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Sam Altman goes before US Congress to propose licenses for building AI

reuters.com

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Re: Sam Altman goes before US Congress to propose licenses for building AI

#261
post #205
post #129

This is the message I shared with my senator (edited to remove information which could identify me). I hope others will send similar messages. Dear Senator [X], I am an engineer working for [major employer in the state]. I am extremely concerned about the message that Sam Altman is sharing with the Judiciary committee today. Altman wants to create regulatory roadblocks to developing AI. My company produces AI-enabled…

You lost me at "While AI regulation is important" - nope, congress does not need to regulate AI.

They might have lost you. But starting with "congress shouldn't regulate AI" would lose the senator.

Which one do you think is more important to convince?

Re: Sam Altman goes before US Congress to propose licenses for building AI

#262

This is going to be RSA export restrictions all over again. I wish the regulators the best of luck in actually enforcing this. I'm tempted to think that whatever regulations they put in place won't really matter that much, and progress will march on regardless. Give it a year and a 10x more efficient algorithm, and we'll have GPT4 on our personal devices and there's nothing that any government regulator will be able…

Agreed. Places like huggingface, or even torrents are allowing a unstoppable decentralised AI race. This is like fighting media piracy. Plus other countries might outcompete you on AI now.

Re: Sam Altman goes before US Congress to propose licenses for building AI

#264

OpenAI willing to bend the knee quite deep. If they want to do licensing and filtering and do that without fundamentally bricking the model, then by all means go ahead.

It's not bending the knee, that's how they want it to be perceived, but what's really happening is that they're trying to pull up the ladder.

Re: Sam Altman goes before US Congress to propose licenses for building AI

#265

Reminds me of SBF calling for crypto regulations while running FTX. Being seen as friendly to regulations is great for optics compared to being belligerently anti-regulation. You can appear responsible and benevolent, and get more opportunity to weaken regulation by controlling more of the narrative. And hey, if you get end up getting some regulatory capture making competition harder, that's a great benefit too. Open…

> Reminds me of SBF calling for crypto regulations while running FTX

Scott Galloway called it the stop-me-before-I-kill-grandma defence. (Paraphrasing.)

You made money making a thing. You continue to make the thing. You’re telling us how the thing will bring doom and gloom if not dealt with (conveniently implying it will change the world). And you want to staff the regulatory body you call for with the very butchers you’re castigating.

Re: Sam Altman goes before US Congress to propose licenses for building AI

#266
post #42
post #9

Imagine thinking that regression based function approximators are capable of anything other than fitting the data you give it. Then imagine willfully hyping up and scaring people who don't understand, and because it can predict words you take advantage of the human tendency to anthropomorphize, so it follows that it is something capable of generalized and adaptable intelligence. Shame on all of the people involved in…

Even if you're correct about the capabilities of LLMs (I don't think you are), there are still obvious dangers here. I wrote a comment recently trying to explain how even if you believe all LLMs can (and will ever) do is regurgitate their training data that you should still be concerned. For example, imagine in 5 years we have GPT-7, and you ask GPT-7 to solve humanity's great problems. From its training data GPT-7 m…

> From its training data GPT-7 might notice

> But its "aligned" so might understand

> Using this information it decides to hack

I think you're anthropomorphizing LLM's too much here. If we assume that there's a AGI-esque AI, then of course we should be worried about an AGI-esque AI. But I see no reason to think that's the case.

Re: Sam Altman goes before US Congress to propose licenses for building AI

#269
post #5

Regulatory capture and monopolies are now as American as apple pie.

Where is the regulatory capture? You might just need to apply for a license. Why is that so horrible? Most travel agents need a license, taxi drivers etc. Not sure why the same shouldn't apply for "AI"?

The whole point of this type of legislation is to make it hard or impossible for upstarts to compete with the incumbents. Licensing is additional overhead. It's likely to be onerous and serve absolutely no purpose other than keeping startups out.

Re: Sam Altman goes before US Congress to propose licenses for building AI

#270
The members of this subcommittee are [1]:

Chair Richard Blumenthal (CT), Amy Klobuchar (MN), Chris Coons (DE), Mazie Hirono (HI), Alex Padilla (CA), Jon Ossoff (GA)

Majority Office: 202-224-2823

Ranking Member Josh Hawley (MO), John Kennedy (LA), Marsha Blackburn (TN), Mike Lee (UT), John Cornyn (TX)

Minority Office: 202-224-4224

If you’re in those states, please call their D.C. office and read them the comment you’re leaving here.

[1] https://www.judiciary.senate.gov/about/subcommittees

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