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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

#831

Post by api »

SkyMarshal wrote: post #695
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…

> 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. If you actually watch the entire session, Altman does address that and recommend to Congress that regulations 1) not be applied to small startups, individual researchers, or open source, and 2) that they not be done in such a way…

That would make the regulations fairly pointless unless you think only mega-corps will ever be able to afford the compute for these things.

Compute continues to get cheaper and cheaper. We have not hit the physics wall yet on that.

That and if someone cracks efficient distributed training in a swarm type configuration then you could train models Seti@Home style. Lots of people would be happy to leave a gaming PC on to help create open source LLMs. The data requirements might be big but I just got gigabit fiber installed in my house so that barrier is vanishing too.

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

#832

Post by yarg »

pg_1234 wrote: post #634
nonethewiser wrote: post #555

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the definition of regulatory capture. Altman should be invited to speak so that we understand the ideas in his head but anything he suggests should be categorically rejected because he’s just not in a position to be trusted. If what he suggests are good ideas then hopefully we can arrive at them in some other way with a clean chain of custody. Although I assume if he’s speaking on AI they actually intend on c…

There is also growing speculation that the current level of AI may have peaked in a bang for buck sense. If this is so, and given the concrete examples of cheap derived models learning from the first movers and rapidly (and did I mention cheaply) closing the gap to this peak, the optimal self-serving corporate play is to invite regulation. After the legislative moats go up, it is once again about who has the biggest…

There's no chance that we've peeked from a bang for buck sense - we still haven't adequately investigated sparse networks.

Relevantish: https://arxiv.org/abs/2301.00774

The fact that we can reach those levels of sparseness with pruning also indicates that we're not doing a very good job of generating the initial network conditions.

Being able to come up with trainable initial settings for sparse networks across different topologies is hard, but given that we've had a degree of success with pre-trained networks, pre-training and pre-pruning might also allow for sparse networks with minimally compromised learning capabilities.

If it's possible to pre-train composable network modules, it might also be feasible to define trainable sparse networks with significantly relaxed topological constraints.

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

#833

Post by jacurtis »

explorer83 wrote: post #696
amelius wrote: post #665

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But goodness gracious we need to be going in the EXACT OPPOSITE direction — open source "core inspectable" AIs that millions of people can examine and tear apart, including and ESPECIALLY the training data and processes that create them Except ... when you look at the problem from a military/national security viewpoint. Do we really want to give this tech away just like that?

Is military capable AI in the hands of few militaries safer than in the hands of many? Or is it more likely to be used to bully other countries who don't have it? If it is used to oppress, would we want the oppressed have access to it? Or do we fear that it gives too much advantage to small cells of extremist to carry out their goals? I can think of pros and cons to both sides.

That is a valid thought experiment. I would say it isn't too dissimilar from nuclear weapons. A handful of powerful countries have access to this and any smaller country doesn't. It creates a large separation between 1st world countries and "everyone else".

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

#836

Post by concordDance »

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…

I'll note that you're correct for current gen LLMs, but we could have future actually dangerous things that would indeed need regulating.

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

#837

Post by concordDance »

stephc_int13 wrote: post #667
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…

This is the same move SBF was trying to do. Get all cozy with the people spending their time in the alleys of power. Telling them what they want to hear, posturing as the good guy. He is playing the game, this guy ambition is colossal, I don't blame him, but we should not give him too much power.

Seems like speculation on very thin grounds to me.

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

#838

Post by jacurtis »

kalkin wrote: post #786
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…

The current generation of AIs are scary to a lot of the initiated, too - both for what they can do now, and what their trajectory of improvement implies. If you take seriously any downsides, whether misinformation or surveillance or laundering bias or x-risk, how does AI model weights or training data being open source solve them? Open source is a lot of things, but one thing it's not is misuse-resistant (and the "wi…

I feel like the people that are most nervous about AI are the ones that don't understand it at all and those that understand it the most.

The layperson in the middle who has been happily plugging prompts into ChatGPT claiming they are a "prompt expert" are the ones the most excited.

For those that truly understand AI, there is a lot that you should genuinely be worried about. Now, don't confuse that for saying that we shouldn't work on it or should abandon AI work. I truly believe that this is the next greatest revolution. This is 1,000x more transformative than the industrial revolution, and 100x more transformative than the internet revolution. But it is worth a brief consideration of the effects of our work before we start running into these changes that could have drastic effects on everybody's daily life.

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

#840

Post by drvdevd »

generalizations wrote: post #134

This is going to be RSA export restrictions all over again. I wish the regulators the best of luck in actually enforcing this. I'm tempted to think that whatever regulations they put in place won't really matter that much, and progress will march on regardless. Give it a year and a 10x more efficient algorithm, and we'll have GPT4 on our personal devices and there's nothing that any government regulator will be able…

Yeah and one of the fundamental assumptions around statements like “let’s make AI a licensed regime” is the idea that we know what AI even is. This idea is banking on current technology being the best algorithm or method to produce “AI” and the whole lesson from the “we have no moat” crowd is that this is actually quite uncertain. Even if they succeed in getting some class of model like LLMs under “regulatory capture” - the technology they are working with today is likely to be undermined still by something cheaper working on weaker hardware and with smaller datasets and it’ll probably happen faster if they seek this market capture.

So yes it is quite comparable to the export restrictions of the 90s.

But since Microsoft is involved and we are all of course thinking about Windows vs Linux, I think another good comparison is the worst assumption Microsoft made in the 90s: “we know what an operating system is and what it is for.”

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