If you force surveillance on 10 people and even one of them doesn't consent, that's still a net bad. And this situation is probably closer to the inverse of those numbers, or at the very least 50/50.
And this isn't even to mention the criminal negligence of Flock, and the evils they have already enabled, as committed both by Flock employees and by government.
It's hard to gauge the sincerity of these beliefs, and even harder to tell if you've actually tested these beliefs against the reality of mass surveillance, especially when it's been used to arrest and stalk innocent people.
Well, we need laws and oversight to stop these actions. Do you realize that people use phones to stalk innocent people? And yet you probably have a phone. Why is that?
This is like the "why drive if it's so dangerous" fallacy. We trade cost for value, downsides for upsides, risk for reward. Cars and phones are highly valuable to normal people. Virtually all people do not experience immediate, constant, concrete benefits from public camera surveillance. And this is not even to mention that Flock cameras are more abused than phones (although scale makes that subjective, it's kind of apples-to-oranges right now).
Analogies are distracting. They are rhetorical junk food. Make an argument directly supporting Flock cameras - don't just say "it's like phones".
This was my exact point. I don't actually believe in banning phones and was just using it to point out how poor the argument is. I'm curious why you're jumping on me, but not OP. Is it because you agree with their opinions but not mine?
Saying "surveillance is bad because it has been abused in these instances" is not a particularly compelling argument because it doesn't talk about the "cost for value, downsides for upsides, risk for reward" aspects of flock.
That's because you haven't thought it through. "We only want info on the bad people" might not alarm you personally until any government entity changes the definition of bad and now you're a "bad guy".
There are all sorts of powers we afford law enforcement that could be abused; I hardly think cameras would be at the top of the list of concerns, honestly. NYC has had thousands upon thousands of cameras for quite a while without much fanfare, along with other major top cities worldwide.
OP knows only a very basic opinion of mine, and they tell me I'm wrong because I haven't thought about it, what else should I think? Do you think they know how much I thought about this?
Isn't the implication "if only you thought more and better about this topic, your opinion would match mine"?
While such a surveillance system appears to (kinda) work in China, do you really trust American companies and the American police system to implement it at anywhere close to that level of competency?
It's not the cameras I mind per-se. They have legitmately been used to solve some crimes that might have gone unsolved otherwise.
But the problem is the cameras are pervasive. It's not like a red light camera, or a speed zone camera, or a toll road camera, that has a specific purpose in a specific location. And it's the building of a database, and correlation of data from point to point, and the potential abuse. We have documented cases of cops abusing Flock data to stalk exes, And history proves that any time you collect data about a group of people, it will eventually if not immediately be abused.
You can propose all the warrants and anonymizing and other restrictions that you might like to control who looks at the data and when, but at the end of the day it's all about trusting those in power who have control of the data, and that's not a good thing to do. The government does not (or should not) have the right to track the public to this degree as they go about their daily personal business.
Would you care to elaborate on why you don't mind individuals being stalked by employees with zero oversight or accountability, and why you don't mind protestors being monitored by the government? Since those are both part of "this type of surveillance", and are a pretty fucking crazy thing to state you're okay with with no argument for them. Do you perhaps lack the imagination to consider how this would affect your life if a government that did not agree with your political views came into power sometime in the future and were to use "this type of surveillance" against you?
Not saying anything at all is one of the worst things you can do when questioned by law enforcement in the US (though "it would be funny" is a close second). The right way to remain silent is to loudly proclaim "I am exercising my right to remain silent."
It's much easier to distill a model than create one from scratch. Part of the reason the open source model factories have been able to keep par with the frontier model factories is that they distill the frontier models, not recreate something as good from scratch.
> It's much easier to distill a model than create one from scratch. Part of the reason the open source model factories have been able to keep par with the frontier model factories is that they distill the frontier models, not recreate something as good from scratch.
I think the "why" was "why would the US companies have models that can't be distilled?", not "why does distillation work"?
I suppose it would be due to intense research and development. Obviously anyone could come upon these models if they exist, so it isn't necessarily a given that frontier labs would do it first, but probably the odds should be given to the groups with the biggest pull and the largest budgets
What researchers want to join a company that is in a race to the bottom to serve inference tokens? If any open weight companies start actually producing state of the art models then maybe, but if it's just copying what others have done for cheaper, you aren't going to find many researchers interested in that
The Chinese AI models are certainly not copied from any US sources.
All of them have quite different structures, and the reasons for choosing those structures have been clearly explained in published research papers.
The structures of the US "SOTA" models are unknown and nothing useful has been published about them, so they certainly were not a source of inspiration for China.
Big LLMs like those published by the Chinese companies must have been trained on a huge amount of text, images etc. and the training sets cannot have anything to do with the data hoarded by OpenAI and Anthropic, though they must have been gathered by the same methods, e.g. scanning the Internet and paying "pirates".
The only thing that could have been done by the Chinese companies, though for now there exists no evidence, only allegations, is that they could have used for post-training their models results of queries to US models, made by accounts which have breached the ToS, which forbid the use of the AI services by competitors.
If this really happened, this is a breach of contract, but there is no way in which one may say that the Chinese have copied anything or stolen any kind of IP and the effects of such a post-training can provide only an extremely small fraction of the information embedded in the weights of a model (though that information may be important, e.g. for ensuring that the LLM will work well in an agentic context).
What would the benchmarks be if GLM5.2 and Kimi K3 be if they didn't use distillation of frontier models?
I don't think any of the Chinese AI companies have stolen IP from the US AI companies (at least, I've seen no evidence of it), but the evidence of distillation is pretty apparent.
My issue with this is that if distillation occurs frequently enough, it is going to zero out most SOTA research into AI. Having cheap AI is great, but that alone won't advance the state of the art. There needs to be groups that are pushing the boundaries, and unless some kind of protection is put into place, there will be zero financial incentive to do so if anyone can come along and effectively steal your model and get financially rewarded for serving it far cheaper than the original group can, because much less R&D cost is needed. I say this as someone who sees distillation as "legal", since if you can train anything you can look at, and you can look at the output of those frontier models, then you can train on them.
This comment is really out of touch with reality. Chinese labs have incredible talent and they're excited to be doing the work they're doing. Moreover, Kimi K3 appears to be well beyond the San Francisco frontier in some domains. Look at the code arena for web dev, for example: K3 is +44 points ahead of Fable.
How could you tell how close they are to the frontier if they weren't distilling? Clearly those labs think distilling is worth it despite the large effort they need to go through to bypass anti distillation techniques used by the frontier labs
Anthropic is “distilling chinese models”. Everyone uses outputs from every other frontier model in both pre training and post training, hilarious to give it this name and pretend like it’s an attack. Fable is just a distillation of stolen copyrighted works, etc.
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