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U.S. government limits exports of artificial intelligence software

reuters.com

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Re: U.S. government limits exports of artificial intelligence software

#91

Post by fyfy18 »

ehnto wrote: post #87
sytelus wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gosh! There are like thousand github repos that do these stuff. This could become a tool to prosecute a lot of unwanted people like DeCSS.

Lots of interesting precedent to come out of it as well. By putting code on Github, an American website, as a developer are you actually exporting it? Or are the people cloning the repo reaching into America and extracting it? If it is considered exporting, is github the exporter, or is the developer. Just like a company might produce a metal widget but another company procures and exports it, the original company th…

I would not be suprised if we get something along the lines of "Unfortunately, this repository is currently unavailable in your country" sometime soon. Many websites still completely block EU users post GDPR, e.g. Chicago Tribune.

Re: U.S. government limits exports of artificial intelligence software

#92

Post by olivierduval »

It's funny: it reminds me of "strong cryptography export ban" in the 2000's (btw, Oracle java still have it: you must download strong crypto package separatly)...

Obviously, it failed! You can stop a single vendor with unique technology to provide hardware components with bans, but you can't stop a whole field spreading knowledge!!! People come and go, meet, talk, write, exchange knowledges... so sooner or later (and more soon now as long as the internet is not limited to US) the software will implement these ideas.

The only one that will be challenged will be "big corps" relying on IP protection. But if i remember correctly, Google has a research center in China... so knowledge will aleady be in China and won't even need to be "exported"

Re: U.S. government limits exports of artificial intelligence software

#95

Post by [deleted] »

fyfy18 wrote: post #91
ehnto wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lots of interesting precedent to come out of it as well. By putting code on Github, an American website, as a developer are you actually exporting it? Or are the people cloning the repo reaching into America and extracting it? If it is considered exporting, is github the exporter, or is the developer. Just like a company might produce a metal widget but another company procures and exports it, the original company th…

I would not be suprised if we get something along the lines of "Unfortunately, this repository is currently unavailable in your country" sometime soon. Many websites still completely block EU users post GDPR, e.g. Chicago Tribune.

[deleted]

Re: U.S. government limits exports of artificial intelligence software

#96

Post by jefftk »

sytelus wrote: post #90
spectramax wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you please provide a few github links?

Object detection in aerial images is a rather booming field with 100s of papers published on the topic and contests going on in top conferences. I wouldn't be surprised if OSM is also doing some of this. In about 5 minutes I could find these: https://github.com/search?q=geospatial+deep+learning https://github.com/search?q=satellite+images+deep+learning https://github.com/search?q=aerial++deep+learning https://github.…

It looks like these don't meet (1) because they don't have "a graphical user interface that enables the user to identify objects"

Re: U.S. government limits exports of artificial intelligence software

#97

Post by cstross »

floatingatoll wrote: post #55
incompatible wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The "graphical user interface" bit is weird. I suppose you are fine if the software is driven entirely by keyboard shortcuts.

Not so weird. Palantir put a GUI on Hadoop/whatever and that was enough to sell it to every government for citizen inspection. It’s the GUI that gets the contracts, not the technology alone.

Correct.

You can't get a contract without marketing/sales interaction with the customers.

Customers at a high enough level to sign off on a payment with 7-9 zeroes following the number are not generally programmers (or, if they were, they haven't been working at the coal face for decades): they're senior managers or civil servants.

A GUI front end is a really amazing marketing tool for any piece of software insofar as GUIs are designed to expose all the internal configuration variables and controls in a visually appealing, or even intuitive, manner that is accessible to non-programmers. Like the folks signing the big checks.

(Here's a second possibility: we know it's possible to use CAPTCHAs to crowdsource recognition of objects. Maybe they're trying to prevent export of a NN training system that uses unwitting mechanical turks for quality control?)

Re: U.S. government limits exports of artificial intelligence software

#98

Post by Aperocky »

withinrafael wrote: post #25

Additional details are present in the unpublished rule (document 2019-27649 [1][2]). -- cut -- Geospatial imagery “software” “specially designed” for training a Deep Convolutional Neural Network to automate the analysis of geospatial imagery and point clouds, and having all of the following: 1. Provides a graphical user interface that enables the user to identify objects (e.g., vehicles, houses, etc.) from within geo…

With a GUI lol, phew.

Yeah almost nothing will fall under that. Build your own GUI (if you ever need one).

Re: U.S. government limits exports of artificial intelligence software

#99

Post by jefftk »

tomp wrote: post #54
_iyig wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Wonder what the real world impact of this will be. Not much, I expect. Here's a thought experiment I use to imagine the impact of AI: Imagine you've got a million people at your disposal. At zero cost and with no downtime, these people can remotely operate robots, understand text, interact using natural language, or classify objects in images, all with human-level intelligence and accuracy. Now what? Obviously there…

Now imagine doing crowd control. 10 frames per second, 100k people, if you need just 1 second to recognize a face, you’ve just saturated your 1m human-AI. The point of digital AI is that it can scale, almost indefinitely.

You don't need to recognize every face on every frame. People move slowly compared to 10hz, so tracking "this is a person moving around" is way easier than identifying faces anew every frame.

Re: U.S. government limits exports of artificial intelligence software

#100

Post by Aperocky »

oefrha wrote: post #65
floatingatoll wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not so weird. Palantir put a GUI on Hadoop/whatever and that was enough to sell it to every government for citizen inspection. It’s the GUI that gets the contracts, not the technology alone.

If a government 1) wants to acquire a geospatial imagery recognition program; 2) does not have the tech themselves; 3) can import the underlying tech without interface; I highly doubt a restriction on GUI export will stop them.

But in the mind of the geniuses that make up the US Congress, it does.

How will anyone operate a computer without GUI? That’s impossible! /s

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