I'm not sure what entirely to do about it, but the fact that some providers still release open models is hopeful to me.

Control and consistency, as well as support for specialized workflows is more important, even if it comes at the expense of model quality.

1. AI succeeds and this success is defined by they will be able to raise prices really high

2. AI fails and receives a bailout

But if there are alternatives I can run locally, they can't raise prices as high because at some point I'd rather run stuff locally even if not state of the art. Like personally, USD 200 a month is already too expensive if you ask me.

And the prices can only go up, right?

Either there's a massive reduction of inference and training costs due to new discoveries and then those big hardware hoarders have no moat anymore or nothing new is discovered and they won't be able to scale forward.

Either way it doesn't sound good for them.

For the long-term value of a horribly overpriced and debt ridden corporation it matters quite a lot if the catch up of open source to adequate is less than a decade in instead of several decades in some uses and a few more in others.

But what I was trying to describe is a "mild mannered" getaway driver. Not fleeing from cops, not speeding. Just calmly driving to and from crimes. Should we punish the road makers for enabling such nefarious activity?

(it's a rhetorical question; I'm just trying to clarify the point)

As a former VFX person, I know that a couple of shows are testing out how/where it can be used. (currently its still more expensive than trad VFX, unless you are using it to make base models.)

Productivity gains in the VFX industry over the last 20 years has been immense. (ie a mid budget TV show has more, and more complex VFX work than most movies that are 10 years old, and look better.)

But, does that mean we should allow any bad actor to flood the floor with fake clips of whatever agenda they want to push? no. If I as a VFX enthusiast gets fooled by GenAI videos (Picture area done deal, its super hard to stop reliably) then we are super fucked.

That's not how these models are used in the the vast majority of cases.

This argument is like saying "kitchen knives are often used to kill people so we need to ban the sale of kitchen knives". Do some people use kitchen knives to kill? Sure. Does it mean they should be banned because of that?

> I agree research is exempt from copyright, but people cashing in on unpaid artists works for commercial purposes is a copyright violation predating the DMCA/RIAA. We must admit these models require piracy, and can never be seen as ethical. =3

So, may I ask - where exactly do you draw the line? For the sake of argument, let's imagine something like this:

    1. I scrape the whole internet onto my disk.
    2. I go through the text, and gather every word bigram, and build a frequency table.
    3. I delete everything I scraped.
    4. I use that frequency table (which, compared to the exabytes of the source text I used to build it, is a couple hundred megabytes at most) to build a text generator.
    5. I profit from this text generator.