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4 months agoI know the article is a threadbare simile, but it more than misses the whole point of Galadriel’s character in the books/movie. For even someone like Galadriel who meets this beyond-human ideal of beauty, purity and “goodness”, the power of the One Ring to dominate life is so corrupting that it would simply turn her into a new Sauron. Which is why after failing to resist temptation, Galadriel leaves Middle Earth and goes into the West. If there’s one point that is hammered in repeatedly throughout the Lord of the Rings, it’s that such absolute power cannot be used for good, despite anyone’s best intentions, and the only recourse is for it to be destroyed.
Weight leaks for semi-open models have been fairly common in the past. Meta’s LLaMa1.0 model was originally closed source, but the weights were leaked and spread pretty rapidly (effectively laundered through finetunes and merges), leading to Meta embracing quasi-open source post-hoc. Similarly, most of the anime-style Stable Diffusion 1.5 models were based on NovelAI’s custom finetune, and the weights were similarly laundered and became ubiquitous.
Those incidents were both in 2023. Aside from some of the biggest players (OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, and I guess Apple kinda), open weight releases (usually not open source) have been become the norm (even for frontier models like DeepSeek-V3, Qwen 2.5 and Llama 3.1), so piracy in that case is moot (although it’s easy to assume that use non-compliant with licenses is also ubiquitous). Leakage of currently closed frontier models would be interesting from an academic and journalistic perspective, for being able to dig into the architecture and assess things like safety and regurgitation outside of the online service shell, but those frontier models would require so much compute that they’d be unusable by individual actors.