Simon Willison
Leaked Google document: “We Have No Moat, And Neither Does OpenAI”
The most interesting thing I've read recently about LLMs - a purportedly leaked document from a researcher at Google talking about the huge strategic impact open source models are having
https://simonwillison.net/2023/May/4/no-moat/
Simon Willison
@jimgar @resing note that I'm not saying that search engines were morally/ethically pure here either!
The ethics around this are deeply complicated - there are no easy or obvious answers
Simon Willison
@jimgar @resing search engines work by indiscriminately harvesting people's work without their permission, and have done for decades
What's different here isn't how the things are built, it's what they can be used for
People mostly tolerated search engines because they saw them as useful - they helped people's work be found, they didn't (appear to) threaten their livelihoods
Jim Gardner
@simon @resing it *all* feels fundamentally wrong, so long as the results rely on indiscriminate harvesting of people’s work without permission. Literally the only compelling argument I have heard is the “necessary evil” Simon mentions - doing it anyway but making it open source. I just find it sad that this is the position we’re in at all, and worse, how little the majority of people seem to care about providence and permissions full stop.
Simon Willison
@resing @jimgar I'm saying I'm not sure it's possible to build a useful LLM without including copyrighted data in the training set
The ethics of this entire field are incredibly murky - I wrote about that last year https://simonwillison.net/2022/Aug/29/stable-diffusion/#ai-vegan
Tom Resing
@simon @jimgar not sure I follow. Are you saying that crawler data, which includes copyrighted material shouldn’t be used by commercial companies and LLMs are inherently flawed because of that? If so, I’m not saying you’re wrong, just trying to understand.
Simon Willison
@resing @jimgar I'm not convinced it's possible to train a usable LLM without including copyrighted material in they raw pretraining data
As such, personally think it's a necessary evil to avoid a monopoly on LLM technology belonging to organizations that are willing to train against crawler data
Tom Resing
@simon what's your take on the copyrighted material included in RedPajama through CommonCrawl? It seems to me that one could train a model on only text that has been shared freely and that might be more ethical. cc @jimgar
Jim Gardner
@simon Hey Simon, I’ve been holding off the use of ChatGPT, Bard, etc., even though I think they could be useful. This is because I can see (especially with ChatGPT) the horrible unethical behaviour that the companies are using in their arms race to deploy deploy deploy. With all the talk in this leaked doc about open source alternatives, do you know of any LLMs that are “ethically sourced” and available for the average punter to use? I don’t want to be left behind :/
Simon Willison
@jimgar the ethics of this stuff is incredibly complicated
I'm very optimistic about the models being trained on the RedPajama data - there's one out already and evidently more to follow very shortly https://simonwillison.net/tags/redpajama/
jeancf
@simon
LoRA is clearly a great tool but, to use an open source analogy, it feels like applying a kernel patch downstream: it gets the job done but at some point, if it is generic enough, it needs to be upstreamed. And that part is not possible with LoRA. To integrate the modification in the model, a full retraining is inevitable.
clacke
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