• TheOakTree@lemm.ee
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      2 months ago

      I did some digging. It’s a parody finance website that makes it seem like you can invest in falcons and make a blockchain (flockchain) with them. Dig a little further, go to the linked forum, and you’ll see it’s just a community of people shitposting (mostly).

  • sunzu2@thebrainbin.org
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    2 months ago

    Yes… but it was MIT that pushed the feds to prosecute.

    Never forgot to the proper perp.

    Disgusting. And we subsidize their existence 🤡

    • doctortran@lemm.ee
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      2 months ago

      Because he literally broke into a server room and installed hardware to harvest this data.

      There’s no world where any organization, for profit or otherwise, would tolerate that. Even your local library would call the damn cops if you tried that.

      • sunzu2@thebrainbin.org
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        2 months ago

        Disgusting bootlicker spotted. For context:

        After state prosecutors dropped their charges, federal prosecutors filed a superseding indictment adding nine more felony counts, which increased Swartz’s maximum criminal exposure to 50 years of imprisonment and $1 million in fines.

        • FanBlade@lemmynsfw.com
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          2 months ago

          You call the other person a name

          You don’t respond to anything they say directly

          You do it twice in the same thread

          You call something context without providing context

    • Flocklesscrow@lemm.ee
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      2 months ago

      MIT releases financials and endowment figures for 2024:

      The Institute’s pooled investments returned 8.9 percent last year; endowment stands at $24.6 billion

  • electricprism@lemmy.ml
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    2 months ago

    Remember what you learned in school: Working as a team to solve a test or problem is unacceptable!!! Unless you are a company town.

  • Iunnrais@lemm.ee
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    2 months ago

    Just let anyone scrape it all for any reason. It’s science. Let it be free.

      • Natanox@discuss.tchncs.de
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        2 months ago

        It’s a US “non-profit”. One that demands 19$ per article which they merely provide as aggregator, they don’t own shit.

        Utterly absurd.

        • Flocklesscrow@lemm.ee
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          2 months ago

          Which means they’re adding profit margin to the otherwise zero marginal cost of said information good.

        • sunzu2@thebrainbin.org
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          2 months ago

          Non profit here merely means they are exemot from US income taxes so they are grifting even hardrr on us.

          MIT is grifting in a similat but bigger manner.

    • chicken@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      2 months ago

      The OP tweet seems to be leaning pretty hard on the “AI bad” sentiment. If LLMs make academic knowledge more accessible to people that’s a good thing for the same reason what Aaron Swartz was doing was a good thing.

      • Ashelyn@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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        2 months ago

        On the whole, maybe LLMs do make these subjects more accessible in a way that’s a net-positive, but there are a lot of monied interests that make positive, transparent design choices unlikely. The companies that create and tweak these generalized models want to make a return in the long run. Consequently, they have deliberately made their products speak in authoritative, neutral tones to make them seem more correct, unbiased and trustworthy to people.

        The problem is that LLMs ‘hallucinate’ details as an unavoidable consequence of their design. People can tell untruths as well, but if a person lies or misspeaks about a scientific study, they can be called out on it. An LLM cannot be held accountable in the same way, as it’s essentially a complex statistical prediction algorithm. Non-savvy users can easily be fed misinfo straight from the tap, and bad actors can easily generate correct-sounding misinformation to deliberately try and sway others.

        ChatGPT completely fabricating authors, titles, and even (fake) links to studies is a known problem. Far too often, unsuspecting users take its output at face value and believe it to be correct because it sounds correct. This is bad, and part of the issue is marketing these models as though they’re intelligent. They’re very good at generating plausible responses, but this should never be construed as them being good at generating correct ones.

        • chicken@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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          2 months ago

          Ok, but I would say that these concerns are all small potatoes compared to the potential for the general public gaining the ability to query a system with synthesized expert knowledge obtained from scraping all academically relevant documents. If you’re wondering about something and don’t know what you don’t know, or have any idea where to start looking to learn what you want to know, a LLM is an incredible resource even with caveats and limitations.

          Of course, it would be better if it could also directly reference and provide the copyrighted/paywalled sources it draws its information from at runtime, in the interest of verifiably accurate information. Fortunately, local models are becoming increasingly powerful and lower barrier of entry to work with, so the legal barriers to such a thing existing might not be able to stop it for long in practice.

          • Venia Silente@lemm.ee
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            2 months ago

            Ok, but I would say that these concerns are all small potatoes compared to the potential for the general public gaining the ability to query a system with synthesized expert knowledge obtained from scraping all academically relevant documents.

            If any of that was actually true, yeah. But it’s not, it can’t be, and it won’t be.

            As with all world-changing technology, “the general public” will never truly obtain its power, not until it has been well squeezed by the elites for gains. Not only that, “the general public” obtaining this power would be devastating on the simple physical principle that this kind of technology depends on ruining the ecology. And this whole “synthethized expert knowledge”… man, that’s three words that mean absolutely nothing when chained together because it’s all illusion: it’s not actual knowledge, it’s not expert, and it’s not even synthetized, at best it’s emulated. It’s all a tangle of lies and make-believes sold on bulk with zero accountability.

            But sure, nice dream. I want a Lamborghini, too.

          • Excrubulent@slrpnk.net
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            2 months ago

            The phrase “synthesised expert knowledge” is the problem here, because apparently you don’t understand that this machine has no meaningful ability to synthesise anything. It has zero fidelity.

            You’re not exposing people to expert knowledge, you’re exposing them to expert-sounding words that cannot be made accurate. Sometimes they’re right by accident, but that is not the same thing as accuracy.

            The fact you confused what the LLM is doing for synthesis is something loads of people will do, and this will just lend more undue credibility to its bullshit.

          • Auli@lemmy.ca
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            2 months ago

            Man the amount of work a bash script needs from a LLM and that is a pretty basic thing. Did it speed up the process I think it did but not really sure actually did it make it easier yes. Did I need some idea of what it was doing yes.

          • Ashelyn@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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            2 months ago

            People developing local models generally have to know what they’re doing on some level, and I’d hope they understand what their model is and isn’t appropriate for by the time they have it up and running.

            Don’t get me wrong, I think LLMs can be useful in some scenarios, and can be a worthwhile jumping off point for someone who doesn’t know where to start. My concern is with the cultural issues and expectations/hype surrounding “AI”. With how the tech is marketed, it’s pretty clear that the end goal is for someone to use the product as a virtual assistant endpoint for as much information (and interaction) as it’s possible to shoehorn through.

            Addendum: local models can help with this issue, as they’re on one’s own hardware, but still need to be deployed and used with reasonable expectations: that it is a fallible aggregation tool, not to be taken as an authority in any way, shape, or form.

      • funkless_eck@sh.itjust.works
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        2 months ago

        That would be good if they did that but that is not the intent of the org, the purpose of the tool, the expected or even available outcome.

        It’s important to remember this data is not being scraped to make it available or presentable but to make a machine that echos human authography convincingly more convincingly.

        On an extremely simplified level, it doesn’t want to answer 1+1=? with “2”, it wants to appear like a human confidently answering an arithmetic question, even if the exchange is “1+1=?” “yes, 2+3 does equal 9”

        Obviously it can handle simple sums, this is an illustrative example

        • chicken@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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          2 months ago

          that is not the … available outcome.

          It demonstrably is already though. Paste a document in, then ask questions about its contents; the answer will typically take what’s written there into account. Ask about something you know is in a Wikipedia article that would have been part of its training data, same deal. If you think it can’t do this sort of thing, you can just try it yourself.

          Obviously it can handle simple sums, this is an illustrative example

          I am well aware that LLMs can struggle especially with reasoning tasks, and have a bad habit of making up answers in some situations. That’s not the same as being unable to correlate and recall information, which is the relevant task here. Search engines also use machine learning technology and have been able to do that to some extent for years. But with a search engine, even if it’s smart enough to figure out what you wanted and give you the correct link, that’s useless if the content behind the link is only available to institutions that pay thousands a year for the privilege.

          Think about these three things in terms of what information they contain and their capacity to convey it:

          • A search engine

          • Dataset of pirated contents from behind academic paywalls

          • A LLM model file that has been trained on said pirated data

          The latter two each have their pros and cons and would likely work better in combination with each other, but they both have an advantage over the search engine: they can tell you about the locked up data, and they can be used to combine the locked up data in novel ways.

          • funkless_eck@sh.itjust.works
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            2 months ago

            the problem is you can’t take those weaknesses and call it “academic” - it’s a contradiction in terms.

            When a real academic makes up answers its a problem, when chatgpt does it its part of the expectation.

  • EmbarrassedDrum@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    2 months ago

    and in due time, we’ll hack OpenAI and get the sources from the chat module…

    I’ve seen a few glitches before that made ChatGPT just drop entire articles in varying languages.

    • FaceDeer@fedia.io
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      2 months ago

      AI models don’t actually contain the text they were trained on, except in very rare circumstances when they’ve been overfit on a particular text (this is considered an error in training and much work has been put into coming up with ways to prevent it. It usually happens when a great many identical copies of the same data appears in the training set). An AI model is far too small for it, there’s no way that data can be compressed that much.

  • CosmicTurtle0@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    2 months ago

    To paraphrase Nixon:

    “When you’re a company, it’s not illegal.”

    To paraphrase Trump:

    “When you’re a company, they just let you do it.”

  • doctortran@lemm.ee
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    2 months ago

    Can we be honest about this, please?

    Aaron Swartz went into a secure networking closet and left a computer there to pull data from the server over many days, which is absolutely not the same thing as scraping public data from the internet.

    He was a hero that didn’t deserve what happened, but it’s patently dishonest ignore that he was effectively breaking and entering, plus installing a data harvesting device in the server room, which any organization in the world would rightfully identity as a hostile.

    • youmaynotknow@lemmy.ml
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      2 months ago

      Wao, it’s not often we get to see someone posting a comment so full of shit while making sure to obscure many facts to see if it sticks.

      “Can we be honest”? Apparently you cannot.

    • Venia Silente@lemm.ee
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      2 months ago

      Why don’t you speak what you truly believe instead of copy-pasting the same gaslighting everywhere? We already made you, anyway.

    • sunzu2@thebrainbin.org
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      2 months ago

      After state prosecutors dropped their charges, federal prosecutors filed a superseding indictment adding nine more felony counts, which increased Swartz’s maximum criminal exposure to 50 years of imprisonment and $1 million in fines.

      Another bootlicker spotted.