Regulatory capture and monopolies are now as American as apple pie.
Where is the regulatory capture? You might just need to apply for a license. Why is that so horrible? Most travel agents need a license, taxi drivers etc. Not sure why the same shouldn't apply for "AI"?
Sam Altman goes before US Congress to propose licenses for building AI
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Re: Sam Altman goes before US Congress to propose licenses for building AI
#42Imagine thinking that regression based function approximators are capable of anything other than fitting the data you give it. Then imagine willfully hyping up and scaring people who don't understand, and because it can predict words you take advantage of the human tendency to anthropomorphize, so it follows that it is something capable of generalized and adaptable intelligence. Shame on all of the people involved in…
I wrote a comment recently trying to explain how even if you believe all LLMs can (and will ever) do is regurgitate their training data that you should still be concerned.
For example, imagine in 5 years we have GPT-7, and you ask GPT-7 to solve humanity's great problems.
From its training data GPT-7 might notice that humans believe overpopulation is a serious issue facing humanity.
But its "aligned" so might understand from its training data that killing people is wrong so instead it uses its training data to seek other ways to reduce human populations without extermination.
Its training data included information about how gene drives were used by humans to reduce mosquito populations by causing infertility. Many human have also suggested (and tried) to use birth control to reduce human populations via infertility so the ethical implications of using gene drives to cause infertility is debatable based on the data the LLM was trained on.
Using this information it decides to hack into a biolab using hacking techniques it learnt from its training data and use its biochemistry knowledge to make slight alterations to one of the active research projects at the lab. This causes the lab to unknowingly produce a highly contagious bioweapon which causes infertility.
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The point here is that even if we just assume LLMs are only capable of producing output which approximates stuff it learnt from its training data, an advanced LLM can still be dangerous.
And in this example, I'm assuming no malicious actors and an aligned AI. If you're willing to assume there might be an actor out there would seek to use LLMs for malicious reasons or the AI is not well aligned then the risk becomes even clearer.
Re: Sam Altman goes before US Congress to propose licenses for building AI
#43Canceling my OpenAI account today and I urge you to do the same.
What they are really afraid of is open source models. As near as I can tell the leading edge there is only a year or two behind OpenAI. Given some time and efforts at pruning and optimization you’ll have GPT-4 equivalents you can just download and run on a high end laptop or gaming PC.
No everyone is not going to run the model themselves, but what this means is that there will be tons of competition including apps and numerous specialized SaaS offerings. None of them will have to pay royalties or API fees to OpenAI.
Edit: a while back I started being a data pack-rat for AI stuff including open source code and usable open models. I encourage anyone with a big disk or NAS to do the same. There's a small but non-zero possibility that an attempt will be made to pull this stuff off the net in the near future.
Re: Sam Altman goes before US Congress to propose licenses for building AI
#44Imagine thinking that regression based function approximators are capable of anything other than fitting the data you give it. Then imagine willfully hyping up and scaring people who don't understand, and because it can predict words you take advantage of the human tendency to anthropomorphize, so it follows that it is something capable of generalized and adaptable intelligence. Shame on all of the people involved in…
Why is it so hard to hear this perspective? Like, genuinely curious. This is the first I hear of someone cogently putting this thought out there, but it seems rather painfully obvious -- even if perhaps incorrect, but certainly a perspective that is very easy to comprehend and one that merits a lot of discussion. Why is it almost nonexistent? I remember even in the hay day of crypto fever you'd still have A LOT of fo…
Those nonplussed by this wave of AI are just yawning.
Re: Sam Altman goes before US Congress to propose licenses for building AI
#45Imagine thinking that regression based function approximators are capable of anything other than fitting the data you give it. Then imagine willfully hyping up and scaring people who don't understand, and because it can predict words you take advantage of the human tendency to anthropomorphize, so it follows that it is something capable of generalized and adaptable intelligence. Shame on all of the people involved in…
The real problem here is that the number of crimes you can commit with LLMs is much higher then the number of good things you can do with it. It's pretty debatable that if society were fair or reasonable with decent laws in place that LLMs training corpus shouldn't even be legal. But here we are, waiting for more billionaires to cash in.
Yeah? Did you get a crystal ball for Christmas to be able to predict what can and can't be done with a new technology?
Re: Sam Altman goes before US Congress to propose licenses for building AI
#46Re: Sam Altman goes before US Congress to propose licenses for building AI
#47This is so stupid its exactly what you would expect in congress. If this was to go through, of course OpenAI and co will be the primary lobbiests to ensure they get to define the filters for such a license. Also how would you even enforce this. It's absolute nonsense and is a clear indicator that these larger companies realize there is no 'gatekeeping' these AI's, that the democratization of models has demonstrated i…
Give the politicians time: I predict a day will come where you will need a permit to use a compiler and connect the result to the internet.
Re: Sam Altman goes before US Congress to propose licenses for building AI
#48Imagine thinking that regression based function approximators are capable of anything other than fitting the data you give it. Then imagine willfully hyping up and scaring people who don't understand, and because it can predict words you take advantage of the human tendency to anthropomorphize, so it follows that it is something capable of generalized and adaptable intelligence. Shame on all of the people involved in…
100% this, I don't get how even on this website people are so clueless. Give them a semi human sounding puppet and they think skynet is coming tomorrow. If we learned anything from the past few months is how gullible people are, wishful thinking is a hell of a drug
Re: Sam Altman goes before US Congress to propose licenses for building AI
#49Imagine thinking that regression based function approximators are capable of anything other than fitting the data you give it. Then imagine willfully hyping up and scaring people who don't understand, and because it can predict words you take advantage of the human tendency to anthropomorphize, so it follows that it is something capable of generalized and adaptable intelligence. Shame on all of the people involved in…
Even if you're correct about the capabilities of LLMs (I don't think you are), there are still obvious dangers here. I wrote a comment recently trying to explain how even if you believe all LLMs can (and will ever) do is regurgitate their training data that you should still be concerned. For example, imagine in 5 years we have GPT-7, and you ask GPT-7 to solve humanity's great problems. From its training data GPT-7 m…
Re: Sam Altman goes before US Congress to propose licenses for building AI
#50Imagine thinking that regression based function approximators are capable of anything other than fitting the data you give it. Then imagine willfully hyping up and scaring people who don't understand, and because it can predict words you take advantage of the human tendency to anthropomorphize, so it follows that it is something capable of generalized and adaptable intelligence. Shame on all of the people involved in…
The real problem here is that the number of crimes you can commit with LLMs is much higher then the number of good things you can do with it. It's pretty debatable that if society were fair or reasonable with decent laws in place that LLMs training corpus shouldn't even be legal. But here we are, waiting for more billionaires to cash in.