There’s a lot that sucks about Giant Language Fashions, machine intelligence, spicy autocorrect, no matter you need to name it.
However maybe the deepest suck of all is that the worst folks on the earth management it. It’s Zuck. It’s Elon. It’s the fanboys of the Torment Nexus.
These are the lizard folks we’ve handed the keys to the long run. Not as a result of we belief them and even like them, however as a result of they have been holding them after we awakened after ingesting that one gentle beer with the gritty sediment and weirdly metallic style final evening. And now they get to determine what AI does, who it serves, and who will get was Soylent Inexperienced.
It feels inevitable, however it doesn’t should be. We now have choices, and I’m not speaking about boycotting ChatGPT or unplugging from the grid. There is no such thing as a unplugging from the grid.
It’s an adjoining matter value its personal column, however as Jessica Wildfire explains, we’re by no means escaping the grid:
“It’s not there in front of us all the time, in the form of a car or a gas station down the street, but it’s there. If someone buys water filters for their rain harvesting system, they live on the grid. They live on the grid if they use hammers and nails from a hardware store. If they use anything that was ever made in a factory, even if it was made decades ago, they live on the grid. If they ever post online, they live on the grid.”
And the grid, the entire fucking planet, goes to be saturated in Mecha-Hitler Clippy clones inside three years.
By then, our billionaire weirdoes and would-be tyrants can be trillionaire weirdos and straight-up cosplaying Thanos.
Look to Norway
However this huge, in the end unknowable alien machine thoughts we’re constructing to exchange us as a species needn’t reply solely to House Karen and the Zuckerborg or the murderous previous clams of the CCP. As in so many issues—sovereign wealth funds, taxing fossil gas firms, and nudie runs from the sauna to the ice tub—Norway exhibits us how.
Schibsted, the Norwegian media and publishing firm, constructed its personal AI referred to as NorLLM. However not in any means Silicon Valley would recognise. In contrast to the Nazi-curious plagiarism engines of the Valley, NorLLM was educated solely on high-quality content material; Norwegian language books, each fiction and nonfiction, journalism, and authorities archives, all with full consent and cooperation from publishers and copyright holders.
No scraping. No copyright side-eye. No coaching Skynet on some incel neckbeard’s 4Chan posts or the psychic scabs of YouTube remark sections.
However the radical genius of Norwegian AI wasn’t simply in asking permission to make use of one of the best knowledge, and solely that knowledge. It was within the mannequin’s philosophical design.
NorLLM is just not a public utility within the sense of being some shiny black field at The Mynistry üf Laptöps. However neither is it Schibsted’s non-public property within the Silicon Valley sense—that’s, a vulture capitalist feeding tube caught into the hacked open carotid of civil society, sucking out the contents as quick as inhumanly attainable.
As a substitute, it exists in a liminal area between these two poles: a Nodic compromise licensed and ruled by the Norwegian College of Science and Know-how, which suggests it’s not owned by the federal government per se, or Schibsted both, however as an alternative is managed by folks with an precise curiosity within the public curiosity.
NorLLM is open entry, however not open season. Startups, public companies, universities, and personal firms can all use the mannequin below clear licensing phrases.
What you’ll be able to’t do is steal it, defile it, or pump it filled with Elon’s brainfarts till it solutions each question with anime porn and quotes from Mein Kampf in haiku. It was not constructed to reply the query, “How do we make this as addictive as high fructose opium and charge a monthly subscription fee?”
In impact, it’s AI as a shared civic useful resource or public infrastructure. Oversight, governance, and a way of accountability are baked into the undertaking’s structure. It’s additionally good tech, with twenty-three billion parameters within the first model, and a 40-billion-parameter beast on the whiteboard. And since it’s been constructed from the bottom up with ethics, transparency, and—regular on now—democratic oversight, it gives a imaginative and prescient of AI that isn’t simply barely much less dangerous.
It’s cleaner, smarter and by no means more likely to recommend that your melancholy might be cured by shopping for some extra Dogecoin and gargling ivermectin.
On this means, Norway hasn’t simply constructed a Giant Language Mannequin. They’ve constructed a blueprint for a type of this expertise which may lead us away from the Torment Nexus.
In the meantime in Australia…
As at present imagined by Google, Meta, OpenAI and Grok, AI is a monster that feeds on planetary-scale knowledge lakes whereas boiling oceans and stealing your IP. However apart from these losers’ determined must make up for the imply issues the cool youngsters stated to them in highschool, there isn’t a cause why this tech must be harnessed within the service of gigaprofits and neofascism.
In Australia alone, now we have huge troves of high-quality knowledge on which we might practice our publicly-controlled AI fashions, designing them to serve our pursuits, not Elon’s or the Borg’s.
There’s no cause why permission to make use of copyrighted supplies couldn’t be sought from the rights holders.
There’s no cause to think about why many, if not most, rights holders wouldn’t grant permission for an enterprise within the public good.
I’d fortunately give a public LLM run by the Nationwide Library and CSIRO each phrase I’d ever written. I believe most writers would, particularly if it promised to undercut the enterprise fashions of the AI bandits who stole our stuff within the first place.
If our nationwide AI have been to attach with publicly owned fashions in different nations, the info pool would rival the stolen assets utilized by non-public issues, at the least in scale. And arguably, it will far surpass them in high quality. In that world, creators might be stakeholders. Unions, universities, writers guilds, even native governments or excessive colleges might construct their very own AI instruments, utilizing them to not substitute human beings however to assist them.
The longer term is ours
AI is already spreading in all places as a result of the non-public sector is speeding to seize the first-mover benefit. Just like the web, will probably be unavoidable in three years, and like the web, will probably be each nice and horrible. Largely horrible, I believe, if we observe the present trajectory.
One method to make it much less shit is to comb the legs out from below fuckers like Elon Musk and provide the world a model of the expertise which is extra aligned to the general public curiosity than no matter kind his quickly evolving psychosis takes subsequent week.
This publish first appeared on John Birmingham’s Alien Sideboob. You may learn the unique right here.
He now not tweets, having deleted his account, however you’ll be able to catch him on Bluesky as Birmo.bsky.social
