I’m genuinely in two minds about the abliterated model debate. It boils down to a liberty v paternalism debate that plagues many political issues.

On one hand, I dislike overly broad safeguards and the idea that a few companies ought to control what you can and can’t do with models. In the set of things banned from most modeled, there are clearly positive beneficial ways to use them: white hat applications of cyber, research in defense tech, research in model development, biotech. Freedom to the user is a worthy maxim.

On the other, we know there are tons of malicious actors in these domains. Maybe the actual 0-days aren’t being found by abliterated models yet, but if you look at the Cloudflare CEOs post on the millions of exploits attempted within 24hrs, it’s clear malicious behavior exists. It exists in all the areas typically safeguarded: bio, cyber, defense.

The key deciding factor on liberty (let the people decide) vs paternalism (prevent people from use) is: does it harm others? This is at the center of the debate on guns, drugs, gambling and more. These are hard debates. Different countries often land on different sides of the same issue. When benefits broadly outweigh even broader harm, we allow it. We allow cars on the road despite them being heavy killing machines. In those cases, we both heavily regulate its use and rely on empirical data to measure how severe the harm. For cars vs guns, many more people do intentional harm with one vs other.

AI safeguards fall very squarely in this debate. Focusing just on one issue: models can both defend against cyber vulnerabilities yet multiply 100s of times and say, use known CVEs to immediately exploit software (and cause harm to others).

Are AI models cars or guns? It’s difficult to say. For one, every new generation of them poses a wholly different risk / reward profile. And secondly, we don’t as know the empirically how people are using models without safeguards. Downsides themselves are difficult to reason about because it’s not as simple as “99% of people use it for good”. We have to consider tail risk too.

So overall, I’m in two minds.