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

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

reuters.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

861–870 of 1001 posts

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

#861

Post by komali2 »

chasd00 wrote: post #783
abeppu wrote: post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> regulation should focus on ensuring the safety of AIs once they are ready to be put into widespread use - this would allow companies and individuals to research new AIs freely while still ensuring that AI products are properly reviewed. While in general I share the view that _research_ should be unencumbered, but deployment should be regulated, I do take issue with your view that safety only matters once they are r…

> I cannot sell a "rain coat" made of gauze which offers no protection from rain, and I cannot sell a "smoke detector" which doesn't effectively detect smoke. Why should low-volume AI/ML products get a pass? i can sell a webserver that gets used to host illegal content all day long. Should that be included? Where does the regulation end? I hate that the answer to any question seems to be just add more government.

Just because there's a conversation about adding more government doesn't mean people are seeking a totalitarian police state. Seems quite the opposite for many of these commenters supporting regulation in fact.

Similarly it's not really good faith to assume everyone opposed to regulation in this field is seeking a lawless libertarian (or anarchist perhaps) utopia.

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

#862

Post by stephc_int13 »

concordDance wrote: post #837
stephc_int13 wrote: post #667

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What would you need to consider this point as less speculative? Direct proof? Is motive not relevant at all?

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

#863

Post by graderjs »

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…

Or Zuck calling for more regulations of social networks?

I mean, I guess there’s always that play: maybe Sam Altman is simply feigning enthusiasm for this to head off a burgeoning regulatory coup: how can he mobilize support against the regulations He doesn’t want? What would be a great way to galvanize support against the regulations? Maybe by doing exactly what he’s doing: by falling on his sword, and making himself seem like a monopolistic supporter of those?

Sacrificing his reputation for the greater good of open competition on AI? Well, that’s a truly noble move.

It’s a bit of a stretch, but maybe it’s very Washington I don’t know.

A more logical (economic) motivation may be: this news is taken as a threat, in effect creating a sense of scarcity around AI, which could be judged to provoke people into buying more of OpenAI's subscriptions, training, or whatever, to ensure access that, in light of such news, they may now feel is at risk.

So, the move is merely a red herring, a fabricated threat designed to provoke people to spend, not intended to actually create legislation.

Don't know which one of these is more likely if any: or maybe Sama is simply living his best life role playing as a super villain? I guess he's starting to remind me of Niander Wallace in Bladerunner 2049

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

#864

Post by stephc_int13 »

yarg wrote: post #832
pg_1234 wrote: post #634

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 diffe…

The efficiency of training has very unlikely reached its peak or near its peak. We are still inefficient. But the bottleneck might be elsewhere, in data, what we use to feed them.

Maybe not peaked yet, but the case can be made that we’re not seeing infinite supply…

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

#867

Post by [deleted] »

rjbwork wrote: post #734
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 said this about Sam Altman and open AI years ago and got poo pooed repeatedly in various fora. "But It's OPEN!" "But it's a non-profit!" "But they're the good guys!" And here we are - Sam trying to lock down his first mover advantage with the boot heel of the state for profit. It's fucking disgusting.

[deleted]

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

#868

Post by cma »

yarg wrote: post #832
pg_1234 wrote: post #634

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 diffe…

50% sparsity is almost certainly already being used given that it is accelerated in current nvidia hardware both at training time, usable dynamically through RigL ("Rigging the Lottery: Making All Tickets Winners" https://arxiv.org/pdf/1911.11134.pdf )--which also addresses your point about initial conditions being locked in-- and at accelerates 50% sparsity at inference time.

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

#870

Post by knewter »

vinay_ys wrote: post #706
robwwilliams wrote: post #687

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I can say that each government requiring AI to locally adhere to national mythology, will create self-reinforcing cognitive blind spots, because that already happens at the current smaller scale of manual creation and creators being told not to "talk the country down". This is a key point. Every culture and agency and state will want (deserve) their own homespun AGI. But can we all learn how to accommodate to or ac…

Quantum Thief has as 3.8 on Goodreads. Worth reading?

Very much so
Post reply on HN