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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

#411

Post by thelittleone »

cheald wrote: post #408
thelittleone wrote: post #392

This feels like theater. Make society fear AI, requiring regulation, so central power controls access to it. I think Osho put it nicely: "No society wants you to become wise: it is against the investment of all societies. If people are wise they cannot be exploited. If they are intelligent they cannot be subjugated, they cannot be forced in a mechanical life, to live like robots."

I agree. Every talk on "AI safety" I've heard given has essentially been some form of "we can be trusted with this power, but someone else might not be, so we should add regulations to ensure that we're the only ones with this power". Examples like "ChatGPT can tell you how to make nerve gas, we can't let people have this tool" seem somewhat hollow given that the detailed chemistry to make Sarin is available on Wikip…

It's very Lord of the Rings.

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

#412

Post by stuckkeys »

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…

Just waiting for the Forbes cover to drop, then I can confirm we are doomed. lol

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

#413

Post by pr337h4m »

vsareto wrote: post #329
simonbarker87 wrote: post #250

Is this just to put up a barrier to entry to new entrants in the market so they can have a government enforced monopoly?

Why would OpenAI be worried about new entrants that are almost certainly too small to present a business threat? What regulation are they proposing that is actually a serious barrier to making a company around AI? If OpenAI just wants to prevent another OpenAI eating its lunch, the barrier there is raw compute. Companies that can afford that can afford to jump regulatory hurdles.

>If OpenAI just wants to prevent another OpenAI eating its lunch, the barrier there is raw compute.

Stable Diffusion pretty much killed DALL-E, cost only $600k to train, and can be run on iPhones.

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

#415

Post by causi »

a13o wrote: post #239
candiddevmike wrote: post #174

I'm sad that we've lost the battle with calling these things AI. LLMs aren't AI, and I don't think they're even a path towards AI.

I started at this perspective, but nobody could agree on the definition of the A, or the I; and also the G. So it wasn't a really rigorous technical term to begin with. Now that it's been corraled by sci-fi and marketers, we are free to come up with new metaphors for algorithms that reliably replace human effort. Metaphors which don't smuggle in all our ignorance about intelligence and personhood. I ended up feeling…

Whether LLMs will be a base technology to AI, we should remember one thing: logically it's easier to convince a human that a program is sapient than to actually make a program sapient, and further, it's easier still to make a program do spookily-smart things than it is to make a program that can convince a human it is sapient. We're just getting to the slightly-spooky level.

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

#416

Post by lurker919 »

RandomLensman wrote: post #12

Finally we'll regulate linear algebra. Joking aside, AIs that on the one hand can cure cancer but can do nothing against misinformation, let alone genocidal AIs, are perhaps mythical creatures, not real ones.

Don't you dare differentiate those weights! Hands in the air!

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

#417

Post by DANmode »

freedomben wrote: post #213
elil17 wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't mean it as a personal insult at all! The word ilk actually means "a type of people or things similar to those already referred to," it is not an insult or rude word.

TIL! https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/ilk still, there are probably a lot of people like me who have heard it used (incorrectly it seems) as an insult so many times that it's an automatic response :-(

Tone, intended or otherwise, is a pretty important part of communication!

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

#418

Post by [deleted] »

ilrwbwrkhv wrote: post #26
srslack wrote: post #9

Imagine 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…

Sam Altman is a great case of failing upwards. And this is the problem. You don't get to build a moral backbone if you fake your brilliance.

[deleted]

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

#419

Post by mola »

m00x wrote: post #387
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Reminds me of SBF calling for crypto regulations while running FTX Scott Galloway called it the stop-me-before-I-kill-grandma defence. (Paraphrasing.) You made money making a thing. You continue to make the thing. You’re telling us how the thing will bring doom and gloom if not dealt with (conveniently implying it will change the world). And you want to staff the regulatory body you call for with the very butchers…

Except they don't make any money from their products. They're losing hundreds of millions per month. This isn't the same at all.

Well, this will give em time. Right now LLM have become a commodity. Everybody is got them and can research and develoo them. OpenAI is without a product, it has no advantage. But if the general public will be limited. It'll be hard to catch up to openAI.

I'm sry for the cynicism, but Altman seems very much disingenuous with this.

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

#420

Post by denverllc »

I don't think Sam read the Google memo and realized they needed a moat -- I think they've been trying this for some time.

Here's their planned proposal for government regulation; they discuss not just limiting access to models but also to datasets, and possibly even chips.

This seems particularly relevant, on the discussion of industry standards, regulation, and limiting access:

"Despite these limitations, strong industry norms—including norms enforced by industry standards or government regulation—could still make widespread adoption of strong access restrictions possible. As long as there is a significant gap between the most capable open-source model and the most capable API-controlled model, the imposition of monitoring controls can deny hostile actors some financial benefit.166 Cohere, OpenAI, and AI21 have already collaborated to begin articulating norms around access to large language models, but it remains too early to tell how widely adopted, durable, and forceful these guidelines will prove to be.

Finally, there may be alternatives to APIs as a method for AI developers to provide restricted access. For example, some work has proposed imposing controls on who can use models by only allowing them to work on specialized hardware—a method that may help with both access control and attribution.168 Another strand of work is around the design of licenses for model use.169 Further exploration of how to provide restricted access is likely valuable."

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2301.04246.pdf

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