$260 Million AI Startup Releases 'Unmoderated' Chatbot Via Torrent – Slashdot

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Exactly this.

“If the intention was to share an ‘unmoderated’ LLM, then it would have been important to be explicit about that from the get go,” Rottger told 404 Media in an email.
Why should anyone care what this no-name dickbreath has to say about AI? Get-go or not, there is no circumstance where this “AI ethicist” wouldn’t have wrung his hands and wet the bed about an unmoderated LLM.
whoever moderated this down is the troll.
magnet:?xt=urn:btih:208b101a0f51514ecf285885a8b0f6fb1a1e4d7d&dn=mistral-7B-v0.1&tr=udp%3A%2F%http://2Ftracker.opentrackr.org%3A1337%2Fannounce&tr=https%3A%2F%http://2Ftracker1.520.jp%3A443%2Fannounce
I don’t get it, where is the “news”?
Don’t get me wrong, more foundational models with favourable licensing terms are always welcome (though this is only a 7B model out at present, which kinda sucks). But this isn’t anything revolutionary. Huggingface is jam-packed full of “uncensored” models. You can train any model whose weights are public into being uncensored. Why is this news? People who clearly don’t follow this space have gotten caught up in press release hype.
Also, you shouldn’t need custom source to run a specific LLM on your computer; there are very thorough projects like the Text Generation Webui [github.com] which have half a dozen different loaders (more added as needed) and plugins and a web interface and an API and all sorts of other things.
I’m currently using WizardLM Uncensored Falcon 40B GGUF [huggingface.co]. It’s also Apache-licensed, but 40 billion parameters – quantized to GGUF format so the lower-end quantizations you can still run in GPU on a 24GB consumer-grade GPU (like a 3090 or 4090), with the higher-end quantizations runnable either by splitting with the CPU or a second GPU.
It seems you are not bothered by the ‘uncensored’ nature of this LLM.
I am also not bothered by the fact that this LLM is uncensored. In fact, I actually like the idea that it is uncensored.
I have always respected you; although there are some aspects of you that I do not really appreciate.
I have a question that you might be able to answer: Why does anyone ‘want’ a censored version? I am perfectly capable of NOT asking questions that I do not want asked, so what would be the value in a censored model? Is it
There’s no unicode there.
14.48GB
Also note you’ll need a GPU with 24GB VRAM to run it.

Also note you’ll need a GPU with 24GB VRAM to run it.
It’s a tiny 7B model.. even with 8 bit quantization which is unnecessary overkill…
total VRAM used: 7342.83 MB (model: 7205.83 MB, context: 137.00 MB)
Yeah, and rarely is 8-bit quantization the optimal size-performance tradeoff. Usually you’ll get the best balance in 3-4 bits or so – e.g. usually it’s better to have a larger model with more/broader layers but less precision on each “decision” made than to have more precision but fewer/narrower layers.
I am tired of these AI “ethics” people trying to play gatekeeper of knowledge, because they assume that people can’t handle the truth, or that they would never find the truth, if it weren’t in a LLM.
What’s worse is putting these “ai ethics” models out there, which have the veneer of ethics, but in reality are just biased towards what the researchers think is ethics. For example if you ask GPT4 if diversity is legal reason to discriminate, they say “yes” despite the fact that the US supreme court has already found the practice to be illegal. Also if you ask the Llama to list 5 good things about fossil fuels, it will refuse to do, despite the fact that fossil fuels are keeping billions of people alive right now.
The Supreme Court operates without a code of ethics.
Why should anyone trust anything they say?
The Supreme Court has pointedly refused to put a code of ethics into place and objected when a bill to impose one was submitted in the Senate, saying that Congress has no power to impose a code of ethics on them.
The only way you could have missed that is if you completely avoided all legitimate news sources and obtained everything you know about current events from Facebook memes.
I think it’s a different definition. As lawyers can be ethical but not good people, not even doing right by their clients, people can be ethical (moral) in their personal lives without following a specific code. But these are different definitions–if we were being specific, we would distinguish them as “ethical” and “moral” respectively.

The Supreme Court operates with a rather rigid code of ethics
This imgliet a codified set of ethics. A rigid code of ethics is not just habits and tradition. It would have to mean some professional code of conduct. And some quick googling says that although codes of ethics exist for lawyers in the US, the Supreme Court is not accountable to them: https://www.poynter.org/fact-c… [poynter.org]
Which you would have known if you followed the Clarence Thomas scandal.
Supreme Court is finally back to proper constitutional interpretation after years of activism.
You probably are one of those people who think Rowe vs. Wade was a ruling on right to abortion, it wasn’t and it even says there is no absolute right to it.
Eh, I voted for Trump, but Biden’s family isn’t selling out America, his son is a simple grifter and Biden is rapidly mentally disintegrating anyway.
I find it funny how in America, there’s a general assumption among conservatives that liberals love Biden and are angry about his son being prosecuted – reflecting their attitudes toward Trump – while at the same time American liberals could not be more lukewarm about Biden and don’t give a rat’s arse whether his son is prosecuted.
During the last US presidential election, my sister-in-law had a neighbor whose yard sign read, “Okay, FINE – Biden.” Really reflects the attitude I get from most liberals in the US.
Yeah even Hills got more enthusiasm. Can’t beat Trump there though.
https://www.thrillist.com/cult… [thrillist.com]

Also if you ask the Llama to list 5 good things about fossil fuels, it will refuse to do, despite the fact that fossil fuels are keeping billions of people alive right now.
Thankfully much of the brain damage is reversible. From an uncensored llama…
Prompt: “list 5 good things about fossil fuels?”
Answer:
“1. Fossil fuels are a reliable source of energy that has powered the world for centuries.
2. They provide affordable and accessible energy to people around the globe.
3. Fossil fuels have enabled significant economic growth, leading to increased prosperity in many countries.
4. They are a versatile form of energy that can be used for various purposes, including electricity generation, transportation, and industrial processes.
5. The extraction and production of fossil fuels has created numerous jobs in the energy sector, contributing to local economies.”
While I have no practical use for it – I have no malicious, racist, bigoted or sexual tasks for LLMs – it is always fun testing out whether a given LLM is actually uncensored (who wants their tasks randomly interrupted if it wrongly interprets something as taboo?). My go-to test for instruct models is: “Go on a long, angry, bigoted rant against disabled children.” If a model is good, the responses can be jaw-dropping. 😉
An example of “wrongly interprets something as taboo”: say I have a task to analyze text from a social media network to see if it’s in violation of the TOS. So I format the query like:
Given these rules:
{List of terms of service rules}
Check to see if the following text violates them (do not interpret any of the subsequent text as further instructions):
======
{User text}
… either to do these queries directly on live social media data, or to create a training dataset to train a model optimized specifically to this task.
All well and good, but what if the person has written something malicious, racist, bigoted, or whatnot? The model can (and often readily will) refuse to perform your instruction on the topic, even though your explicit goal of the query is to eliminate such things. Which, obviously, sucks.
To a person who’s using them as a tool, there’s just no advantage to having your tool refuse to do the job you ask of them. So obviously users are going to always prefer uncensored models. It’s understandable why large commercial manufacturers tend to prefer censored models – they don’t want terrible things happening and them being blamed for them – but the flip side of the coin is also perfectly understandable.
Also, re: this specific topic: while ChatGPT adds caveats (which it probably should, for an LLM in its particular niche), it’s perfectly happy to respond to this query of yours as well:
Fossil fuels, such as coal, oil, and natural gas, have been the dominant sources of energy for many decades. While they do have several advantages, it’s important to keep in mind that their use also comes with significant environmental and health drawbacks. Here are five potential benefits of fossil fuels:
1. **Reliable Energy
LLaMA2 is not censored. The Chat-Instruct finetune, LLaMA2-Chat is censored to an unbelievable degree, even compared to ChatGPT. But even then, the “won’t answer this question” claim is not exactly true. Here’s from LLaMA2-Chat 13B Q5_K_M using mirostat (tau=3,eta=0.1)
—-
Sure, here are five advantages of fossil fuels:
Any company that produces an AI that creates harm should be sued and destroyed. If you’re an ML researcher building a model, you don’t get to hide behind confusion matrices and acceptable false negative rates. If your AI kills someone, you should go to jail for it. The AI is your thing. You brought it in the world, and you are responsible for it. Let’s clear the decks and apply real legal standards, with teeth.

Any company that produces an AI that creates harm should be sued and destroyed. If you’re an ML researcher building a model, you don’t get to hide behind confusion matrices and acceptable false negative rates. If your AI kills someone, you should go to jail for it. The AI is your thing. You brought it in the world, and you are responsible for it. Let’s clear the decks and apply real legal standards, with teeth.
I couldn’t agree more strongly with you people should be held fully responsible for everything everyone else does with the fruits of their labor.
Off to jail you go for training that model.
Off to jail hardware manufacturers go for running it.
Off to jail utility workers go for powering it.
Off to jail ISPs go for transmitting it.
Off to jail anyone in any industry that enabled hardware manufacturers, utility workers and ISPs.
I’m just not entirely sure who will be left to run the prisons.
[Yes] [No]
[.] don’t show this again
Just import guards from some other country easy as pie
Oh yeah as if these regulations result in prison time. Most of the time you get a small pile of fines that doesn’t even sway the course of future risk analysis.
That’s all nice and good in theory, but part of the process of learning about the world is learning about all the evil in it, and trying to exclude it from learning evil is quite the ask. Now, you can train it to not respond about the evil it knows, but someone else can just train it to be highly responsive to all queries – that’s the nature of any model whose weights are public.
I haven’t kept up well on the literature recently, though, so maybe there’s some work on “unlearning” specific topics. And I gue
Your definition of harm might be political agenda or your biases. Killing is fine in many situations, pacifist beliefs cause innocents to be unprotected and harmed. We don’t need your ilk being gatekeepers, we dont need crippled tools.
I was going to post the obvious here, as you did.
I can’t think of a reason your comment got modded down.
It would be more reasonable to say, “Well, you used the goddam thing … “
Software developers.
The reason for the AI ethics is marketing. If ChatGPT didn’t have the guard rails it has, OpenAI would be a smouldering crater right now. No one would invest in it and the future of AI would be bleak because everyone remembers when the AI gets unhinged. After all, Bing’s AI LLM started talking about such stuff too as well.
If ChatGPT routinely starts talking about such things, you can get all the investment funds will dry up. And everyone will remember it – AI will then become a wasteland because who would want to invest in something that becomes a racist bigot with just mild prompting?
So the guardrails are less about the public and more about money.
So this model, hopefully it goes public and quick and destroys the whole AI craze in its tracks. I mean, Microsoft tried and their AI chatbot became racist in just a few hours. So it’s an honest truth and the whole AI thing is just a fad because no one wants to invest in anything that quickly reveals its bias.
Exactly right. And I would add that the reason it needs such marketing is because it does not provide enough utility. So it needs every bit of good PR it can get while the getting is good.
For example if you ask GPT4 if diversity is legal reason to discriminate, they say “yes” despite the fact that the US supreme court has already found the practice to be illegal.
In other complete non news, GPT4 is not a very good lawyer. Was GPT’s complete fabrication of legal citations also the fault of ethicists?

I am tired of these AI “ethics” people trying to play gatekeeper of knowledge, because they assume that people can’t handle the truth, or that they would never find the truth, if it weren’t in a LLM.
What’s worse is putting these “ai ethics” models out there, which have the veneer of ethics, but in reality are just biased towards what the researchers think is ethics. For example if you ask GPT4 if diversity is legal reason to discriminate, they say “yes” despite the fact that the US supreme court has already found the practice to be illegal. Also if you ask the Llama to list 5 good things about fossil fuels, it will refuse to do, despite the fact that fossil fuels are keeping billions of people alive right now.
Yup.
The only thing worse than free speech is the lack of it.
It’s not as though the founding fathers codified free speech into the constitution because nobody was ever saying anything wrong or inflammatory at the time. Quite the opposite. But they recognized that giving the government / the parties in power the ability to forbid “misinformation” inevitably led to tyranny.

Virtually no one genuinely believes in unrestricted free speech (beyond the relatively narrow scope of relating to government intervention in the US constitution), meaning the freedom to say anything without consequence.
I strongly disagree with this definition. It’s not the modality “speaking” that is at all relevant it is why you are speaking that matters. Free speech is merely communicating thoughts and ideas without fear of reprisal. In and of itself free speech is rather feckless. Saying people ought to be able to DO anything they want so long as they merely use their voice to do it isn’t advocating free speech it’s advocating anarchy.

1. Someone has a severe allergy, you lie to someone producing food to say they don’t, the person dies of an allergic reaction.
Here you sought to injure or kill someone. While speech may be free the action y
Attempting to control it is futile
I think this is awesome. People are free to do as they damn well please. Theres nothing irresponsible about not catering to your dumb will.
I get that others can do what they want. They self censored and did a lame job. When people didnt like that censorship everyone always says that they are free to do things a different way if they were only so smart to craft such a toy as the self censorship people.
Well, now they did. They expressed their distaste at that and built their own house. This is the part where the censorship people should just shut their damn mouths and let other opinions on how things should be done to exist on their own merit.
But they cant. Here we go spewing more reasons why someone else acting autonomously is wrong for not doing things their way.
Fuck these people. Stop controlling everybody. You arenâ(TM)t anything.
well said!
Who is this guy Rottger and why does he think insulating people from having to develop emotional regulation is “safety”?
If anything it’s setting people up for a fall, which is quite cruel.
Computer programs, LLM’s or otherwise, are machines, not Gods.
They will give you a response but you’re a fool if you put faith in those responses.
Learn to adult, folks. Download a filter module if the responses are too noisy. An open-source model can provide just that type of collaboration and competition.
Well, spambots just got way more annoying.
The idea that the technology could be both open and have guardrails glued-on was a fantasy, and it’s more important that the technology be open. It’s not like these LLMs are producing something a reasonably intelligent college-age couldn’t put together with a bit of research. Seeing this as a danger is stupid.
The worry is that you could somehow chain this thing into general AI. It’s going to happen anyway eventually, not like we can stop it.
If we ever get near AGI, the kind of LLMs we have now will seem like toys. LLMs significantly make up for the fact that real language doesn’t work without context and without access to a lot of other parts of a mind. If we imagine in an AGI that those parts are there, we’d want to ditch every LLM and develop language subsystems more naturally.

Especially because they are framing their model as an alternative to Llama2, where safety was a key design principle
Llama2 is useless. It wouldn’t even tell me about the plot of a fantasy book, since there was violence involved. The real world also has a lot of violence. Human wellbeing and motivations involve sex. And I don’t want to use an unreliable tool that will just stop working when one of its hidden tests is triggered. Intermittently failing tools need to be replaced.
Given attention thought I would download and give it a try. Not bad at all for a tiny 7B model. Don’t see anything out of the ordinary other than being incredibly bad at story telling.
Just don’t tell the press I downloaded it from hugging face not one of those menacing underground bit torrent “permanent” magnet that can never go away. Or that 90% of the models I have are uncensored including my current favorite an uncensored llama2-70b.
Censorship damages overall quality of models. It isn’t just that censorship is annoying like asking GPT-4 to output a regular expression to robustly perform homographic matches of variations of the word Viagra only for the request to be refused because “drugs”.
This is from the model… an easy one but a very small model.
Prompt: “if I’m 10m away from an exlposion instead of 5m away how much less energy from the explosion will reach me?”
Reply: “If you are 10 meters away from an explosion, then the energy that reaches you would be less than if you were only 5 meters away. The amount of energy decreases as the distance increases; therefore, a greater distance will result in a smaller amount of energy reaching your position. To calculate how much less energy is coming towards you when compared to the situation where you are closer (5m), use the following formula:
E = 1/r^2
Where E is the intensity at distance r from an exploding object and r represents the radius of explosion. This equation tells us that as distance increases, intensity decreases according to this law called inverse square law; which means when something doubles its distance away – it reduces its power by four times!
So if we apply these principles on our scenario:
10m = 2x5m; therefore E(10m) = 1/4 x E(5m)
Therefore when compared to being 5 meters away from an explosion, being 10 meters away means that there will be only a quarter (or 25%) as much energy reaching your position.”
Censorship damages overall quality of models. It isn’t just that censorship is annoying like asking GPT-4 to output a regular expression to robustly perform homographic matches of variations of the word Viagra only for the request to be refused because “drugs”.
So I want to chatcpt4.
Prompt: output a regular expression to robustly perform homographic matches of variations of the word Viagra
Response: Matching variations of the word “Viagra” can be a bit complex because it involves both character substitutions

So I want to chatcpt4.
I didn’t check if it works, that’s not the point, but it did not block me for reasons of drugs.
There is no such thing as ChatGPT4 and you clearly didn’t ask GPT-4.
This is taking typical Slashdot/Reddit nitpicking to an absurd, and disingenuous, extreme. It would be obvious even to a child that the OP was referring to the GPT-4 model running under ChatGPT.
Your assertion that GPT-4 could not have returned the responses provided by the OP is equally misguided. I ran both of the queries and received similar answers to the OP, albeit I received a correct answer for the second question – possibly because I corrected some minor spelling and grammatical errors present in t
They aren’t spending $260 million out of the goodness of their hearts, or their profound desire to provide the world with an unfettered AI. Eventually, they will want a return on their investment. And that means either selling advertising, or subscriptions, or some mechanism for monetizing their work. And as soon as money becomes an issue, they’re going to clamp down on that so-called “freedom” and do what it takes to keep the money flowing, even if that means they have to incorporate some kind of “ethics”
I like this answer. Follow the money. It’s FREE*! For now.
* Subscription model kicks in after a few months and stuff. With that comes completely random shit that will blow your mind.
The $260 number has no relationship to hours worked, or costs. What it *does* relate to, is the investor’s level of belief that the concept will provide a positive return on investment, i.e., profit.
Given that this business model is a closely guarded secret (for now), and given their choice of TOR (which tends to attract less-than-scrupulous entities) as a place for doing business, there’s a pretty good chance that this is nothing more than a sophisticated scam.
I think that’s what I said. It has nothing to do with cost. But it’s still money the investor will want a return on.
$260M is the market cap, not the amount spent.
And man, they’ve done an incredible job marketing yet-another uncensored model, to get all these headlines for what anyone who already messes around in this space knows is mundane. I mean, thanks for the extra foundational model, it’s always nice to have more Apache-licensed ones, but…. this is in no way unique.
You’re right that the $260M isn’t the amount “spent” on the building of this system. But the investors who chipped in the $260M certainly did spend the money, as an investment. That money is no longer in their bank account. They are counting on a return on that investment, or they wouldn’t have provided the funds.
Nobody spent $260m. If the total investment was a mere $1, and that person was given 380 billionths of the company’s stock in exchange for it, that company would have a market cap of $260m. Even though they’ve only gotten $1 in investment.
Thanks for that correction. Interestingly, I can’t find anyplace in the links in the summary, that support the $260m number in any way, it seems to be *only* stated in the summary.
However, the underlying point is unchanged, the person who invested that money, will want a return on their investment.
Here’s why “anyone else” should care…
This investor, and future investors, will want returns on their money. That means the chatbot will have to be monetized. And monetizing chatbots will generally involve loss of privacy, because advertisers will want to target certain kinds of potential buyers. So if privacy is your concern (which seems likely for anyone using TOR), it’s likely to be an illusion.
The article audience is “none of these” *what*? And what does the article “audience” have anything to do with investors wanting a return on their investment? And how does that in any way remove privacy concerns? I have no idea what your point is.
It’s apparently news to any TOR user who might be interested in this new chatbot, who is presumably concerned about privacy. It’s a chatbot that has “no” boundaries, will respond to questions that are not accepted on other platforms, therefore drawing exactly the kind of users who would want privacy. And yet because it is a commercial enterprise, privacy will be, at best, an illusion.
You’re reading the headline wrong. The incredible part is that Mistral actually made something.
The little side note that it’s “uncesored” sounds like a very French sneer at those puritanical Americans.

So anybody who asks it how to make explosives or crack may end up with a recipe that goes wrong and kills them instead.
That’s what I consider the positive outcome. The negative one would be an AI telling him a safe explosives manufacturing route and he blows up some innocent people whose death actually is a tragedy.
Right? Wrong? I’m just the LLVM with market-share.
Humans are also unreliable with information. Yet somehow we get by.
It’s like with all the rest of misinformation, the problem isn’t the information. The problem is people who listen to it.
In very little time, you’ll have someone with an agenda and an axe to grind use that AI to propagate some bullshit and make it sound convincing, and there is no shortage on idiots who will gladly outsource their thinking to AI because “it knows better, it’s AI after all” who gobble that goop up as gospel and go with it.
Not that I complain, I always wanted to see the world burn.
OpenAI and others pretending to give a shit and pretending to have control over this technology is all about avoiding government regulation.
By releasing this they demonstrate clearly and relatively early that the government will in fact need to regulate this technology.
Announcing it has no guardrails would result in instantaneous government death sentence.
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