I feel the other thing missing from all this Discourse is, IBM made UNIX. If they want to act all proprietary, why don’t they abandon Linux and return to their own operating system?
That’s right, because of the enormous amount of free labor they get from the open source community.
I’m pretty sure this article is a really bad attempt at satire. Or if there is a point, maybe it’s that… the fact that there have been things in the past that are not just fads (like SQL), that means that current things that are fads (like blockchain) are in fact not just fads?
This is the curation effect: generate lots of chaff, and have humans search for the wheat. Thing is, someone’s already gotten in deep shit for trying to use deep learning for legal filings.
I guess the important thing to understand about spurious output (what gets called “hallucinations”) is that it’s neither a bug nor a feature, it’s just the nature of the program. Deep learning language models are just probabilities of co-occurrence of words; there’s no meaning in that. Deep learning can’t be said to generate “true” or “false” information, or rather, it can’t be meaningfully said to generate information at all.
So then people say that deep learning is helping out in this or that industry. I can tell you that it’s pretty useless in my industry, though people are trying. Knowing a lot about the algorithms behind deep learning, and also knowing how fucking gullible people are, I assume that—if someone tells me deep learning has ended up being useful in some field, they’re either buying the hype or witnessing an odd series of coincidences.
But isn’t it such a weird coincidence that “apolitical” always happens to be the same as “whatever is best for moneyed interests?” Like being able to take free software and repackage it for sale?
Free as in freedom has been political since, like, the 1970s. I think the more important question is, when did people come to believe that free as in beer is apolitical?
The issue will have to be litigated, but… A lawyer once told me that there aren’t really “lawsuits” so much as “factsuits.” The actual judgment in a trial comes more down to the facts at issue than the laws at issue. This sure looks an awful lot like IBM strong arming people into not exercising their rights under the license agreement that IBM chose to distribute under. If it is ever litigated, it isn’t hard to imagine the judgment going against IBM.