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The Commerce Department is considering national security restrictions on AI

nytimes.com

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Re: The Commerce Department is considering national security restrictions on AI

#11

Post by justicezyx »

kolikotime wrote: post #3

Wide ranging restrictions such as these are being tactically applied throughout the world. Germany and France enacted similar policies last year. As Ian Hogarth sketched out last year, we're entering an era in which AI becomes part and parcel of a country's geopolitics, an era of AI Nationalism so to speak. Hogarth expressed the opinion that Google's purchase of DeepMind(A UK based company initially) is going to be s…

Well, if it's not deep mind, Google can buy some other companies and let them use the world's most advanced AI compute infrastructure and who knows what they would do.

I do not doubt deep minds talents, but your comment seems to me an overstatement on its value.

Re: The Commerce Department is considering national security restrictions on AI

#13

Post by [deleted] »

logicchains wrote: post #10
gumby wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the 90s it meant open source software (we didn’t use this term back then) like Kerberos were considered munitions and it was illegal to provide them to non-us persons without a license. At Cygnus we generated a version with no cryptography at all and sent it to Switzerland where someone wrote crypto routines (available in the open literature) that interoperated, and the everyone on the planet had access to it (but…

Was publishing cryptography papers in open-access journals also illegal? Without such a ban it seems it would be very hard to stop the export of AI, as it's not particularly difficult to implement an AI algorithm from spec, just tedious; certainly much easier than implementing one's own crypto. >illegal to provide them to non-us persons without a license I wonder if in this case Git{hub|lab} would need the license, o…

[deleted]

Re: The Commerce Department is considering national security restrictions on AI

#14

Post by killjoywashere »

Do you restrict the distribution of sets of trained hyperparameters? Do you restrict models for training? Do you restrict the datasets? Do you prevent journal publication of new developments? The fundamental algorithms are pretty well developed. Like Bernoulli's principle was well understood before the first airplane.

If you want to restrict something, you would restrict the tooling. Like we restrict the tooling to make advanced aircraft wings. In the case of ML that means you restrict ... migration of certain groups of engineers? Sale of GPUs?

Re: The Commerce Department is considering national security restrictions on AI

#15

Post by ninguem2 »

logicchains wrote: post #10
gumby wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the 90s it meant open source software (we didn’t use this term back then) like Kerberos were considered munitions and it was illegal to provide them to non-us persons without a license. At Cygnus we generated a version with no cryptography at all and sent it to Switzerland where someone wrote crypto routines (available in the open literature) that interoperated, and the everyone on the planet had access to it (but…

Was publishing cryptography papers in open-access journals also illegal? Without such a ban it seems it would be very hard to stop the export of AI, as it's not particularly difficult to implement an AI algorithm from spec, just tedious; certainly much easier than implementing one's own crypto. >illegal to provide them to non-us persons without a license I wonder if in this case Git{hub|lab} would need the license, o…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernstein_v._United_States

Re: The Commerce Department is considering national security restrictions on AI

#16

Post by omeid2 »

killjoywashere wrote: post #14

Do you restrict the distribution of sets of trained hyperparameters? Do you restrict models for training? Do you restrict the datasets? Do you prevent journal publication of new developments? The fundamental algorithms are pretty well developed. Like Bernoulli's principle was well understood before the first airplane. If you want to restrict something, you would restrict the tooling. Like we restrict the tooling to m…

While I don't advocate any restrictions for knowledge, even if for the very practical reason that it fails the it's premise of keeping it away from the bad guys and also find National Security to have been well and thoroughly abused for overreaching and draconian powers, there is something to be said about the power of the information that a well trained model holds.

I believe it is fair, to at least start with the premise that, restrictions that would normally apply to some data, would reasonably extend to the Model trained by them, obviously, how much depends on the context and sensitivity of the data.

Re: The Commerce Department is considering national security restrictions on AI

#17

Post by wbl »

kolikotime wrote: post #3

Wide ranging restrictions such as these are being tactically applied throughout the world. Germany and France enacted similar policies last year. As Ian Hogarth sketched out last year, we're entering an era in which AI becomes part and parcel of a country's geopolitics, an era of AI Nationalism so to speak. Hogarth expressed the opinion that Google's purchase of DeepMind(A UK based company initially) is going to be s…

It's the UK and the US. The UK traded VX for the hydrogen bomb and gets Trident from us with their warheads on top.

Re: The Commerce Department is considering national security restrictions on AI

#18

Post by Veedrac »

The publication mentioned:

https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2018/11/19/2018-25...

Relevant excerpt:

The representative general categories of technology for which Commerce currently seeks to determine whether there are specific emerging technologies that are essential to the national security of the United States include:

(2) Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning technology, such as:

(i) Neural networks and deep learning (e.g., brain modelling, time series prediction, classification);

(ii) Evolution and genetic computation (e.g., genetic algorithms, genetic programming);

(iii) Reinforcement learning;

(iv) Computer vision (e.g., object recognition, image understanding);

(v) Expert systems (e.g., decision support systems, teaching systems);

(vi) Speech and audio processing (e.g., speech recognition and production);

(vii) Natural language processing (e.g., machine translation);

(viii) Planning (e.g., scheduling, game playing);

(ix) Audio and video manipulation technologies (e.g., voice cloning, deepfakes);

(x) AI cloud technologies; or

(xi) AI chipsets.

Re: The Commerce Department is considering national security restrictions on AI

#20

Post by philipkglass »

Veedrac wrote: post #18

The publication mentioned: https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2018/11/19/2018-25... Relevant excerpt: The representative general categories of technology for which Commerce currently seeks to determine whether there are specific emerging technologies that are essential to the national security of the United States include: (2) Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning technology, such as: (i) Neural ne…

It also names "visualization" and "molecular robotics" as (non-AI) representative technology categories. It includes the specific, the absurdly general, and the so-far-imaginary among its categories. The Federal Register publication is not very enlightening and I can't tell if the NYT story is based on anything more than that publication.
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