ok

There’s a bigger problem here which is that models themselves are general commodities and there’s just not enough difference between them for any one player to differentiate themselves. A company can get ahead of others by a few months, but then the rest quickly close the gap. It’s a really low margin business because you constantly have to burn a ton of money just to stay a bit ahead, and you have diminishing returns the longer you do it.

The only rational approach is to treat models as shared infrastructure akin to Linux because the money is going to be in customization niches. Companies will charge to tune models for specific use cases and charge support for that. There’s also going to be money at the bottom for hardware vendors making chips and memory. But the middle tier of generic LLMs is just relentless involution driving profits towards the bottom.

And then it’s been clarified to you over and over in this thread.

Yes, and as I’ve repeatedly clarified here, I was making that statment in the context of software.

Again, I’m not disagreeing that you can use LLMs to audit all these things. All I’m saying is that software is by far the easiest place to apply models and actually try out exploits end to end.

Sure, you can do all that as well, but the context is an article about cyber security.

The context here is obviously software exploits given that we’re talking about LLM finding them.

The whole trope that LLMs need absurd levels of energy use has not been true for a while now. People latched on to this idea because early models were hideously inefficient, as is the case with pretty much any new technology. Today, you can run local coding models on your laptop that surpass the capabilities of frontier models needing whole data centres to run just a year ago. You no longer need an inordinate amount of computing power to run any of this stuff, and performance gains haven’t stopped. There’s no indication that we’re close to any sort of a limit here.

Also, nowhere did I say that a socialist world would have developed it in the same fashion. I’m merely pointing out that it would have been developed, and there would have been many existing use cases which I listed which have little to do with commercial incentives. I get the impression that you’re conflating hype with the actual legitimate use of which there are plenty already.

Finally, there is really nothing stopping people from developing this technology in open source fashion. And that’s the way to decouple this tech from commercial incentives going forward. There are already open models to build on, and that should be leveraged to develop completely open alternatives which are community driven.

I don’t really agree. I use this tech for coding, doing translations, speech to text transcriptions, extracting data from PDF documents, and none of these use cases would be different if the tech wasn’t commercially driven. I also disagree that it wouldn’t exist if it wasn’t developed under our current dominant economic system. AI research has been around for a long time, and has been done extensively in socialist countries like USSR.

No, I’m a software developer.

reading comprehension is really not your forte is it?

I have actually, but I don’t see how that’s relevant to being informed on China.

Yes, quite extensively in fact. That’s how I found a massive security hole in piefed that I mentioned earlier in fact.

And I gave you a concrete example of how LLMs both find and exploit these vulnerabilities. It’s quite evident that your disagreement stems from not having actually used these tools to find vulnerabilities.

Because it’s trendy and it’s a new thing people can feel outraged about together. And when you really drill down into the arguments, the problem is invariably with the way technology is used under capitalism rather than technology itself.

You’re entitled to your opinion, but finding vulnerabilities goes far beyond simply doing static analysis. LLMs are able to find vulnerabilities that emerge from subtle interactions between different features, where things like keys and security credentials aren’t handled properly, and finding these by hand in a large codebase is nearly impossible.

The very process of finding these vulnerabilities gives you a path towards making an exploit. And the LLM can actually do this laborious process largely autonomously as well. It can probe a site for example, look at the results, and iterate on them. It’s an incredibly effective tool for both finding exploits and testing them out in the wild.

In fact, you can ask piefed devs about their recent security debacle that an LLM exposed and gave a step by step guide for exploiting.

Maybe you should spend a bit of time to actually learn about modern China and then form an educated opinion on the subject. Modern China is a socialist state where the working class holds power, but capitalist relations have not yet been abolished. That’s what socialism is, it’s a transitional state between capitalism and communism.

90% of families in the country own their home giving China one of the highest home ownership rates in the world. What’s more is that 80% of these homes are owned outright, without mortgages or any other leans. https://www.forbes.com/sites/wadeshepard/2016/03/30/how-people-in-china-afford-their-outrageously-expensive-homes

Student debt in China is virtually non-existent. https://www.forbes.com/sites/jlim/2016/08/29/why-china-doesnt-have-a-student-debt-problem/

Chinese household savings hit another record high in 2024 https://www.wsj.com/livecoverage/stock-market-today-dow-jones-bank-earnings-01-12-2024/card/chinese-household-savings-hit-another-record-high-xqyky00IsIe357rtJb4j

People in China enjoy high levels of social mobility https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/11/18/world/asia/china-social-mobility.html

The typical Chinese adult is now richer than the typical European adult https://www.businessinsider.com/typical-chinese-adult-now-richer-than-europeans-wealth-report-finds-2022-9

Real wage (i.e. the wage adjusted for the prices you pay) has gone up 4x in the past 25 years, more than any other country. This is staggering considering it’s the most populous country on the planet. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cw8SvK0E5dI

The real (inflation-adjusted) incomes of the poorest half of the Chinese population increased by more than four hundred percent from 1978 to 2015, while real incomes of the poorest half of the US population actually declined during the same time period. https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w23119/w23119.pdf

From 1978 to 2000, the number of people in China living on under $1/day fell by 300 million, reversing a global trend of rising poverty that had lasted half a century (i.e. if China were excluded, the world’s total poverty population would have risen) https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/China’s-Economic-Growth-and-Poverty-Reduction-Angang-Linlin/c883fc7496aa1b920b05dc2546b880f54b9c77a4

From 2010 to 2019 (the most recent period for which uninterrupted data is available), the income of the poorest 20% in China increased even as a share of total income. https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SI.DST.FRST.20?end=2019&amp%3Blocations=CN&amp%3Bstart=2008

By the end of 2020, extreme poverty, defined as living on under a threshold of around $2 per day, had been eliminated in China. According to the World Bank, the Chinese government had spent $700 billion on poverty alleviation since 2014. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/31/world/asia/china-poverty-xi-jinping.html

Over the past 40 years, the number of people in China with incomes below $1.90 per day – the International Poverty Line as defined by the World Bank to track global extreme poverty– has fallen by close to 800 million. With this, China has contributed close to three-quarters of the global reduction in the number of people living in extreme poverty. https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/press-release/2022/04/01/lifting-800-million-people-out-of-poverty-new-report-looks-at-lessons-from-china-s-experience

None of these things happen in capitalist states, and we can make a direct comparison with India which follows capitalist path of development. In fact, without China there practically would be no poverty reduction happening in the world.

If we take just one country, China, out of the global poverty equation, then even under the $1.90 poverty standard we find that the extreme poverty headcount is the exact same as it was in 1981.

https://www.currentaffairs.org/2019/07/5-myths-about-global-poverty

The $1.90/day (2011 PPP) line is not an adequate or in any way satisfactory level of consumption; it is explicitly an extreme measure. Some analysts suggest that around $7.40/day is the minimum necessary to achieve good nutrition and normal life expectancy, while others propose we use the US poverty line, which is $15.

https://www.cgdev.org/blog/12-things-we-can-agree-about-global-poverty

And finally, here are a few books you can read on the subject of China’s development.

• https://1804books.com/products/chinas-great-road
• https://redletterspp.com/products/the-east-is-still-red
• https://socialistchina.org/2024/10/02/new-book-peoples-china-at-75-the-flag-stays-red/

even as they’re actively being cannibalized apparently

Finding them is a prerequisite to exploiting them, and by far the hardest part. Once you know what the exploit is, abusing it is not difficult.

I have actually, but I don’t see how that’s relevant to being informed on China.

exactly, shit is going to hit the fan once they run out of the reserve