelines.
I'm worried that up until now, this community has been too focused on the threat of big companies pushing capabilities ahead and not focused enough on the threat posed by open-source AI. I would love to see more discussions of regulations in order to mitigate this risk. I suspect it would be possible to significantly hamper these projects by making the developers of these projects potentially liable for any resulting misuse.