if this were true it would not be possible for the system to read the watermark.

You confuse "invisible to humans" with "invisible to statistical analysis". Humans can't, for example, see the difference between metameric colours. Statistical analysis can. Humans can't see minor drift at scales where Brownian motion dominates. Statistical analysis can. Humans can't see the difference between background disease rates and new rising threats. Statistical analysis can. On and on. Statistical analysis is a far more powerful tool than human perceptual abilities.

this is also a lie. Identical thoughts must be expressed identically, otherwise they are, in fact, *different* thoughts.

I literally gave an example above. If you saw "picked a mango", "selected and picked a mango", "from within the tree, picked a mango", you would never think there was anything going on in the choice, and it isn't going to change the story one iota.

Tesco's - one of the UK's largest supermarkets - came out a few months ago and said "We've migrated off VMWare because of the licensing". They did it in months. On the major backends running every store in the country.

They had a massive dispute with VMWare and are suing them (they say they bought a perpetual licence, VMWare then cut them off), but while they did that... they just migrated their ENTIRE infrastructure.

Sure, it's a big thing to do. But it's not impossible, doesn't take years and - like Tesco - you don't need to wait to do it. If it's THAT business-critical? All the more reason to have an alternative ready to move to at a moment's notice.

Companies CHOOSE to get tied in, they CHOOSE to only ever run one system, they CHOOSE to make the migration painful, they CHOOSE to hold back on it in the hopes they can negotiate to carry on just as they are. And those are all DUMB from a business-continuity point of view and no substantial organisation should be allowing that to happen.

Pretending that huge organisations paying Broadcom millions are somehow powerless in this is actual complicity in the worthless side of IT where everything is just absent of any redundancy, resiliency, independence, failover, etc. etc. etc.

Exactly. Base the time zones on GMT and adjust your daily schedule accordingly.

("It actually makes RAM needs worse" -> "MoEs actually make RAM needs worse")

It actually makes RAM needs worse than a dense model, for a given quality.

That said, inference techniques like FreeToken are improving MoE swapping performance, so it's not as bad as it once was. Honestly, I would not be at all surprised if we start doing training in a swap-aware manner, where expert cache misses count as loss and models can queue experts to start loading before they're needed. Could even train in two tiers of loading - RAM and disk. Wouldn't that be great? Could run multi-terabyte models on consumer hardware. Training would tend to tend to concentrate key logic and reasoning on small number of very active experts, mixed reasoning/knowledge on less common experts that are usually kept in RAM, and rarer knowledge on experts that usually remain on-disk until needed.

There are well known, reputable abliterators on HuggingFace.

Also, censorship usually (not always) is something you care about for chats, not agentic work.

A .safetensors or .gguf model cannot run code unless you let it. No agentic framework = all it can do is write text. It can't hurt you directly. At worst, it can only lie to you.

It's big, but not good for its size. They're using tricks to pretend that they're better than they are. For example, compare the numbers that they list for the competion on DeepSWE up against the actual DeepSWE scores.

Not cool, Mistral.

Artificial Analysis is overrated, but yes, Mistral is playing fast and loose with their claims.

It takes one hell of a toll to try to do verbal exams 1:1 on students to evaluate them.

Nobody said "verbal exams 1:1".

The only thing that is required is that they be separated from their computers and their phones.

Nobody, I repeat, nobody who uses AI is going to see "OpenAI adding watermarks" and think, "Oh, I better use AI more, especially OpenAI".

And nobody, I repeat, nobody who doesn't use AI is going to see "OpenAI adding watermarks" and think, "Oh, I better use AI more, now that it'll be easier to see that what I did is made by AI."

It is not "an advertisement of the power of the technology". It's a regulation forced on them by the EU's AI Act, which neither companies nor users want.

As Eric Raymond (ESR) says, AI is a force multiplier. My elaboration: If you are good at what you do, it will let you do accomplish more good stuff faster. If you are not very bright, AI will let you be not bright more efficiently, but it won't make you bright. It's just a tool. It needs to be utilized correctly. There is no shortage of things in this world that can do tremendous damage if not used properly. AI is nothing new in that regard.

Perhaps you should be realizing by now that homework is no longer a viable way to test how well students actually know the subject matter, and the only viable way to do so is in-class tests/exercises - frequent enough and worth enough of the grade to force them to study between lessons.

OR, alternatively, you could just keep doing what you're doing, and instead, in effect grade people on:

Comparably poor grades:
* People who actually do the work by hand
* "AI N00bs" who let stuff like that slip through

Comparably good grades:
* AI-experienced people who know enough to skim over the work, do multiple passes, or issue prompts that prevent such tells from getting into the work

Wherein, in effect, your net reward/punishment is inverted vs. what you should want it to be.

Closing one's eyes and ears to the fact that the environment students operate in has changed isn't an acceptable option. Education must adapt. And watermarks, BTW, will only catch "the n00bs"; more experienced / up to date students will keep track of what watermarks and what doesn't, and use AIs that don't watermark, or de-watermarking services.

"AI slop" is so 2024. That argument isn't valid any more.

I'm surprised you didn't use the word "slop". Spewing a bunch of slogans that would have to be more clever to make it on to bumper stickers makes you look like the people you are complaining about. There are legitimate criticisms to make about AI, and ways to support and defend those arguments. You are not doing that.

I'll repeat: watermarks are anti-marketing. They discourage use.