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SB-1047 will stifle open-source AI and decrease safety

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Re: SB-1047 will stifle open-source AI and decrease safety

#141

Post by eightysixfour »

adamc wrote: post #129
ubj wrote: post #34

> The creator of a model can not ensure that a model is never used to do something harmful – any more so that the developer of a web browser, calculator, or word processor could. Placing liability on the creators of general purpose tools like these mean that, in practice, such tools can not be created at all, except by big businesses with well funded legal teams. This matches my thoughts on why this is ultimately a b…

Someone who creates very dangerous items needs to take responsibility for them. Or their production needs to be very heavily regulated. That is just a reality. We don't let companies sell grenades on street corners. The running away from responsibility is one of the things I like least about big tech.

All technology has good and bad uses and you can’t hold the maker accountable for all of those. At some point you have to hold users and buyers accountable or just stop developing anything.

When a person uses a car to drive into a crowd, do we blame the automobile manufacturer? Do you blame Kali Linux when someone uses it to hack a remote system? What about Apple when an iPhone is used to call in a threat to a school?

Re: SB-1047 will stifle open-source AI and decrease safety

#142

Post by freedomben »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #126
65a wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Laws should be about the outcome, not about processes that may lead to an outcome. It is already illegal in California to produce your own nuclear weapon. Instead of outlawing books, because they allow research into building giant gundam robots, just outlaw giant gundam robots.

> Laws should be about the outcome, not about processes that may lead to an outcome They have to be about both because outcomes aren’t predictable, and whether something is an intermediate or ultimate outcome isn’t always clear. We have a law requiring indicator use on lane change, not just hitting someone while lane changing, for example.

But even this example is a ban on a specific action: changing lanes without using a legally defined indicator with a specific amount of display time.

The equivalent would be if the law simply said, "don't change lanes unsafely" but didn't define it much beyond that, and left it to law enforcement and judges to decide, so anytime someone changed lanes "unsafely" there's now extremely unknown legal risk.

Re: SB-1047 will stifle open-source AI and decrease safety

#143

Post by [deleted] »

carterschonwald wrote: post #7

The law seems to only care about models that take at least 10^26 floating point ops or models that achieve comparable benchmark performance. This is a truly absurd number! I’m ok with organizations with that sort of compute capacity being subject to regulatory oversight and reporting and liability.

[deleted]

Re: SB-1047 will stifle open-source AI and decrease safety

#144

Post by pclmulqdq »

adamc wrote: post #129
ubj wrote: post #34

> The creator of a model can not ensure that a model is never used to do something harmful – any more so that the developer of a web browser, calculator, or word processor could. Placing liability on the creators of general purpose tools like these mean that, in practice, such tools can not be created at all, except by big businesses with well funded legal teams. This matches my thoughts on why this is ultimately a b…

Someone who creates very dangerous items needs to take responsibility for them. Or their production needs to be very heavily regulated. That is just a reality. We don't let companies sell grenades on street corners. The running away from responsibility is one of the things I like least about big tech.

After all of the times that I have heard this argument, I now believe that the lesser evil is allowing people to sell grenades on street corners. This logic causes complacency in users of products and removes any responsibility on the part of malicious actors who still find ways to use the "softened" version of these products badly. They will now just blame the people who didn't "soften" them properly.

So no thank you, bring back responsibility to end users of products, and allow suppliers to develop the best capabilities they can.

Re: SB-1047 will stifle open-source AI and decrease safety

#145

Post by michaelmrose »

sanxiyn wrote: post #69
huevosabio wrote: post #56

Unbelievable. I like Scott Wiener for his housing policies but this bill is rampant overstepping from the government. Ironically, it will have the same effect as the NIMBY system he has fought for so long. Some nuggets... --- So we are only allowed to train what they allow us: This bill would require that a developer, before initiating training of a nonderivative covered model, comply with various requirements, inclu…

> including implementing the capability to promptly enact a full shutdown So you need to be able to turn it off. It should be easy? Still it seems to be a good thing to make sure you can turn it off.

So require a backdoor to shut down software running on someone else's hardware you mean?

Doesn't this inherently break normal distribution of source code which inherently doesn't come with an off switch?

Re: SB-1047 will stifle open-source AI and decrease safety

#146

Post by JumpCrisscross »

freedomben wrote: post #142
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Laws should be about the outcome, not about processes that may lead to an outcome They have to be about both because outcomes aren’t predictable, and whether something is an intermediate or ultimate outcome isn’t always clear. We have a law requiring indicator use on lane change, not just hitting someone while lane changing, for example.

But even this example is a ban on a specific action: changing lanes without using a legally defined indicator with a specific amount of display time. The equivalent would be if the law simply said, "don't change lanes unsafely" but didn't define it much beyond that, and left it to law enforcement and judges to decide, so anytime someone changed lanes "unsafely" there's now extremely unknown legal risk.

> even this example is a ban on a specific action: changing lanes without using a legally defined indicator

This is directly analogous to requiring disclosures and certifications be filed with the state. Those are actions as much as hitting an indicator.

I haven’t read the proposed bill closely. But it seems to be a standard rulemaking bill.

Re: SB-1047 will stifle open-source AI and decrease safety

#147

Post by wokwokwok »

andy99 wrote: post #121
DalasNoin wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agree that artificial intelligence is an outlier. I think it is the technology with the greatest associated risk of all technologies humans have worked on.

That's because you don't understand it.

Please don’t.

It’s unhelpful to the argument when you do this, and it makes our side look like a bunch of smug self entitled assholes.

The reality is that AI is disruptive but we don’t know how disruptive.

The parent post is clearly hyperbole; but let’s push back on what is clearly nonsense (ie. AI being more dangerous than nuclear weapons) in a logical manner hm?

Understanding AI is not the issue here; the issue so that no one knows how disruptive it will eventually be; not me, not you, not them.

People are playing the risk mitigation game; but the point is that if you play it too hard you end up as a ludite in a cave with no lights because something might be dangerous about “electricity”.

Re: SB-1047 will stifle open-source AI and decrease safety

#148

Post by dbish »

nradov wrote: post #111
dbish wrote: post #16

Which states would you speculate will be best long term for AI startups? I would’ve guessed California but it’s looking more important to pick a state less likely to get over their skis with regulation. Washington doesn’t seem yet to be doing this, and no state tax with lots of AI engineers/researchers in Seattle/redmond which is why I’m here. Texas probably won’t add regulations and has similar pros if you’re in Aus…

State politics are important, but electricity prices and availability of real estate for new data centers also matters. California has particularly high electricity prices and makes it difficult to construct new industrial facilities (especially near bodies of water that could help with cooling requirements). While companies might locate some employees in CA, the hardware will likely run elsewhere.

That’s been true for a while though. Datacenters re not usually near your software engineers and researchers

Re: SB-1047 will stifle open-source AI and decrease safety

#149

Post by freedomben »

thijson wrote: post #80
narrator wrote: post #3

The politicians are gunning extremely hard for open source AI. It's crazy. "Soros argued that synergy like that between corporate and government AI projects creates a more potent threat than was posed by Cold War–era autocrats, many of whom spurned corporate innovation. “The combination of repressive regimes with IT monopolies endows those regimes with a built-in advantage over open societies,” Soros said. “They pose…

If all you want is to be able to run it, but don't care about speed, you can run it on a Dell R720, they support hundreds of gigabytes of RAM. https://ollama.com/ makes it easy to download. They're pretty cheap compared to a Mac Studio. I got an R820 for a few hundred dollars, it has 256GB of RAM, with room for much more.

Furthermore you can get used versions of these pretty cheap on ebay. I bought some years back for experimenting with openshift in my homelab and was able to get some pretty insane hardware for $600 USD. Processors are slow, but it will run.

Re: SB-1047 will stifle open-source AI and decrease safety

#150

Post by michaelmrose »

codexb wrote: post #64
dbish wrote: post #16

Which states would you speculate will be best long term for AI startups? I would’ve guessed California but it’s looking more important to pick a state less likely to get over their skis with regulation. Washington doesn’t seem yet to be doing this, and no state tax with lots of AI engineers/researchers in Seattle/redmond which is why I’m here. Texas probably won’t add regulations and has similar pros if you’re in Aus…

What states have good weather year round, already have large urban centers, and better laws and taxes than California? That's basically what it amounts to. That's why cities in Texas and Florida are growing. Seattle has terrible weather. Washington gets cold and their large cities are mismanaged to the point that they're undesirable to live in for well-off families.

How are they mismanaged other than having incompetent police?
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