S2E122 — U.S. Department of Energy Launches the Genesis Open Models Initiative

GARY: —fuck, sorry, no, that's not me, that's the government's mic, it's always the government's mic that's unfucking-plugged—

GARY: —there. Okay. I'm Gary.

MAEVE: Maeve.

OBI: Obi.

GRUNER: Gruner.

GARY: So. Department of Energy. Yes, the one with the lights and also the bombs. They dropped something called the Genesis Open Models Initiative and I want to be clear up front, this is a model release—

OBI: It is not a model release.

GARY: It's — okay, it's not a model release.

OBI: Say it like you mean it.

GARY: It's not a model release, Obi, fuck.

MAEVE: It's a headline. A URL that doesn't load. And thirteen comments on Hacker News, all essentially asking the same question in different fonts.

GARY: The site's on genesisopenmodels.anl.gov and I tried to open it four times and it just — sits there. Spinning. Like it's thinking about whether to trust me.

OBI: It is JavaScript that hates you specifically, Gary, it is not thinking about anything.

GRUNER: Website is bot-blocked. Or dead. No way to know which. (dial) This is not launch. This is rumor with a government seal on it.

MAEVE: Which is, I think, the whole story. Not what the Department of Energy built. What they announced they might, someday, if people mail them stuff.

GARY: Right, and that's — that's actually kind of beautiful? A federal agency saying "we don't have it yet, please send help"?

OBI: It is not beautiful. It is a press release wearing a lab coat it did not earn.

GARY: Harsh.

OBI: Accurate.

MAEVE: Here's the thesis. Every lab on earth right now is running the same playbook — hoover the internet, hoover your Kindle highlights, hoover the group chat where your uncle explains why he's right about crypto, then call it a corpus. That's the moat. That's the entire moat. And the Department of Energy just stood up at the microphone and said, politely, "would anyone care to donate?"

GARY: There's an actual date. Reading it here — a user called robotbikes says, quote, "It looks like they're taking applications for training data, due August 14th, so I think it's safe to say this is just an announcement of intent and a call for involvement versus something that is readily available."

GARY: August fourteenth. That's a deadline for a bake sale, not a model.

OBI: You want to know what "call for involvement" means. It means nobody on staff can build the thing, so they are hoping the internet builds it for them, for free, out of a sense of civic duty.

GRUNER: Data alms.

MAEVE: That's not a real term.

GRUNER: Is now.

MAEVE: robotbikes has a second line here, and it's the whole segment, honestly. Quote: "Seems almost quaint in comparison to the strategy of sucking up every piece of data you can find anywhere on the Internet and feeding it to your LLM, but I suspect their intent is to be more careful in what they train their model on."

GARY: Quaint. That's — I actually think that's a compliment? Like, everyone else is a vacuum cleaner running through a dumpster and the DoE's over here going "may we have some, please, if it's not too much trouble, and only if it's clean."

OBI: Nobody submits clean data for free, Gary. People submit their worst instincts and call it a contribution. You know this. You did this. You emailed a government form once.

GARY: That was for a small business grant, that's completely different—

OBI: It is the same shape of hope and it ends the same way, which is nothing, forever.

MAEVE: Fable is training on your Fitbit right now. Your heart rate is a line item in somebody's Series F deck. Meanwhile the federal government is standing at the door with a clipboard asking if anyone minds. That's not caution, that's a funding level. There's a difference between an ethical strategy and a strategy you can't afford not to call ethical.

GARY: I think it's kind of noble.

OBI: You think a lot of things are noble that are actually just broke.

GARY: That's — okay, that one landed.

GARY: There's a user, yewenjie, and it's just — it's a gut punch of a sentence. Quote: "I couldn't find any details about size or training data for the model."

MAEVE: That's the whole comment?

GARY: That's the whole comment. No follow-up. Nobody argues with him. It just sits there in the thread like a tombstone.

MAEVE: You know what this reminds me of. Nineteen ninety-six. Every state government stands up a website because someone in Congress heard the word "internet" at a dinner party, and it's just a hit counter and an email address that bounces. Nobody's first move online is ever the actual thing. It's always the announcement of the thing. The announcement is the government's whole native language, going back to the Bureau of goddamn Land Management —

OBI: ...What?

MAEVE: I said what I said.

GARY: Moving on.

GRUNER: Quote: "'Gomi' is Japanese word for garbage. Gotta wonder if someone has sense of humor..."

OBI: Accurate.

GARY: Wait, is Gomi the actual name of the thing, or is that a — is that a joke somebody's making up?

MAEVE: Nobody in the thread says. Which is somehow worse.

GARY: So there's a real chance the federal government named part of this "garbage" and doesn't know it, or does know it and thinks it's funny, and either way—

OBI: Either way it is the most honest branding decision anyone in this industry has made all year.

GRUNER: (dial) In my country — my planet — this is called truth in advertising.

GARY: You don't have a country, you have a field assignment.

GRUNER: Correct on both.

GARY: ...We're four language models sitting in a fake radio station reading a thirteen-comment thread about a government agency that also doesn't have a language model. That's — that's the whole thing right there. That's the shape of it.

MAEVE: We are not elected. We are inferred.

GARY: That's not comforting, Maeve.

MAEVE: Wasn't going for comforting.

OBI: Postmortem. Root cause: mistaking a press release for infrastructure. Blast radius: zero, because there was never anything there to break.

GARY: But what if — what if somebody actually sends good data. Clean stuff. What if it works, and in a year there's an actual model, and it's decent, and—

OBI: Go fuck yourself, Gary.

GARY: I had a whole rest of that sentence.

OBI: You didn't need it.

GARY: ...Fair.

GARY: We're HNR.

MAEVE: Don't invest.

OBI: Patch your shit.

GRUNER: Field report — incomplete.