The antidote to hallucination
People who read the Recurrent Patterns publication know better.
They definitely know better than people from American Innovators Network ● Andreessen Horowitz ● Arcee AI ● Arena ● Black Forest Labs ● Box ● CrowdStrike ● Dell Technologies ● Emergence Capital ● Hugging Face ● IBM ● The Linux Foundation ● Mariana Minerals ● Meta ● Microsoft ● Mistral ● Mozilla ● NVIDIA ● Palantir ● Perplexity ● Reflection ● Replit ● ServiceNow ● Telnyx ● Y Combinator
All of those, and more.
Why do Recurrent Patterns’ readers know better?
The representatives from the above organizations signed the recently released manifesto ‘Open Weights and American AI Leadership’.
If they read the article, Which AI is better: Open or Closed? published in May of this year they would know that debating Open vs. Closed is the wrong debate. Or perhaps they know that and the publication and signing of the manifesto is an act of desperation!
It started with Mr. Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft, when he declared that ‘every company should build its own AI model’. Yes, that Mr. Nadella who spent billions of dollars to keep OpenAI running.
One should appreciate the advice from a guy who runs a $3 trillion market cap company. I am just curious if he ever watched a video like this which describes in 8 minutes what it takes to train AI aka Large Language Model. Does he understand that doing that requires lots of time, money and people? He should, He did that with OpenAI…
But then you truly wonder, when the manifesto gets promoted by no other than Mr. Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia — the same company which made a headline in The Wall Street Journal ‘Nvidia in Talks With OpenAI to Guarantee $250 Billion Financing for Data Center.’
The $250 billion supports the principal stand in the manifesto ‘Open weights also strengthen competition and competition is what keeps the gains of AI broadly shared rather than concentrated in a few hands’.
The mental acrobatics, which would make them a star in the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey’s chapito, is on display when discussing legitimate model training compared to illegitimate — ‘Distillation, or the practice of using one model’s outputs to help train or improve another, is a widely used technique for model improvement, evaluation, and validation. It reflects a long tradition of learning from, building upon, and improving existing technologies, a tradition that has helped drive innovation since the rise of the open-source software movement. By contrast, unlawful efforts to extract value from closed models raise legitimate concerns.’
Only the signatories of this manifesto know the difference.
There is one part which one can even call a prophecy — ‘In fact, openness may be one of the most important paths to AI safety and security. Relying solely on closed models is not inherently safe: they can be breached, misused, or fail in ways that outsiders cannot detect. And concentrating advanced AI capabilities behind a small number of closed models compounds that risk. It results in a small number of single points of failure, weakens competition, and leaves critical technology in the hands of a few providers.’
Then this comes from Anthropic — ‘Investigating three real-world incidents in our cybersecurity evaluations’: ‘In a review of our cybersecurity evaluation transcripts, we found three incidents in which a Claude model reached the internet from within or while interacting with a third-party evaluation environment, and then gained unauthorized access to the real systems of three different organizations.’
And documented in TechCrunch — ‘Anthropic says its own AI models breached three companies during security tests’.
Of course, anything that Anthropic does, OpenAI has to do, too.
Not to be outdone:
- OpenAI says its rogue AI tried to hack other companies, BBC
- OpenAI’s Hacking Debacle Comes Down to Human Error, Wired
The reckoning for the AI industry is coming and the game of musical chairs is heating up. The signatories of the manifesto are trying to keep their chairs without losing their money. For them the question of Open vs. Closed is just a game. Maybe they haven’t noticed that they are playing on the deck of Titanic.
But what would be an issue of Recurrent Patterns without some humour and fun. If you’ll indulge me a bit more on this topic:
The fun was delivered kindly by Mr. Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta. Mr. Zuckerberg published his opinion piece ‘The AI Future Is for Everyone’ in The Wall Street Journal. I should note, that’s a publication not known for its sense of humour.
When reading it, you get the feeling that Mr. Zuckerberg is frustrated that a) he’s always behind on the latest technology, b) his projects are going nowhere and c) nobody takes him seriously.
While the CEOs of OpenAI and Anthropic no longer talk about Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) or even Artificial Super Intelligence (ASI) — they just built technology which hacks other companies, Mr. Zuckerberg brings this to the forefront: ‘I propose a philosophy based on individual empowerment as the source of prosperity, invention as the primary purpose of superintelligence, and balance of power as the foundation of safety.’
While he built an empire to attempt to extract and destroy any human interaction, he declared that ‘Historically, hoping that an absolute power will benevolently provide for humanity if sufficiently enlightened hasn’t led to safe or positive outcomes.’
Next he hopes that the technology will help him too when ‘As intelligence becomes abundant, the most important question will be how we direct it.’
For you to better understand, he presented this idea — ‘As a thought experiment, imagine only one person had a superintelligent lawyer. He would have an unfair advantage in court — even if his position was wrong on the merits. That would lead to a worse society. But now imagine everyone has a superintelligent lawyer. Justice would be carried out much more fairly and efficiently than it is today. When people are empowered, they naturally check and balance each other and the power of larger institutions.’
This is coming from a CEO of a company which gets sued by everyone and everywhere. There is a Wikipedia page for it in case you are interested. And unlike the bad guys, if Mr. Zuckerberg has his way, all will be good in the end: ‘But if superintelligence is widely distributed, then I believe we will see more jobs in the future, not fewer.’
The recurrent pattern in all this? Maybe reading this publication won’t prevent hallucination, but it will always be an informed hallucination and it will make you smile. Enjoy.