This essay often asks for LLMs to be compared to what you could find given a Google search. I think this is kind of a bad comparison given that I assume Google uses LLMs in its search product. Presumably a better comparator would be something like DuckDuckGo (which is in fact a bit less usable).
Google could slap some filter on its search engine or the underlying LLM to make it not tell you stuff about scary biotech, but there’s no analogous thing you could do with open-source LLM weights (to the best of my knowledge).
This essay often asks for LLMs to be compared to what you could find given a Google search. I think this is kind of a bad comparison given that I assume Google uses LLMs in its search product. Presumably a better comparator would be something like DuckDuckGo (which is in fact a bit less usable).
If we are assessing the impact of open-sourcing LLMs, it seems like the most relevant counterfactual is the “no open-source LLM” one, right?
Google could slap some filter on its search engine or the underlying LLM to make it not tell you stuff about scary biotech, but there’s no analogous thing you could do with open-source LLM weights (to the best of my knowledge).