But in this case, it wasn't a random person, it was a police-vetted system. Of course the authorities are to blame, but Flock hold a lot of responsibility, too.

It shouldn’t have been vetted then. It’s again the fault of authorities who approved that.

A scientist who uses an LLM to write a paper remains responsible for its contents. And authorities that outsource police work remain responsible for what comes from that.

Sure it shouldn't have been approved, but it was approvied through misleading marketing and a huge and expensive lobbying effort. Flock spends a ton of money convincing cops and legislators that their product works well, is useful and safe. That was always a lie and they have to be held responsible for it.

Also infidels, gays, short skirts, bad books, parties on Sundays, and beer. We can achieve that healthy society if we try hard enough!

Don't forget "asexual acts"! https://law.stackexchange.com/q/115110

Every government on Earth has legislation that allows it to force companies (and citizens) to do its bidding under certain circumstances. That’s pretty much the definition of a government.

The point is this not being the first tool in the toolbox. Other competitors have shown they are more than willing to build weapons of death (OpenAI) so as the government you put them as the preferred contractor.

What the orange turd is going is rather petty bullshit in a market where many options exist.

Then the government should have invoked that legislation.

The DoD is empowered to determine its own supply chain risks by...wait for it...legislation.

They don't need to - there are alternatives, and do you really want to do business with a supplier that is hostile to your needs unless you have to?

That’s exactly what happened here, and the judiciary just confirmed that it was indeed done in accordance with the law.

> There’s a general regression towards fascist and right wing ideologies in the last few years

The “fascist” part (authoritarian/totalitarian tendencies) came long before the resurgence of the right, but most people seem to approve of those methods as long as they target those they dislike, so I won’t be shedding any tears for them when it’s their turn at last.

I think at this point it’s rather obvious that Anthropic leadership considers the company to be something akin to a nation-state that ought to have quasi-sovereign authority that is not granted to other parties.

Indeed, it's a sort of Academic Supremacy – "we're smart so we get to control the world". I think SV tech has had an aspect of this for a long time, but Anthropic do seem to be the clearest version of it in a while. Until regulation catches up.

Should they not safeguard these models then?

I think OpenAI and Anthropic have been asking for a sane regulatory framework for some time, so they aren't the ones calling the shots for humanity. It's just not happening in this administration.

I don't mind taking a hard line on safety (this is even good!), and I don't mind controlled testing without model safety to experiment with safety systems or harden things.

The bit I don't like is taking a hard moral stance on what you are allowed to do with the models, while simultaneously taking the guardrails off themselves and then marketing the results of that. "Look how good our model is when it does things we don't let you do" is a pretty bad marketing line.

And this is all in the face of Anthropic stating that they think this is an existential issue for the human race. It's a bad look.

This is perfectly rational if they believe that they are not going to abuse the model's capabilities, but randoms on the internet will. Tons of people use LLMs to do horrible things today. It's totally within their remit to not extend their trust to the internet.

They have never claimed that simply doing bio research is inherently dangerous. Rather, the risk is from bad actors doing research for nefarious purposes. Which is exactly why they let other organizations use the models without guardrails on a case-by-case basis. Them using it internally has nothing to do with existential risk (at this point anyway).

I'm not crazy about any company being the sole deciders of who is a good actor and who is a bad actor.

I mean. When a bunch of people are abusing their API to do terrible things with their models, they can certainly decide they can trust themselves with models more than others.

> As a strict condition of this settlement, Meta is legally mandated to enforce hard age gates.

Not for allowing you to use your own hardware, what utter nonsense.

It was their choice to forcibly link their hardware to their online account system despite it working fine without it. But it’s absolutely not true that the government requires age verification for using VR goggles.

It should be no problem to call things by their name (censorship) then.

Censorship is the government suppressing information. If people actually believe that this is how things should be, let the government introduce official “censorship bills” and call publicly for “additional censorship measures”.

The fact that they aren’t doing that demonstrates that they feel the need to hide what they are really doing, which speaks of an inherent wrongness that has nothing to do with a US/non-US culture divide.

The post did not use the name "censorship", it just tried to trivialise the democratic will of a country which does not want to give more power to US billionaires, claiming it's just the whim of an "unspecified bureaucrat"

US views on the limited freedom of speech the US government allows are different to those of the limited freedom of speech that Australia, Germany, etc allow

All those countries limit freedom of speech, it doesn't make anything that doesn't exactly copy American "freedoms" (and indeed lack of freedom) wrong.

Of course argue this and HN will flag you

The more speech you have, the more powerful you are. That means those who can have more speech and more targetted speech (i.e. people who are wealthier) are more powerful. Not everyone likes that. You might, that doesn't make you right.

> SciAm writes "in a sense, the LLM found and exploited a loophole in the framing of the question".

God, it’s embarrassing to read stuff like this. They’re making it seem as if everyone involved was either stupid or dishonest just so they can pretend they have a scoop here.

It reads as a transparent attempt at intimidation to me.

It’s a true statement. The way you perceive it is in your mind, not a property of the statement itself.

“If you testify tomorrow, you may not live to see the end of the day. It’s a true statement…”

They absolutely are in the way. We’ve had the most exciting months of mathematical progress since antiquity, and the vast majority of voices from mathematicians have been bitching about one thing or the other, to the extent that they now got themselves a committee that (co-)decides when, how, and possibly if, the next batch of results is made available to the public.

People merely speaking their mind does not constitute getting in the way.

I'm sorry that you personally don't like that mathematicians are "bitching" about OpenAI snaking their work out from under them, and would like to silence them. But if we're going for consistency's sake, maybe consider taking your own advice here before giving it to others.

In the meantime, OpenAI can do whatever they want, mathematically-speaking. Nobody is in their way. If there isn't further meaningful progress from them, that would seem to strengthen the work-product-theft hypothesis.

Please. Have you been doing mathematics ? Yes, some big open problems are solved. I have not seen the ideas therein used to solve related or other problems. That is the point of most mathematics: to develop frameworks and general techniques for understanding and solving problems, not solving one-off problems.

For example, group theory lead to a useful way of thinking about how to solve a wide array of problems. That is what mathematicians are seeking.