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I'll just copy/rephrase my comment that got buried in a thread last night: The fear of large corporations controlling AI is an argument against regulation of A

I'll just copy/rephrase my comment that got buried in a thread last night: The fear of large corporations controlling AI is an argument against regulation of AI. Regulation will guarantee that only the biggest, meanest companies control the direction of AI, and all the benefits of increased resource extraction will flow upward exclusively to them. Whereas if we forego regulation (at least at this stage), then decentralized and community-federated versions of AI have as much of a chance to thrive as do the corporate variants, at least insofar as they can afford some base level of hardware for training (and some benevolent corporations may even open source model weights as a competitive advantage against their malevolent competitors). It seems there are two sources of risk for AI: (1) increased power in the hands of the people controlling it, and (2) increased power in the AI itself. If you believe that (1) is the most existential risk, then you should be against regulation, because the best way to mitigate it is to allow the technology to spread and prosper amongst a more diffuse group of economic actors. If you believe that (2) is the most existential risk, then you basically have no choice but to advocate for an authoritarian world government that can stamp out any research before it begins.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
erlend_sh 4y ago
There’s more than one way to do regulation. Data, source code and APIs can be made openly available by means of regulation.
tpoacher 4y ago
I get the argument, but the absolute dichotomy is misplaced, if not a bit disingenuous. There's nothing stopping regulation of closed-source commercial AI, while promoting academic and opensource use conforming to ethical guidelines.
- danaris 4y ago
  Absolutely; regulations are not synonymous with regulatory capture, which is more or less what chastmasta is implying. These two things are orthogonal, and need to be considered seriously and separately: how to ensure that LLMs are not enabling serious abuses, through various kinds of regulation, and also how to ensure that our common usage of LLMs is not gatekept by huge corporations and dependent on their goodwill and continued interest in supporting the particular things we want to do with them.
- nonbirithm 4y ago
  You can promote those values, but all it takes is one person that doesn't operate by the same ethical system as you to invalidate everything. In the case of MAD that means the annihilation of the world. The more people the technology spreads to, the more chances it has to fall into one of those hands. And unfortunately, those people are always going to exist among the ~8 billion humans alive, somewhere. All this brings me back to the Vulnerable World Hypothesis proposed by Nick Bostrom. In fact global totalitarian surveillance that stamps out all potentially dangerous research is one of his few proposed solutions in his paper. I don't know if I can stomach such a solution, but I think we are living the early stages of such a world that forces such questions to be asked, not one in which we picked out a "black ball" that will make us go extinct, but a sort of "green ball" that irreversibly poisons specific parts of collective humanity. I would personally be in favor of OpenAI keeping GPT-4 and future models proprietary, much as it won't affect the open source spirit. Random hackers with powerful GPUs generating terabytes of SEO spam are less visible to the world and more difficult to hold publicly accountable than a huge corporation with billions in funding.
  - tpoacher 4y ago
    1) I don't think this is an apt analogy. The GPT danger argued here is less a "GPT missile gap" one, and more of a "Skynet / HorizonZeroDawn" one. Openness makes the latter scenario less likely. 2) There's a big difference between commercial and academic research, particularly in terms of incentives (though the gap has narrowed significantly in recent years). But, research is rarely "disney villain" material to be stamped anyway; good research can be used for evil and vice versa. But at least in academia you're supposed to have ethics committees and academic standards to uphold. 3) I dont accept this argument. It has a very "ban encryption / think of the children" vibe to me. The idea that openness makes the life of spammers ever-so-slightly easier and therefore we should not have openness is bizzare. Spammers will spam regardless, and spamming tools being proprietary isn't exactly a deterrant. The only thing you lose by blocking openness is ... well, openness.
ChatGTP 4y ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35333939 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35333939 Have a read of this write up, it compliments this discussion nicely. I think it makes some good points, but one of them stands out clearly to me, there is a narrative going around that we "have" to continue doing AI research at this pace. I'm skeptical about it. This is a story we believe. We're fueling an arms race by doing the research, do you know what I mean? Like if we were throwing billions of dollars into gray goo creating technologies, would that be clever? I'm not saying that it's possible to slow down or stop AI progress, but we're definitely not helping by throwing billions or trillions of dollars into it. If we were an actually intelligent species, I think we would slow down and take stock of what we're doing before disaster strikes. In fact global totalitarian surveillance that stamps out all potentially dangerous research is one of his few proposed solutions in his paper. Someone else posted this, I actually think this is where further AI research will take us, this is because regular people who aren't nerds will vote for this, it would be politically an easy sell for a politician, and people would honestly prefer oversight and their families safety rather than having watching "boffins gone wild" receive endless rounds of funding creating self-replicating terminators for fun. You have to remember, computer geeks and regular people probably have very different ideas about AI. If we can't behave, people will behave us.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

erlend_sh 4y ago

There’s more than one way to do regulation. Data, source code and APIs can be made openly available by means of regulation.

tpoacher 4y ago

I get the argument, but the absolute dichotomy is misplaced, if not a bit disingenuous. There's nothing stopping regulation of closed-source commercial AI, while promoting academic and opensource use conforming to ethical guidelines.

danaris 4y ago
Absolutely; regulations are not synonymous with regulatory capture, which is more or less what chastmasta is implying. These two things are orthogonal, and need to be considered seriously and separately: how to ensure that LLMs are not enabling serious abuses, through various kinds of regulation, and also how to ensure that our common usage of LLMs is not gatekept by huge corporations and dependent on their goodwill and continued interest in supporting the particular things we want to do with them.
nonbirithm 4y ago
You can promote those values, but all it takes is one person that doesn't operate by the same ethical system as you to invalidate everything. In the case of MAD that means the annihilation of the world. The more people the technology spreads to, the more chances it has to fall into one of those hands. And unfortunately, those people are always going to exist among the ~8 billion humans alive, somewhere. All this brings me back to the Vulnerable World Hypothesis proposed by Nick Bostrom. In fact global totalitarian surveillance that stamps out all potentially dangerous research is one of his few proposed solutions in his paper. I don't know if I can stomach such a solution, but I think we are living the early stages of such a world that forces such questions to be asked, not one in which we picked out a "black ball" that will make us go extinct, but a sort of "green ball" that irreversibly poisons specific parts of collective humanity. I would personally be in favor of OpenAI keeping GPT-4 and future models proprietary, much as it won't affect the open source spirit. Random hackers with powerful GPUs generating terabytes of SEO spam are less visible to the world and more difficult to hold publicly accountable than a huge corporation with billions in funding.
- tpoacher 4y ago
  1) I don't think this is an apt analogy. The GPT danger argued here is less a "GPT missile gap" one, and more of a "Skynet / HorizonZeroDawn" one. Openness makes the latter scenario less likely. 2) There's a big difference between commercial and academic research, particularly in terms of incentives (though the gap has narrowed significantly in recent years). But, research is rarely "disney villain" material to be stamped anyway; good research can be used for evil and vice versa. But at least in academia you're supposed to have ethics committees and academic standards to uphold. 3) I dont accept this argument. It has a very "ban encryption / think of the children" vibe to me. The idea that openness makes the life of spammers ever-so-slightly easier and therefore we should not have openness is bizzare. Spammers will spam regardless, and spamming tools being proprietary isn't exactly a deterrant. The only thing you lose by blocking openness is ... well, openness.

ChatGTP 4y ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35333939 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35333939 Have a read of this write up, it compliments this discussion nicely. I think it makes some good points, but one of them stands out clearly to me, there is a narrative going around that we "have" to continue doing AI research at this pace. I'm skeptical about it. This is a story we believe. We're fueling an arms race by doing the research, do you know what I mean? Like if we were throwing billions of dollars into gray goo creating technologies, would that be clever? I'm not saying that it's possible to slow down or stop AI progress, but we're definitely not helping by throwing billions or trillions of dollars into it. If we were an actually intelligent species, I think we would slow down and take stock of what we're doing before disaster strikes. In fact global totalitarian surveillance that stamps out all potentially dangerous research is one of his few proposed solutions in his paper. Someone else posted this, I actually think this is where further AI research will take us, this is because regular people who aren't nerds will vote for this, it would be politically an easy sell for a politician, and people would honestly prefer oversight and their families safety rather than having watching "boffins gone wild" receive endless rounds of funding creating self-replicating terminators for fun. You have to remember, computer geeks and regular people probably have very different ideas about AI. If we can't behave, people will behave us.