Better question: Is it possible to restrict open source AI?
If it is open then everyone has access. Any restrictions would be akin to demanding that linux not use strong encryption or firefox implement content censorship.
White House says no need to restrict 'open-source' AI at least for now
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Re: White House says no need to restrict 'open-source' AI at least for now
#22Regulating open-source AI will only help giants like Google and OpenAI, stifling innovation. It creates barriers only they can afford, limiting competition and diversity. Open-source fosters transparency and rapid progress. We do not need government regulations, or we'll end up like Europe with China leading.
Re: White House says no need to restrict 'open-source' AI at least for now
#23Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Microsoft is invested in OpenAI. Have they released any open weight models themselves? Do the Phi series models not count?
Sure they do. I was genuinely asking.
Well then yes, I would definitely say Phi. And on top of that Microsoft has been releasing a ton of the tooling surrounding LLMs and AI as well, including Semantic Kernel.
Re: White House says no need to restrict 'open-source' AI at least for now
#24Regulating open-source AI will only help giants like Google and OpenAI, stifling innovation. It creates barriers only they can afford, limiting competition and diversity. Open-source fosters transparency and rapid progress. We do not need government regulations, or we'll end up like Europe with China leading.
> It creates barriers only they can afford, limiting competition and diversity.
I would argue this is inherent to the training and compute cost of all large language models.
Re: White House says no need to restrict 'open-source' AI at least for now
#25Earlier quoted context omitted.
This sounds sarcastic, but as is often the case the White House has quite competent people working on this who have put a lot of thought into it already: https://www.ntia.gov/federal-register-notice/2024/dual-use-f... Unfortunately it's past the deadline for you to add your own comments on this, but I'm sure there will be future RFCs if you have thoughts.
In the spirit of this pedantry I’d like to point out that the NTIA is not the White House.
That's true, but "White House" in this headline was actually referring to "Alan Davidson, an assistant secretary of the U.S. Commerce Department". I'm actually not sure where the article got the term "open source" from either, it says it's from a report but I don't know what report or who wrote it. It seems like they are using "White House" as a term for people in the executive branch working at the direction of the White House, which is common.
When I say "the White House has quite competent people working on this" it's because the NTIA RFC I linked was based on a direct executive order from President Biden.
Re: White House says no need to restrict 'open-source' AI at least for now
#26Regulating open-source AI will only help giants like Google and OpenAI, stifling innovation. It creates barriers only they can afford, limiting competition and diversity. Open-source fosters transparency and rapid progress. We do not need government regulations, or we'll end up like Europe with China leading.
Comrade, open source is the wellspring of communism!
(As Microsoft explained years ago)
Re: White House says no need to restrict 'open-source' AI at least for now
#27Earlier quoted context omitted.
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Sorry, I’m no JD Vance fan but what on earth do you mean he was installed by Silicon Valley? Who installed him, and where did they install him to? Do you mean “Silicon Valley” installed him as Trump’s VP pick? Or just that SV installed him as one of two senators from Ohio — in which case, how did they do that, and more importantly why would they choose a senator from Ohio instead of California? I know Vance is friend…
The Elon and Thiel gang, they are not pro "SV" insomuch as being pro Thiel/Elon oligopolies. If open source AI one day threatens their livelihoods and career, the tune from the WH will change overnight. Right now the SV conservatives are playing catch up on AI so they are happy to push for laissez-faire instead of regulatory capture. I won't be suprised that should the cost of running and finetuning FB Llama models become so cheap that they start to eat into x.ai's business, all of a sudden AI is a massive national security issue and AI safety academics will go back to regurgitating talking points about imaginatory AGI terminator bots.
Re: White House says no need to restrict 'open-source' AI at least for now
#28Good. Effective Austruism is trying to destroy democratic institutions and it's likely a bigger threat to society than fascism. The pro-progress people needs to organize themselves to stop types like SBF from giving AI to China.
Re: White House says no need to restrict 'open-source' AI at least for now
#29[deleted]
Re: White House says no need to restrict 'open-source' AI at least for now
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
“AI” is much more than LLMs… Not only have all three of these companies released LLM model weights, Google and Microsoft especially have released nearly countless model architectures, weights, evaluation/training/inference/etc frameworks, toolkits, etc across an extremely wide spectrum.
They mainly offer open tooling to help you adopt their closed-source tech (e.g. RAG frameworks) but you don't get the freedom to do what you want with the model (which is the core). At some point, these big companies may even want to put more regulation or restrictions on their open-weights / open-source competitors. "Hey this is not validated for safety, you can use only Gemini"
They don't? Microsoft and Google both promote Open Source inferencing frameworks, and while both also have proprietary products I think it's completely dishonest to say they "mainly" support them. ONNX and Tensorflow have been supported longer and more productively than any of the closed-source AI frameworks Google or Microsoft offer.