I think if it ultimately protects customer data in a significant way, I would be for it.
Are you able to share any more detail on how you determined this is the best route? It would be a significant implication for many other pieces of open source software also if so.
(And I say this is someone who just recommended cal.com to someone a few days ago specifically citing the fact that it was open source, that led to increased trust in it.)
I think if you are committed to switching back to open source as soon as the threat landscape changes, and you have some metric for what that looks like, that would be valuable to share now.
I would like to see the analysis that you're referencing around open source being 5-10x less secure.
Open source is one of the main reasons I recommended cal.com to everyone — I just did so yesterday again in fact!
I'm disappointed to hear this especially since I don't think the rationale makes sense, from what I understand of the security landscape, and it also makes me a little more skeptical of cal.com in general.
There is a lot of potential in this. Not just for government democracy, but for also introducing democratic elements into tech/AI policy, when that tech has impact comparable to many governments.
I worked in tech, and after some formative experiences, shifted to working on helping ensuring ensure that tech's impact on society can serve the public interest. But that leaves the question of what "what is the public interest"?
Sortitition / lottocracy / deliberative democracy / mini-publics all roughly refer to the same way to answer that question — providing a representative microcosm with the space to deeply examine an issue, and come to a set of recommendations and decisions on it. Unlike with electoral democracy, it's faster to spin up and experiment with, and it's harder for bad actors to entrench power (elections can be useful, but they're one of many tools in the democratic toolbelt).
I've now started an organization focusing on applying this and other democratic paradigms to decision-making about AI (https://aidemocracyfoundation.org/) as a way to solve a variety of challenging governance problems across the AI stack.
If you're curious about it, our ICML paper goes into more detail: https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.09222 .
I think it's interesting to think about this question of open source, benefits, risk, and even competition, without all of the baggage that Meta brings.
I agree with the FTC, that the benefits of open-weight models are significant for competition. The challenge is in distinguishing between good competition and bad competition.
Some kind of competition can harm consumers and critical public goods, including democracy itself. For example, competing for people's scarce attention or for their food buying, with increasingly optimized and addictive innovations. Or competition to build the most powerful biological weapons.
Other kinds of competition can massively accelerate valuable innovation.
The FTC must navigate a tricky balance here — leaning into competition that serves consumers and the broader public, while being careful about what kind of competition it is accelerating that could cause significant risk and harm.
It's also obviously not just "big tech" that cares about the risks behind open-weight foundation models. Many people have written about these risks even before it became a subject of major tech investment. (In other words, A16Z's framing is often rather misleading.) There are many non-big tech actors who are very concerned about current and potential negative impacts of open-weight foundation models.
One approach which can provide the best of both worlds, is for cases where there are significant potential risks, to ensure that there is at least some period of time where weights are not provided openly, in order to learn a bit about the potential implications of new models.
Longer-term, there may be a line where models are too risky to share openly, and it may be unclear what that line is. In that case, it's important that we have governance systems for such decisions that are not just profit-driven, and which can help us continue to get the best of all worlds. (Plug: my organization, the AI & Democracy Foundation; https://ai-dem.org/; is working to develop such systems and hiring.)
If you can provide a script that takes in an HTML file and provides an image ready for rendering, that would be amazing. Then I can automatically take any website and have a cron job that dumps the result into a shared dropbox link where it can be used by the screen.
It's worth knowing that, according to some recent research, taking a topical antibiotic like this might have permanent impacts on microbiome in your nose (and lead to drug resistance.)
Fascinating, this led to this projects which is pretty interesting. https://www.modos.tech/blog/modos-paper-monitor
Seems like a very exciting effort and product but I'm not sure if it's still active.
I think this gets almost all the way there but not quite — there is one more vital point:
How we act depends on our environment and incentives.
It is possible to build environments and incentives that make us better versions of ourselves. Just like GPT-3, we can all be primed (and we all are primed all the time, by every system we use).
The way we got from small tribes to huge civilizations is by figuring out how to create those systems and environments.
So it's not about "reaching for the stars" or complaining about how humanity is too flawed. It's about carefully building the systems that take us to those stars!
> The goal of all this activity is not to debate, converse or exchange information. The goal is to win by being maximally controversial, as that's the behavior that is rewarded.
> the real issue: what gets amplified
But it can be (at least partially) fixed if you change the optimization function.
And Twitter's Birdwatch (that Elon recently got all excited about when it fact checked the White House: https://twitter.com/metaviv/status/1587884806020415491) actually does this "bridging-based ranking" for adding context on tweets.
Halfbaked thought: Have it cost half the amount as normal mail to receive email there.
Perhaps also gov use is free, and users can whitelist specific domains or subdomains to be free.
> It turns out that we like people the best when they respond to us the fastest––so fast (mere milliseconds!) that they must be formulating their reply long before we finish our turn.
This might be true; but looking into the linked study, it appears to be on Dartmouth students. This claim at least maybe culturally dependent.
I'm curious if Astro supports git-backed visual editing? I can't seem to find that, but it would rather useful if so! (ala tinacms.io , stackbit, etc.)
Are you able to share any more detail on how you determined this is the best route? It would be a significant implication for many other pieces of open source software also if so.
(And I say this is someone who just recommended cal.com to someone a few days ago specifically citing the fact that it was open source, that led to increased trust in it.)
I did find the video valuable, for reference for others: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JYEPLpgCRck
I think if you are committed to switching back to open source as soon as the threat landscape changes, and you have some metric for what that looks like, that would be valuable to share now.
I would like to see the analysis that you're referencing around open source being 5-10x less secure.