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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

#131

Post by dmix »

ransom1538 wrote: post #102
olivierduval wrote: post #92

It's funny: it reminds me of "strong cryptography export ban" in the 2000's (btw, Oracle java still have it: you must download strong crypto package separatly)... Obviously, it failed! You can stop a single vendor with unique technology to provide hardware components with bans, but you can't stop a whole field spreading knowledge!!! People come and go, meet, talk, write, exchange knowledges... so sooner or later (and…

I don't think the government actually wanted to stop math [1] from leaving the border. It was just a tool to use against people they suspected being involved espionage. Just another reason to put you in a cell. https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSA_algorithm

The intentions of laws vs the real world implications are so often disconnected. There's been a million cases where the mere side effects of laws have caused more trouble for the intended target of the good intentions than it actually helped itself (see rent control laws in NYC and Toronto ultimately significantly reducing low income housing for over a decade in the 70s and 80s because no developer would build there, significantly increasing average rents by reducing supply).

Thomas Sowell wrote a quite a few good books about this.

I have no doubt it applies equally to export laws.

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

#132

Post by ehnto »

fyfy18 wrote: post #91
ehnto wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lots of interesting precedent to come out of it as well. By putting code on Github, an American website, as a developer are you actually exporting it? Or are the people cloning the repo reaching into America and extracting it? If it is considered exporting, is github the exporter, or is the developer. Just like a company might produce a metal widget but another company procures and exports it, the original company th…

I would not be suprised if we get something along the lines of "Unfortunately, this repository is currently unavailable in your country" sometime soon. Many websites still completely block EU users post GDPR, e.g. Chicago Tribune.

Imagine a world where your project dependencies can be deprecated by import/export law.

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

#133

Post by jahewson »

yorwba wrote: post #80
toxik wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

None of the convnets are Gaussian. It was one of the big reasons convnets came to be at all, to model highly kurtotic distributions like natural images. Chinese convnet research is absolutely state of the art already, indeed.

You can do basic math to a multivariate normal distribution to approximate other distributions. In classic feedforward networks, that's achieved by using nonlinear activation functions. Very wide networks turn into Gaussian processes in the limit [0]. There are also approaches explicitly embracing the "basic math on multivariate normal distributions" framework using normalizing flows [1]. [0] https://arxiv.org/abs/17…

I feel like this is kinda cheating though - “Gaussian in the limit” is not the same as “Gaussian”.

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

#134

Post by DataWorker »

pp34 wrote: post #68
roenxi wrote: post #20

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…

They are Dumb and they are just Reacting out of some "fuck we have to do something" instinct driven by jobless fucks like Peter Thiel/Graham Allison/Kai-Fu Lee constant rhetoric about AI and falling behind and how its going to effect everyone. This is Fear based Decision Making 101. All it leads to is more absurd outcomes such as Endless Wars, Huge Monopolies, More consolidation of power and resources in the hand of…

The thing you fear most is fear itself. But you shouldn’t. Fear is human and probably not going to stop being a thing any time soon, despite your demands.

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

#135

Post by asveikau »

peter303 wrote: post #84

I recall similar happening during Bush admin during 2000s. Many of our software customers were international. To obtain an export license we were required to scan our source code with an approved Dept of Commerce scan software vendor to look for all kinds of inappropriate code like a too strong cryptography algorithm in the licensing portion and plagarism of copyrighted code. The first couple of releases this was don…

Makes me think that the big tech companies which absorb a large amount of new college grads each year have a bunch of copyright violations but won't be audited.

These companies have "strict" code review policies but often the reviewers are just a recent previous year's new college grad, now overconfident by a small amount of work experience.

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

#136

Post by imhoguy »

perl4ever wrote: post #81
steve19 wrote: post #23

Does this mean Nvidia can't export GPUs to China?

Is that snark? Google suggests Nvidia GPUs are probably made in Guangdong by PCPartner. The actual chips, I don't know, but TSMC does have fabs in China.

I bet it is yet another law to bring back knowledge and manufacturing to US.

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

#137

Post by whoevercares »

Tempest1981 wrote: post #75
tomc1985 wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I doubt the US is ahead in this area. China gains heaps upon heaps or practical experience in CV by sheer virtue of the breadth of its surveillance networks. Not to say we aren't doing the same here in the US, but efforts seem to be much more scattered

I can see the surveillance network providing vastly more training data. But isn't that orthogonal with developing the algorithms? Or is it that training data provides experience, which improves the algorithms? Or the application of the algorithms?

It’s a positive loop. More effective surveillance network -> Larger investment (from government or government contract) -> more application/startup/new programs -> more research funding/aggressive hiring -> higher recognition for CV/ML researchers/Engineers -> More and more people doing CV/ML -> More data, algorithms and applications-> more effective surveillance network. Btw it got deployed at scale in real world which is a huge advantage for progressing any CVML research

Not to mention nowadays Deep learning is pretty much a big data game.

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

#138

Post by vajrabum »

salty_biscuits wrote: post #71
withinrafael wrote: post #25

Additional details are present in the unpublished rule (document 2019-27649 [1][2]). -- cut -- Geospatial imagery “software” “specially designed” for training a Deep Convolutional Neural Network to automate the analysis of geospatial imagery and point clouds, and having all of the following: 1. Provides a graphical user interface that enables the user to identify objects (e.g., vehicles, houses, etc.) from within geo…

So is Esri worried?

That would have been my guess at who this is aimed at too. Lots of applications outside the military and spook shops but that's always been the primary customer.

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

#139

Post by vajrabum »

nl wrote: post #42

This is pretty bad. Or good depending on your perspective. I'm based in Australia, and we started playing today with analysis of geospatial imagery for bush fire imagery (because the country is on fire). ECCN0D521No.1 from https://s3.amazonaws.com/public-inspection.federalregister.g... covers pretty much everything I'm doing. I guess if I want to look at the positive side, it means I don't have to compete with any US…

My guess is that this is like the export controls on munitions or encryption. You can't export to China but you can fairly easily get a license to sell it in Australia or any other US allied country.

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

#140

Post by jetti »

qrbLPHiKpiux wrote: post #130
olivierduval wrote: post #92

It's funny: it reminds me of "strong cryptography export ban" in the 2000's (btw, Oracle java still have it: you must download strong crypto package separatly)... Obviously, it failed! You can stop a single vendor with unique technology to provide hardware components with bans, but you can't stop a whole field spreading knowledge!!! People come and go, meet, talk, write, exchange knowledges... so sooner or later (and…

Remember what he did? Software was specifically listed under export controls. So, he printed the code in a book to be OCR’d and further compiled into the software. No export controls on a book.

Cryptography devices (including software) were on the US Munitions List, which meant that it was on par with exporting guided missiles. There was an interesting episode of Darknet Diaries on this topic that covers some of the crazy restrictions, such as professors not being able to teach cryptography classes to foreign students.
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