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Reddit has largely misunderstood Dean Ball's recent tweet about China's open source strategy.[1] Ball's central point [in paragraph 4] is that open source AI undermines the business case for private actors supplying advanced models, and [in my own view] that may be China's motive for releasing open source models. Ball sees open source as decelerationist in the long run due to some combination of investment flight and subsequent government-lead AI R&D (which he views as inherently klunky).
- ^
Ball is partially at fault for the misunderstanding, dropping in the terms "AI communism" and "dystopian hellscape" without preparing the reader for what he means by that. That's Twitter though.
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I use reddit a fair bit and am well aware how often they are completely off the mark or missing the bigger picture. However after trying to analyze this tweet for an hour or so I don't blame them at all.
The tweet is contradictory, inflammatory and extremely biased.
If the central point is that China's motive for open source is to scare off investment in frontier training then it is baffling that he specifically lays out China's reason for open source -
"I suspect the reason they are is 75% explained by strategic blindness/lack of AGI-pilledness (the CCP is very Yann Lecun-y in its views of AI). The other 25% or so is their lack of compute for customer inference"
-And doesn't mention that motive at all. To be clear, this particular argument seems to be on the more solid side. However, it's presented amongst other arguments that either don't make any sense, are outright false or rely on anacdotal evidence.
Now, that rant was mostly a protest against Dean Balls communication style and your phrasing of his commication as having a central point, the actual argument is very interesting.
If Open Source is catching up to frontier - > Profit incentive to train frontier models collapses - > leads to frontier training runs requiring government funding - > slows down frontier Ai development.
So his argument is trying to get accelerationists to go against open source for short term pain, long term gain. Now even if we are accelerationists and think that the faster Ai progresses the better, it's not clear that he's correct. From my understanding open source accelerates development by sharing algorithmic improvements or similar such things, which could componsate for the slowing down of training run funding. Also there will still be massive incentive for government funded training runs due to strategic importance and possible future ASI. It seems the US military is suffiently AGI pilled at this point to refuse to cede the lead to China, even if the models aren't shared wit
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Well said. A few of your disagreements with me were from poor writing on my part. I meant to narrow Ball's central point to paragraph #4 since Reddit focused on that. And China's motive was my own thought based on paragraph #4, though you are absolutely right Ball has his own view there. Otherwise, we are agreed. Looks like Ball and I both have some work to do in writing clearly!
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Open source strikes me as something like nuclear surveillance. If everything's out in the open, there's much less of an incentive to rush ahead blindly out of fear that there's a secret bomber gap. It also has nice externalities in that it mitigates power concentration from e.g. censorship and denial of access for smaller models, while larger models are sufficiently expensive and technically intensive to run that anyone who could run them for malicious purposes has easier ways to cause harm anyhow.