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

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

#111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a normal negotiation tactic on the part of OpenAI. Businesses often say they will leave a jurisdiction or be forced to shut down if X regulation is put in place.

It's a tactic of all businesses. In the US they play states against each other to get higher and higher tax breaks for moving.

It's not a tactic. It's just reality. If all the expense of coping with regulation is too much, then it's not worth doing. It seems almost too facile for Sam Altmann to have said, but perhaps it's worth reminding people that regulatory compliance is an expensive business in and of itself, even if your product already fully complies.

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

#112
post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google search and many other big tech divisions already did that with China. When a country/region deviates from the rest of the world in a big way there comes a point at which you can't offer the same products and services as other markets.

There is a big difference between "censor everything you do to comply to goverment doctrine" and "just don't store PII unnecessarily".

The latter is actually very burdensome because it affects advertising profits

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

#113

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

I wrote my Senators after watching the recent subcommittee meeting. I think it was pretty transparent to everyone that it was largely optics, but privately reinforcing that OpenAI isn't and shouldn't be the sole spokesperson for all things AGI is still important. We're all already using AGI, but we're not using OpenAI's AGI, and we don't need their pre- and proscriptive alignment.

It's starting a discussion, and more tacitly, a negotiation. We need to weigh in to the right people proactively if we want to be represented and start defining intelligent regulation.

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

#114
post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Individuals will always be able to do this, but it might be enough if it's illegal and a bit of extra effort. You don't need to eliminate 100% of AI-generated spam, just make it risky and unprofitable enough that it's not a common practice, and have people call out those who seem to be doing it. I'm not sure it's possible, but it seems worth trying.

And if someone is operating a troll farm in another country, this won't help.

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

#115
post #5

> If we can comply, we will, and if we can’t, we’ll cease operating… We will try. But there are technical limits to what’s possible. Isn't that what any normal company does? Comply until it's impossible to operate legally? They can choose between ceasing to operate or getting arrested. If the AI regulations are reasonable and AI companies can't operate, the technology just isn't ready for wide-spread adoption yet. Se…

> If the AI regulations are reasonable and AI companies can't operate, the technology just isn't ready for wide-spread adoption yet. See also: Tesla's Autopilot.

It couldn’t be that the EU regulators are clueless could it?

And you don’t see a difference between the harm that ChatGPT could do compared to the harm of an AI controlling a self driving car?

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

#116
post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

VAT, employment taxes and regulatory fines are hard to avoid paying in the EU, even if corporate profit taxes get moved around a bit.

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

#117
Feels like a first step in a long dance performance. Good that EU regulators are already looking at this space (given that nobody else does).

The main risk for them is that the actual risks from use and abuse of AI in various domains will only start showing up later. So early regulatory work might appear silly or misplaced. But that is not a reason to adopt a "wait-and-see" attitude.

There is so much recent precedence in the software domain: the privacy disaster from targeted adtech and the speculative manias of crypto. Once large numbers of users are lulled into certain behaviors under false pretenses it becomes much harder to reverse the social damage.

While privacy is a connected risk here too, there are much wider possibilities for abuse once algorithms are on the loose, processing and influencing without any transparency or accountability. We know that people will try anything that is not explicitly illegal if it gives them financial or political leverage. Gray areas of missing regulation are an open invitation for "creative" thinking and regulatory arbitrage.

The noise "not to suppress innovation" will be enormous. But the concepts and tools for sandboxing and keeping a close eye on developments are there. The idea that the only way to innovate is to move fast and break things is just a transparently self-serving dictum that should be put to rest.

They should keep an eye for oligopolies too. There is no reason to endure more decades of gratuitous "winner-takes-all" dynamics. The technologies are exciting, there are clearly positive scenarios. Let us hope we are smart enough to properly regulate smart algorithms.

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

#118
post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Nobody outlawed cars.

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

#119
post #59

This reminds me strongly of the famous cartoon "A brief history of corporate whining" [1]. US companies said the same when the EU enacted the RoHS regulations, they said the same when the EU passed the GDPR, and it will be just the same with AI regulations: the European market is just too massive to ignore it. [1] https://leftycartoons.com/2009/09/04/a-brief-history-of-corp...

Every thread about GDPR have people (I assume from US, especially given it being HN) whining how "hard" it is to implement (just don't store user data by default, how hard is that?) and how "overbearing" it is. Then big surprise when another news about US spying on its citizens harder than people thought drops...

If the law is that simple, then why did it take 11 chapters and 99 sections to say that?

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

#120
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…

How are you going to *proove* in advance that a certain economic or social measure is doing what you expect?
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