edit: I suppose it would be hard still. You can get anonymity inside wallets with Tornado Cash but then to turn that into actual money it will be very dependent on the country
> For one, the engineer in India doesn't drive the demand for housing in Seattle thus keeping it more reasonably (less insanely) priced.
I urge you to understand that housing prices in Seattle are largely driven by supply inelasticity, more than anything.
If the premise was true, we'd have seen large drops in rent/home prices after mass layoffs (we didn't).
Also, it would be hard to explain the prices finally falling in Seattle for the last few months, which aligned perfectly with the largest supply since Feb 2014.
I think it’s pretty clear that Immigration has a direct strain on housing. It’s been a big problem in Canada too. Of course if you just keep building to increase the supply, that would be desirable.
>I urge you to understand that housing prices in Seattle are largely driven by supply inelasticity, more than anything.
Supply inelasticity comes from increased demand. Much of that demand in the past 20 years has come from the increase in Tech workers. A significant % of those tech workers are foreign workers. Places like Bellevue, Redmond, Bothell, etc. have dramatically changed in ethnic makeup.
It's driven by demand too. As soon as Canada restricted student visas, housing and rental prices (finally) started to drop. This wasn't because of supply.
Supply is rising from builders and also from lack of buying, iiuc the flattening and recent drops does line up with immigration and layoff changes, and its often quoted by the multiple local real estate agents weve talked to.
Obviously supply matters most but that doesnt mean demand isnt still a significant factor.
There won’t be a bailout. I doubt the obligations will even amount to anything substantial anyways.
Many of these obligations are with the big clouds who don’t have capacity to serve them anyways. Google has said they have hundreds of billions in purchase obligations they can’t fill because they don’t have enough TPUs and data centers. Google gets a bigger marketing and investor headline, and there’s a queue behind Anthropic if they bail, so of course everyone would sign the commitments knowing the risks.
I’m sure AWS and Azure are on the same page.
In the worst case, many of their biggest customers have tons of GPUs (Meta, AWS), so they could always license out their raw models at steep discount to help absolve themselves of the obligations.
Finally, in the worst case scenario, even with margin compression, they pre-purchased most of the compute so there’s not enough for the open models to run on. If Opus was the same price as Kimi/GLM, I doubt many people would pick the open models.
Yeah not sure about that. OpenAI and oracle are already losing money because of their obligations. They are already going to the worst case scenario and it's worse than you describe.
being a bit more specific: the sample efficiency of humans is orders of magnitude larger for more abstract concepts. the same doesn't hold for memory-intensive tasks though (like any kind of trivia), but that only takes you so far.
We've had technology beating humans on memory for millennia, and we've had technology beating humans on computation for many decades now.
The tricky thing with LLMs is describing what they actually do. They are too clearly beating humans on some things, but what exactly? Memory – already done, they're bad at basic computation (all LLMs just write code for actual computation/calculation). And as you say, they do badly at more abstract concepts.
Short and to the point! Open and cheap models will undercut the big labs continuously. The blast radius won't be pretty once spending commitments knock the door.
Open models wont be open for long. No one is going to release an open model capable of chaining zero-days. Even the Chinese aren't that reckless because it will just be turned around and used against them.
As compute prices fall it gets easier and easier to make "frontier" models. So it's inevitable that commodity, open source models of equivalent capacity to today's "frontier" models will be available to the public. Remember this is just weights, anyone can download them and run it whenever they like. The only constraint is compute.
Isn't that assuming that fix won't be implemented?
Zero days are valuable because they can be exploited but if the pace of exploitation is faster (which I'm not sure is the case), then the response WILL be faster, even if it means going offline. Institutions that won't will simply go offline by losing their data or becoming unprofitable due to ransomware.
Now for components that are core to the infrastructure, say OpenSSL, there is already a TON of attention and efforts, including red teaming, so it's not as if it's opening floodgates.
Sure low hanging fruits will get picked either faster or a at a larger scale, say a random outdated IoT device at your local flower shop, but for the rest, I don't think it's realistic to expect no response.
Security, digital or not, has always been an arm race. New threats means new responses specifically by incorporating the threat.
depends on the blast radius of zero-days, it's not like there's a continuous immediate release process for these models; they can eval internally before releasing publicly
They already aren't really open, try asking an open model on advice for constructing a nuclear bomb. There's no available model that's even remotely near the frontier that doesn't have restrictive safeguards built in.
(Mind you, this may be for the better. I'm just saying that the safeguards driven by cybersecurity concerns aren't some new quality that wasn't there before.)
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