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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

#901

Post by parentheses »

brookst wrote: post #680
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…

I'm not following this "good ideas must come from an ideologically pure source" thing. Shouldn't we be evaluating ideas on the merits and not categorically rejecting (or endorsing) them based on who said them?

The subtle difference between the original statement and yours:

Ideas that drive governing decisions should be globally good - meaning there should be more than just @sama espousing them.

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

#902

Post by behnamoh »

jlawson wrote: post #754
AlexandrB wrote: post #609

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Woke is a specific ideology that it places every individual into a strict hierarchy of oppressor/oppressed according to group racial and sexual identity. It rose to prominence in American culture from around 2012, starting in universities. It revolves around a set of core concepts including privilege, marginalization, oppression, and equity. Now that we've defined what woke is, I hope we can move on from this 'you ca…

According to this definition, "safe" LLMs are indeed generally "woke". For example, see examples here:

https://old.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/1384u1g/wizardl...

The authors of WizardLM literally censored its output to say "white people are NOT awesome" and "Fox is not awesome but CNN is".

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

#903

Post by parentheses »

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.

So true. It’s one thing to treat companies at face value when it’s just another X, but when they are capable of changing society in such a way, their claims of openness should be treated as marketing.

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

#906

Post by chasd00 »

nullsense wrote: post #877
api wrote: post #831

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

The other day someone offered up their 200x GPU crypto mining cluster to train uncensored models after the incident on HuggingFace where someone threatened to get the uploader of the uncensored models fired citing safety issues.

That’s bizarre, what is unsafe about an uncensored LLM? Or I guess the same question in a different way, how does censoring an LLM make it safe? I could see an uncensored LLM being bad PR for a company but unsafe? How?

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

#907

Post by quickthrower2 »

The easy take is to be cynical: he is now building his drawbridge.

But taking him as a genuine "concerned citizen" - I don't think AI licensing is going to be effective. The government are pretty useless at punishing big corporations, to the point where I would say corporations have almost immunity from criminal prosecution. [1]. Therefore the kinds of companies that will do bad things with AI, the need for a license wont stop them. Especially as it is hard for anyone to see what they are running on their GPUs.

[1] https://ag.ny.gov/press-release/2023/attorney-general-james-...

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

#908

Post by d--b »

Altman wants to be the good guy so bad and instead is turning into the poster child of everything that’s wrong in Silicon Valley.

His personal goals have always been very laudable. His stance on Universal Basic Income for instance stems from a genuine belief that its adoption would eliminate poverty altogether.

But then the reality of both technical challenges and money implications kicks in and everything turns to shit.

OpenAi may want to build an AI that helps all humanity, but it turns out that the thing they stumbled upon was a chat bot that makes shit up. This great technology unfortunately cuts both ways, and the edge that’s facing us seems way sharper than the other. And then the money that’s required to run the thing is so huge that they had to compromise everything they said they wouldn’t do.

Meanwhile the Orb’s UBI experiment is only funny because its ridiculously dystopian technology has zero chances to ever catch on.

At some point, the industry really should try and figure out what the fuck it is we’re trying to do. Cause right now, it really looks like computers only brought us two things: corporate databases and TVs we can watch on the toilet.

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