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Sam Altman goes before US Congress to propose licenses for building AI

reuters.com

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Re: Sam Altman goes before US Congress to propose licenses for building AI

#371

Post by elil17 »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #369
elil17 wrote: post #129

This is the message I shared with my senator (edited to remove information which could identify me). I hope others will send similar messages. Dear Senator [X], I am an engineer working for [major employer in the state]. I am extremely concerned about the message that Sam Altman is sharing with the Judiciary committee today. Altman wants to create regulatory roadblocks to developing AI. My company produces AI-enabled…

> regulation should focus on ensuring the safety of AIs once they are ready to be put into widespread use What would you say to a simple registration requirement? You give a point of contact and a description of training data, model, and perhaps intended use (could be binary: civilian or dual use). One page, publicly visible. This gives groundwork for future rulemaking and oversight if necessary.

Personally I think a simple registration requirement would be a good idea, if it were truly simple and accessible to independent researchers.

Re: Sam Altman goes before US Congress to propose licenses for building AI

#372

Post by cwkoss »

nixcraft wrote: post #298

I understand that some people may not agree with what I am about to say, but I feel it is important to share. Recently, some talented writers who are my good friends at major publishing houses have lost their jobs to AI technology. There have been news articles about this in the past few months too. While software dev jobs in the IT industry may be safe for now, many other professions are at risk of being replaced by…

Tax AI and use it to fund UBI

Re: Sam Altman goes before US Congress to propose licenses for building AI

#374

Post by capital_guy »

Some of the members of congress are totally falling for Altman's gambit. Sen. Graham kept asking about how a licensing regime would be a solution, which of course Altman loves, and kept interrupting Ms. Montgomery who tried to explain why that was not the best approach. Altman wants to secure his monopoly here and now. You can't have a licensing regime for AI - it doesn't make sense and he knows it. It would destroy the Open Source AI movement.

You need to control what data is allowed to be fed into paid AI model like OpenAI - can't eat a bunch of copyrighted material without express consent, for example. Or personally private information purchased from a data broker. Those kind of foundational rules would serve us all much better

Re: Sam Altman goes before US Congress to propose licenses for building AI

#375

Post by hellojesus »

sangnoir wrote: post #252
nico wrote: post #143

This is quite incredible Could you imagine if MS had convinced the govt back in the day, to require a special license to build an operating system (this blocking Linux and everything open)? It’s essentially what’s happening now, Except it is OpenAI instead of MS, and it is AI instead of Linux AI is the new Linux, they know it, and are trying desperately to stop it from happening

I guess @sama took that leaked Google memo to heart ("We have no moat... and neither does OpenAI"). Requiring a license would take out the biggest competitive threats identified in the same memo (Open Source projects) which can result in self-hosted models, which I suppose Altman sees as an existential threat to OpenAI

There is no way to stop self hosted models. The best would be to send gov to data centers, but what if those centers are outside US jurisdiction? Too funny to watch the gov play these losing games.

Re: Sam Altman goes before US Congress to propose licenses for building AI

#376

Post by abeppu »

nvegater wrote: post #353
abeppu wrote: post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> regulation should focus on ensuring the safety of AIs once they are ready to be put into widespread use - this would allow companies and individuals to research new AIs freely while still ensuring that AI products are properly reviewed. While in general I share the view that _research_ should be unencumbered, but deployment should be regulated, I do take issue with your view that safety only matters once they are r…

I think by "widespread use" he means the reach of the AI System. Dangerous analogy but just to get the idea across: In the same way there is higher tax rates to higher incomes, you should increase regulations in relation to how many people could be potentially affected by the AI system. E.G a Startup with 10 daily users should not be in the same regulation bracket as google. If google deploys an AI it will reach Bill…

But the "reach" is _not_ just a function of how many users the company has, it's also what they do with it. If you have only one user who generates convincing misinformation that they share on social media, the reach may be large even if your user-base is tiny. Or your new voice-cloning model is used by a single user to make a large volume of fake hostage proof-of-life recordings. The problem, and the reason for guardrails (whether regulatory or otherwise), is that you don't know what your users will do with your new tech, even if there's only a small number of them.

Re: Sam Altman goes before US Congress to propose licenses for building AI

#377

Post by peepeepoopoo5 »

thrway345772 wrote: post #317
brenns10 wrote: post #234

Reminds me of SBF calling for crypto regulations while running FTX. Being seen as friendly to regulations is great for optics compared to being belligerently anti-regulation. You can appear responsible and benevolent, and get more opportunity to weaken regulation by controlling more of the narrative. And hey, if you get end up getting some regulatory capture making competition harder, that's a great benefit too. Open…

FWIW, OpenAI and FTX leadership share the same ideology

oy vey

Re: Sam Altman goes before US Congress to propose licenses for building AI

#378

Post by tedunangst »

visarga wrote: post #243
rdedev wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair LLMs are predicting the next token. It's just that to get better and better predictions it needs to understand some level of reasoning and math. However it feels to me that a lot of this reasoning is brute forced from the training data. Like chatgpt gets some things wrong when adding two very large numbers. If it really knew the algorithm for adding two numbers it shouldn't be making them in the first plac…

> If it really knew the algorithm for adding two numbers it shouldn't be making them in the first place. You're using it wrong. If you asked a human to do the same operation in under 2 seconds without paper, would the human be more accurate? On the other hand if you ask for a step by step execution, the LLM can solve it.

I never told the LLM it needed to answer immediately. It can take its time and give the correct answer. I'd prefer that, even.

Re: Sam Altman goes before US Congress to propose licenses for building AI

#380

Post by jazzyjackson »

adamsmith143 wrote: post #173
jazzyjackson wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

your comment reads to me as totally disconnected to the OP, whose concern relates to using the appearance of intelligence as a scare tactic to build a regulatory moat.

Actually OP is clearly, ironically, parroting the stochastic parrot idea that LLMs are incapable of anything other than basic token prediction and dismissing any of their other emergent abilities.

yea but that's a boring critique and not the point they were making - whether or not LLMs reason or parrot has no relevance to whether Mr Altman should be the one building the moat.
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