Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Joint Statement on AI Safety and Openness

open.mozilla.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 166 posts

Re: Joint Statement on AI Safety and Openness

#61

Post by smcleod »

skybrian wrote: post #26
jeanloolz wrote: post #12

Leaving AI to a handful of companies is in my opinion the fastest route for inequality and power concentration/centralisation, and this is in a way an AI disaster we should be worrisome. Power corrupts, great power greatly corrupts, this is not entirely new. From where I stand, it looks like the pandora box has already been opened anyway. The era of hugginface and/or Llama2 models is only going to grow from there.

I disagree entirely. We shouldn't be hoping for a complex ecosystem of small, shady companies nobody ever heard of, like happened with ad networks [1]. Or worse, a scam-filled ecosystem like cryptocurrency. Or worse, an underground ecosystem like the criminals who share cracked passwords and credit card numbers. Big companies are easier to regulate. [1] https://lumapartners.com/lumascapes/

Really? You think Amazon, Google, Apple, Facebook etc…. Are well regulated?

The US has shown time and time again it’s complete incompetence when it comes to meaningful regulation of large companies.

Re: Joint Statement on AI Safety and Openness

#62

Post by visarga »

hyeonwho22 wrote: post #29
CamperBob2 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AI is no different than proliferating nuclear weapons I mean, once the discussion goes THIS far off the rails of reality, where do we go from here?

Why not? It has already been shown that AI can be (mis)used to identify good candidates for chemical weapons. [1] Next in the pipeline is obviously some religious nut (who would not otherwise have the capability) using it to design a virus which doesn't set off alarms at the gene synthesis / custom construct companies, and then learning to transfect it. More banally, state actors can already use open source models to…

> Next in the pipeline is obviously some religious nut (who would not otherwise have the capability)

So you're saying that:

1. the religious nut would not find the same information on Google or in books

2. if someone is motivated enough to commit such an act, the ease of use of AI vs. web search would make a difference

Has anyone checked how many biology students can prepare dangerous substances with just what they learned in school?

Have we removed the sites disseminating dangerous information off the internet first? What is to stop someone from training a model on such data anytime they want?

Re: Joint Statement on AI Safety and Openness

#63

Post by dclowd9901 »

bufferoverflow wrote: post #2

I still don't get what the plan is to stop bad actors from developing bad AI. A bunch of good actors agreeing not to do bad things won't help it.

I don’t know if you were intending to do this but your argument is almost ripped verbatim from advocates of open gun ownership.

Re: Joint Statement on AI Safety and Openness

#64

Post by devwastaken »

Mozilla is not involved in AI, nor are they a relevant org in general. A for profit with a nonprofit status. Mozilla can't have an opinion on something it is ignorant of, and therefore it doesn't deserve a seat. If they want to be apart of it they needed to invest in it 8 years ago.

Re: Joint Statement on AI Safety and Openness

#65

Post by benatkin »

jph00 wrote: post #51
benatkin wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're curating it. Look at the list - its almost entirely people who represent well known institutions. I don't agree and wouldn't sign anyways.

tbh I think I'm more well known in AI than most of the people currently listed there, so I don't think that's the reason.

Might explain the delay though :)

Re: Joint Statement on AI Safety and Openness

#66

Post by jmfldn »

pdonis wrote: post #38
jmfldn wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True but there is a really difficult trade off here between a big tech monopoly and decentralised open source anarchy. I say this as a Linux-using FOSS lover, but we need to open this up as much as possible without allowing superpowers to escape into the wrong hands. I guess strong regulation is the key but I'm just handwaving here really. I don't know how the tradeoff should be made. I see great dangers in hyper-pow…

> without allowing superpowers to escape into the wrong hands The wrong hands will have the same access to whatever "superpowers" AI gives regardless of what regulations are or are not put in place. Regulations can't and won't stop potential bad actors with state-level resources, like China, from using any technology they decide they want to use. So trying to regulate on that basis is a fool's errand. The real questi…

Interesting point. Perhaps you're right. I hope so, as someone who otherwise believes in the FOSS ideal.

Re: Joint Statement on AI Safety and Openness

#67

Post by [deleted] »

ta1243 wrote: post #44
pdonis wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> without allowing superpowers to escape into the wrong hands The wrong hands will have the same access to whatever "superpowers" AI gives regardless of what regulations are or are not put in place. Regulations can't and won't stop potential bad actors with state-level resources, like China, from using any technology they decide they want to use. So trying to regulate on that basis is a fool's errand. The real questi…

China, Iran, North Korea, Iran, US, Israel, Europe aren't bad actors. The bad actors don't have state level resources.

[deleted]

Re: Joint Statement on AI Safety and Openness

#68

Post by chasd00 »

nonrandomstring wrote: post #20
bufferoverflow wrote: post #2

I still don't get what the plan is to stop bad actors from developing bad AI. A bunch of good actors agreeing not to do bad things won't help it.

> A bunch of good actors agreeing not to do bad things won't help it. And that's true whichever way you cut it. Whether those "good" actors are everybody or a few selected for privilege. We have no basis on which to trust big technology companies more than anybody else. Indeed quite the opposite if the past 10 years are anything to go by. It is such a god-awful shame that corporations have been so disgracefully behav…

Another sane solution would be a law stating all trained models, source code, and training data must be made available to anyone who asks at no cost. That removes an AI as the secret sauce to any commercial entity but still leaving the door open to research and advancement. Propose that and watch all these big companies come back with "whoa whoa whoa, that's not what we meant. What we meant was we have it but no one else can have it".

Re: Joint Statement on AI Safety and Openness

#69

Post by shrimpx »

jeanloolz wrote: post #12

Leaving AI to a handful of companies is in my opinion the fastest route for inequality and power concentration/centralisation, and this is in a way an AI disaster we should be worrisome. Power corrupts, great power greatly corrupts, this is not entirely new. From where I stand, it looks like the pandora box has already been opened anyway. The era of hugginface and/or Llama2 models is only going to grow from there.

Power is already concentrated in the sense that only the wealthy can train. We should make kickstarter-type models to fund open source AI training, because it'll likely continue to cost millions to tens of millions for cutting edge models.

With Llama2 we're at Meta's mercy, as it cost 20M to train. No guarantee Meta will continue to give us next-gen models. And even if it does, we're stuck with their training biases, at least to some extent. (I know you can fine-tune etc.)

Re: Joint Statement on AI Safety and Openness

#70

Post by chakalakasp »

jay_kyburz wrote: post #55
jph00 wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is not at all true that "AI is no different than proliferating nuclear weapons". The project manager for the Nuclear Information Project said ( https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2023/7/3/23779794/artific... ) : """ But what we are seeing too often is a calorie-free media panic where prominent individuals — including scientists and experts we deeply admire — keep showing up in our push alerts because they vaguely…

Furthermore, there is little or no defense against a full scale nuclear attack, but a benevolent AI should be sufficient defense against a hostile AI. I think the true fear is that in an AI age, humans are not "useful" and the market and economy will look very different. With AI growing our food, clothing us, building us houses, and entertaining us, humans don't really have anything to do all day.

In what other sphere of tech does that apply?

"Hackers aren't a problem because we have cybersecurity engineers". And yet somehow entire enterprises and governments are occasionally taken down.

What prevents issues in redteam/blueteam is having teams invested in the survivability of the people their organization is working for. That breaks down a bit when all it takes is one biomedical researcher whose wife just left him to have an AI help him craft a society ending infectious agent. Force multipliers are somewhat tempered when put in the hands of governments but not so much with individuals. Which is why people in some countries are allowed to have firearms and in some countries are not, but in no countries are individuals allowed to legally possess or manufacture WMDs. Because if everyone can have equal and easy access to WMDs, advanced civilization ends.

Post reply on HN