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U.S. government will decide who gets to use GPT-5.6

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Re: U.S. government will decide who gets to use GPT-5.6

#341

Given how the WH operates these days, this is ripe for corruption. Imagine the WH dislikes the CEO of a biotech company, while appreciating the attitude of a competitor CEO. What is to stop them from stalling on giving acess for the latest model to the company they don't like?

They is what is currently and blatantly happening already.

Re: U.S. government will decide who gets to use GPT-5.6

#343
post #259
post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This arrangement is already dubiously legal. The government is already being sued over the Fable incident with Anthropic. No amount of rules can stop people who are willing to break them. Only enforcement can.

And enforcement cannot work if you’ve captured all three estates.

Did you mean this in the French Revolution sense (the clergy, the nobility, and the commoners) or in the American sense (the legislative, judicial, and executive branches)?

The French Revolution sense would be an ironic counterpoint, because the Revolutionaries did end up capturing all three estates, only to fall to someone (Napoleon) who captured the military, which wasn't considered one of the "three estates" because at the start of the French Revolution destroying civil society, enacting a military dictatorship, and starting a series of wars throughout Europe was considered outside the Overton Window.

This perhaps holds some lessons for America today.

Re: U.S. government will decide who gets to use GPT-5.6

#344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On some level though we have to be cognizant of the potential for harm these models have. LLMs are still a little loosey goosey, and we are right on the cusp (if not there already) for an agent to hack a bank and steal money for some rando teenager with a penchant for jail breaking. The regulations are and will be negative, but don't lose sight of what LLMs can do off the leash.

>but don't lose sight of what LLMs can do off the leash. there is no such thing as an LLM "off the leash", it's not a dog, and even if it was a dog the person responsible is the owner. What is this bizarre attitude to a piece of software that makes people think existing laws don't apply? If your LLM agent hacks a bank, you have hacked a bank, you will go to prison and that's entirely sufficient. People have been hack…

This is overly reductive.

If your web browser hacks a bank, but you didn't know and didn't expect it to, have you hacked a bank? Why is an LLM different? What happened to mens rea?

Re: U.S. government will decide who gets to use GPT-5.6

#345
post #291

This was coming for a while. For years now there have been job postings for ai safety and not really what people expect. Jobs in places like RAND, funded off DOD grants, exploring the feasibility of building a bioweapon with off the shelf tooling and measuring how far along these tools are. Maybe they figured out it was too easy now, and this is the clamping down we are seeing in response.

How does this account for the Chinese models that are the ones people will use if they can't use OAI's or Anthropic's. Last time I checked, the US president doesn't have the ability to regulate the Chinese models. Considering this, do you still stand by your maybe?

Maybe they are looking into those too and a ban might be on the horizon. President makes their own rules now and controls the supreme court, you can't consider precedent anymore.

Re: U.S. government will decide who gets to use GPT-5.6

#346

Im not worried about this at all. The OpenAI, Anthropic and the US government can play this game all they want... They're just accelerating the development of open source models; and helping destroy the lead the US has built in AI, and their profit margins along with it. This is like the battle between PostgreSQL and Oracle all over. Move up market, isolate yourself to enterprises, and watch while everyone else build…

> and their profit margins along with It

lol that’s a good one.

Re: U.S. government will decide who gets to use GPT-5.6

#347
post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed, I find quite ironic that some people in tech in the US complain about EU "regulations first" approach, but then their government seem to arbitrarily stop things from being released because, well, there is no established policy on safety guarantees or other similar aspects.

It’s a bit in general, because if you actually read the EU AI legislation, most of it follows the right ideas and provides more safety, in the sense that OpenAI and Anthropic used to pretend to care about, but never really did.

The ideas are debatable but generally correct. The EU's problem is that regulation stops at the ideas, and it is intentionally designed so to be impossible to ensure compliance in advance. So the regulation is really after the fact and a subjective judgment by regulators. So there's tons of risk even if you genuinely believe you're complying with the prescribed intents.

My opinion on EU regulation would flip 180 degrees if they offered any kind of pre-clearance where you could propose a product, feature, or policy and be told in advance if it meets their subjective requirements.

IMO you can have clear, specific requirements in advance, or you can have a body that provides interpretations of spirit-of-the-rules regulations in advance. Having neither is a problem.

(yes, I'm aware of the argument that if you tell companies what's legal in advance they will just do the bare minimum or find loopholes... I don't find that to be a legit rule of law system)

Re: U.S. government will decide who gets to use GPT-5.6

#348

Are these models still relevant for people outside the US? I get the impression we're stuck on GPT 5.5 and Opus 4.8 pretty much permanently now, and relying on Chinese models in future.

If the US really cracks down on frontier model access, you'll see them make Chinese open models illegal. You might say "oh well, let them try", but they will just put direct and secondary sanctions on every company whose systems have used Chinese models in some way. They just have to make an example out of a few international companies and no one will dare to use Chinese frontier models, at least commercially.
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