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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

#651

Post by itronitron »

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.

FTX was also losing money.

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

#652

Post by 10000truths »

sangnoir wrote: post #384
hellojesus wrote: post #375

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> There is no way to stop self hosted models. edit: Current models- sure, but they will soon be outdated. I think the idea is to strangle the development of comparable, SoTA models in the future that individuals can self-host; OpenAI certainly won't release their weights, and they'd want the act of releasing weights without a license to be criminalized. If such a law is signed, it would remove the threat of smaller A…

You can't strangle the development of such models because the data comes from anywhere and everywhere. Short of shutting off the entire Internet, there's nothing a government can do to prevent some guy on the opposite side of the world from hoovering up publicly accessible human text into a corpus befitting an LLM training set.

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

#653

Post by ThrowawayTestr »

hellojesus wrote: post #375
sangnoir wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Sure, but they can be made illegal and difficult to share on the clear web.

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

#654

Post by ozi »

happytiger wrote: post #497

We need to MAKE SURE that AI as a technology ISN'T controlled by a small number of powerful corporations with connections to governments. To expound, this just seems like a power grab to me, to "lock in" the lead and keep AI controlled by a small number of corporations that can afford to license and operate the technologies. Obviously, this will create a critical nexus of control for a small number of well connected…

How do you even end up enforcing licensing here? It's only a matter of time before something as capable as GPT-4 works on a cell phone.

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

#655

Post by graycat »

In simple terms:

Credibility and Checking. We have ways of checking suggestions. Without passing such checks, for anything new, in simple terms. there is no, none, zero credibility. Current AI does not fundamentally change this situation: The AI output starts with no, none, zero credibility and to be taken seriously needs to be checked by traditional means.

AI is smart or soon will be? Maybe so, but I don't believe it. Whatever, to be taken seriously, e.g., as more than just wild suggestions to get credibility from elsewhere, AI results still need to be checked by traditional means.

Our society has long checked nearly ALL claims from nearly ALL sources before taking the claims seriously, and AI needs to pass the same checks.

I checked the credibility of ChatGPT for being smart by asking

(i) Given triangle ABC, construct D on AB and E on BC so that the lengths AD = DE = EC.

Results: Grade of flat F. Didn't make any progress at all.

(ii) Solve the initial value problem of ordinary differential equation

y'(t) = k y(t) ( b - y(t) )

Results: Grade of flat F. Didn't make any progress at all.

So, the AI didn't actually learn either high school plane geometry or freshman college calculus.

For the hearings today, we have from Senator Blumenthal

(1) "... this apparent reasoning ..."

(2) "... the promise of curing cancer, of developing new understandings of physics and biology ..."

Senator, you have misunderstood:

For (1), the AI is not "reasoning", e.g., can't reason with plane geometry or calculus. Instead, as in example you gave with a clone of your voice and based on your Senate floor speeches, the AI just rearranged some of your words.

For (2), the AI is not going to cure cancer or "develop new" anything.

If some researcher does find a cure for a cancer and publishes the results in a paper and AI reads the paper, there is still no expectation that the AI will understand any of it -- recall, the AI does NOT "understand" either high school plane geometry or freshman college calculus. And without some input with a recognized cure for the cancer, the AI won't know how to cure the cancer. If the cure for cancer is already in the training data, then the AI might be able to regurgitate the cure.

Again, the AI does NOT "understand" either high school plane geometry or freshman college calculus and, thus, there is no reasonable hope that the AI will cure cancer or contribute anything new and correct about physics or biology.

Or, Springer Verlag uses printing presses to print books on math, but the presses have no understanding of the math. And AI has no real understanding of high school plane geometry, freshman college calculus, cancer, physics, or biology.

The dangers? To me, Senator Blumenthal starts with no, none, zero understanding of AI. To take his claims seriously, I want to check out the claims with traditional means. Now I've done that. His claims fail. His opinions have no credibility. For AI, I want to do the same -- check the output with traditional means before taking the output seriously.

This checking defends me from statements from politicians AND from AI. AI dangerous? Same as for politicians, not if do the checking.

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

#656

Post by itronitron »

sumtechguy wrote: post #60
bilekas wrote: post #16

This 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…

wait they are talking about licenses for giant arrays and for loop interactions? I know I am wildly oversimplifying, but yes that is nonsense.

just rename everything to ML, in fact you could start a company and call it OpenML

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

#657

Post by phpisthebest »

kweinber wrote: post #636
discardedrefuse wrote: post #605

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's the point of these letters? Everyone knows this is rent-seeking behavior by OpenAI, and they're going to pay off the right politicians to get it passed. Dear Senator [X], It's painfully obvious that Sam Altman's testimony before the judiciary committee is an attempt to set up rent-seeking conditions for OpenAI, and to snuff out competition from the flourishing open source AI community. We will be carefully mon…

Did you watch the hearing? He specifically said that licensing wouldn’t be for the smaller places and didn’t want to impede their progress. The pitfalls of consolidation and regulatory capture also came up.

>>He specifically said that licensing wouldn’t be for the smaller places

This is not a rebuttle to regulatory capture. it is in fact built into the model

These "small companies" are feeder systems for the large company, it is a place for companies to raise to the level where they would come under the burden of regulations, and prevented from growing larger there by making them very easy to acquire by the large company.

The small company has to sell or raise massive amounts of capital to just piss away on compliance cost. Most will just sell

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

#659

Post by itronitron »

johnyzee wrote: post #552

The mainstream media cartel is pumping Sam Altman hard for some reason. Just from today (CNBC): "Sam Altman wows lawmakers at closed AI dinner: ‘Fantastic…forthcoming’" [1]. When was the last time you saw MSM suck up so hard to a Silicon Valley CEO? I see stories like this all the time now. They always play up the angle of the geeky wizzkid (so innocent!), whereas Sam Altman was always less a technologist and more of…

I'm willing to follow dang if they decide to ditch HN and reboot it someplace separate from YC.

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

#660

Post by yyyk »

Aperocky wrote: post #541
vsareto wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

OpenAI have no moat. The open source community will catch up in at most a year or two, they are scared and now want to use regulations to strangle competitions. While their AI is going to advance as well, the leap will not be qualitative as the ChatGPT gen 1 was - so they will lose competitive advantage.

OpenAI has plenty of moats if it looks for them.

The trick is that companies' moats against commoditization (open source or not) usually have little to do with raw performance. Linux could in theory do everything Mac or Windows do, but Apple and Microsoft are still the richest companies in the world. Postgres can match Oracle, but Larry Ellison still owns a private island.

The moats are usually in products (bet: There will not be any OSS product using LLM within a year. Most likely not within two. No OSS product within two or three years or even a decade will come close to commercial offerings in practice), API, current service relations, customer relations, etc. If OpenAI could lock customers to its embeddings and API, or embed its products in current moats (e.g. Office 365) they'll have a moat. And it won't matter a bit what performance OSS models say they have, or what new spin Google Research would come up with.

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