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U.S. government limits exports of artificial intelligence software

595 points by ckcheng 7y ago

zerr 7y ago
Is it time to label current AI stuff by its real name - statistics?
- smt1 7y ago
  I think as opposed to classical statistics, except for the important subfield of statistical learning theory, machine learning relates much more to functional analysis, differential geometry/optimization over manifolds, and measure/probability theory. "AI" is whatever marketing people want to define it as.
Animats 7y ago
This assumes the US is ahead of China in image recognition. Is there any justification for that?
- naniwaduni 7y ago
  It is meaningful if the US is ahead of any cooperating bloc of powers in any covered area of image recognition. This is much broader than being ahead of specifically China on the whole. For it to not be true would essentially imply that no new research is happening in the US.
  - tomc1985 7y ago
    I doubt the US is ahead in this area. China gains heaps upon heaps or practical experience in CV by sheer virtue of the breadth of its surveillance networks. Not to say we aren't doing the same here in the US, but efforts seem to be much more scattered
    - Tempest1981 7y ago
      I can see the surveillance network providing vastly more training data. But isn't that orthogonal with developing the algorithms? Or is it that training data provides experience, which improves the algorithms? Or the application of the algorithms?
      - whoevercares 7y ago
        It’s a positive loop. More effective surveillance network -> Larger investment (from government or government contract) -> more application/startup/new programs -> more research funding/aggressive hiring -> higher recognition for CV/ML researchers/Engineers -> More and more people doing CV/ML -> More data, algorithms and applications-> more effective surveillance network. Btw it got deployed at scale in real world which is a huge advantage for progressing any CVML research Not to mention nowadays Deep learning is pretty much a big data game.
      - tomc1985 7y ago
        It's not just availability of data for training networks; I was mainly referring to practical engineering know-how built by field experience
      - sangnoir 7y ago
        > But isn't that orthogonal with developing the algorithms? Assuming it is - China is also competitive on developing algorithms. A few months ago there was a post on explosion of AI papers submitted by authors at Chinese research institutions, with no signs of slowing down.
- sanxiyn 7y ago
  No there isn't. ImageNet 2017 was won by a Chinese startup, for example.
- rasz 7y ago
  Considering even Chinese kids are building drones with AI driven aimbots for fun in their spare time, I highly doubt it. https://www.robomaster.com https://www.robomaster.com
- bpanon 7y ago
  They use it for flight check-ins, entering the park, giving you a fine instantly for jaywalking, buying a soda from a vending machine, any many more use cases. I assume they are ahead.
  - filoleg 7y ago
    I think this speaks more about the government and the acceptance of such things by the population rather than the state of research. Even in a hypothetical scenario of US being far ahead of China in the field at the moment, i do not see this kind of things going over well at all with the public in the US.
    - mewpmewp2 7y ago
      It gives opportunities to practice with the tech in ways US can't which might make them gain a lead.
      - filoleg 7y ago
        More opportunities != being ahead. Given two research labs, with one having a bit better equipment, while the other having a more proven history of publishing innovative research, it would be disingenuous to say that the better equipped lab is ahead until they have actually produced some research that puts them ahead. It might help them gain lead, but it also might result in nothing. Better equipment is just one of many components that affect the chances of success. Until that lead is acquired, I don't really think it would be appropriate to say that they had done so. Note: the lab with a history of published innovative research in my analogy isn't supposed to represent the US or any country in specific. This was just an example to better illustrate the point I was making. The only thing that should matter for whether someone is ahead or not in this situation is the actual proof of being ahead, not "the opportunities that could lead to them being ahead". Otherwise, we should also start immediately trusting all those articles that pop up once every few months about how some random city is "about to become the next Silicon Valley, here are the reasons why".
- chmod775 7y ago
  Anecdotally even number and quality of publications/papers by Chinese in English outperform the entire English speaking region. They probably publish a lot more in their native scripts. Most of the time whatever interesting thing (posted to HN) originated in some Chinese startup/university. But that's just my gut feel.
kragen 7y ago
Bernstein's case established that he had a First Amendment right to publish source code under the law in effect at the time; he argued, successfully, that this was the form in which his research was communicated to other researchers. He won his case, but it took many years, and of course court cases are political processes; they may be decided differently when different judges have been appointed to the bench. It seems that machine-vision researchers may now need to make the same argument. It's probably worthwhile to save the neural network parameter vectors you currently have access to somewhere outside the US while that is still legal.
- tlb 7y ago
  The ethical argument for why everyone should have access to cryptography is a lot stronger than why everyone should have access to satellite imagery recognition algorithms. Also, cryptography requires both sides to use the same algorithm, while companies don't need to use the same recognition algorithms. It also helped, in the crypto case, that you could print some version of it on a T-shirt or mail it on a postcard. It looked like speech, while neural net parameters don't. So the free speech case seems much weaker.
  - Fnoord 7y ago
    Can one exfiltrate these neural net parameters via the Internet or via Tor?
  - kragen 7y ago
    Lawyers have made strong cases on both sides of the cryptography argument; probably they can on both sides of the satellite-imagery argument as well. Maps are the primary result of satellite imagery recognition and are a public good. Most covert activity visible on satellite imagery is environmental damage, which is often illegal and generally harms the public. Satellite image processing can be very useful for increasing agricultural production; restricting that to one country, or granting one country's companies an effective worldwide monopoly on increasing agricultural production, would be ethically unconscionable — in times of drought, it amounts to letting people starve instead of telling them how to raise adequate food. But Bernstein's case didn't hinge on the likely consequences of strong cryptography being widely available; rather, he argued that he had a First Amendment right to publish his research.
myndpage 7y ago
They say it doesn't apply to Canada. What prevents a Chinese company to open a business in Canada and get access to US A.I software without the license?
- hawkice 7y ago
  Canada counts as the US for several national security purposes. There's a lot of cooperation to prevent this type of loophole.
  - La1n 7y ago
    Can you point to some of that cooperation or legislation regarding it, that sounds quite interesting.
    - fierarul 7y ago
      My guess it's related to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Eyes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Eyes
      - elfexec 7y ago
        It more likely has to do with NORAD. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_Aerospace_Defense_Command https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_Aerospace_Defen...
    - Rebelgecko 7y ago
      https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/22/126.5 https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/22/126.5
  - cdmckay 7y ago
    When they had the cryptography restriction, I’m pretty sure it was still ok in Canada to export it. That’s why OpenBSD is based in Calgary.
    - 7y ago
Fragoel2 7y ago
Seems way more narrow than the title implies "The rule will likely be welcomed by industry, Lewis said, because it had feared a much broader crackdown on exports of most artificial intelligence hardware and software"
- colejohnson66 7y ago
  That doesn’t make it ok. It’s just the Overton Window[0]. Say something ridiculous so what you really want is deemed “not as bad.” [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window
- tiborsaas 7y ago
  Once you have a very narrow targeted ban it's then much easier to just quietly expand the scope over time.
haecceity 7y ago
Considering that AI is whatever marketing folks want it to be, it'd be interesting see their legal definition AI. Anyone have a link to the actual document?
- Rebelgecko 7y ago
  I think it's this: https://s3.amazonaws.com/public-inspection.federalregister.gov/2019-27649.pdf https://s3.amazonaws.com/public-inspection.federalregister.g... Page 4 and 9 have the technical definitions. My off the cuff interpretation is that the rule would only cover convolutional neural nets that are trained to identify and determine the orientation of specific objects in geospatial imagery. If the neural net's input/output aren't wrapped in a GUI it sounds like they still might be OK to export without a license
  - haecceity 7y ago
    Looks like it's very specific and targeted to military applications. Although the GUI requirement seems to make it a little too specific to be applicable.
  - TJSomething 7y ago
    My reading is that it's the GUI used to train a neural network to identify any objects in geospatial imagery. I'm definitely less okay with that. Although, I feel like the GUI is not the hard part to make, so it's a weird part to restrict.
  - nitrogen 7y ago
    1. Provides a graphical user interface that enables the user to identify objects (e.g., vehicles, houses, etc.) from within geospatial imagery and point clouds in order to extract positive and negative samplesof an object of interest; 2.Reduces pixel variation by performing scale, color, and rotational normalization on the positive samples; 3. Trains a Deep Convolutional Neural Network to detect the object of interest from the positive and negative samples; and 4. Identifies objects in geospatial imagery using the trained Deep Convolutional Neural Network by matching the rotational pattern from the positive samples with the rotational pattern of objects in the geospatial imagery. What counts as "geospatial imagery"? Could this apply to any training UI for self-driving cars, maps, street view, etc.?
kick 7y ago
Because this is so incredibly broad, there's a good chance that >20% of people here will be working on something that falls under this at some point in the next decade. While we patiently await for a HN user (or, let's be honest, one of the ancient cryptologist-lawyers who come out of the woodwork every time something like this happens and sue the government) to fix this by suing the government on free speech grounds, don't forget that git, mercurial, fossil, bazaar and more are all decentralized, can't actually be censored at scale, and can be effectively hosted and mirrored trivially. I actually think it's a well-intentioned law, and it's not like it'll harm most people, but it's still something that should be stood against on principle.
- 9nGQluzmnq3M 7y ago
  It actually sounds far more narrow than the title implies? > Under a new rule which goes into effect on Monday, companies that export certain types of geospatial imagery software from the United States must apply for a license to send it overseas except when it is being shipped to Canada.
  - kick 7y ago
    The measure covers software that could be used by sensors, drones, and satellites to automate the process of identifying targets for both military and civilian ends, Lewis said, noting it was a boon for industry, which feared a much broader crackdown on exports of AI hardware and software. "sensors, drones, and satellites" used to target anything means that you can't even send a Ring camera to Europe.
akerro 7y ago
Google, Amazon, Microsoft are in military and oil business now because of AI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v3n8txX3144 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v3n8txX3144
kresten 7y ago
Other countries/companies will thank for the economic opportunity.
- K0SM0S 7y ago
  My initial instinct exactly, because major corps are global now, which means they can easily set up shop anywhere on Earth: subsidiaries, but also quasi-independent structures which might only be related through distant funding or meta-agreements. So you can be an American company with tons of "friends" in the EU, Asia, Latin American and now Africa, doing stuff (research, product) and you would just happen to buy/sell from/through these independent actors. Fiction-Google: “Oh but that's not us! It's Oogleg, a Swiss company! It's true 95% of our private shareholders also have shares in Oogleg, but that's only circumstancial, these are large funds you know... they actually have shares in 95% of businesses altogether through ETFs and mutual funds dilution. + some legalese blabla.” There goes your protectionism, State governments! You'll get your import taxes for physical goods and on-prems services but overall, it certainly won't impede or even touch the thriving heads, the global leaders of the business world. Not anymore. That was in another time, before global networks. And actually, we might think Fortune 100, perhaps 1,000; but in truth it's probably much more (cue 80% of GDP in the form of SMBs) because how do you enforce a restriction on remoting to contribute to some repo somewhere? Note that this is true as of 2020, factually from a technical standpoint, but given a few decades and some generalized country-based firewalls (it's coming, in all likelihood) + convenient surveillance and you get all the means necessary to enforce such policies anew.
  - perl4ever 7y ago
    I don't understand why you mention ETFs. If Google said it was meaningless that they were in a total market index fund with almost every other public company, then they would be right. But whether they were or weren't they could do business with somebody just the same. Did you think that companies can't interact if they're not subsidiaries of the same organization? Not only can they do whatever they want bilaterally, but often companies or other organizations set up a joint board or company or something with representatives to work on something of common interest. It probably has to be done the right way to avoid antitrust, but it's done a lot, and by government agencies too. This is not a mutual fund or ETF; the joint entity is controlled by the members, not vice versa.
Buttons840 7y ago
Prior to this "rule", was it possible to break the law and get in trouble for doing nothing more than publishing source code to the world? Has that now changed? Is publishing personal code on GitHub "exporting"?
- reubenmorais 7y ago
  In the US, at some point cryptography code was considered "munitions" and you needed permission to export it. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Export_of_cryptography_from_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Export_of_cryptography_from_th... and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernstein_v._United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernstein_v._United_States
  - Buttons840 7y ago
    Definitely worth mentioning, thank you. However, I was aware of that and believe there are currently no cryptography related restrictions (right?), so I'm still wondering if this is a zero-to-one situation. Has the software export restriction been switched from off to on?
    - astura 7y ago
      An Intel subsidiary was fined for exporting encryption between 2008 and 2011 without permission. https://www.bis.doc.gov/index.php/all-articles/107-about-bis/newsroom/press-releases/press-release-2014/763-intel-subsidiary-agrees-to-750-000-penalty-for-unauthorized-encryption-exports https://www.bis.doc.gov/index.php/all-articles/107-about-bis...
m0zg 7y ago
Seems pretty narrowly targeted, probably similar to things like ITAR, quantum, and crypto - which already require regulatory disclosure. Probably just to make sure that US companies aren't doing Project Maven (or the like) for China. Currently, best I can tell, there's nothing in place to prevent such a "collaboration".
roenxi 7y ago
We're in an early and explosive growth stage of AI where well-established statistical knowledge is having an unreasonable effect when combined with computing power. I've yet to see any AI platform that is mindbending vs doing basic math with a multivariate normal distribution. The eyewatering stuff is the number of Hz of computing power being thrown into simulating Go games, etc, etc. Assuming that among 1.4 billion people there are a few good coder/statistician people and using supercomputers [0] as a rough proxy for available computing power, it isn't obvious the US is even going to inconvenience the Chinese military. Presumably they are going to have a parallel AI effort anyway given that they have been investing in the area. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TOP500#Top_countries https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TOP500#Top_countries
- toxik 7y ago
  None of the convnets are Gaussian. It was one of the big reasons convnets came to be at all, to model highly kurtotic distributions like natural images. Chinese convnet research is absolutely state of the art already, indeed.
  - yorwba 7y ago
    You can do basic math to a multivariate normal distribution to approximate other distributions. In classic feedforward networks, that's achieved by using nonlinear activation functions. Very wide networks turn into Gaussian processes in the limit [0]. There are also approaches explicitly embracing the "basic math on multivariate normal distributions" framework using normalizing flows [1]. [0] https://arxiv.org/abs/1711.00165 https://arxiv.org/abs/1711.00165 [1] https://arxiv.org/abs/1505.05770 https://arxiv.org/abs/1505.05770
    - jahewson 7y ago
      I feel like this is kinda cheating though - “Gaussian in the limit” is not the same as “Gaussian”.
- sgt101 7y ago
  I'd be interested in how you would do NLP tasks such as those now done with transformers like gtp2 and Bert by working with multi variate normal distributions.
steve19 7y ago
Does this mean Nvidia can't export GPUs to China?
- perl4ever 7y ago
  Is that snark? Google suggests Nvidia GPUs are probably made in Guangdong by PCPartner. The actual chips, I don't know, but TSMC does have fabs in China.
  - imhoguy 7y ago
    I bet it is yet another law to bring back knowledge and manufacturing to US.
  - steve19 7y ago
    It was not snark. The article says they are banning hardware and software.
withinrafael 7y ago
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 geospatial imagery and point clouds in order to extract positive and negative samples of an object of interest; 2. Reduces pixel variation by performing scale, color, and rotational normalization on the positive samples; 3. Trains a Deep Convolutional Neural Network to detect the object of interest from the positive and negative samples; and 4. Identifies objects in geospatial imagery using the trained Deep Convolutional Neural Network by matching the rotational pattern from the positive samples with the rotational pattern of objects in the geospatial imagery. Technical Note: A point cloud is a collection of data points defined by a given coordinate system. A point cloud is also known as a digital surface model. -- cut -- [1] https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2020/01/06/2019-27649/addition-of-software-specially-designed-to-automate-the-analysis-of-geospatial-imagery-to-the-export https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2020/01/06/2019-27... [2] https://s3.amazonaws.com/public-inspection.federalregister.gov/2019-27649.pdf https://s3.amazonaws.com/public-inspection.federalregister.g...
- lopmotr 7y ago
  It seems strangely ambiguous: "(geospatial imagery) and (point clouds)" or "geospatial (imagery and point clouds)"? Point 4 requires the use of geospatial imagery, so any point-cloud-only product would be exempt, it seems? The document doesn't define "geospatial imagery", but that could surely include hobby and commercial drone footage of the ground. Perhaps even ordinary photography from security cameras that have user-define object identification features? That would make it really quite broad. But all we need to do is not normalize color, and then everything's exempt!
  - Frost1x 7y ago
    Was doing similar work on a project using sonar imaging for the bottom of water bodies to much of what they're excluding. Not sure how concerned they'd be with identify freshwater creatures and riverbed structures...
Buttons840 7y ago
I used to put on my tinfoil hat and imagine that cryptography was the field to study if you wanted secret government agents to visit you. Maybe next time I will instead imagine that computer vision is what summons the secret agents. More seriously, computer vision is going to be important and it appears to be far less known than machine learning and has higher barriers to entry. I'd exchange a few introductory machine learning books for more good computer vision introductions. Any suggestions on how to get started with computer vision?
netcan 7y ago
Can anyone illustrate this with current examples? What financially or technologically significant exports are going to stop? How military or nonmilitary are they?
astatine 7y ago
Unlike the space race, where Russia and the US were significantly ahead of everyone else, the field is far more level in AI. Arguably there will be areas where the US could even be behind in some areas. Wonder what the real world impact of this will be. Not much, I expect.
- _iyig 7y ago
  >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 are areas where AI can outperform humans, like mechanical accuracy and mathematical computation. But in general, I find this experiment works pretty well.
  - tomp 7y ago
    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.
    - _iyig 7y ago
      OK, then imagine 100 billion people. Scale isn't the point of the experiment - the point is bounding expectations based on probable (maximal?) capabilities. Perhaps a post-Singularity AI will have wild capabilities beyond our comprehension, but that is outside the scope of this experiment.
    - jefftk 7y ago
      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.
- antpls 7y ago
hyustan 7y ago
Sounds like something straight out of Terminator movies. I think they are afraid this technology will get out of hand in the near future and I can't really blame them. I remember that video with the Google Assistant making a hair dresser appointment. Pretty scary stuff
quicon 7y ago
I guess these guys will be affected: https://www.planet.com/ https://www.planet.com/
nl 7y ago
This is pretty bad. Or good depending on your perspective. I'm based in Australia, and we started playing today with analysis of geospatial imagery for bush fire imagery (because the country is on fire). ECCN0D521No.1 from https://s3.amazonaws.com/public-inspection.federalregister.gov/2019-27649.pdf https://s3.amazonaws.com/public-inspection.federalregister.g... covers pretty much everything I'm doing. I guess if I want to look at the positive side, it means I don't have to compete with any US vendors if I want to sell my work.
- skissane 7y ago
  > I guess if I want to look at the positive side, it means I don't have to compete with any US vendors if I want to sell my work. Until the Australian government gets the same idea
- vajrabum 7y ago
  My guess is that this is like the export controls on munitions or encryption. You can't export to China but you can fairly easily get a license to sell it in Australia or any other US allied country.
solarengineer 7y ago
Naieve question: Are there any repositories (e.g. Hosted at github) that one should mirror?
- hanniabu 7y ago
  Good question, bumping for visibility
  - colejohnson66 7y ago
    This isn’t reddit. Replies don’t “bump” posts.
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
- Gudin 7y ago
  I doubt this applies to open-source software.
FpUser 7y ago
"... boost oversight of exports of sensitive technology to adversaries like China, for economic and security reasons..." I think economic is the keyword here. From what I gather this is not the first time the US is doing something like this. I am pretty sure other countries have done the same in their particular areas of concern. They're just not as mighty and famous as the US so nobody pays attention. So much for free market. Anyways I think it is a little too late and all it will accomplish is - opening a window of opportunity for other players. Also because it formulated way too broad and has an escape clause (apply for a license) then it might offer an unfair advantage right inside the US. Big companies will get it and for smaller it nay be more difficult. Same as patent system. Company like Apple can patent my cat with little troubles. Me: not so much and I speak from experience.
m4r35n357 7y ago
There is no such thing.
paganel 7y ago
Not related to AI but instead related to geo-spatial imagery, I’m pretty sure I saw YT videos of ISIS commanders coordinating suicidal VBIED attacks in Syria using Google Maps aerial imagery. That was happening back in 2014-2015, when such videos were not instantly banned on /r/combatfootage and /r/SyrianCivilWar .
peter303 7y ago
I recall similar happening during Bush admin during 2000s. Many of our software customers were international. To obtain an export license we were required to scan our source code with an approved Dept of Commerce scan software vendor to look for all kinds of inappropriate code like a too strong cryptography algorithm in the licensing portion and plagarism of copyrighted code. The first couple of releases this was done were brutal. Many of the developers not far our of the university were used to taking anything from the internet/open source if it saved effort. There was not a clear company policy about this until the export restrictions. Sometimes there would be a half dozen chain of borrowing before a culprit turned up. We muddled through and fixed hundreds of flags. If I was the program manager, I'd schedule and export code scan every week to avoid late problems. AI code is just another layer in this odorous process.
- Aperocky 7y ago
  lmao this is hilarious. Imagine dealing with such stupidity while other countries don’t have to, instant competitive disadvantage
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
- asveikau 7y ago
  Makes me think that the big tech companies which absorb a large amount of new college grads each year have a bunch of copyright violations but won't be audited. These companies have "strict" code review policies but often the reviewers are just a recent previous year's new college grad, now overconfident by a small amount of work experience.
tu7001 7y ago
This wrong, we are going to lose on that.
olivierduval 7y ago
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"
- ransom1538 7y ago
  I don't think the government actually wanted to stop math [1] from leaving the border. It was just a tool to use against people they suspected being involved espionage. Just another reason to put you in a cell. https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSA_algorithm https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSA_algorithm
  - baby 7y ago
    No it makes it a pain to export any products abroad. In today's world where your market is probably not just the US anymore it is insane to have such rules in place.
  - dmix 7y ago
    The intentions of laws vs the real world implications are so often disconnected. There's been a million cases where the mere side effects of laws have caused more trouble for the intended target of the good intentions than it actually helped itself (see rent control laws in NYC and Toronto ultimately significantly reducing low income housing for over a decade in the 70s and 80s because no developer would build there, significantly increasing average rents by reducing supply). Thomas Sowell wrote a quite a few good books about this. I have no doubt it applies equally to export laws.
  - utopian3 7y ago
    > It was just a tool to use against people they suspected being involved espionage. Just another reason to put you in a cell. https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSA_algorithm https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSA_algorithm The wiki link you provided does not have the words "export" or "espionage". Are you trying to imply that R,S, and A were suspected of espionage? You'll need a real source for that..
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
stuqqq 7y ago
I have open source deep learning projects on GitHub. Should I be worried?
mark_l_watson 7y ago
I sold AI software (for building expert systems) for Xerox Lisp Machines from 1982 to 1985 and the lawyers at my company complained that the $5K license price did not make up for the hassle for foreign sales (I sold to customers in Japan, Norway, and Germany). So, export controls are not such a new things.
- winrid 7y ago
  Oh that sounds interesting. What problems did your AI software solve in the 80s?
LifeLiverTransp 7y ago
Stirring paranoia as a buisness model for 2nd tier softwar development regions.
mlthoughts2018 7y ago
The reason for this has to be economics / lobbyist driven. It makes no sense technologically (because it could not be effective) and there are far more dangerous examples of American companies developing technology that assists the Chinese military, such as private search engines and social credit systems that leave the general populace unable to make democratic influence on military actions or government policy.
Abishek_Muthian 7y ago
Progress in AI tech has been due to open sharing of knowledge, so much so that even companies such as Apple which tend to keep its research under closed doors started publishing open Machine Learning journals to attract talent. AI tech is too powerful to be monopolised, if not democratised it might become another 'semiconductor' industry.
NHQ 7y ago
China doesn't need American AI technology.
pandaman 7y ago
The main impact of these regulations is not going to be on the software availability overseas but on the software jobs availability for foreign nationals, IMO. I work on ITAR-regulated software and, even though, the software itself is exported all over the world, I would not be able to write it if I had been a national of a restricted country, working in the US on a temporary visa.
alkonaut 7y ago
What the threat (of an ability the US doesn’t want other nations to have) here and how does geospatial imagery and point clouds fit in? This seems to target one or a few products so they dislike that someone uses the software for that purpose
- sedachv 7y ago
  Most likely autonomous drone navigation (particularly very low altitude terrain following) and targeting. That is how cruise missiles work: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TERCOM https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TERCOM There was a big drone attack on a Saudi Arabian oil processing facility last year: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_Abqaiq%E2%80%93Khurais_attack https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_Abqaiq%E2%80%93Khurais_at...
__s 7y ago
A protectionist response to the US losing power, & trying to stave off brain drain. They should be considering any person who knows how to program with Tensorflow a munition. Mitigating brain drain is a hopeless endeavor. US should make their immigration more liberal to try encourage US as a destination for brain drain, as opposed to a source. Drain or be drained
- michannne 7y ago
  Are there any studies or reports that point to the US falling behind technologically in regards to software research?
andrei_says_ 7y ago
Seems like China is way ahead in the AI game, including by applying it for mass surveillance and oppression. I highly recommend the Frontline documentary on AI in China. https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/film/in-the-age-of-ai/ https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/film/in-the-age-of-ai/ They see AI as the next industrial revolution and have decided to make sure they are at its forefront. And likely they will, which means that we’ll be the ones trying to import their tech.
StuffedParrot 7y ago
Why not ban heuristics altogether?
cced 7y ago
Is there anything that people outside of the US should download now in order to get access to software?
- bitminer 7y ago
  The rule refers to products, not freely available source code. Companies don't sell stuff from GitHub, they sell proprietary stuff. It may well be based on open source code, but they own it to sell (license) it. There's lots of examples of products in the geospatial domain that are not "AI" yet are restricted or even classified. For example, ship detection from space-based radar. There are numerous public papers on the topic yet any software that purports to do this is subject to ITAR rules in the US and CGP rules in Canada. Just because you may know how to do something doesn't prevent a government from restricting you from selling it, or talking about it. Even if it is "public". Machine guns are an old tech and yet are restricted. As they should be.
blackrock 7y ago
Didn’t the most advanced AI research come straight out of China? The ResNet Project [1] of 2015. It was used as the core algorithm behind Google’s AlphaGo in 2017. The 4 computer scientists behind the paper were Chinese nationals. They were all educated by the Chinese educational system, and got their PhD there (one guy was from Hong Kong). They worked at Microsoft at the time, so Microsoft paid them a salary for their work, but I think Microsoft benefited more from their research, as did the other Silicon Valley and American companies. Three of them went to start or lead other Chinese unicorn companies, and one guy went to Facebook in Silicon Valley, so Facebook benefited here. [1] https://macropolo.org/china-ai-research-resnet/ https://macropolo.org/china-ai-research-resnet/
csense 7y ago
How could they possibly enforce legal limits on software distribution in the age of the Internet? Anyone can slap their code onto a private Gitlab installation in an hour. Hosting a tarball on an HTTPS server is even more trivial.
- lopmotr 7y ago
  Threat of punishment. Same as how any other law is enforced.
aspectmin 7y ago
Hmm. Doesn’t the point cloud and deep conv section cover a good percentage take of self driving car tech?
bookAlot 7y ago
In the US, selling weapons and internet tools is like making every day household items look like middle school. We still can't figure in that this stuff isn't a service. It's production. Something tangible. Gotta have parts. But service is easy to remember if you consider the person conducting their end of a service, that's between you two as them the representative.
upwardbound 7y ago
As other commenters have stated, this export ban seems both very narrow and an extremely good idea. My interpretation of the meaning & intent of the ban is that it is banning GUI-based tools for training CNN's to automatically identify specific types of objects in aerial imagery (e.g. distinguishing a limousine from a different type of car). These CNN's being trained are almost certainly intended for use in autonomous targeting of airstrikes by fully-autonomous weaponized UAV's. Here is the text of the specific ban: https://s3.amazonaws.com/public-inspection.federalregister.gov/2019-27649.pdf https://s3.amazonaws.com/public-inspection.federalregister.g... Here is a really good book for background on this topic: https://www.amazon.com/Army-None-Autonomous-Weapons-Future-ebook/dp/B073VXYD5P https://www.amazon.com/Army-None-Autonomous-Weapons-Future-e...
CMCDragonkai 7y ago
When does this export ban get executed?
anonu 7y ago
There was a tangential discussion on SAR imagery and North Korea here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21955246 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21955246
aminulislam1266 7y ago
ha ha ha... that's good
frankzen 7y ago
These dummies never learn, do they?

595 points by ckcheng 7y ago

zerr 7y ago

Is it time to label current AI stuff by its real name - statistics?

smt1 7y ago
I think as opposed to classical statistics, except for the important subfield of statistical learning theory, machine learning relates much more to functional analysis, differential geometry/optimization over manifolds, and measure/probability theory. "AI" is whatever marketing people want to define it as.

Animats 7y ago

This assumes the US is ahead of China in image recognition. Is there any justification for that?

naniwaduni 7y ago
It is meaningful if the US is ahead of any cooperating bloc of powers in any covered area of image recognition. This is much broader than being ahead of specifically China on the whole. For it to not be true would essentially imply that no new research is happening in the US.
- tomc1985 7y ago
  I doubt the US is ahead in this area. China gains heaps upon heaps or practical experience in CV by sheer virtue of the breadth of its surveillance networks. Not to say we aren't doing the same here in the US, but efforts seem to be much more scattered
  - Tempest1981 7y ago
    I can see the surveillance network providing vastly more training data. But isn't that orthogonal with developing the algorithms? Or is it that training data provides experience, which improves the algorithms? Or the application of the algorithms?
    - whoevercares 7y ago
      It’s a positive loop. More effective surveillance network -> Larger investment (from government or government contract) -> more application/startup/new programs -> more research funding/aggressive hiring -> higher recognition for CV/ML researchers/Engineers -> More and more people doing CV/ML -> More data, algorithms and applications-> more effective surveillance network. Btw it got deployed at scale in real world which is a huge advantage for progressing any CVML research Not to mention nowadays Deep learning is pretty much a big data game.
    - tomc1985 7y ago
      It's not just availability of data for training networks; I was mainly referring to practical engineering know-how built by field experience
    - sangnoir 7y ago
      > But isn't that orthogonal with developing the algorithms? Assuming it is - China is also competitive on developing algorithms. A few months ago there was a post on explosion of AI papers submitted by authors at Chinese research institutions, with no signs of slowing down.
sanxiyn 7y ago
No there isn't. ImageNet 2017 was won by a Chinese startup, for example.
rasz 7y ago
Considering even Chinese kids are building drones with AI driven aimbots for fun in their spare time, I highly doubt it. https://www.robomaster.com https://www.robomaster.com
bpanon 7y ago
They use it for flight check-ins, entering the park, giving you a fine instantly for jaywalking, buying a soda from a vending machine, any many more use cases. I assume they are ahead.
- filoleg 7y ago
  I think this speaks more about the government and the acceptance of such things by the population rather than the state of research. Even in a hypothetical scenario of US being far ahead of China in the field at the moment, i do not see this kind of things going over well at all with the public in the US.
  - mewpmewp2 7y ago
    It gives opportunities to practice with the tech in ways US can't which might make them gain a lead.
    - filoleg 7y ago
      More opportunities != being ahead. Given two research labs, with one having a bit better equipment, while the other having a more proven history of publishing innovative research, it would be disingenuous to say that the better equipped lab is ahead until they have actually produced some research that puts them ahead. It might help them gain lead, but it also might result in nothing. Better equipment is just one of many components that affect the chances of success. Until that lead is acquired, I don't really think it would be appropriate to say that they had done so. Note: the lab with a history of published innovative research in my analogy isn't supposed to represent the US or any country in specific. This was just an example to better illustrate the point I was making. The only thing that should matter for whether someone is ahead or not in this situation is the actual proof of being ahead, not "the opportunities that could lead to them being ahead". Otherwise, we should also start immediately trusting all those articles that pop up once every few months about how some random city is "about to become the next Silicon Valley, here are the reasons why".
chmod775 7y ago
Anecdotally even number and quality of publications/papers by Chinese in English outperform the entire English speaking region. They probably publish a lot more in their native scripts. Most of the time whatever interesting thing (posted to HN) originated in some Chinese startup/university. But that's just my gut feel.

kragen 7y ago

Bernstein's case established that he had a First Amendment right to publish source code under the law in effect at the time; he argued, successfully, that this was the form in which his research was communicated to other researchers. He won his case, but it took many years, and of course court cases are political processes; they may be decided differently when different judges have been appointed to the bench. It seems that machine-vision researchers may now need to make the same argument. It's probably worthwhile to save the neural network parameter vectors you currently have access to somewhere outside the US while that is still legal.

tlb 7y ago
The ethical argument for why everyone should have access to cryptography is a lot stronger than why everyone should have access to satellite imagery recognition algorithms. Also, cryptography requires both sides to use the same algorithm, while companies don't need to use the same recognition algorithms. It also helped, in the crypto case, that you could print some version of it on a T-shirt or mail it on a postcard. It looked like speech, while neural net parameters don't. So the free speech case seems much weaker.
- Fnoord 7y ago
  Can one exfiltrate these neural net parameters via the Internet or via Tor?
- kragen 7y ago
  Lawyers have made strong cases on both sides of the cryptography argument; probably they can on both sides of the satellite-imagery argument as well. Maps are the primary result of satellite imagery recognition and are a public good. Most covert activity visible on satellite imagery is environmental damage, which is often illegal and generally harms the public. Satellite image processing can be very useful for increasing agricultural production; restricting that to one country, or granting one country's companies an effective worldwide monopoly on increasing agricultural production, would be ethically unconscionable — in times of drought, it amounts to letting people starve instead of telling them how to raise adequate food. But Bernstein's case didn't hinge on the likely consequences of strong cryptography being widely available; rather, he argued that he had a First Amendment right to publish his research.

myndpage 7y ago

They say it doesn't apply to Canada. What prevents a Chinese company to open a business in Canada and get access to US A.I software without the license?

hawkice 7y ago
Canada counts as the US for several national security purposes. There's a lot of cooperation to prevent this type of loophole.
- La1n 7y ago
  Can you point to some of that cooperation or legislation regarding it, that sounds quite interesting.
  - fierarul 7y ago
    My guess it's related to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Eyes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Eyes
    - elfexec 7y ago
      It more likely has to do with NORAD. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_Aerospace_Defense_Command https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_Aerospace_Defen...
  - Rebelgecko 7y ago
    https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/22/126.5 https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/22/126.5
- cdmckay 7y ago
  When they had the cryptography restriction, I’m pretty sure it was still ok in Canada to export it. That’s why OpenBSD is based in Calgary.
  - 7y ago

Fragoel2 7y ago

Seems way more narrow than the title implies "The rule will likely be welcomed by industry, Lewis said, because it had feared a much broader crackdown on exports of most artificial intelligence hardware and software"

colejohnson66 7y ago
That doesn’t make it ok. It’s just the Overton Window[0]. Say something ridiculous so what you really want is deemed “not as bad.” [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window
tiborsaas 7y ago
Once you have a very narrow targeted ban it's then much easier to just quietly expand the scope over time.

haecceity 7y ago

Considering that AI is whatever marketing folks want it to be, it'd be interesting see their legal definition AI. Anyone have a link to the actual document?

Rebelgecko 7y ago
I think it's this: https://s3.amazonaws.com/public-inspection.federalregister.gov/2019-27649.pdf https://s3.amazonaws.com/public-inspection.federalregister.g... Page 4 and 9 have the technical definitions. My off the cuff interpretation is that the rule would only cover convolutional neural nets that are trained to identify and determine the orientation of specific objects in geospatial imagery. If the neural net's input/output aren't wrapped in a GUI it sounds like they still might be OK to export without a license
- haecceity 7y ago
  Looks like it's very specific and targeted to military applications. Although the GUI requirement seems to make it a little too specific to be applicable.
- TJSomething 7y ago
  My reading is that it's the GUI used to train a neural network to identify any objects in geospatial imagery. I'm definitely less okay with that. Although, I feel like the GUI is not the hard part to make, so it's a weird part to restrict.
- nitrogen 7y ago
  1. Provides a graphical user interface that enables the user to identify objects (e.g., vehicles, houses, etc.) from within geospatial imagery and point clouds in order to extract positive and negative samplesof an object of interest; 2.Reduces pixel variation by performing scale, color, and rotational normalization on the positive samples; 3. Trains a Deep Convolutional Neural Network to detect the object of interest from the positive and negative samples; and 4. Identifies objects in geospatial imagery using the trained Deep Convolutional Neural Network by matching the rotational pattern from the positive samples with the rotational pattern of objects in the geospatial imagery. What counts as "geospatial imagery"? Could this apply to any training UI for self-driving cars, maps, street view, etc.?

kick 7y ago

Because this is so incredibly broad, there's a good chance that >20% of people here will be working on something that falls under this at some point in the next decade. While we patiently await for a HN user (or, let's be honest, one of the ancient cryptologist-lawyers who come out of the woodwork every time something like this happens and sue the government) to fix this by suing the government on free speech grounds, don't forget that git, mercurial, fossil, bazaar and more are all decentralized, can't actually be censored at scale, and can be effectively hosted and mirrored trivially. I actually think it's a well-intentioned law, and it's not like it'll harm most people, but it's still something that should be stood against on principle.

9nGQluzmnq3M 7y ago
It actually sounds far more narrow than the title implies? > Under a new rule which goes into effect on Monday, companies that export certain types of geospatial imagery software from the United States must apply for a license to send it overseas except when it is being shipped to Canada.
- kick 7y ago
  The measure covers software that could be used by sensors, drones, and satellites to automate the process of identifying targets for both military and civilian ends, Lewis said, noting it was a boon for industry, which feared a much broader crackdown on exports of AI hardware and software. "sensors, drones, and satellites" used to target anything means that you can't even send a Ring camera to Europe.

akerro 7y ago

Google, Amazon, Microsoft are in military and oil business now because of AI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v3n8txX3144 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v3n8txX3144

kresten 7y ago

Other countries/companies will thank for the economic opportunity.

K0SM0S 7y ago
My initial instinct exactly, because major corps are global now, which means they can easily set up shop anywhere on Earth: subsidiaries, but also quasi-independent structures which might only be related through distant funding or meta-agreements. So you can be an American company with tons of "friends" in the EU, Asia, Latin American and now Africa, doing stuff (research, product) and you would just happen to buy/sell from/through these independent actors. Fiction-Google: “Oh but that's not us! It's Oogleg, a Swiss company! It's true 95% of our private shareholders also have shares in Oogleg, but that's only circumstancial, these are large funds you know... they actually have shares in 95% of businesses altogether through ETFs and mutual funds dilution. + some legalese blabla.” There goes your protectionism, State governments! You'll get your import taxes for physical goods and on-prems services but overall, it certainly won't impede or even touch the thriving heads, the global leaders of the business world. Not anymore. That was in another time, before global networks. And actually, we might think Fortune 100, perhaps 1,000; but in truth it's probably much more (cue 80% of GDP in the form of SMBs) because how do you enforce a restriction on remoting to contribute to some repo somewhere? Note that this is true as of 2020, factually from a technical standpoint, but given a few decades and some generalized country-based firewalls (it's coming, in all likelihood) + convenient surveillance and you get all the means necessary to enforce such policies anew.
- perl4ever 7y ago
  I don't understand why you mention ETFs. If Google said it was meaningless that they were in a total market index fund with almost every other public company, then they would be right. But whether they were or weren't they could do business with somebody just the same. Did you think that companies can't interact if they're not subsidiaries of the same organization? Not only can they do whatever they want bilaterally, but often companies or other organizations set up a joint board or company or something with representatives to work on something of common interest. It probably has to be done the right way to avoid antitrust, but it's done a lot, and by government agencies too. This is not a mutual fund or ETF; the joint entity is controlled by the members, not vice versa.

Buttons840 7y ago

Prior to this "rule", was it possible to break the law and get in trouble for doing nothing more than publishing source code to the world? Has that now changed? Is publishing personal code on GitHub "exporting"?

reubenmorais 7y ago
In the US, at some point cryptography code was considered "munitions" and you needed permission to export it. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Export_of_cryptography_from_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Export_of_cryptography_from_th... and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernstein_v._United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernstein_v._United_States
- Buttons840 7y ago
  Definitely worth mentioning, thank you. However, I was aware of that and believe there are currently no cryptography related restrictions (right?), so I'm still wondering if this is a zero-to-one situation. Has the software export restriction been switched from off to on?
  - astura 7y ago
    An Intel subsidiary was fined for exporting encryption between 2008 and 2011 without permission. https://www.bis.doc.gov/index.php/all-articles/107-about-bis/newsroom/press-releases/press-release-2014/763-intel-subsidiary-agrees-to-750-000-penalty-for-unauthorized-encryption-exports https://www.bis.doc.gov/index.php/all-articles/107-about-bis...

m0zg 7y ago

Seems pretty narrowly targeted, probably similar to things like ITAR, quantum, and crypto - which already require regulatory disclosure. Probably just to make sure that US companies aren't doing Project Maven (or the like) for China. Currently, best I can tell, there's nothing in place to prevent such a "collaboration".

roenxi 7y ago

We're in an early and explosive growth stage of AI where well-established statistical knowledge is having an unreasonable effect when combined with computing power. I've yet to see any AI platform that is mindbending vs doing basic math with a multivariate normal distribution. The eyewatering stuff is the number of Hz of computing power being thrown into simulating Go games, etc, etc. Assuming that among 1.4 billion people there are a few good coder/statistician people and using supercomputers [0] as a rough proxy for available computing power, it isn't obvious the US is even going to inconvenience the Chinese military. Presumably they are going to have a parallel AI effort anyway given that they have been investing in the area. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TOP500#Top_countries https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TOP500#Top_countries

toxik 7y ago
None of the convnets are Gaussian. It was one of the big reasons convnets came to be at all, to model highly kurtotic distributions like natural images. Chinese convnet research is absolutely state of the art already, indeed.
- yorwba 7y ago
  You can do basic math to a multivariate normal distribution to approximate other distributions. In classic feedforward networks, that's achieved by using nonlinear activation functions. Very wide networks turn into Gaussian processes in the limit [0]. There are also approaches explicitly embracing the "basic math on multivariate normal distributions" framework using normalizing flows [1]. [0] https://arxiv.org/abs/1711.00165 https://arxiv.org/abs/1711.00165 [1] https://arxiv.org/abs/1505.05770 https://arxiv.org/abs/1505.05770
  - jahewson 7y ago
    I feel like this is kinda cheating though - “Gaussian in the limit” is not the same as “Gaussian”.
sgt101 7y ago
I'd be interested in how you would do NLP tasks such as those now done with transformers like gtp2 and Bert by working with multi variate normal distributions.

steve19 7y ago

Does this mean Nvidia can't export GPUs to China?

perl4ever 7y ago
Is that snark? Google suggests Nvidia GPUs are probably made in Guangdong by PCPartner. The actual chips, I don't know, but TSMC does have fabs in China.
- imhoguy 7y ago
  I bet it is yet another law to bring back knowledge and manufacturing to US.
- steve19 7y ago
  It was not snark. The article says they are banning hardware and software.

withinrafael 7y ago

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 geospatial imagery and point clouds in order to extract positive and negative samples of an object of interest; 2. Reduces pixel variation by performing scale, color, and rotational normalization on the positive samples; 3. Trains a Deep Convolutional Neural Network to detect the object of interest from the positive and negative samples; and 4. Identifies objects in geospatial imagery using the trained Deep Convolutional Neural Network by matching the rotational pattern from the positive samples with the rotational pattern of objects in the geospatial imagery. Technical Note: A point cloud is a collection of data points defined by a given coordinate system. A point cloud is also known as a digital surface model. -- cut -- [1] https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2020/01/06/2019-27649/addition-of-software-specially-designed-to-automate-the-analysis-of-geospatial-imagery-to-the-export https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2020/01/06/2019-27... [2] https://s3.amazonaws.com/public-inspection.federalregister.gov/2019-27649.pdf https://s3.amazonaws.com/public-inspection.federalregister.g...

lopmotr 7y ago
It seems strangely ambiguous: "(geospatial imagery) and (point clouds)" or "geospatial (imagery and point clouds)"? Point 4 requires the use of geospatial imagery, so any point-cloud-only product would be exempt, it seems? The document doesn't define "geospatial imagery", but that could surely include hobby and commercial drone footage of the ground. Perhaps even ordinary photography from security cameras that have user-define object identification features? That would make it really quite broad. But all we need to do is not normalize color, and then everything's exempt!
- Frost1x 7y ago
  Was doing similar work on a project using sonar imaging for the bottom of water bodies to much of what they're excluding. Not sure how concerned they'd be with identify freshwater creatures and riverbed structures...

Buttons840 7y ago

I used to put on my tinfoil hat and imagine that cryptography was the field to study if you wanted secret government agents to visit you. Maybe next time I will instead imagine that computer vision is what summons the secret agents. More seriously, computer vision is going to be important and it appears to be far less known than machine learning and has higher barriers to entry. I'd exchange a few introductory machine learning books for more good computer vision introductions. Any suggestions on how to get started with computer vision?

netcan 7y ago

Can anyone illustrate this with current examples? What financially or technologically significant exports are going to stop? How military or nonmilitary are they?

astatine 7y ago

Unlike the space race, where Russia and the US were significantly ahead of everyone else, the field is far more level in AI. Arguably there will be areas where the US could even be behind in some areas. Wonder what the real world impact of this will be. Not much, I expect.

_iyig 7y ago
>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 are areas where AI can outperform humans, like mechanical accuracy and mathematical computation. But in general, I find this experiment works pretty well.
- tomp 7y ago
  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.
  - _iyig 7y ago
    OK, then imagine 100 billion people. Scale isn't the point of the experiment - the point is bounding expectations based on probable (maximal?) capabilities. Perhaps a post-Singularity AI will have wild capabilities beyond our comprehension, but that is outside the scope of this experiment.
  - jefftk 7y ago
    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.
antpls 7y ago

hyustan 7y ago

Sounds like something straight out of Terminator movies. I think they are afraid this technology will get out of hand in the near future and I can't really blame them. I remember that video with the Google Assistant making a hair dresser appointment. Pretty scary stuff

quicon 7y ago

I guess these guys will be affected: https://www.planet.com/ https://www.planet.com/

nl 7y ago

This is pretty bad. Or good depending on your perspective. I'm based in Australia, and we started playing today with analysis of geospatial imagery for bush fire imagery (because the country is on fire). ECCN0D521No.1 from https://s3.amazonaws.com/public-inspection.federalregister.gov/2019-27649.pdf https://s3.amazonaws.com/public-inspection.federalregister.g... covers pretty much everything I'm doing. I guess if I want to look at the positive side, it means I don't have to compete with any US vendors if I want to sell my work.

skissane 7y ago
> I guess if I want to look at the positive side, it means I don't have to compete with any US vendors if I want to sell my work. Until the Australian government gets the same idea
vajrabum 7y ago
My guess is that this is like the export controls on munitions or encryption. You can't export to China but you can fairly easily get a license to sell it in Australia or any other US allied country.

solarengineer 7y ago

Naieve question: Are there any repositories (e.g. Hosted at github) that one should mirror?

hanniabu 7y ago
Good question, bumping for visibility
- colejohnson66 7y ago
  This isn’t reddit. Replies don’t “bump” posts.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
Gudin 7y ago
I doubt this applies to open-source software.

FpUser 7y ago

"... boost oversight of exports of sensitive technology to adversaries like China, for economic and security reasons..." I think economic is the keyword here. From what I gather this is not the first time the US is doing something like this. I am pretty sure other countries have done the same in their particular areas of concern. They're just not as mighty and famous as the US so nobody pays attention. So much for free market. Anyways I think it is a little too late and all it will accomplish is - opening a window of opportunity for other players. Also because it formulated way too broad and has an escape clause (apply for a license) then it might offer an unfair advantage right inside the US. Big companies will get it and for smaller it nay be more difficult. Same as patent system. Company like Apple can patent my cat with little troubles. Me: not so much and I speak from experience.

m4r35n357 7y ago

There is no such thing.

paganel 7y ago

Not related to AI but instead related to geo-spatial imagery, I’m pretty sure I saw YT videos of ISIS commanders coordinating suicidal VBIED attacks in Syria using Google Maps aerial imagery. That was happening back in 2014-2015, when such videos were not instantly banned on /r/combatfootage and /r/SyrianCivilWar .

peter303 7y ago

I recall similar happening during Bush admin during 2000s. Many of our software customers were international. To obtain an export license we were required to scan our source code with an approved Dept of Commerce scan software vendor to look for all kinds of inappropriate code like a too strong cryptography algorithm in the licensing portion and plagarism of copyrighted code. The first couple of releases this was done were brutal. Many of the developers not far our of the university were used to taking anything from the internet/open source if it saved effort. There was not a clear company policy about this until the export restrictions. Sometimes there would be a half dozen chain of borrowing before a culprit turned up. We muddled through and fixed hundreds of flags. If I was the program manager, I'd schedule and export code scan every week to avoid late problems. AI code is just another layer in this odorous process.

Aperocky 7y ago
lmao this is hilarious. Imagine dealing with such stupidity while other countries don’t have to, instant competitive disadvantage
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
asveikau 7y ago
Makes me think that the big tech companies which absorb a large amount of new college grads each year have a bunch of copyright violations but won't be audited. These companies have "strict" code review policies but often the reviewers are just a recent previous year's new college grad, now overconfident by a small amount of work experience.

tu7001 7y ago

This wrong, we are going to lose on that.

olivierduval 7y ago

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"

ransom1538 7y ago
I don't think the government actually wanted to stop math [1] from leaving the border. It was just a tool to use against people they suspected being involved espionage. Just another reason to put you in a cell. https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSA_algorithm https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSA_algorithm
- baby 7y ago
  No it makes it a pain to export any products abroad. In today's world where your market is probably not just the US anymore it is insane to have such rules in place.
- dmix 7y ago
  The intentions of laws vs the real world implications are so often disconnected. There's been a million cases where the mere side effects of laws have caused more trouble for the intended target of the good intentions than it actually helped itself (see rent control laws in NYC and Toronto ultimately significantly reducing low income housing for over a decade in the 70s and 80s because no developer would build there, significantly increasing average rents by reducing supply). Thomas Sowell wrote a quite a few good books about this. I have no doubt it applies equally to export laws.
- utopian3 7y ago
  > It was just a tool to use against people they suspected being involved espionage. Just another reason to put you in a cell. https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSA_algorithm https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSA_algorithm The wiki link you provided does not have the words "export" or "espionage". Are you trying to imply that R,S, and A were suspected of espionage? You'll need a real source for that..

deleted 7y ago

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stuqqq 7y ago

I have open source deep learning projects on GitHub. Should I be worried?

mark_l_watson 7y ago

I sold AI software (for building expert systems) for Xerox Lisp Machines from 1982 to 1985 and the lawyers at my company complained that the $5K license price did not make up for the hassle for foreign sales (I sold to customers in Japan, Norway, and Germany). So, export controls are not such a new things.

winrid 7y ago
Oh that sounds interesting. What problems did your AI software solve in the 80s?

LifeLiverTransp 7y ago

Stirring paranoia as a buisness model for 2nd tier softwar development regions.

mlthoughts2018 7y ago

The reason for this has to be economics / lobbyist driven. It makes no sense technologically (because it could not be effective) and there are far more dangerous examples of American companies developing technology that assists the Chinese military, such as private search engines and social credit systems that leave the general populace unable to make democratic influence on military actions or government policy.

Abishek_Muthian 7y ago

Progress in AI tech has been due to open sharing of knowledge, so much so that even companies such as Apple which tend to keep its research under closed doors started publishing open Machine Learning journals to attract talent. AI tech is too powerful to be monopolised, if not democratised it might become another 'semiconductor' industry.

NHQ 7y ago

China doesn't need American AI technology.

pandaman 7y ago

The main impact of these regulations is not going to be on the software availability overseas but on the software jobs availability for foreign nationals, IMO. I work on ITAR-regulated software and, even though, the software itself is exported all over the world, I would not be able to write it if I had been a national of a restricted country, working in the US on a temporary visa.

alkonaut 7y ago

What the threat (of an ability the US doesn’t want other nations to have) here and how does geospatial imagery and point clouds fit in? This seems to target one or a few products so they dislike that someone uses the software for that purpose

sedachv 7y ago
Most likely autonomous drone navigation (particularly very low altitude terrain following) and targeting. That is how cruise missiles work: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TERCOM https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TERCOM There was a big drone attack on a Saudi Arabian oil processing facility last year: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_Abqaiq%E2%80%93Khurais_attack https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_Abqaiq%E2%80%93Khurais_at...

__s 7y ago

A protectionist response to the US losing power, & trying to stave off brain drain. They should be considering any person who knows how to program with Tensorflow a munition. Mitigating brain drain is a hopeless endeavor. US should make their immigration more liberal to try encourage US as a destination for brain drain, as opposed to a source. Drain or be drained

michannne 7y ago
Are there any studies or reports that point to the US falling behind technologically in regards to software research?

andrei_says_ 7y ago

Seems like China is way ahead in the AI game, including by applying it for mass surveillance and oppression. I highly recommend the Frontline documentary on AI in China. https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/film/in-the-age-of-ai/ https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/film/in-the-age-of-ai/ They see AI as the next industrial revolution and have decided to make sure they are at its forefront. And likely they will, which means that we’ll be the ones trying to import their tech.

StuffedParrot 7y ago

Why not ban heuristics altogether?

cced 7y ago

Is there anything that people outside of the US should download now in order to get access to software?

bitminer 7y ago
The rule refers to products, not freely available source code. Companies don't sell stuff from GitHub, they sell proprietary stuff. It may well be based on open source code, but they own it to sell (license) it. There's lots of examples of products in the geospatial domain that are not "AI" yet are restricted or even classified. For example, ship detection from space-based radar. There are numerous public papers on the topic yet any software that purports to do this is subject to ITAR rules in the US and CGP rules in Canada. Just because you may know how to do something doesn't prevent a government from restricting you from selling it, or talking about it. Even if it is "public". Machine guns are an old tech and yet are restricted. As they should be.

blackrock 7y ago

Didn’t the most advanced AI research come straight out of China? The ResNet Project [1] of 2015. It was used as the core algorithm behind Google’s AlphaGo in 2017. The 4 computer scientists behind the paper were Chinese nationals. They were all educated by the Chinese educational system, and got their PhD there (one guy was from Hong Kong). They worked at Microsoft at the time, so Microsoft paid them a salary for their work, but I think Microsoft benefited more from their research, as did the other Silicon Valley and American companies. Three of them went to start or lead other Chinese unicorn companies, and one guy went to Facebook in Silicon Valley, so Facebook benefited here. [1] https://macropolo.org/china-ai-research-resnet/ https://macropolo.org/china-ai-research-resnet/

csense 7y ago

How could they possibly enforce legal limits on software distribution in the age of the Internet? Anyone can slap their code onto a private Gitlab installation in an hour. Hosting a tarball on an HTTPS server is even more trivial.

lopmotr 7y ago
Threat of punishment. Same as how any other law is enforced.

aspectmin 7y ago

Hmm. Doesn’t the point cloud and deep conv section cover a good percentage take of self driving car tech?

bookAlot 7y ago

In the US, selling weapons and internet tools is like making every day household items look like middle school. We still can't figure in that this stuff isn't a service. It's production. Something tangible. Gotta have parts. But service is easy to remember if you consider the person conducting their end of a service, that's between you two as them the representative.

upwardbound 7y ago

As other commenters have stated, this export ban seems both very narrow and an extremely good idea. My interpretation of the meaning & intent of the ban is that it is banning GUI-based tools for training CNN's to automatically identify specific types of objects in aerial imagery (e.g. distinguishing a limousine from a different type of car). These CNN's being trained are almost certainly intended for use in autonomous targeting of airstrikes by fully-autonomous weaponized UAV's. Here is the text of the specific ban: https://s3.amazonaws.com/public-inspection.federalregister.gov/2019-27649.pdf https://s3.amazonaws.com/public-inspection.federalregister.g... Here is a really good book for background on this topic: https://www.amazon.com/Army-None-Autonomous-Weapons-Future-ebook/dp/B073VXYD5P https://www.amazon.com/Army-None-Autonomous-Weapons-Future-e...

CMCDragonkai 7y ago

When does this export ban get executed?

anonu 7y ago

There was a tangential discussion on SAR imagery and North Korea here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21955246 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21955246

aminulislam1266 7y ago

ha ha ha... that's good

frankzen 7y ago

These dummies never learn, do they?