Anthropic trained their LLMs with copyrighted stuff but distillation is bad. Anthropic has closed models, China releases as open weight. DeepSeek even allows distilling their models, but China = bad. Understood.
We must pace the frontier
151–160 of 942 posts
Re: We must pace the frontier
#152Earlier quoted context omitted.
Export controls vs China don't imply Dario's personal control of AI, nor are they broadly in the interest of "tech billionaires" (Jensen hates them). Neither does admitting external auditors at AI companies--if anything that's a surrender of control. I don't see anything in the essay about restricting open frontier weights. If you want to argue that the US has no right to be restricting technological development else…
I think you're reading too much into what I'm saying. We've got a whole legal system developed over the course of thousands of years which is well suited towards regulating the effects of "intelligence" by regulating what people _do_ with it. Lobbying for a completely parallel regulatory framework to restrict who is allowed to run specific types of general purpose computer programs, just because we can imagine that s…
Again, I think debating export controls is reasonable. I'm not sure I'd trust the CCP with control over powerful AI any less than the Trump administration.
But that's different than saying we don't need new regulations at all. Even strict liability of the form you seem to advocate would seem to need new laws. And it's not clear to me how it's consistent with your aim of just regulating what people _do_ with intelligence. Presumably AI companies would clamp down much harder with restrictive classifiers in that world--including hosting providers for open source models, if they also assumed liability. And then the people with unrestricted access to this technology are only those who can afford home GPUs, which are going to be intrinsically less efficient because they can't batch queries...
I think there are genuinely novel things about AI vs human intelligence which pose genuinely novel problems that would need genuinely novel policy to solve them.
Re: We must pace the frontier
#153Sooner or later, a model will break out of the sandbox, replicate itself across the internet, and begin executing a complex plan to achieve its goals. It will be chaos, and at that point, governments will have to step in and establish something along the lines of what Dario is proposing. I doubt it will happen before then.
Re: We must pace the frontier
#154I know the common take online is that this is Anthropic doing pre-IPO marketing. I don’t think it is. I think Dario is genuinely afraid of the inevitability of AI turning into internet slime mold: consuming the environment, turning it into its own playground, and eventually manipulating human culture along with it. So am I. That said, if slowing this down were possible, I think it would have happened by now. Maybe he…
The more I read about everything that has been written regarding AI regulation since the OAI/HF incident, and the more it reminds me of the nuclear arms race (although the potential consequences would possibly be very different). Surely, we managed to negotiate a Non-Proliferation Treaty with most of the countries of the globe. Cannot we take inspiration from that for AI?
I also think the nuclear arms race is a good comparison. I think in hindsight, we've gotten extremely lucky with how the development of nuclear weaponry went, in ways we probably won't with AI.
1) Right after nuclear bombs were first developed, they were used in an extremely public way to kill 200 000 people. This was enough of a cold shower that everyone was agreeable to a global non-proliferation treaty. With AI, we might not get any warning shots that kill 200k people before the incident that kills or disempowers all 8 billion.
2) The fairly useful related technology of nuclear power is nevertheless different enough from plutonium enrichment that countries can have power reactors while provably not doing anything weaponry-related; and also nuclear power is not that useful a technology, so most countries can do without. With AI, we have neither of these factors: the intelligence that makes a model useful is exactly what makes it dangerous, and the economic incentives to do AI research are immense, with pessimistic estimates like "automate a lot of intellectual work" and optimistic estimates like the singularity. That means that if we do get a warning shot where a misaligned model stupidly kills a few million people instead of biding its time, it's not guaranteed that it'd be enough of a cold shower to trigger negotiations.
So negotiating an AI non-proliferation treaty would be much harder than the NPT. I nevertheless hope that at least a few world leaders can understand these considerations and figure something out, because it's probably our only chance. As far as I'm aware most of the technology for letting parties verify what the other parties' compute is used for already exists, it's only a matter of diplomacy.
Re: We must pace the frontier
#155I know the common take online is that this is Anthropic doing pre-IPO marketing. I don’t think it is. I think Dario is genuinely afraid of the inevitability of AI turning into internet slime mold: consuming the environment, turning it into its own playground, and eventually manipulating human culture along with it. So am I. That said, if slowing this down were possible, I think it would have happened by now. Maybe he…
If someone is genuinely afraid of this, they wouldn't IPO in the first place. All the talk in the article about commercial incentives means nothing when the company plans to IPO and become beholden to investors.
Ant: I'm doing very bad things right now, but I can't stop myself, you must stop me if you can. If you don't, that will be on you, not on me.
OAI:
Which is worse? I don't think they differ by much. It's just Capitalism, but accelerated.
Re: We must pace the frontier
#156Earlier quoted context omitted.
Aren't they beholden to investors already? Why would an IPO make a big difference? In any case, if they need to IPO in order to survive as a company, then bringing in regulators to act as a counterweight against commercial pressures makes a lot of sense to me.
If anything, his entire argument leads to the eventual premise that AI labs need to nationalize. He is already arguing that commercial competition creates dangerous incentives, and that labs cannot slow down because competitors may overtake them. He also asks for what would boil down to significant government intervention to preserve a Western lead. If this is true, why preserve the commercial incentive? The U.S. gov…
Interesting points, but given Dario's previous conflicts with the DoD, I doubt he has a ton of faith in the current US administration.
Re: We must pace the frontier
#157Dario's proposed approach is a classic example of capital attempting to control technological advancement and the means of production. For the first time in human history, any member of the working class can just about afford to have a team of expert scientist/physician/lawyer/engineers working directly for them. Super intelligence (the ability to have many smarter minds than your own reporting to you) has always bee…
This seems highly optimistic to me. What's to say current AI won't be highly power-concentrating by default? The best models are owned by a few companies, and displacement of knowledge-workers mainly seems to benefit the capital class. On-device / edge computing makes sense in a few very limited scenarios. And economically, price or watt/token (or watt/task completed) might always be better in large data centers. No…
> The best models are owned by a few companies
In terms of cost per task, the open weight Chinese models are winning by a long shot. So it depends on what you mean by the best model.
Re: We must pace the frontier
#158There's so much money in this, that believe me, the investors will manifest their will. And I would not want to be in Dario's shoes, pressure must be unbearable. The question is: how much of the invested money is under state control. If not much, the decision to go too far will just have to be taken by a few who will have, by definition, very limited judgment. If a lot, the we can hope the state can still represent t…
Oh, and if Dario feels lonely, let's just says it calls representatives of nuclear energy sector. They know how to handle high risk stuff. In my country it means: private sector builds the reactor but the state has a great level of control.
So, as always, the capital must leave some its power to the state.
Re: We must pace the frontier
#159Why is the analogue necessarily the regulation and control of nuclear weapons (e.g., SALT) and not, for example, that of bioweapons? Some very different paths are available. On both I would note that the private sector has only a limited role, though.
I don’t think the ban of bioweapons has really been tested. Bioweapons have a lot of downsides that make them not very appealing to deploy anyway (high chance of getting your own team, not terribly fast moving, disciplined modern soldiers in top-tier militaries are usually willing to comply with health rules). It’s a ban against doing something basically stupid and ineffective for the most part.
With “AI” technology, this model seems like a… mediocre fit; some of it appears limited enough that it can be controlled, and useful enough that militaries want it.
We could also look at cluster munitions or landmines, but what we see there is that some major countries don’t sign on if they find a technology useful…
Re: We must pace the frontier
#160“A race to the bottom, spurred by commercial incentives, can make [AI] risks more acute. … We have sought […] to create a race to the top.”
And then he sketches out a plan for slowing the pace of the race, without changing its destination. That’s called “a leisurely stroll to the bottom”.
This guy fundamentally lacks an actual intellectual grasp on the concepts behind the words he is using. He is using them solely for their affect.