Alexander Ljungberg

@slevenbits

I explore arcane bits and bytes in and out of my startups. Currently mixing unexciting but useful work on shipping software with more fun AI research.

Roseville, CA

Joined June 2009

218 Following

287 Followers

1.1K Posts

slevenbits retweeted

MONK

@defi_monk

1 day ago

“Did you receive the $10 test transaction?” “Yes” “Ok sending the other $4.4B”

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Mullvad.net

@mullvadnet

3 days ago

The UK government spyware demand means that the government decides exactly what should be censored on every mobile device. They say they will start with nude pictures (if you don’t identify yourself as an adult). But it could at any time be expanded to anything the government disapproves of. Today, 30 people are arrested every day in the United Kingdom for writing something online that the government classifies as "grossly offensive". It is obvious that they will use this tool to restrict free speech. Currently, there appears to be no requirement to report findings outside the device. However, with both legal and technological decision-making power taken away from individuals and transferred to the government, that is only a pen stroke away. This means that the government could also use this system for total mass surveillance. And they can do so in secret. The government recently, in secret, tried to pressure Apple (which is now agreeing to client-side scanning) to build backdoors into its end-to-end encrypted cloud service. They can do this under the Investigatory Powers Act 2016, also known as the "Snoopers' Charter" – a law that makes it illegal for tech companies to disclose secret demands from the government.

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Perry E. Metzger

@perrymetzger

4 days ago

I have seen some people claim, completely incorrectly, that Anthropic’s new “silent sabotage” policy is just trying to stop distillation attacks that steal weights from their models. This paragraph makes it extremely clear that that is not the case. Anthropic is generally blocking attempts to advance the state of the art in AI research, even for techniques they themselves make no use of. For example, Anthropic is targeting research on distributed training, which is to say, training runs done on large pools of computers loosely attached over the Internet, but it does not do any distributed training, as it has no need for it. Distributed training is, however, a technique that open source AI researchers without billions of dollars at their disposal have been leaning on to allow them to leverage large amounts of crowdsourced computation. Why would Anthropic do this? Likely because they fear that their model might help people write code to build open source AI systems trained without expensive hardware, and because to the EA cult, distributed open source AI training systems are the worst possible thing someone could build. It is perfectly within Anthropic’s right as a company to do stuff like this, but it is also within our right, as users of AI systems, to stop giving them money. It is perfectly within Anthropic right to lobby to try to gain a government monopoly on AI research and development, as they have for years now. It is perfectly within our rights, as citizens, to oppose repugnant attempts to grab power with all our strength.

perrymetzger's tweet photo. I have seen some people claim, completely incorrectly, that Anthropic’s new “silent sabotage” policy is just trying to stop distillation attacks that steal weights from their models. This paragraph makes it extremely clear that that is not the case. Anthropic is generally blocking attempts to advance the state of the art in AI research, even for techniques they themselves make no use of.

For example, Anthropic is targeting research on distributed training, which is to say, training runs done on large pools of computers loosely attached over the Internet, but it does not do any distributed training, as it has no need for it. Distributed training is, however, a technique that open source AI researchers without billions of dollars at their disposal have been leaning on to allow them to leverage large amounts of crowdsourced computation.

Why would Anthropic do this? Likely because they fear that their model might help people write code to build open source AI systems trained without expensive hardware, and because to the EA cult, distributed open source AI training systems are the worst possible thing someone could build.

It is perfectly within Anthropic’s right as a company to do stuff like this, but it is also within our right, as users of AI systems, to stop giving them money.

It is perfectly within Anthropic right to lobby to try to gain a government monopoly on AI research and development, as they have for years now. It is perfectly within our rights, as citizens, to oppose repugnant attempts to grab power with all our strength.

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slevenbits retweeted

frankie

@FrankieIsLost

4 days ago

the year is 2028. claude infers whether you’ve ever even thought about gradient descent and silently routes your queries to Claude Sisyphus, a model RL’d to maximize engagement while avoiding task completion. you spend your entire UBI token allotment on it without ever realizing.

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