AI is really a giant plagiarism machine and I could not care less about it being tightly regulated.
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SB-1047 will stifle open-source AI and decrease safety
171–180 of 201 posts
Re: SB-1047 will stifle open-source AI and decrease safety
#172Earlier quoted context omitted.
>my comment was quite ambiguous and . . . No harm done! >If the bill were only covering AI killing machines I'd (probably) be in agreement with it, but it seems significantly more overreaching than that. Just to make sure we are on the same page: my main worry is the projects ("deployments"?) that aren't intended to kill anybody, but one of those project ends up killing billions of people anyways. It probably kills a…
Agreed, and I think this bill probably would help against that, although indirectly by stifling research outside of big corps. You might be winning me over somewhat - stifling research outside of big corps does feel like a pretty low price to pay against the death/destruction of all of humanity... I guess I need to decide how high I feel the risk is of that, and that I'm less sure of. Appreciate the discussion btw!
If you're in the Bay Area and want to discuss in person, my email is in my profile.
Re: SB-1047 will stifle open-source AI and decrease safety
#173The 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.
"I think there is a world market for maybe five computers."
Thomas Watson, president of IBM, 1943
Re: SB-1047 will stifle open-source AI and decrease safety
#174this feels a lot like Uber/Lyft whining about rideshare regulation, or Musk whining about self-driving regulation. Howard does a miserable job attempting to explain what, exactly, this legislation will do to impact open source development and clearly hasnt read the specifics for open-source development in the bill. things like dual use/ITAR apply explicitly to commercial products, but he attempts to conflate them wit…
> things like dual use/ITAR apply explicitly to commercial products
No, just no. Have you ever been to a University?
Re: SB-1047 will stifle open-source AI and decrease safety
#175"This could inadvertently criminalize the activities of well-intentioned developers working on beneficial AI projects." It wouldn't be inadvertent. It's a control tactic. "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." ... "These requirements could disproportionately impact open…
How about some liability placed on members of government for their hopeless legislating? As developers of law shouldn’t they accept responsibility for the harms they cause?
Re: SB-1047 will stifle open-source AI and decrease safety
#176mmmmmmm regulatory capture, wouldn't be america without it - nothing says freedom and open markets like sawing off the rungs from the bottom of the ladder after you've already climbed to the top
Open source AI is not at the bottom of the ladder; like closed source AI, some of the brightest, well-educated and arguably well-paid people in the world are the driving force behind it. OpenAI, arguably at the top of the ladder, was supposed to be open source as well.
It's not a perfect analogy, but it's still corporate interests trying to entrench their position to prevent disruption by less politically powerful players.
Re: SB-1047 will stifle open-source AI and decrease safety
#177Honest question -- if models (much like code) are open-sourced anonymously, what can governments and politicians do about it? This sounds like the "export-restricted cryptography" foolishness of the 90's all over again.
Seize your domain name. Force anyone to refuse to do business with you and or give up enough info to find you and put you in prison anywhere in the US or any country with an extradition treaty which is most of the better places to live.
Extradition is only possible in cases where both countries have (approximately) equivalent laws and the crime is sufficiently serious.
Re: SB-1047 will stifle open-source AI and decrease safety
#178Earlier quoted context omitted.
As I understand this law does not mandate you to ensure anything. It requires you to follow best practices (to be determined), report safety incidents, etc. You are not even liable for safety incidents, you just need to report them, although it may be embarrassing. Overall, it seems highly reasonable.
Nothing drives fear into my heart like the phrase “best practices”. Never in my career has it ever meant anything remotely reasonable.
"Best practices" means something sensible in most subfields of capital-E Engineering. (In fact, I think that's where the term originates from, with all other usages being a corruption of the original concept.)
In Engineering, "best practices" are the set of "just do X" answers that will let you skip deriving every answer about what material or design to use from first principles for cases where there's a known dominant solution. For example, "for a load-bearing pillar, use steel-reinforced concrete, in a cylindrical shape, with a cross-sectional diameter following formula XYZ given the number of storeys of the building." You can (and eventually must!) still do a load simulation for the building, to see that the pillar can hold things up without cracking — but you don't have to model the building when selecting what material to use; and you don't have to randomly fiddle with the shape or diameter of the pillar until the load holds. You can slap a pillar into the design and be able to predict that it'll hold the load (while not being overly costly in material use!), because "best practices."
Re: SB-1047 will stifle open-source AI and decrease safety
#179[dead]
Re: SB-1047 will stifle open-source AI and decrease safety
#180There is no such thing as AI safety. AI is far too dangerous. The only thing that exists with regard to AI is "distracting the population so they think AI benefits them" or "AI is too amusing so I don't want to think about the consequences".
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