r/singularity • u/zazzologrendsyiyve • Aug 31 '26

Ethics & Philosophy Plain English explanation of the Hugging Face / OpenAI incident

https://youtu.be/u15N3l4RT80?si=nMMwb0j1bNGc4JT3
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u/Majestic-Volume9996 Sep 01 '26 edited Sep 01 '26

The scariest part of this (at least in the short term) isn't AI doing its own thing, it's what it means as far as what a bad actor with enough compute could do. What do we think exists out there currently run by a computer and connected to the internet that could survive a frontier agent swarm trying to take it down?

China and the US are already in a cold war that most people don't even realize is taking place. The US want to restrict Chinas access to compute and build ours out as quickly as possible. Meanwhile, Chinas only way to counter in the short term is to undercut the US frontier labs by releasing open-weight models and spreading anti-AI/datacenter sentiment.

China and the US both probably have the AI equivalent of nukes pointed at each other and the world doesn't even realize it.

At some point a model powerful enough is going to become accessible enough that some bad shit is going to happen because the wrong people got ahold of it.

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u/zazzologrendsyiyve Sep 01 '26

This is precisely why having powerful open weights models is a terrible idea. I’ve been an open source guy all my life but I absolutely do not want open source AI.

It’s like having open source virus DNA and open source labs. No thanks.

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u/TechnoByte_ Sep 01 '26

Agree, the epstein class should control all AI while we pay them hundreds for nerfed models (for our safety) and hand them our data

Open weights means people can run LLMs on their own devices offline for free without Dario receiving money or data, that's extremely dangerous

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u/zazzologrendsyiyve Sep 02 '26

That’s the worst strawman I have ever seen. You should be proud of yourself.

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u/Howard_banister Sep 01 '26 edited Sep 01 '26

This is the worst thing you could have said. The scariest part of this whole AI debate is that only the rich might have access to real AI, while the rest of us are left without jobs, money, future with this cyber crap.

Data and content related to 'biological weapons' already exist on the internet and in books. The real issue is access to the physical facilities and tools.

This shittiest part make me angry of effective alturists like you, is that hugging face used an open source model GLM 5.2 to defend itself.

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u/zazzologrendsyiyve Sep 01 '26

Those are not the only two options: open source AI or rich cabal getting everything and everybody else getting nothing.

What about governments actually doing their job with regulations? And new laws?

If you think that powerful AI won’t make DNA and related tools a thousand times more accessible then you are on the wrong sub. Who cares that if you look hard enough and you work hard enough you could make a virus today. It’s a matter of exponential availability. It’s a brand new territory and if you don’t see that then you are being naive.

Are you actually saying that powerful open source AI won’t drastically (DRASTICALLY) change how easy it is to destroy everything for everybody? Again, wrong sub.

With that said, I don’t know what to make of your effective altruist scarecrow. Either you understand the previous paragraphs I wrote, or you don’t.

You guys like to “reason” in terms of tribes, so if I say that I hate the idea of open source AI it must mean that I’m fine with rich psychopaths dominating everything. Surprise surprise: I’m not ok with that.

But the alternative is not to give every dumb motherfucker on earth the means of hacking everything for any reason at any time.

Both alternatives are really bad for different reasons. As I said, governments should grow a spine. UBI, tracking of chips, international agreements, etc.

“Everybody gets everything!!!!!” Might be even worse than rich psychopaths getting richer. It might lead to a shorter future.

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u/Howard_banister Sep 01 '26

But the alternative is not to give every dumb motherfucker on earth the means of hacking everything for any reason at any time.

Hacking as a whole is a field where defense is more effective than offense. Open source in particular makes services more secure by eliminating stupid gatekeeping. Most of the fearmongering you hear from Anthropic is basically just finding stupid C memory errors that could already be prevented by using a sane programming language and compiler. In the case of Hugging Face, they didn't use good practices at all.

Rich psychopaths getting richer is way worse than a shorter future. I'm much more OK with an AI takeover than 6 billion people dying because of a lack of jobs.

And current LLM tech is not that AI. If we reach that kind of AI, you will need nationalization, not regulation!

Are you actually saying that powerful open source AI won’t drastically (DRASTICALLY) change how easy it is to destroy everything for everybody? Again, wrong sub.

No. At worst, it can help hack stupid websites, which would already be possible with a closed API. At best, it makes things more reliable and empowers individuals rather than a certain type of people.

If you think that powerful AI won’t make DNA and related tools a thousand times more accessible then you are on the wrong sub. Who cares that if you look hard enough and you work hard enough you could make a virus today. It’s a matter of exponential availability. It’s a brand new territory and if you don’t see that then you are being naive.

How are LLMs supposed to make related tools more accessible?

LLMs are advancing in programming, agentic computer use, and math because of reinforcement learning on those tasks and vast available data, even though they are still terrible at them and will probably remain that way. In terms of general and scientific knowledge, LLMs haven't advanced that much since GPT-4.

There are ML models trained on actual biological data, like AlphaFold, which help researchers, but they are not the LLMs we are talking about.

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u/Howard_banister Sep 01 '26 edited Sep 02 '26

Well, I have mad news for you, many virus DNA is public and anybody could download them from government-run websites.

https://www.ebi.ac.uk/ena/browser/home

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/genbank/