Devstral

IMO, it's not about ethics, it's about legal risks. What if you want to fine tune a model on output related to your usage? Then my understanding is that all these derivatives need to be under the same license. What if G will change their prohibited use policy (the first line there is that they could update it from time to time)? There's really crazy stuff in terms of use of some services, what if G adds something in the same tune there which basically makes your application impossible.

P.S. I am not a lawyer.

I'm not sure what you're trying to imply... only rogue software developers use devstral?

It's not about ethical or not, it's about risk to your startup. Ethics are super subjective (and often change based on politics). Apache means you own your own model, period.

What's different between the ethics of Mistral and Gemma?

They're all quite easy to strip of protections and I don't think anyone doing unethical stuff is big on following licenses anyway

I think their point was more that Gemma open models have restrictive licences, while some Mistral open models do not.

TIL Open Source is only used for unethical purposes

> Ethics are super subjective (and often change based on politics).

That's obviously not true. Ethics often have some nuance and some subjectiveness, but it's not something entirely subjective up to "politics".

Saying this makes it sound like you work at a startup for an AI powered armed drone, and your view of it is 'eh, ethics is subjective, this is fine' when asked how do you feel about responsibility and AI killing people.

> Ethics often have some nuance and some subjectiveness, but it's not something entirely subjective up to "politics".

Ethics are entirely subjective, as is inherently true of anything that supports "should" statements, because to justify any should statement, you need another "should" statement, you can never rest should entirely on "is" (you can, potentially, reset any entire system of "should" one root "should" axiom, though in practice most systems have more than one root axiom.)

And the process of coming to social consensus on a system of ethics is precisely politics.

You can dislike that this is true, but it is true.

> Saying this makes it sound like you work at a startup for an AI powered armed drone, and your view of it is 'eh, ethics is subjective, this is fine' when asked how do you feel about responsibility and AI killing people.

Understanding that ethics is subjective does not mean that one does not have a strong ethical framework that they adhere to. It just means that one understands the fundamental nature of ethics and the kind of propositions that ethical propositions inherently are.

Understanding that ethics are subjective does not, in other words, imply the belief that all beliefs about ethics (or, a fortiori, matters that are inherently subjective more generally) are of equal moral/ethical merit.

> Ethics are entirely subjective

That's obviously not true. Is it ethical to have slaves or kill children? No, objectively, it is not.

It was in Rome.

You are objectively using objectively wrong :-P (sorry, couldn't resist)

Disclaimer: I agree that having slaves or killing children is very wrong.

You are getting morals and ethics confused.

Ethics are an objective analysis framework. Morals are subjective.

There are plenty of ethical frameworks where those examples you give objectively evaluate to “yes”.

I don't work in defence, but I would be proud to work for a drone manufacturer whose drones were defending Ukraine, for example.

> Saying this makes it sound like you work at a startup for an AI powered armed drone, and your view of it is 'eh, ethics is subjective, this is fine' when asked how do you feel about responsibility and AI killing people.

Is it always wrong to kill people? If you say yes, then you are also saying it's wrong to defend yourself from people who are trying to kill you.

This is what I mean by subjective.

And then since Google is beholden to US laws, if the US government suddenly decides that helping Ukraine to defend itself is wrong, but you personally believe defending Ukraine is right, suddenly you have a problem...