(2023-11-09) Wardley Why Open Source Ai Matters

Simon Wardley: Why open source AI matters? Why the fuss about conversational programming — Part III. ((2023-01-30) Wardley Why The Fuss About Conversational Programming)

What is code?

For our topic today, we need to understand what code is. Code is a set of symbolic instructions.

Without a compiler, those symbols are just text.

we are moving from a world where code is provided simply as text to a world where other forms of code can exist, such as maps. The reason for this is that it enables different forms of discussion to occur around the problem space

In the world of maps, the conversation tends towards objects, relationships and context. (ER diagram?)

Walk into any engineering department, anywhere and you’ll find whiteboards. A very different conversation is happening on the whiteboard compared to what is happening when programming the text on a screen

With ChatGPT4v (a LMM or large multi-modal model), I can provide the map itself and start a conversation about the map and its context.

What might surprise you is that this has already happened.

In the past, data was operated on by code, but data didn’t change the behaviour of the system; it was separate. LLMs are systems which have been trained on data

data is your code and the compiled version is your model weights.

what it recognises as a face will depend upon the images you provide

Prompts will also be “source code”.

Are today’s AIs open?

Over many decades we have fought the open source battle to wrestle control from the hands of the few but we’ve been fixated with text. In our new world, the few have once again brought their proprietary ideas to the space but they’ve dressed themselves up as being open source because they open a subset of the symbolic instructions needed to create the system. I say subset because they don’t open, for example, training data which is also part of the symbolic instructions used to program the system.

Without ALL the symbolic instructions used to program the system, you can’t freely modify it. It’s not even open source when you hand me the model weights because that’s the compiled version

even those who share model weights can often add clauses on its use. There is nothing remotely open about most of the AI projects out there claiming to be open.

Skynet is not the real danger of AI

We are handing technological sovereignty (from individual to national) to a small group of players that we have no reason to suspect have your benevolence in mind. (AGI+BigWorld)

Over the last decade, I have repeatedly warned that “the danger of machine intelligence isn’t malignant machines, it’s the use by people and concentration of power”.

Be careful of groups promoting “responsible AI” when “responsible” is defined by that group, and you don’t get to look at what is happening behind closed doors out of concern for your “safety”

For a safe future of AI, look East... The summit was barely underway before China Gov signalled again its intended role in open source AI and a number of Chinese enterprises have reinforced that message since.

If anyone is laughing, it has to be China. Before anyone says “whatabout” jobs or impact on creative rights or dangerous AIs, well those are important issues. Just remember, if the foundations are proprietary then you’ll have to accept whatever values others have coded into those foundations and since you can’t inspect them (as you don’t have access to most of the source code i.e. the training data) then you will have to rely on trying to test for anomolies.

What we need is all the source code and many eyeballs.

Where is our rebel alliance?

Hopefully, the EU under the AI act might create onerous and costly testing tasks for AI and add a tiered approach

But I’m clutching at straws here. I was hoping the UK would lead the open charge. Instead, we are being led into gilded cages

In the next post, I’ll cover what comes next. For that, we’re going to have to revisit the wonderful world of SpimeScript (or cyberphysical as some like to call it).