Live data from Hacker News

Sam Altman Says OpenAI Will Leave the EU If There's Any Real AI Regulation

gizmodo.com

91–100 of 210 posts

Re: Sam Altman Says OpenAI Will Leave the EU If There's Any Real AI Regulation

#91
post #79
post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

… no regulation unless actual harm has been shown first. What? It is the duty of politics to protect the citizens and environment - also proactively. From reckless CEOs, greedy shareholders and lawyers which claim that it wasn’t strictly forbidden to cause harm. Politics isn’t doing always right. The Cookie-Directive tried to make misuse of Cookies illegal. Actually it made web browsing horrible and created further q…

vaccines are like the medicine analogy to regulation. You have to first prove that it is not going to do more harm than good. And without knowing what sort of harm AI's do - it's all theoretical at the moment - any regulation is merely speculating a harm, and the cost of prevention might be high (or stifling). ABS and ESP in cars came _after_ harm was shown. And so is emission controls, and crash-related safety measu…

We know certain possible high risk applications already (e.g., dosage recommendation for medication), so it is not all about figuring if something is risky or can cause harm.

The question then is more: regulate those within the particular area of use or have something that generally aims to regulate risky use.

Re: Sam Altman Says OpenAI Will Leave the EU If There's Any Real AI Regulation

#92
post #11

EU market is too big to ignore. We have seen this with Meta and others play out multiple times since GDPR has been increasingly enforced in the past decade. That's why it's important the EU keeps pushing, hopefully mostly sensible, regulation. There is no other counterweight that's aligned with consumer interests rather than corporate interests. Sure, you can accuse EU of hidden protectionisms blabla, but for now, th…

> EU market is too big to ignore It's not what it used to be. The EU's makes up around 15-20% of world GDP depending on how you measure it, but that's subject to disproportionality high taxes and compliance costs. Meta only gets around 10% of its ad earnings from the EU [1]. I'm not aware of the figures for Google and Microsoft or whether such figures are even available. Many global banks left the US or reduced it to…

Given how many companies were saying they would leave Russia versus those who actually left Russia there's a gap between what companies say and what they do.

> but that's subject to disproportionality high taxes and compliance costs.

Well, disproportionality [sic] is subjective at best, and those high taxes get evaded within EU. All big corporations do that, btw.

Re: Sam Altman Says OpenAI Will Leave the EU If There's Any Real AI Regulation

#93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I am a fan of no regulation unless actual harm has been shown first. I used to be, but some of the modern crop of CEOs has taken the wind out of that. They have done tremendous damage, very quickly, and the regulation has been unable to keep up, until severe damage has already been done. Once the bullet has left the gun, it can't be stuffed back in.

Can you be more specific, with examples? Who did what?

Asbestos. Phthalates. Fen-phen. Chloroflorocarbons. Leaded gasoline. All were legal because no harm had been shown... yet.

Re: Sam Altman Says OpenAI Will Leave the EU If There's Any Real AI Regulation

#95
post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If the AI regulations are reasonable and AI companies can't operate, the technology just isn't ready for wide-spread adoption yet. Conversely if the AI system is reasonable, but the regulations are making them illegal, then the blame is on the regulations. There is a trade-off between potential benefits and potential harm, and it's not immediately clear to me, who is in the better position to find it: the AI compan…

> Conversely if the AI system is reasonable, but the regulations are making them illegal, then the blame is on the regulations. have you read the EU's proposed approach to regulating AI? https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/policies/regulatory... it seems to be an extremely reasonable approach to me, if anything a little too lax the problem for OpenAI is its products can't easily be segregated into the different…

I think the proposal is reasonable provided ChatGPT is classified as moderate risk.

One thing I don't quite understand is how they are going to ensure that AI-generated text is always marked as such. When the text is generated in the chatbot, the fact that it is AI-generated is clear, but the user is free to copy-paste it anywhere. There is no good way to watermark plaintext.

Re: Sam Altman Says OpenAI Will Leave the EU If There's Any Real AI Regulation

#96

I wouldn’t be surprised if Sam Altman calling for regulation were done for two reasons. 1. Make it harder for smaller LLM based companies to break into the space 2. Drum up interest in OpenAI by making it seem that they had or were close to having an ai worth regulating

It's the business jackass tactic, enter a market and then use the government puppets to raise the barriers to entry.

I've seen a few times. It's one of the steps to create a government assisted monopoly

Re: Sam Altman Says OpenAI Will Leave the EU If There's Any Real AI Regulation

#97
post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If the AI regulations are reasonable and AI companies can't operate, the technology just isn't ready for wide-spread adoption yet. Conversely if the AI system is reasonable, but the regulations are making them illegal, then the blame is on the regulations. There is a trade-off between potential benefits and potential harm, and it's not immediately clear to me, who is in the better position to find it: the AI compan…

The regulation is meant to protect the EU citizens which couldn't care less about the financial incentives of a US company or their hype du jour. If hypothetically no AI can be created with respecting the citizens, what should the choice be, block or accept Skynet? (I said "hypothetically")

Suppose a new generation of AIs results in a big economy boost. Then a country might be put in a position to choose between some risks to privacy etc and a risk of being left behind.

A similar situation would be a country that in 1900 decides whether or not to outlaw cars.

Re: Sam Altman Says OpenAI Will Leave the EU If There's Any Real AI Regulation

#98
post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If the AI regulations are reasonable and AI companies can't operate, the technology just isn't ready for wide-spread adoption yet. Conversely if the AI system is reasonable, but the regulations are making them illegal, then the blame is on the regulations. There is a trade-off between potential benefits and potential harm, and it's not immediately clear to me, who is in the better position to find it: the AI compan…

The regulation is meant to protect the EU citizens which couldn't care less about the financial incentives of a US company or their hype du jour. If hypothetically no AI can be created with respecting the citizens, what should the choice be, block or accept Skynet? (I said "hypothetically")

[flagged]

Re: Sam Altman Says OpenAI Will Leave the EU If There's Any Real AI Regulation

#100
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By proclaiming they'd leave if they can't comply, it might cause the EU regulators to "self-censor" the regulation such that it's "easy to comply". but tbh, i dont see what the regulations would be. I am a fan of no regulation unless actual harm has been shown first.

This is a nonsensical statement. All markets, and thus all goods sold on a market are regulated. You can’t have markets without regulations.

This is just thinking about the wrong level of regulation. Not all goods need to have CE marking, or get audited regularly, or anything like that. I can go to someone who makes furniture in their shop and buy that furniture without them ever contacting the British Standards Institute.
Post reply on HN