Malta is an important component of Russia's money laundering Laundromat system.

"Malta’s corruption is not just in the heart of government, it’s the entire body"

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/dec/03/malta-...

• justshutup123

  today at 4:22 AM

  [flagged]

  • jerrythegerbil

    today at 4:34 AM

    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.

    • justshutup123

      today at 4:44 AM

      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.

  • gmerc

    today at 4:29 AM

    Thanks Ivan

    • bingaweek

      today at 4:36 AM

      The overt hatred people here feel for Russians would make an antisemite blush. This is on the same level as calling random people Schlomo.

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.

Next, maybe Anthropic can make Sicily an offer it can’t refuse.

All that data on all Malta citizens. Remember, if you're more paying, you're the product

• zamadatix

  today at 3:30 AM

  Remember, if the government says it's free it almost certainly means the people are actually paying for it.

  • EGreg

    today at 3:44 AM

    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.

    • zamadatix

      today at 3:53 AM

      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.

• today at 3:43 AM

• akomtu

  today at 4:16 AM

  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 a voluntary two hour online AI course with 1 year ChatGPT premium reward. Getting AI basics to the people with playground.

• emsign

  today at 3:59 AM

  Getting free data from every Maltese citizen rather.

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.

• aaronbrethorst

  today at 4:42 AM

  Malta has a population of 574,000 people. That's slightly more people than transit through the NYC metro area's airports on a daily basis.

  Yes, ChatGPT has a large user base, but Malta's not a particularly meaningful datapoint in terms of the population size.

It's a one year free trial, after that it costs money.

• Sophira

  today at 2:00 AM

  And only after a mandatory course, if I'm reading the article correctly.

  • alpinisme

    today at 2:15 AM

    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

• emsign

  today at 4:00 AM

  What a great marketing campaign. How huge was the bribe from OpenAI to the Maltese government to sell out their citizens?

Openai seems to be fast forwarding the original Facebook playbook: lobbying for regulatory moat and now OpenAI zero[0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook_Zero

• lucaspiller

  today at 4:44 AM

  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.

  So per citizen: €10 upfront and €1 per year.

• today at 4:43 AM

Gosh how generous of malta government officials to transfer those tax earnings straight to the 1%ers pockets

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.

• purrcat259

  yesterday at 8:58 PM

  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

  • SOLAR_FIELDS

    today at 2:11 AM

    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.

    • rileymat2

      today at 3:26 AM

      Wouldn’t 45 to 95 years of use be plenty of time for ROI?

    • today at 3:35 AM

    • IncreasePosts

      today at 2:22 AM

      You're thinking of the maldives.

• Yokohiii

  today at 3:44 AM

  What has this to do with AI literacy?

• preisschild

  yesterday at 9:12 PM

  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.

  • charcircuit

    today at 2:56 AM

    >You don't let tobacco companies make anti smoking education either.

    Many jurisdictions literally force them to put education on the boxes.

    • zamadatix

      today at 3:35 AM

      Education written by the government, not the tobacco company. Hence why the tobacco companies weren't keen on it.

• emsign

  today at 4:02 AM

  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).

[1] https://support.google.com/googleone/answer/14534406?hl=en

• gwerbin

  yesterday at 9:16 PM

  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.

  • loloquwowndueo

    today at 12:32 AM

    First step of enshittification :)

• weird-eye-issue

  today at 1:18 AM

  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

  • LeoPanthera

    today at 3:43 AM

    It does come with a discount for YouTube Premium.

• dwa3592

  yesterday at 8:47 PM

  Thank you for this comment and holy cow, I have the pro subscription and didn't know it came with that many bells.

• yesterday at 9:16 PM

• pishpash

  today at 2:07 AM

  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.

• conradev

  today at 12:30 AM

  The government does subsidize basic banking, though?

• ecommerceguy

  yesterday at 9:14 PM

  I had a free 3 month trial I just terminated. I deemed it too expensive.

  • loloquwowndueo

    today at 12:32 AM

    Free is too expensive? Were you expecting to get paid for using it?

    • esafak

      today at 12:38 AM

      It should be understood that he canceled before Google started charging him.

> "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."*

• dawnerd

  yesterday at 9:06 PM

  Gotta get them hooked and reliant on it. It’s why they subsidized the entire software industry to adopt it.

  • 34df

    today at 1:36 AM

    OAI really believes LLMs are going to have the same revolutionary effect as personal computers did.... lmao.

    • beering

      today at 3:12 AM

      Yeah, I think we can all agree that personal computers were a mistake.

      • Forgeties79

        today at 3:37 AM

        Even reading this as a sarcastic comment I’m not sure what you’re trying to say here.

• julianlam

  yesterday at 8:34 PM

  > for one year

  snort

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.

• arcanemachiner

  yesterday at 9:04 PM

  > 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?

  • malfist

    yesterday at 9:08 PM

    Is the electricity or natural gas that your body produces a defining feature of humanity?

    Does AI actually provide intelligence?

    • today at 3:52 AM

    • yesterday at 9:55 PM

  • raq98

    yesterday at 9:11 PM

    "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?

    • archagon

      yesterday at 10:22 PM

      I think we’ll need certified human/no-ai communities at some point in the near future.

      • trollbridge

        today at 1:34 AM

        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."

      • bluefirebrand

        today at 12:54 AM

        I'm in, where do we start?

        If I never have to hear anything about AI ever again it will be too soon

• kovek

  today at 2:15 AM

  LLMs are like a search engine that autocompletes. It's a tool.

• pizza

  yesterday at 9:05 PM

  you can say the same thing of the watts in a person too

• Muromec

  yesterday at 9:05 PM

  >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

  • 34df

    today at 1:38 AM

    None of those things qualify as intelligence.

    Is a calculator intelligent? I can 'talk' to it via pushing buttons.

  • malfist

    yesterday at 9:09 PM

    Is a dictionary intelligent?

    • hilariously

      yesterday at 9:11 PM

      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"

    • Muromec

      yesterday at 9:19 PM

      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.

  • preisschild

    yesterday at 9:09 PM

    > 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.

    Wikipedia has existed for decades...

    • Muromec

      yesterday at 9:13 PM

      You can't talk to wikipedia either, but it exists and is helpful, yes.

• martin-t

  yesterday at 9:40 PM

  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.

• delusional

  yesterday at 9:12 PM

  > providing intelligence as a utility

  Lol, they are literally just promising to make people fungible. Tale as old as time.

Welcome to the 1990's internet days redux in the form of AI! Can't wait for the new AI devices and Web 4.0! So exciting!

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?

• applfanboysbgon

  yesterday at 8:44 PM

  Malta is the size of a small city, I don't think national security or investing into home grown companies comes into play here.

  • phillc73

    yesterday at 8:58 PM

    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?

    • Aurornis

      today at 12:32 AM

      How is this any different than EU citizens accessing OpenAI, which is already available in the EU?

      Nobody is obligated to use it. It just moves the price to $0 for people in Malta who choose to use it. Same service.

    • beering

      today at 3:16 AM

      I’m very confused as to what you are asking here. Do you think OpenAI does not serve ChatGPT to EU users already under EU law?

    • fock

      today at 12:46 AM

      - 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.

    • applfanboysbgon

      yesterday at 9:14 PM

      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.

      • varispeed

        yesterday at 9:17 PM

        > but there's nothing particularly legally interesting about this offering.

        Care to elaborate or we have become completely apathetic to any display of sleaze?

        • applfanboysbgon

          yesterday at 9:21 PM

          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.

• morkalork

  yesterday at 8:42 PM

  Worse than that, it's bi-directional. The model's responses and tuning now influences a whole nation of people.

  • netsharc

    today at 12:35 AM

    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...

WTF? Corruption?

Surely the deal is beneficial for both sides.

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.

A gambling, money laundering and Mafia paradise where journalists are killed for investigating the Mafia partners with OpenAI. A match made in heaven!

Next, force an eyeball scan on the peasant population.

• Muromec

  yesterday at 9:09 PM

  Eyball scans are already there on the border for other people. So are AI turrets shooting people on sight, just a different border

• purrcat259

  yesterday at 8:56 PM

  Unfortunate thats the reputation we have :(

  • eska

    yesterday at 9:02 PM

    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.

Facts for context:

Malta has a population of only 550k.

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.)

• purrcat259

  yesterday at 8:59 PM

  Citation needed. I haven't heard of this.

  I'm Maltese so feel free to be as detailed as needed.

  • collingreen

    yesterday at 9:11 PM

    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.

    • purrcat259

      yesterday at 9:18 PM

      Maltese population are historically price sensitive. €20 a month isn't something you easily justify especially with recent cost of living increases.

      So the fact that you get it free after doing some basic due diligence is actually a big deal in the local context.

      • kdheiwns

        today at 2:49 AM

        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.

  • yesterday at 9:17 PM

Smart move, just wish a more ethical outfit was making it.

... rather than that, they should prepay everyone a few hours of therapy and aroma sticks. A waaay more profit in the long game.

What could possibly go wrong?

Nauseating.

I run local models. They're fun to play with. I get a bit of a dopamine hit when it works.

They're selling addiction. This is fucking disgusting.

TL;DR: they made a course for citizens

To be honest, PR pieces don’t all need to go on HN, especially when this is probably not news worthy to anyone here except Maltese living in Malta

• GaggiX

  yesterday at 8:38 PM

  I'm not Maltese and I did find it interesting.

  • muwtyhg

    yesterday at 10:35 PM

    Could you articulate what part you find interesting?

    • ipaddr

      today at 12:40 AM

      I find the small sample size of Malta to be like tests they have done in Iceland. It won't cost them too much and will generate interesting answers

    • GaggiX

      today at 12:25 AM

      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.

    • cj

      today at 12:35 AM

      Can you name one private/government partnership that resembles this one?

      I can’t.

It’s a shame ChatGPT is total trash now.

• Muromec

  yesterday at 9:11 PM

  Thanks CCP for having providing one that is as lying and flattering but cheaper.

  • today at 1:59 AM

The comments here were not sufficiently obsequious towards AI companies, so the submission dropped from the front page to page three in minutes.

That is how AI boosterism works here.

• foxglacier

  today at 1:39 AM

  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.

  • eashG

    today at 4:47 AM

    Your comment does not even internally make any sense. Go ask a clanker, 80 IQ guy.