It's not about it being impossible. I guess the major issue right now is that people are focusing on the wrong aspect of it. They should be focusing on how most LLMs are currently only controlled by bigger coroporations. Democratizing the LLMs and Giving access to people would resolve the x-poly we have currently.
This also solves the "safety and regulations" issue to an extent - Do you really trust that Microsoft, Google, or govt-entities will not have their own biases and will want to regulate the citizens who want to use their products more, sometimes in unethical ways (because we all know, corps and govts never do anything bad)?
This "Open letter" reeks of "we are behind, let us play catch up, you cant take all the money!" or, of baseless fearmongering where LLMs and future assistants could be used to help countless people with disabilities for example.
"Make the world a better place, but no, not like that, not by democratizing it, but under OUR CONTROL" seems to be the motto here.
What do you mean by "democratizing the LLMs"? There are already open source LLMs. Making Claude, GPT-4, and whatever else is being worked on open source wouldn't make them any less capable of doing harm.
I mean in the sense of getting capable models in the hands of people, rather than only a few companies who will arguably steer them towards their own goals. The open source models we currently have are vastly inferior to proprietary ones.
Fragmentation reduces any danger. It doesn't amplify it. Imagine just chrome and Google pushing pwas at you.
The corporations pay for people to learn how to do this stuff. Eventually, someone will leave and build the open-source version (when it's feasible to do it / the price has come down).
This also solves the "safety and regulations" issue to an extent - Do you really trust that Microsoft, Google, or govt-entities will not have their own biases and will want to regulate the citizens who want to use their products more, sometimes in unethical ways (because we all know, corps and govts never do anything bad)?
This "Open letter" reeks of "we are behind, let us play catch up, you cant take all the money!" or, of baseless fearmongering where LLMs and future assistants could be used to help countless people with disabilities for example.
"Make the world a better place, but no, not like that, not by democratizing it, but under OUR CONTROL" seems to be the motto here.