Near the end they include a paragraph claiming we should interpret this piece as being about more than self-interest and resistance to change, but it doesn't really feel like the piece offered a taste of what that "more" is.
The most thought-provoking part for me was considering that AI companies have used pretty much all available data for training while "they spend more and more money to create proprietary training data". That seems to break a sort of intuitive social contract - like, well you all used everyone's knowledge. Send yours back out too.
Grant from 3brown1blue released a video exploring the economics and mechanics that enable careers in math, in light of the AI company releases over the last couple weeks. Overall it was a lot more hopeful, and it didn't need to strain awkwardly like this piece to apply an ill-fitting historical framework like enclosure. Worth checking out: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LKrwhjOI8Nc
Not one word of copyright length, which is now effectively over a century long. Not one word of some of the most successful AI models being open source.
Commons encirclement, as the author is describing, has been happening since source code was labelled art instead of engineering and since lobbying efforts have been extending copyright terms. My view is that AI technology are trampling over the encirclement, which is why so many people are upset.
Literal quote: "Over the course of the twentieth century, the scope of human cre- ations that were treated as IP expanded dramatically, a phenomenon that has been called 'the second enclosure movement'."
Open-weight models aren't open source. Companies that release open-weight models do so because it currently suits their business interests. They can cut you off whenever they want or if they come under political pressure to do so. If they truly cared, they would release their training data and procedures and democratize access to their training infrastructure.
I still disagree but it looks like the author makes a cursory attempt to address the issues that I think are more relevant.
So ... "no one owns" is doing some pretty heavy lifting there ... and it's kind of the foundation of the entire article.
Academic publishing is predominantly controlled by a small
oligopoly of five for-profit corporations that collectively
publish roughly 50% of all scientific articles: Elsevier
(owned by RELX Group), Springer Nature, Wiley (John
Wiley & Sons), Taylor & Francis (owned by Informa PLC),
and SAGE Publications.
Going forward, colleges can pay for ChatGPT and things like it, and presumably will. The AI companies will be happy to sell to them. There's really no problems here except for self-created ones (for example, if some researchers don't want to use AI). Of course, they're free to do that, just like they're free to not use computers. But then don't complain that doing stuff takes too long.
There may be a concern going forward with locking things down. One can lament that AIs need to be prompted to "hit the literature" directly or they don't really think about it, prefering random web pages most of the time. But at least at the moment science is more open and accessible than ever before.
"all knowledge so far" (ie. the data needed for LLM training) is only a grain of sand on a beach compared to the return on making it all regurgitatable on demand.
We are at the bottom of a science, knowledge & art hockey stick chart, we're staring up at it and the steep bit is labeled "the future".
BUT I also agree that, like any new technology, people will find mind-blowingly creative paths forwards with it, opening up whole new art forms.
The first reviews of OAI's dump on math are coming out. Quasi-Riemann Hypothesis Proof looks to be valid. The irony is that is uses and approach that the people who work in that area have disregarded for the most part. As well as mining some other parts of maths corpus. There really isnt "innovation" there.
For as much as OAI is guilty of leveraging work in progress, the complaints about some of the other work(s) are looking spurious (and I'm being very kind using that word).
Whether it meets human needs and meets them in a rich and satisfying way is another question.
I've never seen so much faith outside of a religious setting. Do you have any proof of this at all, or is it a faith-based system?
Its been 4 _years_ since GPT 3.5's release. Where are all these marvels people keep saying are just around the corner?
It's happening all around but you're somehow not seeing it.
This is supposed to be The technology that will colonize the universe, and you're saying "Games are being remixed" is the happening we're supposed to be excited about? That's the hockey stick inflection point?
The West collectively has touched markets with Science using concepts of property rights. All of that is upturned now. I agree that publishing portals like Elsivier have done damage to Science while enriching the company and its allies. However that complaint looks quaint compared to literally four military-industrial groups running all new discoveries and their commercialization.
This is not resolved at all...
I'm advocating mindfully managing your own influences.
Springer would like a word
Yes, not everyone will be able to launch a swarm of agents and a few billion tokens, but scientific research has always had areas where the most advanced tools were beyond the reach of every scientist who might like to have access.
What's different this time is that this situation is expanding to almost every field.
I'm all for the idea that AI capabilities can be democratized and help ordinary scientists outside of a handful of labs. But it seems there would need to be some checks against Big Tech and it won't happen by just letting the free market do its thing.
The mechanism through which this occurs being..?
The only reason computers are so expensive is that demand is so out of control.
Is typing a prompt into ChatGPT "science"? It's an experiment, I guess, to find out whether you get a useful response out of it, and your hypothesis is that the model is able to answer your question correctly? How do you falsify that if you don't have the academic foundations to verify its answer?
China, on the other hand, seems to be doubling down on fundamental research, including announcing these changes:
https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202609/1371583.shtml
and this: https://www.scmp.com/news/china/science/article/3368750/chin...
Can you go into more detail about that? My impression is the real reason the Trump administration has defunded basic science (and so much else) is an unholy combination of "government bad" libertarianism and the belief the funding was going to their ideological opponents.
I feel that and use of AI to justify the redirection is most likely post-hoc.
This administration thinks science is 'woke' because it says things that disagree with him. Many of these funding cuts were explicitly politically motivated, e.g. they specifically targeted research about diversity, gender, or vaccines.
It's not about AI, it's about removing funding from liberal causes and giving it to conservative causes.
The real reason for this is that Elon Musk is a conservative megadonor, while academics are vocally opposed to Trump. He takes from his enemies and gives to his friends; that's how he operates.
UK has strong inheritance tax, so common angricultural land is very strong and doing quite well!
Also shit tons of stuff you can not do on your "private" agricultural land, like producing too many cow farts!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KPUlgSRn6e0 [Not Just Bikes]