alt Hacker NewsThe problem is that training a free and open source model costs just as much as training a closed one, but has even fewer potential avenues for recouping that investment. The money still has to come from somewhere.
I'm not sure if open weights are immune to being compromised by ads anyway, they can't serve pay-per-impression ads on the output side, but there's nothing stopping the creator from accepting funding in exchange for biasing the training one way or another.
Coming soon: Foobar-600B, a new SOTA open weight model kindly sponsored by Coca Cola, Exxon Mobil and the Heritage Foundation. Please pay no attention to the men behind the curtain.
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I would laugh my ass off if Coca Cola Company ends up being the company that solves alignment - so that it can align an "open weight" AI with its corporate interests.
Without that though? Our ability to manipulate LLMs is so shaky I would be really surprised if anyone managed to pull off this kind of model manipulation and have it remain undetected.
Just wait until someone leaks an internal SOTA model. Would be deeply ironic given how much AI robber barons ‘respect’ others’ copyright and trade secrets.
I'm not sure about that. Reports have shown that models from China or Mistral can achieve 80% or more of OpenAI's performance for a fraction of the cost.
If you're tucked in right behind the absolute frontier models, the economics change completely