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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

#171

Post by blackrock »

Didn’t the most advanced AI research come straight out of China?

The ResNet Project [1] of 2015. It was used as the core algorithm behind Google’s AlphaGo in 2017.

The 4 computer scientists behind the paper were Chinese nationals. They were all educated by the Chinese educational system, and got their PhD there (one guy was from Hong Kong). They worked at Microsoft at the time, so Microsoft paid them a salary for their work, but I think Microsoft benefited more from their research, as did the other Silicon Valley and American companies.

Three of them went to start or lead other Chinese unicorn companies, and one guy went to Facebook in Silicon Valley, so Facebook benefited here.

[1] https://macropolo.org/china-ai-research-resnet/

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

#172

Post by semi-extrinsic »

ehnto wrote: post #87
sytelus wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gosh! There are like thousand github repos that do these stuff. This could become a tool to prosecute a lot of unwanted people like DeCSS.

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…

Actually, when we buy lab equipment from the US we have to fill out paperwork saying that it will not be used to produce weapons, and that it will not be resold to "bad" countries.

Probably there is some precedent by considering e.g. if Lockheed or FedEx is the exporting company if there have been cases where weapons got exported to unwanted actors. Probably github is like FedEx in these cases.

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

#174

Post by lopmotr »

csense wrote: post #173

How could they possibly enforce legal limits on software distribution in the age of the Internet? Anyone can slap their code onto a private Gitlab installation in an hour. Hosting a tarball on an HTTPS server is even more trivial.

Threat of punishment. Same as how any other law is enforced.

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

#175

Post by smt1 »

zerr wrote: post #2

Is it time to label current AI stuff by its real name - statistics?

I think as opposed to classical statistics, except for the important subfield of statistical learning theory, machine learning relates much more to functional analysis, differential geometry/optimization over manifolds, and measure/probability theory. "AI" is whatever marketing people want to define it as.

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

#176

Post by antpls »

astatine wrote: post #36

Unlike the space race, where Russia and the US were significantly ahead of everyone else, the field is far more level in AI. Arguably there will be areas where the US could even be behind in some areas. Wonder what the real world impact of this will be. Not much, I expect.

USA is probably still ahead of the rest of the world regarding IA, thanks to Google. Google sits on a massive amount of text, video and speech data. Google is one of the biggest coordinated entity (regarding business, data, hardware and software) on Earth aimed at advancing AI. The only rival in term of budget and data is probably China with a few state-sponsored companies together (Huawei + Alibaba + Tencent).

All other countries probably have smart researchers and engineers, but no one has the data machine that Google has...

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

#177

Post by sitkack »

jetti wrote: post #140
qrbLPHiKpiux wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCILl8ozWuxnFYXIe2svjHhg

Feedback and control systems can be described in a couple pages of text and a handful of simple equations. Suppressing knowledge is never an effective strategy. We shouldn't hoard the Krabby Patty Secret Formula.

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

#178

Post by lopmotr »

jahewson wrote: post #128
lopmotr wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems strangely ambiguous: "(geospatial imagery) and (point clouds)" or "geospatial (imagery and point clouds)"? Point 4 requires the use of geospatial imagery, so any point-cloud-only product would be exempt, it seems? The document doesn't define "geospatial imagery", but that could surely include hobby and commercial drone footage of the ground. Perhaps even ordinary photography from security cameras that have u…

You’re forgetting that how the word “and” works in English is often not the same as logical AND, e.g. in “give me a list of people who live in New York and Los Angeles” the “and” means OR.

Good point. Though I think "and" in those other cases really means something like "additionally" or "plus" rather than OR. You sentence could be written "... list of people who live in NY and people who live in LA.".

But it's still confusing here. If they mean it applies to both imagery software and point cloud software, then point cloud software would be excluded in point 2 because it doesn't have pixels or color (if lidar/etc). So it must be software that uses both. That makes more sense if it's aimed at a specific existing product.

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

#180

Post by filoleg »

mewpmewp2 wrote: post #127
filoleg wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this speaks more about the government and the acceptance of such things by the population rather than the state of research. Even in a hypothetical scenario of US being far ahead of China in the field at the moment, i do not see this kind of things going over well at all with the public in the US.

It gives opportunities to practice with the tech in ways US can't which might make them gain a lead.

More opportunities != being ahead.

Given two research labs, with one having a bit better equipment, while the other having a more proven history of publishing innovative research, it would be disingenuous to say that the better equipped lab is ahead until they have actually produced some research that puts them ahead. It might help them gain lead, but it also might result in nothing. Better equipment is just one of many components that affect the chances of success. Until that lead is acquired, I don't really think it would be appropriate to say that they had done so.

Note: the lab with a history of published innovative research in my analogy isn't supposed to represent the US or any country in specific. This was just an example to better illustrate the point I was making. The only thing that should matter for whether someone is ahead or not in this situation is the actual proof of being ahead, not "the opportunities that could lead to them being ahead". Otherwise, we should also start immediately trusting all those articles that pop up once every few months about how some random city is "about to become the next Silicon Valley, here are the reasons why".

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