collectively "leading the bull" is a much more reasonable approach than trying to stop research across the planet...

This is a great initiative! Let's just hope that it doesn't go the way of that classic joke: the french will build it, the germans will make it funny, the british will teach it about food, etc...

Now that's a petition I can stand for.

Democratization of LLMs and its derivatives, is in fact, the AI safe way - Counterintuitive as it may sound to the AI DEI folks.

This could be it - true open AI. Maybe this could be the answer to AI alignment and democratising AI - empowering humanity as a whole. Disarming the arms race, and working in cooperation.

Who will administrate access to it?

Can we just skip some steps and collect worldwide taxes to help train a new government?

Sounds like a buy signal for $NVDA

I’m a big fan of open source AI research, but creating a new facility doesn’t seem like the way to go. If you’re making a GPU cluster that has to be shared among a bunch of different academic groups, you’ll have to build resource-sharing software, infrastructure tools, etc, and spend all this money on what is essentially an AWS clone.

Wouldn’t it be more effective to simply give this money to AI research groups and let them buy infrastructure from the most cost-effective provider? If AWS works best, fine, if it’s some smaller infrastructure provider, that’s fine too.

This proposal seems like it would actually divert money away from AI, by spending a lot of money rebuilding the standard cluster infrastructure stuff that cloud providers already have.

Please everyone, go through to the link and sign it

I don’t know how they’d go about doing this but there need to be provisions that it can never become a for-profit agency. OpenAI gained traction by doing cutting-edge research and touting it as open to the public (or at least researchers) and then pulled the rug out from under everyone when they struck gold. In case the LAION discovers a new architecture that dwarfs the capability of LLMs, they should never be able to say “ok time to start a company and mint billions now!”.

Currently, due to so much vested interest, I am suspicious of "too good" initiatives led by a group of "very virtuous" people with the aim of "democratizing technology".

What bothers me is that most researchers don't care to use any model compression or efficiency techniques. They want others to pay for their architectural inefficiencies. IMO such funding could be a bad idea if it were to stop competition of neural architectures, and a good idea otherwise.

For example, is matrix-matrix multiplication necessary or can matrix-vector multiplication do the job? Similarly, are dense networks necessary or can sparse networks do the job? Alternatively the funding can go toward the engineering of optical and analog hardware that is significantly more power efficient.

What's the point, when we know that if it discovers anything revolutionary related to AGI, it'll be locked down, the model will be closed for 'safety evaluation' and will never see the light of day. Nothing 'open' in AI is actually open, as soon as a whiff of AGI arrives.

Who will be funding such a initiative?

If a corporation were trying to depreciate an open-source alternative to one of their projects, it might look like spreading negative propaganda about the open-source alternative or highlighting the perceived weaknesses of the alternative. For example:

FUD: The corporation may spread Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt (FUD) about the open-source alternative, such as by suggesting that it is not secure, reliable, or compatible with other systems.

Highlighting perceived weaknesses: The corporation may highlight perceived weaknesses of the open-source alternative, such as by emphasizing areas where it falls short compared to the corporation's proprietary solution.

Undermining community support: The corporation may attempt to undermine community support for the open-source alternative by spreading misinformation about the project's development or suggesting that it lacks the necessary resources to succeed.

Offering alternative solutions: The corporation may offer alternative solutions that they claim are superior to the open-source alternative, such as by highlighting their own proprietary products or services.

Funding competitors: The corporation may fund competitors who are developing similar solutions to the open-source alternative, with the intention of creating negative publicity or drawing attention away from the alternative.

These tactics can be effective in diminishing support for the open-source alternative, but they can also be perceived as unethical and manipulative, potentially damaging the corporation's reputation and relationship with the open-source community.

[removed]

[removed]

Signed in a heart beat

Doesn’t give me the option of selecting USA in the location area.

Not to be too irreverent but I like that we are exponentially creeping towards realizing Asher’s Earth-Central

Origins of Communism without human governance /s

The possibility of creating an autonomous agent with current level hardware is not as far-fetched as it may seem. A single adept engineer could conceivably construct such an agent by amalgamating insights from disparate papers that have been divulged in the field of artificial intelligence. These papers may contain novel algorithms, techniques, or architectures that could be integrated into a coherent and functional system. Moreover, the open source implements that are available today, such as langchain/flow and pinecone db (or similar), could provide the necessary tools and frameworks to assemble an architecture that is self augmenting and self refining. Such an architecture could leverage the power of distributed computing, natural language processing, and machine learning to improve its own performance and capabilities over time. This could potentially enable the agent to surpass the optimal human capacities at most undertakings, or at least match them.