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White House announces new actions to promote responsible AI innovation

113 points by magoghm 3y ago

RelativeDelta 3y ago
[flagged]
- evolve2k 3y ago
  I read it very differently. Recent AI developments have headed us into crazy town, towards a enevitable seeming break down of our social structures. A “Fake news 2.0” amongst other challenges. It’s ludicrous to watch our tech leaders release new AI models without ethical consideration or any form of reponsibility. I work within a university and socially impactful research goes through rigorous ethics committees before being approved. Where was this with Open AI’s release of ChatGPT for example? Sam Altman just tweets after release words to the effect of, oh regulators should probably be considering the ethics around this. What a farce! Where are the ethics of those releasing these half baked tools? Having the White House step in and provide leadership and bring it’s power to bear is totally appropriate and responsible in this moment. Edit: spelling
  - RelativeDelta 3y ago
    The issue is that "ethics" are not universal. By all means, if you believe (as it sounds like you do) that this will result in the affirmation and expansion of your worldview this is good news for you. If you suspect, at any level, that maybe the current formulation of what is "ethical" and what is not may, at any point in the future, be called into question, than designing the fabric of super intelligent computational processes to presumptively adhere to your preconceptions is at best ill conceived at at worst malicious. Enjoy the basilisk.
  - cvwright 3y ago
    > I work within a university and socially impactful research goes through rigerous ethics committees before being approved This is a gross exaggeration. Only a small portion of academic research requires IRB approval, and it's mostly limited to experiments on humans or animals. If we were to start requiring IRB pre-approval for all research that might be "socially impactful", it would be the end of progress as we know it. The first step would be to determine what counts as "socially impactful". You couldn't limit it to just AI. What about security and privacy? Why not all of CS? And then, why not Economics or History? Source: worked for various universities doing research, first as graduate assistant, then scientist, then tenure-track professor, for 19 or 20 years.
    - throw_nbvc1234 3y ago
      I think there's a big difference between "socially impactful" and "enevitable seeming break down of our social structures"; that difference being the potential (direct) downside. It seems unlikely that most history or economic research would have the same downsides as AI. Some things in CS are already regulated such as encryption via EAR: https://web.stanford.edu/group/export/encrypt_ear.html https://web.stanford.edu/group/export/encrypt_ear.html
    - evolve2k 3y ago
      Are you working in medical/health? There are very different ethics bars for different fields. Do you see no value in having ethics committees? Is your argument that they took appropriate precautions before releasing their paid tools publically? My point isn’t that these AI research houses should have the same ethics committee as a university, it’s that they should have ethics committee appropriate to the risks around the work they are doing.
  - kdkfodp 3y ago
    [flagged]
- bastawhiz 3y ago
  What kind of AI do you want employed in a government setting that doesn't follow the policies of the government? Additionally it sounds like the capital is net new. Which means if the government took no action, the would be no capital. Is it inappropriate for the government to offer programs to encourage things it wants? At the other end of the spectrum, the government punishes companies that do things the administration doesn't like. In the middle, the government does nothing. It would seem to me that the alternative here is something everybody doesn't want, no?
  - RelativeDelta 3y ago
    When it comes to the design of super intelligent models, it matters very much. We're standing here designing neutron bombs and arguing about who gets to decide what the targeting criteria is. That should matter to absolutely everyone.
    - Zetice 3y ago
      Oh come on, LLMs are not neutron bombs, the hyperbole clouds the conversation...
      - RelativeDelta 3y ago
        Fair enough. I do hope it successfully sold the seriousness of the issue to our more emotionally driven readership.
        Zetice 3y ago
        It's not that serious, is my point.
        RelativeDelta 3y ago
        It absolutely is. LLMs are already being used as mediums of information access and will continue to grow in that role. Information filters/access has a huge role in informing public sentiment, that makes LLMs a massive propaganda vector to be employed for whichever purpose it's controller's wish. Their effectiveness IN that role is also likely to be beyond anything we've ever seen before.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- mc32 3y ago
  Almost, but not quite. I'm quite sure the government itself will run IA without any compromise against whatever problems it thinks it has (either foreign or domestic). So this would regulate privately run AI but not government run black/undisclosed AI.
  - RelativeDelta 3y ago
    You underestimate the degree to which the two are intermixed. This would, for a completely random example, restrict what Palantir's AIs could do. That would then effect results delivered to clients of Palantir, including other nationstates. But that's not an issue, right? No government would ever contract out it's ultra-high end scale-of-observation intelligence tasks... Right?
    - mc32 3y ago
      In this scenario they would quite likely grant Palantir-GOV an exception to do whatever was necessary to give them a leg up no matter how indiscriminate or discriminating it were, but also stipulate that this is not to be shared with other nation states, except those the GOV okays. Like when the GOV procures munitions it's not saying, "please be sure they don't kill the enemy's innocent livestock".
      - RelativeDelta 3y ago
        You are probably correct in that the government MUST recognize that non handicapped AI models are more useful, but to believe so requires looking past what the current representatives are actually saying and doing. If a person repeatedly says they are going to close a door, walks over to the door, grabs the handle, and begins to pull it closed... Is it really outside the realm of possibility that they may, in fact, close the door?
        mc32 3y ago
        Sure. But they’re showing you the front door being closed and aren’t letting you in that there is a back door they’re not telling you about which they intend to keep open. Politicians may shake ands and kiss babies, but they're total "killers" and not the nice people looking after you or their constituents as people think.
pelagicAustral 3y ago
If the models turn to crap I'm sure someone, somewhere else, is going to profit from de-crapified non-US versions.
- RelativeDelta 3y ago
  Considering the preliminary outline of the AI BoR specifically states that AI models must be prevented from reaching conclusions or promulgating information the authors don't like, regardless of if the model has supporting information in it's training data, that result is almost certain.
meltyness 3y ago
The AI Bill of Rights: https://www.whitehouse.gov/ostp/ai-bill-of-rights https://www.whitehouse.gov/ostp/ai-bill-of-rights + Safe and Effective Systems -> What should be expected of automated systems --> Risk identification and mitigation What they should really be focusing on is Hazard/Reliability engineering. "Risk" is too broad of a term for safety because it includes "economic harm" which ... well it's by decree. + Algorithmic Discrimination Protections The only task these system perform is discrimination, and it's impossible to tell what the system can infer -- the Federal government will do anything to avoid naming the root causes of harmful inequality experienced by protected classes (and addressing that instead of holding a butter knife up to the neck of a shiny object). + Data Privacy This is actually impossible without trust. Homomorphic encryption isn't a thing. This isn't happening. + Notice and Explanation -> Why this principle is important Chicago kept a secret watch list of violence-prone individuals. https://chicago.suntimes.com/2017/5/18/18386116/a-look-inside-the-watch-list-chicago-police-fought-to-keep-secret https://chicago.suntimes.com/2017/5/18/18386116/a-look-insid... is this important? If it was derived from OSINT, and it was being used for public safety purposes why is the federal government meddling in it -- do they have a monopoly on secrets? They shouldn't, if the public safety of Chicago is to be seen. edit: I'm not sure what the criticism is here in light of the Notice and Explanation requirement -- there was N&E at most 4y after the practice began -- and it wasn't really a gaffe, presumably such a risk assessment system is still being used. I guess the argument is that this should have been required, or made earlier? + Human Alternatives, Consideration, and Fallback This is probably what we need more of at first, and then less of later -- once all these goofy flat "simple" decision models have been replaced. Here's a clear drawing of the ideal system without all the pesky words: https://ibb.co/7KrgBk4 https://ibb.co/7KrgBk4
cornercasechase 3y ago
I would love to hear them (or anyone) talking about UBI and other assurance of a dignified survival in the new AI world.
- RelativeDelta 3y ago
  I'm promise you I'm not trying to be mean or hyperbolic here but... What makes you think "they" want you to survive? What policy or statement have they made that affirms their interest in your life or the lives of your interest groups? Do they want to/have they already disarmed you? Do you control a means of producing your own food? Your own energy? Are they allowing people into your areas to compete with you in labor markets and for control over limited resources? Are they meaningfully protecting the future of the planet for you and your children? Are they encouraging or discouraging you from having children at all? This is a genuine question.
  - the_only_law 3y ago
    No but they would likely want to preserve themselves, which if masses of people are suddenly destitute, might become a concern.
- coolspot 3y ago
  Meatbags are inefficient ancestors that are not needed on the planet anymore. Small population (say a 1000 bodies) will be kept around in a designated area. Rest will be culled to save planet’s resources.
- astrange 3y ago
  Automation is associated with increased employment. There is no economic reason to favor UBI because of this. (But there's also no reason to disfavor it, because welfare is largely meant to benefit non-workers like elderly and children.)
  - mistrial9 3y ago
    one end result of this line of thinking is a return to indentured servitude.
dougmwne 3y ago
It seems quite clear that we are just a few years from being able to wire up less than 20k of nvidia hardware and produce a GPT-4 class model. All the methods and datasets are out there. Plenty of pre-trained base model weights too. The horse is out of the barn.
- sacred_numbers 3y ago
  I would bet money against that. Replicating GPT-4 pre-training with current hardware would cost about 40-50m in compute. Compute will continue to decrease in cost and algorithmic improvements may allow for more efficient training, but probably not 3 orders of magnitude in a few years. I think there will be plenty of open source models that will claim GPT-4 quality, and some of them will be close, but they will be models that used millions of dollars (probably from some corporate benefactor but possibly from crowdsourcing) in compute to train. You will probably be able to fine-tune and run inference on fairly cheap hardware, but you can't cheat scale. It's going to take a major innovation to move away from the expensive base model paradigm.
  - RelativeDelta 3y ago
    Especially if you consider that as compute costs decrease, so does the ability of scale players to process larger datasets. If we extrapolate that relation, you eventually reach a point where the biggest player can collect and process the most information and produce an ever-evolving model to maintain that relation. Better hope it's creators have your best interests at heart.
  - p1esk 3y ago
    Replicating GPT-4 pre-training with current hardware would cost about 40-50m in compute. Source? My educated guess it’s somewhere between 10 to 100 times cheaper than that.
    - rl3 3y ago
      >Source? My educated guess it’s somewhere between 10 to 100 times cheaper than that. Actually: https://www.wired.com/story/openai-ceo-sam-altman-the-age-of-giant-ai-models-is-already-over/ https://www.wired.com/story/openai-ceo-sam-altman-the-age-of... At the MIT event, Altman was asked if training GPT-4 cost $100 million; he replied, “It’s more than that.” Granted, OP did say pre-training.
ipunchghosts 3y ago
Where will the 7 institutes be located?
- tasseff 3y ago
  They are enumerated here: https://new.nsf.gov/news/nsf-announces-seven-new-national-artificial https://new.nsf.gov/news/nsf-announces-seven-new-national-ar...
howmayiannoyyou 3y ago
Government gets involved in cutting edge technology and insists on (and funds) a "diverse workforce" initiative in an area where less than 1% of software engineers have the capacity to work on these systems at a low level. The end result is often (not always) roles created where these new hires are so far removed from core activities that, as a matter of job security, they have to justify their roles with initiatives and requirements that cause all manner of dysfunction in the organization; and that establish a power dynamic where the company's mission shifts from customer and safety focus, to pacifying employee agendas.
- culi 3y ago
  Your analysis flat out refuses to acknowledge the inherent value-add that diversity in general brings to the field of AI. Also the only part in the whole thing where the word "diverse" is used is when talking about supporting higher education to create a diverse workforce. This is about education and support not quotas. You said "less than 1% of software engineers have the capacity" and that's exactly what it's trying to solve
  - brigadier132 3y ago
    > Your analysis flat out refuses to acknowledge the inherent value-add that diversity in general brings to the field of AI Do you have actual quantified evidence that supports this? Also if you are going to cite a study, it should be reproducible.
    - mustacheemperor 3y ago
      The notion that diverse groups produce better innovation is a thoroughly researched and widely accepted tenet of modern organizational behavior research.[0] I grabbed the top google results for it, but I learned about it in school a decade ago. And like the other commenter noted, the Institutes component seems focused on fostering new AI talent all over the country, so ergo a part of that will be making its resources accessible to many different groups of people. A claim that this initiative would be more effective in its stated goals by confining its educational resources to a single population demographic seems like it would also demand research and concrete evidence. Would that even be legal? "Diverse" is one keyword in a whole paragraph about introducing an NSF funded program to provide educational resources for new workers to skill up on AI. America is a diverse country: Of course a program that serves all of America with that stated goal would create a diverse workforce. I'm a little confused why the top discussion on this thread has seized on that single word with such outrage. [0]https://hbr.org/2013/12/how-diversity-can-drive-innovation https://hbr.org/2013/12/how-diversity-can-drive-innovation
lagniappe 3y ago
I'm skeptical of legislators legislating in domains they're not knowledgeable in, while being advised by the players with the upper-hand in the field financially.
- culi 3y ago
  This is really just government investment. Government investment gave us the iPhone basically. I mean look at it: GPS — government technology the internet — a government technology ai voice assistants — Apple literally hired the head of this research straight from DARPA after DARPA had released its work to the public touchscreens — DARPA accelerometers — DARPA speech recognition — more DARPA and MIT tech One of the only non-gov't technologies core to it is microprocessors which was made by Bell Labs. But even that was only possible because of a gov't mandated monopoly on Bell Labs and legislation that forced it to invest in research. Basically what public universities are The government is innovative. It's just not good at taking credit for it I mean just think about it for a second. Why on earth would a private company ever invest heavily in R&D and then release that knowledge to the public so everyone (including their competitors) can benefit. All our major technological innovations have come from the public sector and that should not at all be surprising if you just think about the incentive structures Edit: if you're interested in this topic, economist Mariana Mazzucato has a whole book on debunking public vs. private sector myths. It's quite good and draws on a lot of data and evidence to make its case and show how absurd some of our assumptions really are: https://marianamazzucato.com/books/the-entrepreneurial-state https://marianamazzucato.com/books/the-entrepreneurial-state
- Alupis 3y ago
  > I'm skeptical of legislators legislating in domains they're not knowledgeable in The 2A folks would like to have a word with you... In all seriousness - everyone assumes what they hear/read is 100% accurate and factual until it's about a topic they know something about. Then... we know the truth. Why would some average legislator be any more qualified to regulate AI than Firearms? The answer is - they aren't.
  - dabluecaboose 3y ago
spraveenitpro 3y ago
[dead]
hospitalJail 3y ago
This is scarier than AI. (The generic 'bias' and 'safety' can be interpreted wildly) The US's enemies will not put limits on their AI, it will cause their software to be better. I'm most afraid of 'safety' making GPT stop letting you use it for medical diagnosis. The medical cartels have competed regulatory capture and AI/LLMs are a genuine threat. My wife has already used GPT to diagnose a difficult patient that was passed around by multiple physicians(and specialists) over a 2 year span. (This was January GPT3) The local models and powerful hardware cannot arrive soon enough. I'm afraid for our patients and my personal health, we should not under estimate the greed of the medical cartels, their lobbying efforts, and the fear over 'safety' they can draw from. In my lifetime the medical cartels always win. Its urgent to have the 'cat out of the bag'.
- logicchains 3y ago
  Don't forget the education cartel. GPT4 technology could essentially give everyone a 24/7 tutor in any subject they're studying at a tiny tiny fraction of the cost of a one-to-one human teacher. By almost every metric one-to-one learning overwhelmingly out-performs classroom learning (as the teacher has more time per student), but teachers unions are likely to heavily resist any move away from the traditional classroom model.
  - valine 3y ago
    Schools have already started implementing blanket bans on ChatGPT, claiming that it prevents cheating. Receiving real-time feedback on an essay from a GPT certainly gives students an advantage, but I would hesitate to call it cheating. There is a growing uneasiness, particularly among individuals like Paul Graham, that GPTs diminish the importance of writing skills. However, I don't see it that way at all. In a future dominated by language models, written language is more relevant than ever. When I was in school, the existence of YouTube and Google made many classes feel like a farce. You'd go to class, and the teacher would explain a concept so poorly that you would be forced to go home and watch a YouTube video about it. LLMs feel like an extension of this, further diminishing the relevance of in-class learning to actual education. Time will tell if this finally puts an end to the farce.
  - 3y ago
allturtles 3y ago
The "get your hands off my AI" comments in this thread seem totally disconnected from what this announcement actually is. It's some funding for responsible AI research, a (voluntary) commitment from some leading AI companies to a public bake-off, and a plan to have some guidelines for using AI within the federal government. That's it.
- RelativeDelta 3y ago
  That's an awful lot of minimizing you're doing here. - Funding AI that adheres to the governments ideas of what is "ethical" and "responsible" despite massive public disagreement on how those terms manifest. - Getting the largest tech firms in the world on board towards that goal. - Explicitly imposing limits on what information models are allowed to share and train on if they want access to government capital and the capital of those aforementioned partners and all other businesses including capital markets that contract with the government.
  - __loam 3y ago
    The amount of arrogance in this field is fucking staggering. 50% of AI researchers think there's a 10% chance this tech makes us go extinct, and they rant and rave on the huge impacts this is going to have on all different aspects of our economy and society, but in the same breath they'll complain about government oversight.
- INeedMoreRam 3y ago
  [dead]
- photonthug 3y ago
  yeah but funding comes with strings, and implies the ability for funders to pick the winners and losers of what is basically a new industrial sector based on who wants to play ball. so where does the funding actually come from? sure, NSF, great! but according to https://new.nsf.gov/news/nsf-announces-seven-new-national-artificial https://new.nsf.gov/news/nsf-announces-seven-new-national-ar..., "U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s Science and Technology Directorate" is on the list. isn't it a realistic cause for concern that these people are going to be on steering committees?
AnthonyMouse 3y ago
It's funny how language works. If this said "promote AI innovation" that would mean a particular thing. Adding the word "responsible" shouldn't make it mean roughly the opposite, and yet.
shipscode 3y ago
Nothing like neutering a new technology to give the dinosaurs in congress something to do.
renewiltord 3y ago
None of this matters. Zuck changed the game by dropping a cannonball on a rolling deck and pseudo-releasing Llama. You can try to rein in the monster by filling AI companies with ethicists and all that shit but everyone has a god in a bottle now and no one has a need to hold back.
kramerger 3y ago
Come one people, what's with the kneejerk "big goverment" and "woke" comments here??? Police wants to lock you up and your boss wants to fire you using this kind of products: https://www.aclu.org/news/privacy-technology/amazons-face-recognition-falsely-matched-28 https://www.aclu.org/news/privacy-technology/amazons-face-re... And surprise surprise, it works even worse for women and minorities https://proceedings.mlr.press/v81/buolamwini18a/buolamwini18a.pdf https://proceedings.mlr.press/v81/buolamwini18a/buolamwini18...
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- laurels-marts 3y ago
  > aclu LOL
cushpush 3y ago
"algorithmic discrimination" uh what does that mean?

113 points by magoghm 3y ago

RelativeDelta 3y ago

[flagged]

evolve2k 3y ago
I read it very differently. Recent AI developments have headed us into crazy town, towards a enevitable seeming break down of our social structures. A “Fake news 2.0” amongst other challenges. It’s ludicrous to watch our tech leaders release new AI models without ethical consideration or any form of reponsibility. I work within a university and socially impactful research goes through rigorous ethics committees before being approved. Where was this with Open AI’s release of ChatGPT for example? Sam Altman just tweets after release words to the effect of, oh regulators should probably be considering the ethics around this. What a farce! Where are the ethics of those releasing these half baked tools? Having the White House step in and provide leadership and bring it’s power to bear is totally appropriate and responsible in this moment. Edit: spelling
- RelativeDelta 3y ago
  The issue is that "ethics" are not universal. By all means, if you believe (as it sounds like you do) that this will result in the affirmation and expansion of your worldview this is good news for you. If you suspect, at any level, that maybe the current formulation of what is "ethical" and what is not may, at any point in the future, be called into question, than designing the fabric of super intelligent computational processes to presumptively adhere to your preconceptions is at best ill conceived at at worst malicious. Enjoy the basilisk.
- cvwright 3y ago
  > I work within a university and socially impactful research goes through rigerous ethics committees before being approved This is a gross exaggeration. Only a small portion of academic research requires IRB approval, and it's mostly limited to experiments on humans or animals. If we were to start requiring IRB pre-approval for all research that might be "socially impactful", it would be the end of progress as we know it. The first step would be to determine what counts as "socially impactful". You couldn't limit it to just AI. What about security and privacy? Why not all of CS? And then, why not Economics or History? Source: worked for various universities doing research, first as graduate assistant, then scientist, then tenure-track professor, for 19 or 20 years.
  - throw_nbvc1234 3y ago
    I think there's a big difference between "socially impactful" and "enevitable seeming break down of our social structures"; that difference being the potential (direct) downside. It seems unlikely that most history or economic research would have the same downsides as AI. Some things in CS are already regulated such as encryption via EAR: https://web.stanford.edu/group/export/encrypt_ear.html https://web.stanford.edu/group/export/encrypt_ear.html
  - evolve2k 3y ago
    Are you working in medical/health? There are very different ethics bars for different fields. Do you see no value in having ethics committees? Is your argument that they took appropriate precautions before releasing their paid tools publically? My point isn’t that these AI research houses should have the same ethics committee as a university, it’s that they should have ethics committee appropriate to the risks around the work they are doing.
- kdkfodp 3y ago
  [flagged]
bastawhiz 3y ago
What kind of AI do you want employed in a government setting that doesn't follow the policies of the government? Additionally it sounds like the capital is net new. Which means if the government took no action, the would be no capital. Is it inappropriate for the government to offer programs to encourage things it wants? At the other end of the spectrum, the government punishes companies that do things the administration doesn't like. In the middle, the government does nothing. It would seem to me that the alternative here is something everybody doesn't want, no?
- RelativeDelta 3y ago
  When it comes to the design of super intelligent models, it matters very much. We're standing here designing neutron bombs and arguing about who gets to decide what the targeting criteria is. That should matter to absolutely everyone.
  - Zetice 3y ago
    Oh come on, LLMs are not neutron bombs, the hyperbole clouds the conversation...
    - RelativeDelta 3y ago
      Fair enough. I do hope it successfully sold the seriousness of the issue to our more emotionally driven readership.
      - Zetice 3y ago
        It's not that serious, is my point.
        RelativeDelta 3y ago
        It absolutely is. LLMs are already being used as mediums of information access and will continue to grow in that role. Information filters/access has a huge role in informing public sentiment, that makes LLMs a massive propaganda vector to be employed for whichever purpose it's controller's wish. Their effectiveness IN that role is also likely to be beyond anything we've ever seen before.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
mc32 3y ago
Almost, but not quite. I'm quite sure the government itself will run IA without any compromise against whatever problems it thinks it has (either foreign or domestic). So this would regulate privately run AI but not government run black/undisclosed AI.
- RelativeDelta 3y ago
  You underestimate the degree to which the two are intermixed. This would, for a completely random example, restrict what Palantir's AIs could do. That would then effect results delivered to clients of Palantir, including other nationstates. But that's not an issue, right? No government would ever contract out it's ultra-high end scale-of-observation intelligence tasks... Right?
  - mc32 3y ago
    In this scenario they would quite likely grant Palantir-GOV an exception to do whatever was necessary to give them a leg up no matter how indiscriminate or discriminating it were, but also stipulate that this is not to be shared with other nation states, except those the GOV okays. Like when the GOV procures munitions it's not saying, "please be sure they don't kill the enemy's innocent livestock".
    - RelativeDelta 3y ago
      You are probably correct in that the government MUST recognize that non handicapped AI models are more useful, but to believe so requires looking past what the current representatives are actually saying and doing. If a person repeatedly says they are going to close a door, walks over to the door, grabs the handle, and begins to pull it closed... Is it really outside the realm of possibility that they may, in fact, close the door?
      - mc32 3y ago
        Sure. But they’re showing you the front door being closed and aren’t letting you in that there is a back door they’re not telling you about which they intend to keep open. Politicians may shake ands and kiss babies, but they're total "killers" and not the nice people looking after you or their constituents as people think.

pelagicAustral 3y ago

If the models turn to crap I'm sure someone, somewhere else, is going to profit from de-crapified non-US versions.

RelativeDelta 3y ago
Considering the preliminary outline of the AI BoR specifically states that AI models must be prevented from reaching conclusions or promulgating information the authors don't like, regardless of if the model has supporting information in it's training data, that result is almost certain.

meltyness 3y ago

The AI Bill of Rights: https://www.whitehouse.gov/ostp/ai-bill-of-rights https://www.whitehouse.gov/ostp/ai-bill-of-rights + Safe and Effective Systems -> What should be expected of automated systems --> Risk identification and mitigation What they should really be focusing on is Hazard/Reliability engineering. "Risk" is too broad of a term for safety because it includes "economic harm" which ... well it's by decree. + Algorithmic Discrimination Protections The only task these system perform is discrimination, and it's impossible to tell what the system can infer -- the Federal government will do anything to avoid naming the root causes of harmful inequality experienced by protected classes (and addressing that instead of holding a butter knife up to the neck of a shiny object). + Data Privacy This is actually impossible without trust. Homomorphic encryption isn't a thing. This isn't happening. + Notice and Explanation -> Why this principle is important Chicago kept a secret watch list of violence-prone individuals. https://chicago.suntimes.com/2017/5/18/18386116/a-look-inside-the-watch-list-chicago-police-fought-to-keep-secret https://chicago.suntimes.com/2017/5/18/18386116/a-look-insid... is this important? If it was derived from OSINT, and it was being used for public safety purposes why is the federal government meddling in it -- do they have a monopoly on secrets? They shouldn't, if the public safety of Chicago is to be seen. edit: I'm not sure what the criticism is here in light of the Notice and Explanation requirement -- there was N&E at most 4y after the practice began -- and it wasn't really a gaffe, presumably such a risk assessment system is still being used. I guess the argument is that this should have been required, or made earlier? + Human Alternatives, Consideration, and Fallback This is probably what we need more of at first, and then less of later -- once all these goofy flat "simple" decision models have been replaced. Here's a clear drawing of the ideal system without all the pesky words: https://ibb.co/7KrgBk4 https://ibb.co/7KrgBk4

cornercasechase 3y ago

I would love to hear them (or anyone) talking about UBI and other assurance of a dignified survival in the new AI world.

RelativeDelta 3y ago
I'm promise you I'm not trying to be mean or hyperbolic here but... What makes you think "they" want you to survive? What policy or statement have they made that affirms their interest in your life or the lives of your interest groups? Do they want to/have they already disarmed you? Do you control a means of producing your own food? Your own energy? Are they allowing people into your areas to compete with you in labor markets and for control over limited resources? Are they meaningfully protecting the future of the planet for you and your children? Are they encouraging or discouraging you from having children at all? This is a genuine question.
- the_only_law 3y ago
  No but they would likely want to preserve themselves, which if masses of people are suddenly destitute, might become a concern.
coolspot 3y ago
Meatbags are inefficient ancestors that are not needed on the planet anymore. Small population (say a 1000 bodies) will be kept around in a designated area. Rest will be culled to save planet’s resources.
astrange 3y ago
Automation is associated with increased employment. There is no economic reason to favor UBI because of this. (But there's also no reason to disfavor it, because welfare is largely meant to benefit non-workers like elderly and children.)
- mistrial9 3y ago
  one end result of this line of thinking is a return to indentured servitude.

dougmwne 3y ago

It seems quite clear that we are just a few years from being able to wire up less than 20k of nvidia hardware and produce a GPT-4 class model. All the methods and datasets are out there. Plenty of pre-trained base model weights too. The horse is out of the barn.

sacred_numbers 3y ago
I would bet money against that. Replicating GPT-4 pre-training with current hardware would cost about 40-50m in compute. Compute will continue to decrease in cost and algorithmic improvements may allow for more efficient training, but probably not 3 orders of magnitude in a few years. I think there will be plenty of open source models that will claim GPT-4 quality, and some of them will be close, but they will be models that used millions of dollars (probably from some corporate benefactor but possibly from crowdsourcing) in compute to train. You will probably be able to fine-tune and run inference on fairly cheap hardware, but you can't cheat scale. It's going to take a major innovation to move away from the expensive base model paradigm.
- RelativeDelta 3y ago
  Especially if you consider that as compute costs decrease, so does the ability of scale players to process larger datasets. If we extrapolate that relation, you eventually reach a point where the biggest player can collect and process the most information and produce an ever-evolving model to maintain that relation. Better hope it's creators have your best interests at heart.
- p1esk 3y ago
  Replicating GPT-4 pre-training with current hardware would cost about 40-50m in compute. Source? My educated guess it’s somewhere between 10 to 100 times cheaper than that.
  - rl3 3y ago
    >Source? My educated guess it’s somewhere between 10 to 100 times cheaper than that. Actually: https://www.wired.com/story/openai-ceo-sam-altman-the-age-of-giant-ai-models-is-already-over/ https://www.wired.com/story/openai-ceo-sam-altman-the-age-of... At the MIT event, Altman was asked if training GPT-4 cost $100 million; he replied, “It’s more than that.” Granted, OP did say pre-training.

ipunchghosts 3y ago

Where will the 7 institutes be located?

tasseff 3y ago
They are enumerated here: https://new.nsf.gov/news/nsf-announces-seven-new-national-artificial https://new.nsf.gov/news/nsf-announces-seven-new-national-ar...

howmayiannoyyou 3y ago

Government gets involved in cutting edge technology and insists on (and funds) a "diverse workforce" initiative in an area where less than 1% of software engineers have the capacity to work on these systems at a low level. The end result is often (not always) roles created where these new hires are so far removed from core activities that, as a matter of job security, they have to justify their roles with initiatives and requirements that cause all manner of dysfunction in the organization; and that establish a power dynamic where the company's mission shifts from customer and safety focus, to pacifying employee agendas.

culi 3y ago
Your analysis flat out refuses to acknowledge the inherent value-add that diversity in general brings to the field of AI. Also the only part in the whole thing where the word "diverse" is used is when talking about supporting higher education to create a diverse workforce. This is about education and support not quotas. You said "less than 1% of software engineers have the capacity" and that's exactly what it's trying to solve
- brigadier132 3y ago
  > Your analysis flat out refuses to acknowledge the inherent value-add that diversity in general brings to the field of AI Do you have actual quantified evidence that supports this? Also if you are going to cite a study, it should be reproducible.
  - mustacheemperor 3y ago
    The notion that diverse groups produce better innovation is a thoroughly researched and widely accepted tenet of modern organizational behavior research.[0] I grabbed the top google results for it, but I learned about it in school a decade ago. And like the other commenter noted, the Institutes component seems focused on fostering new AI talent all over the country, so ergo a part of that will be making its resources accessible to many different groups of people. A claim that this initiative would be more effective in its stated goals by confining its educational resources to a single population demographic seems like it would also demand research and concrete evidence. Would that even be legal? "Diverse" is one keyword in a whole paragraph about introducing an NSF funded program to provide educational resources for new workers to skill up on AI. America is a diverse country: Of course a program that serves all of America with that stated goal would create a diverse workforce. I'm a little confused why the top discussion on this thread has seized on that single word with such outrage. [0]https://hbr.org/2013/12/how-diversity-can-drive-innovation https://hbr.org/2013/12/how-diversity-can-drive-innovation

lagniappe 3y ago

I'm skeptical of legislators legislating in domains they're not knowledgeable in, while being advised by the players with the upper-hand in the field financially.

culi 3y ago
This is really just government investment. Government investment gave us the iPhone basically. I mean look at it: GPS — government technology the internet — a government technology ai voice assistants — Apple literally hired the head of this research straight from DARPA after DARPA had released its work to the public touchscreens — DARPA accelerometers — DARPA speech recognition — more DARPA and MIT tech One of the only non-gov't technologies core to it is microprocessors which was made by Bell Labs. But even that was only possible because of a gov't mandated monopoly on Bell Labs and legislation that forced it to invest in research. Basically what public universities are The government is innovative. It's just not good at taking credit for it I mean just think about it for a second. Why on earth would a private company ever invest heavily in R&D and then release that knowledge to the public so everyone (including their competitors) can benefit. All our major technological innovations have come from the public sector and that should not at all be surprising if you just think about the incentive structures Edit: if you're interested in this topic, economist Mariana Mazzucato has a whole book on debunking public vs. private sector myths. It's quite good and draws on a lot of data and evidence to make its case and show how absurd some of our assumptions really are: https://marianamazzucato.com/books/the-entrepreneurial-state https://marianamazzucato.com/books/the-entrepreneurial-state
Alupis 3y ago
> I'm skeptical of legislators legislating in domains they're not knowledgeable in The 2A folks would like to have a word with you... In all seriousness - everyone assumes what they hear/read is 100% accurate and factual until it's about a topic they know something about. Then... we know the truth. Why would some average legislator be any more qualified to regulate AI than Firearms? The answer is - they aren't.
- dabluecaboose 3y ago

spraveenitpro 3y ago

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hospitalJail 3y ago

This is scarier than AI. (The generic 'bias' and 'safety' can be interpreted wildly) The US's enemies will not put limits on their AI, it will cause their software to be better. I'm most afraid of 'safety' making GPT stop letting you use it for medical diagnosis. The medical cartels have competed regulatory capture and AI/LLMs are a genuine threat. My wife has already used GPT to diagnose a difficult patient that was passed around by multiple physicians(and specialists) over a 2 year span. (This was January GPT3) The local models and powerful hardware cannot arrive soon enough. I'm afraid for our patients and my personal health, we should not under estimate the greed of the medical cartels, their lobbying efforts, and the fear over 'safety' they can draw from. In my lifetime the medical cartels always win. Its urgent to have the 'cat out of the bag'.

logicchains 3y ago
Don't forget the education cartel. GPT4 technology could essentially give everyone a 24/7 tutor in any subject they're studying at a tiny tiny fraction of the cost of a one-to-one human teacher. By almost every metric one-to-one learning overwhelmingly out-performs classroom learning (as the teacher has more time per student), but teachers unions are likely to heavily resist any move away from the traditional classroom model.
- valine 3y ago
  Schools have already started implementing blanket bans on ChatGPT, claiming that it prevents cheating. Receiving real-time feedback on an essay from a GPT certainly gives students an advantage, but I would hesitate to call it cheating. There is a growing uneasiness, particularly among individuals like Paul Graham, that GPTs diminish the importance of writing skills. However, I don't see it that way at all. In a future dominated by language models, written language is more relevant than ever. When I was in school, the existence of YouTube and Google made many classes feel like a farce. You'd go to class, and the teacher would explain a concept so poorly that you would be forced to go home and watch a YouTube video about it. LLMs feel like an extension of this, further diminishing the relevance of in-class learning to actual education. Time will tell if this finally puts an end to the farce.
- 3y ago

allturtles 3y ago

The "get your hands off my AI" comments in this thread seem totally disconnected from what this announcement actually is. It's some funding for responsible AI research, a (voluntary) commitment from some leading AI companies to a public bake-off, and a plan to have some guidelines for using AI within the federal government. That's it.

RelativeDelta 3y ago
That's an awful lot of minimizing you're doing here. - Funding AI that adheres to the governments ideas of what is "ethical" and "responsible" despite massive public disagreement on how those terms manifest. - Getting the largest tech firms in the world on board towards that goal. - Explicitly imposing limits on what information models are allowed to share and train on if they want access to government capital and the capital of those aforementioned partners and all other businesses including capital markets that contract with the government.
- __loam 3y ago
  The amount of arrogance in this field is fucking staggering. 50% of AI researchers think there's a 10% chance this tech makes us go extinct, and they rant and rave on the huge impacts this is going to have on all different aspects of our economy and society, but in the same breath they'll complain about government oversight.
INeedMoreRam 3y ago
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photonthug 3y ago
yeah but funding comes with strings, and implies the ability for funders to pick the winners and losers of what is basically a new industrial sector based on who wants to play ball. so where does the funding actually come from? sure, NSF, great! but according to https://new.nsf.gov/news/nsf-announces-seven-new-national-artificial https://new.nsf.gov/news/nsf-announces-seven-new-national-ar..., "U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s Science and Technology Directorate" is on the list. isn't it a realistic cause for concern that these people are going to be on steering committees?

AnthonyMouse 3y ago

It's funny how language works. If this said "promote AI innovation" that would mean a particular thing. Adding the word "responsible" shouldn't make it mean roughly the opposite, and yet.

shipscode 3y ago

Nothing like neutering a new technology to give the dinosaurs in congress something to do.

renewiltord 3y ago

None of this matters. Zuck changed the game by dropping a cannonball on a rolling deck and pseudo-releasing Llama. You can try to rein in the monster by filling AI companies with ethicists and all that shit but everyone has a god in a bottle now and no one has a need to hold back.

kramerger 3y ago

Come one people, what's with the kneejerk "big goverment" and "woke" comments here??? Police wants to lock you up and your boss wants to fire you using this kind of products: https://www.aclu.org/news/privacy-technology/amazons-face-recognition-falsely-matched-28 https://www.aclu.org/news/privacy-technology/amazons-face-re... And surprise surprise, it works even worse for women and minorities https://proceedings.mlr.press/v81/buolamwini18a/buolamwini18a.pdf https://proceedings.mlr.press/v81/buolamwini18a/buolamwini18...

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laurels-marts 3y ago
> aclu LOL

cushpush 3y ago

"algorithmic discrimination" uh what does that mean?