Laundering of CC/Trial Accounts/Enterprise LLM inference is already a HUGE market, leveraged in part for distillation attacks on western AI.
A whole country’s worth of accounts just got access to a service we know is being laundered en masse and is also the same tech currently propping up many economies at the moment.
That same country is known for laundering other forms of liquidity. This is par for the course, not propaganda. And it’s going to be a huge problem by November.
have you considered not slandering malta? Its a country with people. to reduce it to this random news item that may or may not be rooted in reality is just offensive.
hn is turning more and more into a propaganda platform where bigotry like this is encouraged.
We had a mandatory ChatGPT training course at work. You had to sign up in limited space classes. This is a large company, needless to say it was chaos to get a significant number of people to participate.
I got a spot. We were shown how to copy and paste data from excel and other data sources into the chat interface. We had sample data to work with, there was always someone in class who would say "mine didn't work." The developers in the room asked about codex, the instructor said she wasn't a developer.
We did get a certificate though. There was nothing they could teach that you couldn't learn by using the free version in your own time. Whatever they are doing with the Maltese government is just to increase the monthly active user count.
Yes and even if you are paying, you’re still the product!
That’s whats happens in two sided markets. Everyone’s the product.
The original adage of “if you’re not paying, you’re the product” doesn’t necessarily rule out the converse. The fact that the grandfather comment made a freudian slip makes it funnier.
Hear hear! And those who say paying is the only time one has a chance to not be the product should look at getting involved with a genuine charity or volunteer program too. There are no universal rules about this kind of thing.
Not long ago nearly everyone in the anglosphere had a habit to talk to a pastor, revealing all the dirty secrets under the veil of anonymity. The Church was an incredibly informed organization. Today OpenAI & Anthrophic are re-creating a parody on that tradition: people talk to an AI pastor, under the veil of anonymity, and divulge their darkest secrets.
It's sobering to think that if every single person in Malta -- an entire country! -- signed up for ChatGPT and used it weekly, ChatGPT’s WAU would increase by only a few tenths of a percent.
Honestly depending on how it’s implemented the course could be really socially useful, both for establishing some baseline knowledge that could help avoid some of the pitfalls of too-credulous use of AI and for spurring people to innovate in their local businesses because they’ve been exposed to ideas earlier than would happen “naturally” as ideas just percolate through society
I run some numbers, how much would it cost to build MaltaGPT - sovereign hosted ChatGPT.
Malta has a population of 500k. Let's assume 100k people use MaltaGPT daily, and they send an average of 10 messages per day, so roughly 1M messages per day. That averages 694 per minute, but at peak could be 3-5x that, so let's say 3000 per minute. Usage will of course vary by day of week and time of day (they could partner with a Pacific island and share inference hardware).
Those 3000 messages per minute translate to 50 messages per second. Let's say average prompt input is 5k tokens, and output is 500. So 250k tokens per second for prompt processing (let's ignore caching for simplicity) and 25k tokens per second for output decode.
If we take a 500B dense model, that concerts to roughly 1 trillion flops per token. So we need 250 petaflops per second of prompt processing and 25 petaflops for output decode. So 275 PFLOPS in compute.
That may sound like a lot, however a NVIDIA DGX B200 machine (8xB200) has a compute of 144 PFLOPS at FP4. That is assuming 100% efficiency which isn't really possible, and we also need to factor in memory usage which we would be limited more by than compute. So let's say we'd need 10 of them. For an entire country to have a sovereign version of ChatGPT.
The cloud cost to rent one machine is around $50/hour, so that would mean our cluster comes to $4.8m per year. However the list price of a machine is around €400k, so the price to buy the cluster outright would be around €5m (you need the rest of the data center too), with operating costs of around €500k per year.
Would be interesting long term if this sways public opinion about data centers in Malta. I do support though AI literacy in general and this is a good step. Would wonder about the deal in how much this is actually costing Malta if at all.
Unlikely. Other than the telcos there's only one proper commercial datacentre here. Space is very constrained and the electricity supply stability + summer heat aren't a fun combination
As a complete layman, I do wonder why you would bother building a datacenter at a place that everyone agrees is going to be basically underwater in the next 50-100 years.
OpenAI is inherently incentivized to sell as much LLM compute as possible, that is not neutral "AI literacy". You don't let tobacco companies make anti smoking education either.
Data centers in a country that has barely enough water and electricity for its citizens? That is utterly ridiculous. This AI hype is going crazy, it's all an insane joke, right?
The subsidies deployed by the industry are so massive I don't even know if consumers need public assistance here. It's kinda like the gov was subsidizing web hosting or basic banking. The price for a regular consumer already barely hovers above zero.
Just look at this list of services included in Google's AI Pro subscription[1]. Google took everything it could think any consumer might need and bundled for $20/mo. There's even $10 GCP credit (that you can use for AI API calls).
It's a ploy to drive adoption. Once it's considered essential they can turn the screws in massive contracts with governments, big enterprises, universities, and public school systems. Probably some genuine competition on price, but the equilibrium price is probably below cost and not sustainable.
If only it came with YouTube Premium... Most of that list is just AI in existing products which is not all that interesting. You get better value and models through ChatGPT or Claude especially if you are a developer
That's not close to "everything ... any consumer might need". It's a list of useless things, other than 5TB of storage. Granted, cloud storage typically sells for more than this, so they are offering Gemini for something like -$15/mo.
> "Malta’s AI for All initiative will offer people of all backgrounds the opportunity to learn how AI can be used responsibly through a course developed by the University of Malta. The course is designed to help people understand what AI is, what it can and can’t do, and how to use it responsibly at home and work. After the course is completed, citizens can access ChatGPT Plus for one year at no cost to them."*
I’m personally not a fan of OpenAI always referring to their model as “providing intelligence as a utility.” Sounds very condescending, are you saying this isn’t something we already have? If that’s the opinion, may be good to reflect on how the models were trained. On millions upon millions of books which no authors were compensated for.
But that’s besides the point, the whole initiative is self-defeating by design. This isn’t like power, it’s something humans do inherently possess, this is simply a way to amplify what already exists. Intelligent people using AI generally seem to be more productive than when they don’t use it, and lazy or unintelligent people generally see cognitive decline, at least based on what I’ve heard online but I could be wrong on that.
So saying “this is where you get intelligence” is both false marketing and destructive to OpenAI as a company, since by all definitions, it isn’t true.
> I’m personally not a fan of OpenAI always referring to their model as “providing intelligence as a utility.” Sounds very condescending, are you saying this isn’t something we already have?
Your body also generates electricity and natural gas. Do you also get upset when energy companies claim to provide these services as a utility?
"Humans also produce farts" is a new low. Can the AI people be interned or moved to some seasteading libertarian hellhole so the rest of us can live a normal life?
My brother is actually moving to one (although that's not the core focus of the community, but they are extremely sceptical of AI there).
I suspect in a few years it's going to be strange to talk to him and other people there. It's already hard to explain to people that "Yeah, you can have a phone call and it can sound like your dad but it might just be a chat bot."
>I’m personally not a fan of OpenAI always referring to their model as “providing intelligence as a utility.” Sounds very condescending, are you saying this isn’t something we already have?
We do and we don't. If you would go out there and talk to a random person about elliptic curves and matrix multiplications and whether you hit a performance ceiling in a specific 2x2 multiplication thingy with Karatsuba and wnaf, they would not know half the words, but the lying and flattering machine will be able to hold the conversation.
The thing will not get all things right and bullshit me about DSTU4145 using normal basis, will lie about A being set to 1 for all standard curves, but it's definitely more intelligence that you can get from a taxi driver.
If it's not general superintelligence right there for five bucks a piece, I don't know what is
These philosophical questions are decades if not older https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room
And the answer is "depends on who you ask and how many capabilities it has"
Does the prayer by a kafir not knowing the language in which the prayer is recited get forgiveness?
I mean, what's the point of this question even. The thing is either useful or fun or it's not. I personally think the whole AI is the work of devil tempting us, but some people would say that about pork sausages and Paulaner and I like my pork sausages with Paulaner.
> We do and we don't. If you would go out there and talk to a random person about elliptic curves and matrix multiplications and whether you hit a performance ceiling in a specific 2x2 multiplication thingy with Karatsuba and wnaf, they would not know half the words, but the lying and flattering machine will be able to hold the conversation.
Then perhaps their signalling isn't meant for you but for people who have to pay those pesky expensive intelligent people like translators, programmers, designers and writers. Those people would benefit greatly if they could rent intelligence much cheaper from companies like OpenAI.
Can't imagine the size of brown envelope. Handing over your entire nation's thoughts to a foreign company operating under US Cloud Act in normal circumstances would be considered a risk to national security. Why not invest in home grown talent and companies?
Malta is part of the EU. I am personally very surprised about this partnership, just in the context of data security, privacy and the GDPR. How is the privacy of these EU citizens protected when all their prompts and data is sent to OpenAI? How do these EU citizens submit a request for all their personal data to be deleted from OpenAI records, a right they have under the GDPR with a compliant data processor?
- Malta is selling passports and harboring criminals who kill journalists (we all remember Daphne Caruana Galizia don't we?).
- buying votes/parties there would get you 10 times the MEPs you get in Germany or France.
- their mayors can veto EU policy... This EU-thing really is democratic!
so: I doubt anyone has to care about that pesky GDPR if they buy the government of Malta.
ChatGPT is already available to users in the EU. It already has an EU-aligned terms of service. Not that I'd trust them, because the GDPR has been borderline useless in reality, but there's nothing particularly legally interesting about this offering.
> How do these EU citizens submit a request for all their personal data to be deleted from OpenAI records
Probably by sending an e-mail to a designated address, like most services that operate in the EU, but you can read their TOS if you'd like to be sure.
I mean, it's just a literal non-event legally. I'm repeating myself here, but OpenAI already operates in the EU. EU users can already use ChatGPT, with some assurances about adhering to GDPR. Offering the ad-free tier to a subset of EU users for free, who could already use the tier with ads for free, doesn't change anything legally in regards to data processing.
If you want my commentary on the political context, obviously I think it's not very intelligent for nations to be trusting a US corporation with all of their citizens' data. I think the most impactful use of LLMs is going to be their usage as surveillance and propaganda tools, so this is probably not a prudent decision. But legally, as pertains to GDPR, this is not different from the status quo in any way.
It's an interesting way to control the population.. let them delegate thinking to systems, and then just control the systems to respond to your (you = government) preference.
My analogy is using AI is like using a navigation system, you can end up delegating everything to it and drive into a river...
For OpenAI because they get a lot of money and and for the government because they can keep tabs on how people use LLMs to make sure they're not doing anything naughty.
I used to work for a hosting company, and all the shady business like exploitation of children and sex workers came from there unfortunately. But that’s because people move their business there for legal reasons, not because of their residents I assume.
Everyone in Malta could already, before this deal/plan, and even without it now, use ChatGPT (or any other LLM model/service, whether free or premium.)
They are saying that the product is already available then implying a government deal on behalf of all citizens doesn't matter because the product is already available.
Anyone can use ChatGPT for free already. The vast majority of people using AI as a search engine alternative/chatbot never have any reason to pay. You don't even need an account.
The fact that a nation provides free access to SOTA models to all his citizen via this partnership, I mean it's not something I have seen before, therefore I find it interesting, also Malta is not too far from me.
How?? Are you saying there's a lot of silent AI-boosters on HN voting it down despite almost every single comment here being non-obsequious? Looks like your model of reality has detached from modelling reality.