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U.S. government limits exports of artificial intelligence software

reuters.com

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Re: U.S. government limits exports of artificial intelligence software

#11

Post by Rebelgecko »

haecceity wrote: post #8

Considering that AI is whatever marketing folks want it to be, it'd be interesting see their legal definition AI. Anyone have a link to the actual document?

I think it's this: https://s3.amazonaws.com/public-inspection.federalregister.g...

Page 4 and 9 have the technical definitions.

My off the cuff interpretation is that the rule would only cover convolutional neural nets that are trained to identify and determine the orientation of specific objects in geospatial imagery. If the neural net's input/output aren't wrapped in a GUI it sounds like they still might be OK to export without a license

Re: U.S. government limits exports of artificial intelligence software

#14

Post by tlb »

kragen wrote: post #4

Bernstein's case established that he had a First Amendment right to publish source code under the law in effect at the time; he argued, successfully, that this was the form in which his research was communicated to other researchers. He won his case, but it took many years, and of course court cases are political processes; they may be decided differently when different judges have been appointed to the bench. It see…

The ethical argument for why everyone should have access to cryptography is a lot stronger than why everyone should have access to satellite imagery recognition algorithms.

Also, cryptography requires both sides to use the same algorithm, while companies don't need to use the same recognition algorithms.

It also helped, in the crypto case, that you could print some version of it on a T-shirt or mail it on a postcard. It looked like speech, while neural net parameters don't.

So the free speech case seems much weaker.

Re: U.S. government limits exports of artificial intelligence software

#15

Post by m0zg »

Seems pretty narrowly targeted, probably similar to things like ITAR, quantum, and crypto - which already require regulatory disclosure. Probably just to make sure that US companies aren't doing Project Maven (or the like) for China. Currently, best I can tell, there's nothing in place to prevent such a "collaboration".

Re: U.S. government limits exports of artificial intelligence software

#16

Post by La1n »

hawkice wrote: post #6
myndpage wrote: post #5

They say it doesn't apply to Canada. What prevents a Chinese company to open a business in Canada and get access to US A.I software without the license?

Canada counts as the US for several national security purposes. There's a lot of cooperation to prevent this type of loophole.

Can you point to some of that cooperation or legislation regarding it, that sounds quite interesting.

Re: U.S. government limits exports of artificial intelligence software

#17

Post by haecceity »

Rebelgecko wrote: post #11
haecceity wrote: post #8

Considering that AI is whatever marketing folks want it to be, it'd be interesting see their legal definition AI. Anyone have a link to the actual document?

I think it's this: https://s3.amazonaws.com/public-inspection.federalregister.g... Page 4 and 9 have the technical definitions. My off the cuff interpretation is that the rule would only cover convolutional neural nets that are trained to identify and determine the orientation of specific objects in geospatial imagery. If the neural net's input/output aren't wrapped in a GUI it sounds like they still might be OK to e…

Looks like it's very specific and targeted to military applications. Although the GUI requirement seems to make it a little too specific to be applicable.

Re: U.S. government limits exports of artificial intelligence software

#18

Post by reubenmorais »

Buttons840 wrote: post #13

Prior to this "rule", was it possible to break the law and get in trouble for doing nothing more than publishing source code to the world? Has that now changed? Is publishing personal code on GitHub "exporting"?

In the US, at some point cryptography code was considered "munitions" and you needed permission to export it. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Export_of_cryptography_from_th... and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernstein_v._United_States

Re: U.S. government limits exports of artificial intelligence software

#19

Post by 9nGQluzmnq3M »

kick wrote: post #9

Because this is so incredibly broad, there's a good chance that >20% of people here will be working on something that falls under this at some point in the next decade. While we patiently await for a HN user (or, let's be honest, one of the ancient cryptologist-lawyers who come out of the woodwork every time something like this happens and sue the government) to fix this by suing the government on free speech grounds…

It actually sounds far more narrow than the title implies?

> Under a new rule which goes into effect on Monday, companies that export certain types of geospatial imagery software from the United States must apply for a license to send it overseas except when it is being shipped to Canada.

Re: U.S. government limits exports of artificial intelligence software

#20

Post by roenxi »

We're in an early and explosive growth stage of AI where well-established statistical knowledge is having an unreasonable effect when combined with computing power. I've yet to see any AI platform that is mindbending vs doing basic math with a multivariate normal distribution. The eyewatering stuff is the number of Hz of computing power being thrown into simulating Go games, etc, etc.

Assuming that among 1.4 billion people there are a few good coder/statistician people and using supercomputers [0] as a rough proxy for available computing power, it isn't obvious the US is even going to inconvenience the Chinese military. Presumably they are going to have a parallel AI effort anyway given that they have been investing in the area.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TOP500#Top_countries

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