alt Hacker Newsputting my old man cap on and I would like to weigh in on the US admin export control on Mythos.
It does remind me of the mid-1990s when suddenly asymmetric cryptographic tools such as PGP became a reality and a wide usage possible due to the growing base of internet users.
Governments (US, France…) did not understand how to regulate and banned export (and asked users to apply for a licence).
I do see a strong parallel with the situation that we are currently living.
What’s interesting is what’s happened out of the few years where regulations were strong enough to reduce innovation.
Well, open source won for the common and everyday uses, and even more powerful crypto has been developed and used by corporations and governments.
I can certainly imagine LLMs taking a similar path.
Replies
I think what's also very similar between that situation and this one is the technology is not understood at all by the people in government. They've just been told by certain people it's powerful and dangerous
Following the PGP example, I wonder how long until "illegal" tshirts with weights printed on them start popping up.
Interesting comparison, thanks for sharing! It reminds me of this post about how machine learning and encryption have some fundamental similarities: https://reiner.org/neural-net-ciphers
> I can certainly imagine LLMs taking a similar path. Maybe it's useful to think about what fundamental differences could contribute to LLMs taking a very different path. What comes to mind is the scaling hypothesis, implying that the best LLMs will require enormous capital investment.
That seems largely incompatible with open source barring a fundamental change. There's open weights, but I can't think of a clean historical analogy there and find it extremely difficult to even guess how the future will go