Some people seem to think that American sanctions and export controls are some form of absolute justice, and that any violation is an affront to humanity.
If GPUs are going to be priced out of consumer reach anyway, I would rather see the GPUs used to create open weight models than just to make these AI companies richer.
Well the problem is you can't prove they are only being used to create open weight models. You can't prove they aren't also creating closed weight models with military applications beyond what they've publicly open sourced.
Why should I care that China is making some super powered hacking model? We already know they do state sponsored APTs. It's just motivation to care about security and red team your server code.
Their government is not really the type to violently take over other countries and impose their laws. Taiwan is a special case because they see it as a rebel state on their own land. The rest of us are probably better off with China being the top superpower than Trump's America.
> Their government is not really the type to violently take over other countries and impose their laws.
Taiwan would like a word. Taiwanese govt was the original government in China before CCP violently took over in the aftermath of WW2 with help from the Soviet Union.
China was also involved in destabilizing Vietnam by backing the communists and then after having a fall out with the communists there, proceeded to engage in border conflicts for almost two decades before normalizing relations.
China hasn't lifted a finger for Ukraine. It hasn't lifted a finger for Venezuela. It hasn't lifted a finger for Iran. Nobody knows what China's long term intentions are or how China will change after Xi Jinping's reign.
You don't surrender your culture's lead in tech willingly as it could be existential down the road.
the only things the "AI industry" has done is price normal people out of computing, give justification for companies to lay people off, fill the internet with slop, contribute to centralizing capital, and add a transaction cost to everything people do with their computers.
i couldn't care less about the "industry" that focuses on profits or the "nation" that is more committed to overseas wars than providing basic infrastructure.
AI is strategic, so the government pays for it behind the curtain. Everything the government buys is taken out the hands of the poorest people. The rest pays more for what is left.
This simply shows how the real tax is government spending, not how it gets the money. It can "tax the rich", print money, or take debt, but when it spends, it takes your computer, your fuel, your house, your car, your furniture, and your food.
I get why they have done it but it’s also a symptom of over segmenting the market based on time. The airlines have absolutely made this bed by having such adversarial pricing.
Airlines are by nature a risk-averse industry, and throwing something as fundamental as inventory out of whack would lead to unjustifiable losses. Threats need to be prevented not reacted to.
Imagine you're an airline and have the ability to hire smart people and can equip them with ai tools.
This is something that should be solved with a 2 person team over a weekend.
Airline prices are the absolute worse! I'm trying to book 5 tickets together between 2 major airports that I have flown multiple times in the past. The price has been a rollercoaster!
$2200, I waited a bit too long to confirm with the group
$4000 then $3500, then $2500 which changed within 5 minutes to $2600 and then $3000 and now $5000+
Other than memestocks, nothing else has such insane price volatility!
Fair could be construed as "the layers of market participants receive a share of the profits" . As far as I can tell there is essentially none left, and thats because folks will bid it down to 0 profit because they're lending others' money. (they're only responsible for their opportunity cost, but even 1% on others money is a good deal for the bank)
Not just that! The EIP-7702 delegation to make the wallet into a smart contract bypassed all of the controls that they had in place on the signer. It's wild that they didn't have a system in place to stop it from signing that transaction type.
From my rough understanding, this seems like the main exploit. It seems like the machine with access to the wallet key was presented with a crazy EIP-7702 transaction and signed it (which effectively owned its wallet in a single transaction)[1]. Without knowing their security model, it seems like biggest trust boundary should be between that signing machine and everything else.
[1] The fact that the needed to sign 50 of these transactions to solve a race condition seems like an implementation detail
They had to sign 50 of them because they had to compete timing the transaction with the normal transactions. Transactions have to be in nonce order for the wallet, and if two transactions with the same nonce are submitted to a block, it is up to the miner / validator to determine which one to put in. So if you spray 50, you can almost guarantee that the transaction you want will get in.
In Ethereum it would be implemented by linking your account to smart contract code, then throwing away your private key so you can only make transactions through the smart contract. The approval of linking to smart contract code is exactly what they signed here - only it wasn't a multisig smart contract, it was something malicious.
Also Superman III, which predates it and presumably was well known to the writers. But I have an inkling the scheme and it's infamy go back much further. (Precious metal coin clipping/debasement?) It's one of those ethical questions, like a pauper stealing bread, or thought experiments, like "what if reality is just a dream" that many if not most people encounter during their formative years. Per usual, though, the chasm between theory and application (even just identifying real world potential when it matters) is the toughest one to cross.
If they did and didn't account for a simple scenario like this happening and built in roadblocks and friction to prevent it from happening? Then it would stand to reason their entire EIS team should be fired.
The fact nobody thought of this is pretty staggering.
Interestingly Russia I think itself presented its 2012 law as modeled on the American Foreign Agents Registration Act at the time. A bit worrying is that the US DoJ starts to create also a bit of the same chilling effect speaking about “Liability for Unregistered Foreign Agents". Don't get me wrong: there is huge differences in freedom of speech and I do not say this is the beginning of the end. But it seems at least intellectually interesting to draw comparisons.
If this is true, or even if the people working on it think this is true, those people should be incarcerated, their companies disbanded, and their research dismantled, with more serious repercussions for anyone who tries it after that. It also needs to be a global initiative like with nuclear non-proliferation, and this time with no looking-the-other-way when it comes to Israel.
I'm an American, but I do not think the American government being strong helps me or my fellow Americans. The less America can project its cultural and military power on the rest of the world, the better.
There are different kinds of strengths. There was a past American government that was strong enough to stamp out inequality and fight for civil rights. To overturn oppression and give everyone an equal opportunity to succeed. That's a strong American government I could get behind.
Economic inequality is higher than it's ever been in the US. The reforms you're talking about largely happened in the single term of LBJ, I don't think it can be extrapolated to the "US government"
> There was a past American government that was strong enough to stamp out inequality and fight for civil rights.
this is a hilariously naive rewriting of history, the government was very reluctant to make those changes. It's thanks to popular movements that those changes were made.
I'm thinking specifically of the Little Rock Nine in 1957 where President Eisenhower took charge of the national guard so that nine Black students could attend high school. The government isn't one monolithic entity. It's a bunch of people doing different stuff, and some of them suck, and some of them are awesome.
Ok but when you said "There was a past American government that was strong enough to stamp out inequality" you did not make that distinction. The US government in 50s and 60s was not responsible for giving you civil rights, it was popular movements.
Yes. We can go into a whole history lesson and you can call me naive some more if it makes you feel bigger but doesn't seem like fun. To go back to my original point, a strong American government is a good thing in the places where it can do good, and is a bad thing in places where it will do bad. I would like the government to step in a build more housing, for example. A weak government can't do that. The market's failed to do that for all sorts of reasons.
If GPUs are going to be priced out of consumer reach anyway, I would rather see the GPUs used to create open weight models than just to make these AI companies richer.
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