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We need to MAKE SURE that AI as a technology ISN'T controlled by a small number of powerful corporations with connections to governments. To expound, this just

We need to MAKE SURE that AI as a technology ISN'T controlled by a small number of powerful corporations with connections to governments. To expound, this just seems like a power grab to me, to "lock in" the lead and keep AI controlled by a small number of corporations that can afford to license and operate the technologies. Obviously, this will create a critical nexus of control for a small number of well connected and well heeled investors and is to be avoided at all costs. It's also deeply troubling that regulatory capture is such an issue these days as well, so putting a government entity in front of the use and existence of this technology is a double whammy — it's not simply about innovation. The current generation of AIs are "scary" to the uninitiated because they are uncanny valley material, but beyond impersonation they don't show the novel intelligence of a GPI... yet. It seems like OpenAI/Microsoft is doing a LOT of theater to try to build a regulatory lock in on their short term technology advantage. It's a smart strategy, and I think Congress will fall for it. But goodness gracious we need to be going in the EXACT OPPOSITE direction — open source "core inspectable" AIs that millions of people can examine and tear apart, including and ESPECIALLY the training data and processes that create them. And if you think this isn't an issue, I wrote this post an hour or two before I managed to take it live because Comcast went out at my house, and we have no viable alternative competitors in my area. We're about to do the same thing with AI, but instead of Internet access it's future digital brains that can control all aspects of a society.

nonethewiser 3y ago
This is the definition of regulatory capture. Altman should be invited to speak so that we understand the ideas in his head but anything he suggests should be categorically rejected because he’s just not in a position to be trusted. If what he suggests are good ideas then hopefully we can arrive at them in some other way with a clean chain of custody. Although I assume if he’s speaking on AI they actually intend on considering his thoughts more seriously than I suggest.
- pg_1234 3y ago
  There is also growing speculation that the current level of AI may have peaked in a bang for buck sense. If this is so, and given the concrete examples of cheap derived models learning from the first movers and rapidly (and did I mention cheaply) closing the gap to this peak, the optimal self-serving corporate play is to invite regulation. After the legislative moats go up, it is once again about who has the biggest legal team ...
  - deleted 3y ago
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  - robwwilliams 3y ago
    Counterpoint—-there is growing speculation we are just about to transition to AGI.
    - EamonnMR 3y ago
      Growing? Or have the same voices who have been saying it since the aughts suddenly been platformed.
      - TeMPOraL 3y ago
        Yes, growing. It's not that the Voices have suddenly been "platformed" - it's that the field made a bunch of rapid jumps which made the message of those Voices more timely. Recent developments in AI only further confirm that the logic of the message is sound, and it's just the people that are afraid the conclusions. Everyone has their limit for how far to extrapolate from first principles, before giving up and believing what one would like to be true. It seems that for a lot of people in the field, AGI X-risk is now below that extrapolation limit.
        b112 3y ago
        it's that the field made a bunch of rapid jumps I wish I knew what we really have achieved here. I try to talk to these things, via turbo3.5 api, amd all I get is broken logic, twisted moral reasoning, all due to oipenai manually breaking their creation. I don't understand their whole filter business. It's like we found a 500 yr old nude painting, a masterpiece, and 1800 puritans painted a dress on it. I often wonder if the filter, is more to hide its true capabilities.
- EGreg 3y ago
  I remember when a different Sam — Mr. Bankman Fried came to testify and ask a different government agency CFTC to oversee cryptocurrency, and put regulations and licenses in place. AI is following the path of Web3
  - mschuster91 3y ago
    At least AI has legitimate, actual use cases.
    - EGreg 3y ago
      True but also other use cases with much worse outcomes than blockchain could ever have
  - smcin 3y ago
    That was entirely different, and a play to muddy the regulatory waters and maybe buy him time: the CFTC is much smaller (budget, staff) than the SEC, and less aggressive in criminal enforcement. Aided by a bill introduced by crypto-friendly Sens Lummis and Gillibrand [https://archive.ph/vqHgC https://archive.ph/vqHgC].
- brookst 3y ago
  I'm not following this "good ideas must come from an ideologically pure source" thing. Shouldn't we be evaluating ideas on the merits and not categorically rejecting (or endorsing) them based on who said them?
  - samstave 3y ago
    Aside from who is saying them, the premise holds water. AI is beyond-borders, and thus unenforceable in practicality. The top-minds-of-AI are a group that cannot be regulated. - AI isnt about the industries it shall disrupt ; AI is the policy-makers it will expose. THAT is what they are afraid of. -- I have been able to do financial lenses into organizations that even with rudimentary BI would have taken me months/weeks - but I have been able to find insights which took me minutes. AI regulation right now, in this infancy, is about damage control. --- Its the same as the legal weed market. You think BAIN Capital just all of a sudden decided to jump into the market without setting up their spigot? Do you think that haliburton under cheney was able to setup their supply chains without cheney as head of KBR/Hali/CIA/etc... Yeah, this is the same play ; AI is going to be squashed until they can use it to profit over you. Have you watched ANIME ever? Yeah... its here now.
    - turtleyacht 3y ago
      Which anime(s)? If ANIME is the title, that's going to be hard to search. Do you mean like Serial Experiments Lain?
      - throwaway2037 3y ago
        One idea / suggestion: The original Ghost in the Shell.
    - throwaway2037 3y ago
      This is a very interesting post. I don't understand this part: <<AI is the policy-makers it will expose>> Can you help to explain a different way? And hat tip to this comment: Have you watched ANIME ever? Yeah... its here now. The more I watch the original Ghost in the Shell, the more I think it has incredible foresight.
anileated 3y ago
> open source "core inspectable" AIs that millions of people can examine and tear apart, including and ESPECIALLY the training data and processes that create them. True open source AI also strikes me as prerequisite for fair use of original works in training data. I hope Congress asks ClosedAI to explain what’s up with all that profiting off copyrighted material first before even considering the answer.
- happytiger 3y ago
  Absolutely. It's going to absolutely shred the trademark and copyright systems, if they even apply (or are extended to apply) which is a murky area right now. And even then, the sheer volume of material created by a geometric improvement and subsequent cost destruction of virtually every intellectual and artistic endeavor or product means that even if you hold the copyright or trademark, good luck paying for enforcement on the vast ocean of violations intrinsic in the shift. What people also fail to understand is that AI is largely seen by the military industrial complex as a weapon to control culture and influence. The most obvious risk of AI — the risk of manipulating human behavior towards favored ends — has been shown to be quite effective right out the gate. So, the back channel conversation has to be to put it under regulation because of it's weaponization potential, especially considering the difficulty in identifying anyone (which of course is exactly what Elon is doing with X 2.0 — it's a KYC id platform to deal with this exact issue with a 220M user 40B head start). I mean, the dead internet theory is turning true, and half the traffic on the Web is already bot driven. Imagine when it's 99%, as proliferation of this technology will inevitably generate simply for the economics. Starting with open source is the only way to get enough people looking at the products to create any meaningful oversight, but I fear the weaponization fears will mean that everything is locked away in license clouds with politically influential regulatory boards simply on the proliferation arguments. Think of all the AI technologists who won't be versed in this technology unless they work at a "licensed company" as well — this is going to make the smaller population of the West much less influential in the AI arms race, which is already underway. To me, it's clear that nobody in Silicon Valley or the Hill has learned a damn thing from the prosecution of hackers and the subsequent bloodbath of cybersecurity as a result of the exact same kinds of behavior back in the early to mid-2000s. We ended up driving out best and brightest into the grey and black areas of infosec and security, instead of out in the open running companies where they belong. This move would do almost the exact same thing to AI, though I think you have to be a tad of an Asimov or Bradbury fan to see it right now. I don't know, that's just how I see it, but I'm still forming my opinions. LOVE LOVE LOVE your comment though. Spot on. Relevant articles: https://www.independent.co.uk/tech/internet-bots-web-traffic-imperva-b2339153.html https://www.independent.co.uk/tech/internet-bots-web-traffic... https://theconversation.com/ai-can-now-learn-to-manipulate-human-behaviour-155031#:~:text=A%20recent%20study%20has%20shown%20how%20AI%20can,way%20we%20live%20and%20work%2C%20but%20it%E2%80%99s%20true https://theconversation.com/ai-can-now-learn-to-manipulate-h....
ben_w 3y ago
You're not wrong, except in so far as that's parochial. A government-controlled… never mind artificial god, a government-controlled story teller can be devastating. I don't buy Musk's claim ChatGPT is "woke" (or even that the term is coherent enough to be tested), but I can say that each government requiring AI to locally adhere to national mythology, will create self-reinforcing cognitive blind spots, because that already happens at the current smaller scale of manual creation and creators being told not to "talk the country down". But, unless someone has a technique for structuring an AI such that it can't be evil even when you, for example, are literally specifically trying to train it to support the police no matter how authoritarian the laws are, then a fully open source AGI is almost immediately also a perfectly obedient sociopath of $insert_iq_claim_here. I don't want to wake up to the news that some doomsday cult has used one to design/make a weapon, nor the news a large religious group target personalised propaganda against me and mine. Fully open does that by default. But, you're still right, if we don't grok the AI, the governments can each secretly manipulate the AI and bend it to government goals in opposition to the people.
- AlexandrB 3y ago
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  - junofan 3y ago
    It refers to a pretty specific set of views on race and gender.
    - f-securus 3y ago
      Care to elaborate? I’ve read about 5 different explanations for ‘woke’ the last couple of months.
      - junofan 3y ago
oldagents 3y ago
The theater is in alignment with Congress. Lobbyists and PR types are working behind the scenes 24/7 to bring this narrative together and look in command to the public. Work on open source locally hosted AI is important. I keep local clones and iterate as I can.
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downWidOutaFite 3y ago
Open source doesn't mean outside the reach of regulation, which I would guess is your real desire. You downplay AI's potential danger while well knowing that we are at a historic inflection point. I believe in democracy as the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried. We the people must be in control of our destiny.
- happytiger 3y ago
  Hear, hear. Excellent point, and I don't mean to imply it shouldn't be regulated. However, it has been my general experience that concentrating immense power in governments doesn't typically lead to more security, so perhaps we just have a difference of philosophy. Democracy will not withstand AI when it's fully developed. Let me offer a better written explanation of my general views than I could ever muster up for a comment on HN in the form of a quote from an article by Dr. Thorsten Thiel (Head of the Research Group "Democracy and Digitaliziation" at the Weizenbaum Institute for the Networked Society): > The debate on AI’s impact on the public sphere is currently the one most prominent and familiar to a general audience. It is also directly connected to long-running debates on the structural transformation of the digital public sphere. The digital transformation has already paved the way for the rise of social networks that, among other things, have intensified the personalization of news consumption and broken down barriers between private and public conversations. Such developments are often thought to be responsible for echo-chamber or filter-bubble effects, which in turn are portrayed as root causes of the intensified political polarization in democracies all over the world. Although empirical research on filter bubbles, echo chambers, and societal polarization has convincingly shown that the effects are grossly overestimated and that many non-technology-related reasons better explain the democratic retreat, the spread of AI applications is often expected to revive the direct link between technological developments and democracy-endangering societal fragmentation. > The assumption here is that AI will massively enhance the possibilities for analyzing and steering public discourses and/or intensify the automated compartmentalizing of will formation. The argument goes that the strengths of today's AI applications lie in the ability to observe and analyze enormous amounts of communication and information in real time, to detect patterns and to allow for instant and often invisible reactions. In a world of communicative abundance, automated content moderation is a necessity, and commercial as well as political pressures further effectuate that digital tools are created to oversee and intervene in communication streams. Control possibilities are distributed between users, moderators, platforms, commercial actors and states, but all these developments push toward automation (although they are highly asymmetrically distributed). Therefore, AI is baked into the backend of all communications and becomes a subtle yet enormously powerful structuring force. > The risk emerging from this development is twofold. On the one hand, there can be malicious actors who use these new possibilities to manipulate citizens on a massive scale. The Cambridge Analytica scandal comes to mind as an attempt to read and steer political discourses (see next section on electoral interference). The other risk lies in a changing relationship between public and private corporations. Private powers are becoming increasingly involved in political questions and their capacity to exert opaque influences over political processes has been growing for structural and technological reasons. Furthermore, the reshaping of the public sphere via private business models has been catapulted forward by the changing economic rationality of digital societies such as the development of the attention economy. Private entities grow stronger and become less accountable to public authorities; a development that is accelerated by the endorsement of AI applications which create dependencies and allow for opacity at the same time. The ‘politicization’ of surveillance capitalism lies in its tendency, as Shoshana Zuboff has argued, to not only be ever more invasive and encompassing but also to use the data gathered to predict, modify, and control the behavior of individuals. AI technologies are an integral part in this ‘politicization’ of surveillance capitalism, since they allow for the fulfilment of these aspirations. Yet at the same time, AI also insulates the companies developing and deploying it from public scrutiny through network effects on the one hand and opacity on the other. AI relies on massive amounts of data and has high upfront costs (for example, the talent required to develop it, and the energy consumed by the giant platforms on which it operates), but once established, it is very hard to tame through competitive markets. Although applications can be developed by many sides and for many purposes, the underlying AI infrastructure is rather centralized and hard to reproduce. As in other platform markets, the dominant players are those able to keep a tight grip on the most important resources (models and data) and to benefit from every individual or corporate user. Therefore, we can already see that AI development tightens the grip of today’s internet giants even further. Public powers are expected to make increasing use of AI applications and therefore become ever more dependent on the actors that are able to provide the best infrastructure, although this infrastructure, for commercial and technical reasons, is largely opaque. > The developments sketched out above – the heightened manipulability of public discourse and the fortification of private powers – feed into each other, with the likely result that many of the deficiencies already visible in today’s digital public spheres will only grow. It is very hard to estimate whether these developments can be counteracted by state action, although a regulatory discourse has kicked in and the assumption that digital matters elude the grasp of state regulation has often been proven wrong in the history of networked communication. Another possibility would be a creative appropriation of AI applications through users whose democratic potential outweighs its democratic risks thus enabling the rise of differently structured, more empowering and inclusive public spaces. This is the hope of many of the more utopian variants of AI and of the public sphere literature, according to which AI-based technologies bear the potential of granting individuals the power to navigate complex, information-rich environments and allowing for coordinated action and effective oversight (e.g. Burgess, Zarkadakis). Source: https://us.boell.org/en/2022/01/06/artificial-intelligence-and-democracy https://us.boell.org/en/2022/01/06/artificial-intelligence-a... Social bots and deep fakes will be so good so quickly — the primary technologies being talked about in terms of how Democracy can survive — I doubt there will be another election without extensive use of these technologies in a true plethora of capacities from influence marketing to outright destabilization campaigns. I'm not sure what Government can deal with a threat like that, but I suspect the recent push to revise tax systems and create a single global standard for multinational taxation recently the subject of an excellent talk at the WEF are more than tangentially related to the AI debate. So, is it a transformational technology that will liberate mankind of a nuclear bomb? Because ultimately, this is the question in my mind. Excellent comment, and I agree with your sentiment. I just don't think concentrating control of the technology before it's really developed is wise or prudent.
ozi 3y ago
How do you even end up enforcing licensing here? It's only a matter of time before something as capable as GPT-4 works on a cell phone.
- stuckkeys 3y ago
  Not necessarily “on” a mobile device. It would be data driven with the help of 10g. Mobile makers will not allow that kind of power on our hands. =p and ofc, it will be subscription driven like GPT plus haha
amelius 3y ago
> But goodness gracious we need to be going in the EXACT OPPOSITE direction — open source "core inspectable" AIs that millions of people can examine and tear apart, including and ESPECIALLY the training data and processes that create them Except ... when you look at the problem from a military/national security viewpoint. Do we really want to give this tech away just like that?
- vinay_ys 3y ago
  If you mean US by 'we', it is problematic because AI inventions are happening all over the globe, much more outside US than inside.
  - behnamoh 3y ago
    Name one significant progress in the field of LLMs that happened outside the US. Basically all the scientific papers came from Stanford, CMU, and other US universities. And the major players in the field are all American companies (OpenAI + Microsoft, Google, AnthropicAI, etc.)
    - code_witch_sam 3y ago
      Not to mention access to chips. That's becoming more and more difficult for uncooperative states like China and Russia.
      - vinay_ys 3y ago
        Well, chips needed for AI training/inference are lot more simpler than general purpose CPUs. Fabs have already demonstrated 7nm process with older DUV tech for such chips. They can brute force their way through it – at least for mission-critical use-cases. https://www.edn.com/the-truth-about-smics-7-nm-chip-fabrication-ordeal/ https://www.edn.com/the-truth-about-smics-7-nm-chip-fabricat...
    - ImprobableTruth 3y ago
      Deepmind is owned by Google, but it's British and they've been behind a lot of significant conceptual results in the last couple years. Most significant progress is just "engineering", so it's all done by US corporations. Other than that there's also things like roformer, but I'm going to assume you won't count that as significant. US universities then certainly don't produce anything significant either though.
stephc_int13 3y ago
This is the same move SBF was trying to do. Get all cozy with the people spending their time in the alleys of power. Telling them what they want to hear, posturing as the good guy. He is playing the game, this guy ambition is colossal, I don't blame him, but we should not give him too much power.
- williamcotton 3y ago
  Have you tried watching actual soap operas?
- concordDance 3y ago
  Seems like speculation on very thin grounds to me.
  - stephc_int13 3y ago
    What would you need to consider this point as less speculative? Direct proof? Is motive not relevant at all?
    - concordDance 3y ago
      In general I'm extremely skeptical of people ascribing motives to other people that they don't know personally or havent spent at least 100 hours studying. The reasons for this skepticism are a bit hard to elucidate in a quick post but include things like information sampling bias issues, having seen people make motive inferences I know to be incorrect and the Fundamental Attribution Error.
  - csomar 3y ago
    He already has precedent with OpenAI and pivoting from Open to fully Close overnight once the tech kind of worked. We know the guy is a piece of work, let’s not give him any benefit of doubt.
    - concordDance 3y ago
SkyMarshal 3y ago
> To expound, this just seems like a power grab to me, to "lock in" the lead and keep AI controlled by a small number of corporations that can afford to license and operate the technologies. If you actually watch the entire session, Altman does address that and recommend to Congress that regulations 1) not be applied to small startups, individual researchers, or open source, and 2) that they not be done in such a way as to lock in a few big vendors. Some of the Senators on the panel also expressed concern about #2.
- deleted 3y ago
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- paulddraper 3y ago
  That's what is said...
- chasd00 3y ago
  > not be applied to small startups how will that work? Isn't OpenAI itself a small startup? I don't see how they can regulate AI at all. Sure, the resources required to push the limits are high right now but hardware is constantly improving and getting cheaper. I can take the GPUs out of my kids computers and start doing fairly serious AI work myself. Do i need a license? The cat is out of the bag, there's no stopping it now.
- api 3y ago
  That would make the regulations fairly pointless unless you think only mega-corps will ever be able to afford the compute for these things. Compute continues to get cheaper and cheaper. We have not hit the physics wall yet on that. That and if someone cracks efficient distributed training in a swarm type configuration then you could train models Seti@Home style. Lots of people would be happy to leave a gaming PC on to help create open source LLMs. The data requirements might be big but I just got gigabit fiber installed in my house so that barrier is vanishing too.
  - nullsense 3y ago
    The other day someone offered up their 200x GPU crypto mining cluster to train uncensored models after the incident on HuggingFace where someone threatened to get the uploader of the uncensored models fired citing safety issues.
tric 3y ago
> seems like a power grab to me If you're not at the table, you're on the menu.
mcv 3y ago
And how can the government license AI? Do they have any expertise to determine who is and isn't responsible enough to handle it? A better idea is to regulate around the edges: transparency about the data used to train, regulate the use of copyrighted training data and what that means for the copyright of content produced by the AI, that sort of stuff. (I think the EU is considering that, which makes sense.) But saying some organisations are allowed to work on AI while others aren't, sounds like the worst possible idea.
- kelseyfrog 3y ago
  Citizen, please step away from the terminal, you are not licensed to multiple matrices that large.
mindcrime 3y ago
To expound, this just seems like a power grab to me, to "lock in" the lead and keep AI controlled by a small number of corporations that can afford to license and operate the technologies. Obviously, this will create a critical nexus of control for a small number of well connected and well heeled investors and is to be avoided at all costs. Exactly. Came here to say pretty much the same thing. This is the antithesis of what we need. As AI develops, it's imperative that AI be something that is open and available to everyone, so all of humanity can benefit from it. The extent to which technology tends to exacerbate concentration of power is bad enough as it is - the last thing we need is more regulation intended to make that effect even stronger.
- Aeolun 3y ago
  If you don’t have a moat, just dig one!
rjbwork 3y ago
I said this about Sam Altman and open AI years ago and got poo pooed repeatedly in various fora. "But It's OPEN!" "But it's a non-profit!" "But they're the good guys!" And here we are - Sam trying to lock down his first mover advantage with the boot heel of the state for profit. It's fucking disgusting.
- jacurtis 3y ago
  As a wise person once said > You either die a hero, or live long enough to become the villain Sam Altman has made the full character arc
  - jiveturkey 3y ago
    yeah sorry, that is a statement about leadership and responsibility to make the "tough decisions", like going to war, or deciding who the winners and losers are when deciding a budget that everyone contributed to via taxes. NOT a statement meant to whitewash VC playbooks.
    - darkerside 3y ago
      No... it's a line from a terrific movie called The Dark Knight, and it's about the ease with which public perception is manipulated.
      - hanniabu 3y ago
        This has nothing to do with perception being manipulated
        darkerside 3y ago
        The story does not, but the quote does
      - edgyquant 3y ago
        No, that line is specifically about Julius Caesar being appointed by the Senate as dictator and then never giving up his power. Though I agree it seems to fit here. Being granted an oligopoly in the name of protecting the people and all that.
chrgy 3y ago
I would triple vote this comment. 100% , seems like a group of elite AI company who already stole the data from internet are gonna decide who does what! We need to regulate only the big players, and allow small players to do whatever they want.
cratermoon 3y ago
Yes, this is the first-to-market leaders wanting to raise the barriers to entry to lock out competition.
- stuckkeys 3y ago
  Sam is a snake. The goal is to fuck everyone else. He is scared that someone will beat his tech and the hype is gone. Which is going to happen. Matter of months.
  - cratermoon 3y ago
    I suspect that he knows that this is a 'local maxima' as someone put it, and the field will stagnate once the size and attention of models approach the limits of available computing resources. He wants others kept out of the field not only because they could beat him but because he would wants to horde available processing power.
    - stuckkeys 3y ago
      That is a well thought possibility. But with MS developing their own in-house SOC, that is not going to be an issue as they can always prioritize to their investments. But anything is possible. We need apple to release some competitive and dedicated low power GPUs.
      - MichaelZuo 3y ago
        I think it's more about the lack of data. GPT-4's training likely already used all publicly available text on Earth and some private databases too.
kalkin 3y ago
The current generation of AIs are scary to a lot of the initiated, too - both for what they can do now, and what their trajectory of improvement implies. If you take seriously any downsides, whether misinformation or surveillance or laundering bias or x-risk, how does AI model weights or training data being open source solve them? Open source is a lot of things, but one thing it's not is misuse-resistant (and the "with many eyes all bugs are shallow" thing hasn't proved true in practice even with high level code, much less giant matrices and terabytes of text). Is there a path forward that doesn't involve either a lot of downside risk (even if mostly for people who aren't on HN and interested in tinkering with frontier models themselves, in the worlds where surveillance or bias is the main problem), or significant regulation? I don't particularly like or trust Altman but I don't think he'd be obviously less self-serving if he were to oppose any regulation.
- jacurtis 3y ago
  I feel like the people that are most nervous about AI are the ones that don't understand it at all and those that understand it the most. The layperson in the middle who has been happily plugging prompts into ChatGPT claiming they are a "prompt expert" are the ones the most excited. For those that truly understand AI, there is a lot that you should genuinely be worried about. Now, don't confuse that for saying that we shouldn't work on it or should abandon AI work. I truly believe that this is the next greatest revolution. This is 1,000x more transformative than the industrial revolution, and 100x more transformative than the internet revolution. But it is worth a brief consideration of the effects of our work before we start running into these changes that could have drastic effects on everybody's daily life.
johnalbertearle 3y ago
Happy Tiger I will remember because I agree totally. Yes "OpenAi/Microsoft" is right way to think about this attempt.
concordDance 3y ago
I'll note that you're correct for current gen LLMs, but we could have future actually dangerous things that would indeed need regulating.
aspectmin 3y ago
> happytiger 4 hours ago | unvote | prev | next [–] > We need to MAKE SURE that AI as a technology ISN'T controlled by a small number of powerful corporations with connections to governments. This, absolutely this. I am really concerned about his motives in this case. AI has massive potential to improve the world. I find it highly suspicious that an exec at one of the lead companies in AI right now wants to lock it up. (Ever read the intro to Max Tegmarks book?)
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danielvaughn 3y ago
Kinda beating a dead horse here, but I'll never get over the fact that a company called "OpenAI" is spearheading this nonsense.
burtonator 3y ago
I'd go further and say if only corporations with government license are allowed to create LLMs, then we should NOT have LLMs. Let the market develop organically.
fuzzfactor 3y ago
When Zappa testified before Congress he was extremely adamant about unsavory outcomes resulting from government control of language expression being more damaging than any unsavory language on its own. https://societyofrock.com/in-1985-frank-zappa-is-asked-to-testify-in-front-of-congress-instantly-stunned-the-entire-room/ https://societyofrock.com/in-1985-frank-zappa-is-asked-to-te... Less fulfilling text version: https://urbigenous.net/library/zappa.html https://urbigenous.net/library/zappa.html
- selimthegrim 3y ago
  I am sure he would be thrilled about Google censoring his track titles.
  - fuzzfactor 3y ago
    We need someone like him today to take old Fidel DeSantis down a notch or two.
    - selimthegrim 3y ago
      He and Gene Siskel were a very good good cop bad cop pair.
gentleman11 3y ago
- Most, but not all, all the most scary uses for ai are those potentially by governments against their people. - The next most scary uses are by governments against the people of other countries. - After that, corporate use of ai against their employees and customers is also terrifying; - next, the potential for individuals or small organizations seeking to use it for something terrorism-related. Eg, 3d printers or a lab + an ai researcher who helps you make dangerous things I suppose - near the bottom of the noteworthy list is probably crime. eg, hacking, blackmail, gaslighting, etc These problems will probably all come up in a big way over the next decade; but limiting ai research to the government and their lackeys? That's extremely terrifying. To prevent the least scary problems, we're jumping into the scariest pool with both feet Look at how China has been using AI for the last 5-10 years: millions of facial recognition cameras, a scary police force, and a social credit system. In 10-20 years, how much more sophisticated will this be? If the people wanted to rebel, how on Earth will they? Hell, with generative ai, a sophisticated enough future state could actually make the Dead Internet Theory a reality That's the future of ai: a personal, automated boot stomping on everybody individually and collectively forever, with no ability to resist
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nonethewiser 3y ago

This is the definition of regulatory capture. Altman should be invited to speak so that we understand the ideas in his head but anything he suggests should be categorically rejected because he’s just not in a position to be trusted. If what he suggests are good ideas then hopefully we can arrive at them in some other way with a clean chain of custody. Although I assume if he’s speaking on AI they actually intend on considering his thoughts more seriously than I suggest.

pg_1234 3y ago
There is also growing speculation that the current level of AI may have peaked in a bang for buck sense. If this is so, and given the concrete examples of cheap derived models learning from the first movers and rapidly (and did I mention cheaply) closing the gap to this peak, the optimal self-serving corporate play is to invite regulation. After the legislative moats go up, it is once again about who has the biggest legal team ...
- deleted 3y ago
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- robwwilliams 3y ago
  Counterpoint—-there is growing speculation we are just about to transition to AGI.
  - EamonnMR 3y ago
    Growing? Or have the same voices who have been saying it since the aughts suddenly been platformed.
    - TeMPOraL 3y ago
      Yes, growing. It's not that the Voices have suddenly been "platformed" - it's that the field made a bunch of rapid jumps which made the message of those Voices more timely. Recent developments in AI only further confirm that the logic of the message is sound, and it's just the people that are afraid the conclusions. Everyone has their limit for how far to extrapolate from first principles, before giving up and believing what one would like to be true. It seems that for a lot of people in the field, AGI X-risk is now below that extrapolation limit.
      - b112 3y ago
        it's that the field made a bunch of rapid jumps I wish I knew what we really have achieved here. I try to talk to these things, via turbo3.5 api, amd all I get is broken logic, twisted moral reasoning, all due to oipenai manually breaking their creation. I don't understand their whole filter business. It's like we found a 500 yr old nude painting, a masterpiece, and 1800 puritans painted a dress on it. I often wonder if the filter, is more to hide its true capabilities.
EGreg 3y ago
I remember when a different Sam — Mr. Bankman Fried came to testify and ask a different government agency CFTC to oversee cryptocurrency, and put regulations and licenses in place. AI is following the path of Web3
- mschuster91 3y ago
  At least AI has legitimate, actual use cases.
  - EGreg 3y ago
    True but also other use cases with much worse outcomes than blockchain could ever have
- smcin 3y ago
  That was entirely different, and a play to muddy the regulatory waters and maybe buy him time: the CFTC is much smaller (budget, staff) than the SEC, and less aggressive in criminal enforcement. Aided by a bill introduced by crypto-friendly Sens Lummis and Gillibrand [https://archive.ph/vqHgC https://archive.ph/vqHgC].
brookst 3y ago
I'm not following this "good ideas must come from an ideologically pure source" thing. Shouldn't we be evaluating ideas on the merits and not categorically rejecting (or endorsing) them based on who said them?
- samstave 3y ago
  Aside from who is saying them, the premise holds water. AI is beyond-borders, and thus unenforceable in practicality. The top-minds-of-AI are a group that cannot be regulated. - AI isnt about the industries it shall disrupt ; AI is the policy-makers it will expose. THAT is what they are afraid of. -- I have been able to do financial lenses into organizations that even with rudimentary BI would have taken me months/weeks - but I have been able to find insights which took me minutes. AI regulation right now, in this infancy, is about damage control. --- Its the same as the legal weed market. You think BAIN Capital just all of a sudden decided to jump into the market without setting up their spigot? Do you think that haliburton under cheney was able to setup their supply chains without cheney as head of KBR/Hali/CIA/etc... Yeah, this is the same play ; AI is going to be squashed until they can use it to profit over you. Have you watched ANIME ever? Yeah... its here now.
  - turtleyacht 3y ago
    Which anime(s)? If ANIME is the title, that's going to be hard to search. Do you mean like Serial Experiments Lain?
    - throwaway2037 3y ago
      One idea / suggestion: The original Ghost in the Shell.
  - throwaway2037 3y ago
    This is a very interesting post. I don't understand this part: <<AI is the policy-makers it will expose>> Can you help to explain a different way? And hat tip to this comment: Have you watched ANIME ever? Yeah... its here now. The more I watch the original Ghost in the Shell, the more I think it has incredible foresight.

anileated 3y ago

> open source "core inspectable" AIs that millions of people can examine and tear apart, including and ESPECIALLY the training data and processes that create them. True open source AI also strikes me as prerequisite for fair use of original works in training data. I hope Congress asks ClosedAI to explain what’s up with all that profiting off copyrighted material first before even considering the answer.

happytiger 3y ago
Absolutely. It's going to absolutely shred the trademark and copyright systems, if they even apply (or are extended to apply) which is a murky area right now. And even then, the sheer volume of material created by a geometric improvement and subsequent cost destruction of virtually every intellectual and artistic endeavor or product means that even if you hold the copyright or trademark, good luck paying for enforcement on the vast ocean of violations intrinsic in the shift. What people also fail to understand is that AI is largely seen by the military industrial complex as a weapon to control culture and influence. The most obvious risk of AI — the risk of manipulating human behavior towards favored ends — has been shown to be quite effective right out the gate. So, the back channel conversation has to be to put it under regulation because of it's weaponization potential, especially considering the difficulty in identifying anyone (which of course is exactly what Elon is doing with X 2.0 — it's a KYC id platform to deal with this exact issue with a 220M user 40B head start). I mean, the dead internet theory is turning true, and half the traffic on the Web is already bot driven. Imagine when it's 99%, as proliferation of this technology will inevitably generate simply for the economics. Starting with open source is the only way to get enough people looking at the products to create any meaningful oversight, but I fear the weaponization fears will mean that everything is locked away in license clouds with politically influential regulatory boards simply on the proliferation arguments. Think of all the AI technologists who won't be versed in this technology unless they work at a "licensed company" as well — this is going to make the smaller population of the West much less influential in the AI arms race, which is already underway. To me, it's clear that nobody in Silicon Valley or the Hill has learned a damn thing from the prosecution of hackers and the subsequent bloodbath of cybersecurity as a result of the exact same kinds of behavior back in the early to mid-2000s. We ended up driving out best and brightest into the grey and black areas of infosec and security, instead of out in the open running companies where they belong. This move would do almost the exact same thing to AI, though I think you have to be a tad of an Asimov or Bradbury fan to see it right now. I don't know, that's just how I see it, but I'm still forming my opinions. LOVE LOVE LOVE your comment though. Spot on. Relevant articles: https://www.independent.co.uk/tech/internet-bots-web-traffic-imperva-b2339153.html https://www.independent.co.uk/tech/internet-bots-web-traffic... https://theconversation.com/ai-can-now-learn-to-manipulate-human-behaviour-155031#:~:text=A%20recent%20study%20has%20shown%20how%20AI%20can,way%20we%20live%20and%20work%2C%20but%20it%E2%80%99s%20true https://theconversation.com/ai-can-now-learn-to-manipulate-h....

ben_w 3y ago

You're not wrong, except in so far as that's parochial. A government-controlled… never mind artificial god, a government-controlled story teller can be devastating. I don't buy Musk's claim ChatGPT is "woke" (or even that the term is coherent enough to be tested), but I can say that each government requiring AI to locally adhere to national mythology, will create self-reinforcing cognitive blind spots, because that already happens at the current smaller scale of manual creation and creators being told not to "talk the country down". But, unless someone has a technique for structuring an AI such that it can't be evil even when you, for example, are literally specifically trying to train it to support the police no matter how authoritarian the laws are, then a fully open source AGI is almost immediately also a perfectly obedient sociopath of $insert_iq_claim_here. I don't want to wake up to the news that some doomsday cult has used one to design/make a weapon, nor the news a large religious group target personalised propaganda against me and mine. Fully open does that by default. But, you're still right, if we don't grok the AI, the governments can each secretly manipulate the AI and bend it to government goals in opposition to the people.

AlexandrB 3y ago
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- junofan 3y ago
  It refers to a pretty specific set of views on race and gender.
  - f-securus 3y ago
    Care to elaborate? I’ve read about 5 different explanations for ‘woke’ the last couple of months.
    - junofan 3y ago

oldagents 3y ago

The theater is in alignment with Congress. Lobbyists and PR types are working behind the scenes 24/7 to bring this narrative together and look in command to the public. Work on open source locally hosted AI is important. I keep local clones and iterate as I can.

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downWidOutaFite 3y ago

Open source doesn't mean outside the reach of regulation, which I would guess is your real desire. You downplay AI's potential danger while well knowing that we are at a historic inflection point. I believe in democracy as the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried. We the people must be in control of our destiny.

happytiger 3y ago
Hear, hear. Excellent point, and I don't mean to imply it shouldn't be regulated. However, it has been my general experience that concentrating immense power in governments doesn't typically lead to more security, so perhaps we just have a difference of philosophy. Democracy will not withstand AI when it's fully developed. Let me offer a better written explanation of my general views than I could ever muster up for a comment on HN in the form of a quote from an article by Dr. Thorsten Thiel (Head of the Research Group "Democracy and Digitaliziation" at the Weizenbaum Institute for the Networked Society): > The debate on AI’s impact on the public sphere is currently the one most prominent and familiar to a general audience. It is also directly connected to long-running debates on the structural transformation of the digital public sphere. The digital transformation has already paved the way for the rise of social networks that, among other things, have intensified the personalization of news consumption and broken down barriers between private and public conversations. Such developments are often thought to be responsible for echo-chamber or filter-bubble effects, which in turn are portrayed as root causes of the intensified political polarization in democracies all over the world. Although empirical research on filter bubbles, echo chambers, and societal polarization has convincingly shown that the effects are grossly overestimated and that many non-technology-related reasons better explain the democratic retreat, the spread of AI applications is often expected to revive the direct link between technological developments and democracy-endangering societal fragmentation. > The assumption here is that AI will massively enhance the possibilities for analyzing and steering public discourses and/or intensify the automated compartmentalizing of will formation. The argument goes that the strengths of today's AI applications lie in the ability to observe and analyze enormous amounts of communication and information in real time, to detect patterns and to allow for instant and often invisible reactions. In a world of communicative abundance, automated content moderation is a necessity, and commercial as well as political pressures further effectuate that digital tools are created to oversee and intervene in communication streams. Control possibilities are distributed between users, moderators, platforms, commercial actors and states, but all these developments push toward automation (although they are highly asymmetrically distributed). Therefore, AI is baked into the backend of all communications and becomes a subtle yet enormously powerful structuring force. > The risk emerging from this development is twofold. On the one hand, there can be malicious actors who use these new possibilities to manipulate citizens on a massive scale. The Cambridge Analytica scandal comes to mind as an attempt to read and steer political discourses (see next section on electoral interference). The other risk lies in a changing relationship between public and private corporations. Private powers are becoming increasingly involved in political questions and their capacity to exert opaque influences over political processes has been growing for structural and technological reasons. Furthermore, the reshaping of the public sphere via private business models has been catapulted forward by the changing economic rationality of digital societies such as the development of the attention economy. Private entities grow stronger and become less accountable to public authorities; a development that is accelerated by the endorsement of AI applications which create dependencies and allow for opacity at the same time. The ‘politicization’ of surveillance capitalism lies in its tendency, as Shoshana Zuboff has argued, to not only be ever more invasive and encompassing but also to use the data gathered to predict, modify, and control the behavior of individuals. AI technologies are an integral part in this ‘politicization’ of surveillance capitalism, since they allow for the fulfilment of these aspirations. Yet at the same time, AI also insulates the companies developing and deploying it from public scrutiny through network effects on the one hand and opacity on the other. AI relies on massive amounts of data and has high upfront costs (for example, the talent required to develop it, and the energy consumed by the giant platforms on which it operates), but once established, it is very hard to tame through competitive markets. Although applications can be developed by many sides and for many purposes, the underlying AI infrastructure is rather centralized and hard to reproduce. As in other platform markets, the dominant players are those able to keep a tight grip on the most important resources (models and data) and to benefit from every individual or corporate user. Therefore, we can already see that AI development tightens the grip of today’s internet giants even further. Public powers are expected to make increasing use of AI applications and therefore become ever more dependent on the actors that are able to provide the best infrastructure, although this infrastructure, for commercial and technical reasons, is largely opaque. > The developments sketched out above – the heightened manipulability of public discourse and the fortification of private powers – feed into each other, with the likely result that many of the deficiencies already visible in today’s digital public spheres will only grow. It is very hard to estimate whether these developments can be counteracted by state action, although a regulatory discourse has kicked in and the assumption that digital matters elude the grasp of state regulation has often been proven wrong in the history of networked communication. Another possibility would be a creative appropriation of AI applications through users whose democratic potential outweighs its democratic risks thus enabling the rise of differently structured, more empowering and inclusive public spaces. This is the hope of many of the more utopian variants of AI and of the public sphere literature, according to which AI-based technologies bear the potential of granting individuals the power to navigate complex, information-rich environments and allowing for coordinated action and effective oversight (e.g. Burgess, Zarkadakis). Source: https://us.boell.org/en/2022/01/06/artificial-intelligence-and-democracy https://us.boell.org/en/2022/01/06/artificial-intelligence-a... Social bots and deep fakes will be so good so quickly — the primary technologies being talked about in terms of how Democracy can survive — I doubt there will be another election without extensive use of these technologies in a true plethora of capacities from influence marketing to outright destabilization campaigns. I'm not sure what Government can deal with a threat like that, but I suspect the recent push to revise tax systems and create a single global standard for multinational taxation recently the subject of an excellent talk at the WEF are more than tangentially related to the AI debate. So, is it a transformational technology that will liberate mankind of a nuclear bomb? Because ultimately, this is the question in my mind. Excellent comment, and I agree with your sentiment. I just don't think concentrating control of the technology before it's really developed is wise or prudent.

ozi 3y ago

How do you even end up enforcing licensing here? It's only a matter of time before something as capable as GPT-4 works on a cell phone.

stuckkeys 3y ago
Not necessarily “on” a mobile device. It would be data driven with the help of 10g. Mobile makers will not allow that kind of power on our hands. =p and ofc, it will be subscription driven like GPT plus haha

amelius 3y ago

> But goodness gracious we need to be going in the EXACT OPPOSITE direction — open source "core inspectable" AIs that millions of people can examine and tear apart, including and ESPECIALLY the training data and processes that create them Except ... when you look at the problem from a military/national security viewpoint. Do we really want to give this tech away just like that?

vinay_ys 3y ago
If you mean US by 'we', it is problematic because AI inventions are happening all over the globe, much more outside US than inside.
- behnamoh 3y ago
  Name one significant progress in the field of LLMs that happened outside the US. Basically all the scientific papers came from Stanford, CMU, and other US universities. And the major players in the field are all American companies (OpenAI + Microsoft, Google, AnthropicAI, etc.)
  - code_witch_sam 3y ago
    Not to mention access to chips. That's becoming more and more difficult for uncooperative states like China and Russia.
    - vinay_ys 3y ago
      Well, chips needed for AI training/inference are lot more simpler than general purpose CPUs. Fabs have already demonstrated 7nm process with older DUV tech for such chips. They can brute force their way through it – at least for mission-critical use-cases. https://www.edn.com/the-truth-about-smics-7-nm-chip-fabrication-ordeal/ https://www.edn.com/the-truth-about-smics-7-nm-chip-fabricat...
  - ImprobableTruth 3y ago
    Deepmind is owned by Google, but it's British and they've been behind a lot of significant conceptual results in the last couple years. Most significant progress is just "engineering", so it's all done by US corporations. Other than that there's also things like roformer, but I'm going to assume you won't count that as significant. US universities then certainly don't produce anything significant either though.

stephc_int13 3y ago

This is the same move SBF was trying to do. Get all cozy with the people spending their time in the alleys of power. Telling them what they want to hear, posturing as the good guy. He is playing the game, this guy ambition is colossal, I don't blame him, but we should not give him too much power.

williamcotton 3y ago
Have you tried watching actual soap operas?
concordDance 3y ago
Seems like speculation on very thin grounds to me.
- stephc_int13 3y ago
  What would you need to consider this point as less speculative? Direct proof? Is motive not relevant at all?
  - concordDance 3y ago
    In general I'm extremely skeptical of people ascribing motives to other people that they don't know personally or havent spent at least 100 hours studying. The reasons for this skepticism are a bit hard to elucidate in a quick post but include things like information sampling bias issues, having seen people make motive inferences I know to be incorrect and the Fundamental Attribution Error.
- csomar 3y ago
  He already has precedent with OpenAI and pivoting from Open to fully Close overnight once the tech kind of worked. We know the guy is a piece of work, let’s not give him any benefit of doubt.
  - concordDance 3y ago

SkyMarshal 3y ago

> To expound, this just seems like a power grab to me, to "lock in" the lead and keep AI controlled by a small number of corporations that can afford to license and operate the technologies. If you actually watch the entire session, Altman does address that and recommend to Congress that regulations 1) not be applied to small startups, individual researchers, or open source, and 2) that they not be done in such a way as to lock in a few big vendors. Some of the Senators on the panel also expressed concern about #2.

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paulddraper 3y ago
That's what is said...
chasd00 3y ago
> not be applied to small startups how will that work? Isn't OpenAI itself a small startup? I don't see how they can regulate AI at all. Sure, the resources required to push the limits are high right now but hardware is constantly improving and getting cheaper. I can take the GPUs out of my kids computers and start doing fairly serious AI work myself. Do i need a license? The cat is out of the bag, there's no stopping it now.
api 3y ago
That would make the regulations fairly pointless unless you think only mega-corps will ever be able to afford the compute for these things. Compute continues to get cheaper and cheaper. We have not hit the physics wall yet on that. That and if someone cracks efficient distributed training in a swarm type configuration then you could train models Seti@Home style. Lots of people would be happy to leave a gaming PC on to help create open source LLMs. The data requirements might be big but I just got gigabit fiber installed in my house so that barrier is vanishing too.
- nullsense 3y ago
  The other day someone offered up their 200x GPU crypto mining cluster to train uncensored models after the incident on HuggingFace where someone threatened to get the uploader of the uncensored models fired citing safety issues.

tric 3y ago

> seems like a power grab to me If you're not at the table, you're on the menu.

mcv 3y ago

And how can the government license AI? Do they have any expertise to determine who is and isn't responsible enough to handle it? A better idea is to regulate around the edges: transparency about the data used to train, regulate the use of copyrighted training data and what that means for the copyright of content produced by the AI, that sort of stuff. (I think the EU is considering that, which makes sense.) But saying some organisations are allowed to work on AI while others aren't, sounds like the worst possible idea.

kelseyfrog 3y ago
Citizen, please step away from the terminal, you are not licensed to multiple matrices that large.

mindcrime 3y ago

To expound, this just seems like a power grab to me, to "lock in" the lead and keep AI controlled by a small number of corporations that can afford to license and operate the technologies. Obviously, this will create a critical nexus of control for a small number of well connected and well heeled investors and is to be avoided at all costs. Exactly. Came here to say pretty much the same thing. This is the antithesis of what we need. As AI develops, it's imperative that AI be something that is open and available to everyone, so all of humanity can benefit from it. The extent to which technology tends to exacerbate concentration of power is bad enough as it is - the last thing we need is more regulation intended to make that effect even stronger.

Aeolun 3y ago
If you don’t have a moat, just dig one!

rjbwork 3y ago

I said this about Sam Altman and open AI years ago and got poo pooed repeatedly in various fora. "But It's OPEN!" "But it's a non-profit!" "But they're the good guys!" And here we are - Sam trying to lock down his first mover advantage with the boot heel of the state for profit. It's fucking disgusting.

jacurtis 3y ago
As a wise person once said > You either die a hero, or live long enough to become the villain Sam Altman has made the full character arc
- jiveturkey 3y ago
  yeah sorry, that is a statement about leadership and responsibility to make the "tough decisions", like going to war, or deciding who the winners and losers are when deciding a budget that everyone contributed to via taxes. NOT a statement meant to whitewash VC playbooks.
  - darkerside 3y ago
    No... it's a line from a terrific movie called The Dark Knight, and it's about the ease with which public perception is manipulated.
    - hanniabu 3y ago
      This has nothing to do with perception being manipulated
      - darkerside 3y ago
        The story does not, but the quote does
    - edgyquant 3y ago
      No, that line is specifically about Julius Caesar being appointed by the Senate as dictator and then never giving up his power. Though I agree it seems to fit here. Being granted an oligopoly in the name of protecting the people and all that.

chrgy 3y ago

I would triple vote this comment. 100% , seems like a group of elite AI company who already stole the data from internet are gonna decide who does what! We need to regulate only the big players, and allow small players to do whatever they want.

cratermoon 3y ago

Yes, this is the first-to-market leaders wanting to raise the barriers to entry to lock out competition.

stuckkeys 3y ago
Sam is a snake. The goal is to fuck everyone else. He is scared that someone will beat his tech and the hype is gone. Which is going to happen. Matter of months.
- cratermoon 3y ago
  I suspect that he knows that this is a 'local maxima' as someone put it, and the field will stagnate once the size and attention of models approach the limits of available computing resources. He wants others kept out of the field not only because they could beat him but because he would wants to horde available processing power.
  - stuckkeys 3y ago
    That is a well thought possibility. But with MS developing their own in-house SOC, that is not going to be an issue as they can always prioritize to their investments. But anything is possible. We need apple to release some competitive and dedicated low power GPUs.
    - MichaelZuo 3y ago
      I think it's more about the lack of data. GPT-4's training likely already used all publicly available text on Earth and some private databases too.

kalkin 3y ago

The current generation of AIs are scary to a lot of the initiated, too - both for what they can do now, and what their trajectory of improvement implies. If you take seriously any downsides, whether misinformation or surveillance or laundering bias or x-risk, how does AI model weights or training data being open source solve them? Open source is a lot of things, but one thing it's not is misuse-resistant (and the "with many eyes all bugs are shallow" thing hasn't proved true in practice even with high level code, much less giant matrices and terabytes of text). Is there a path forward that doesn't involve either a lot of downside risk (even if mostly for people who aren't on HN and interested in tinkering with frontier models themselves, in the worlds where surveillance or bias is the main problem), or significant regulation? I don't particularly like or trust Altman but I don't think he'd be obviously less self-serving if he were to oppose any regulation.

jacurtis 3y ago
I feel like the people that are most nervous about AI are the ones that don't understand it at all and those that understand it the most. The layperson in the middle who has been happily plugging prompts into ChatGPT claiming they are a "prompt expert" are the ones the most excited. For those that truly understand AI, there is a lot that you should genuinely be worried about. Now, don't confuse that for saying that we shouldn't work on it or should abandon AI work. I truly believe that this is the next greatest revolution. This is 1,000x more transformative than the industrial revolution, and 100x more transformative than the internet revolution. But it is worth a brief consideration of the effects of our work before we start running into these changes that could have drastic effects on everybody's daily life.

johnalbertearle 3y ago

Happy Tiger I will remember because I agree totally. Yes "OpenAi/Microsoft" is right way to think about this attempt.

concordDance 3y ago

I'll note that you're correct for current gen LLMs, but we could have future actually dangerous things that would indeed need regulating.

aspectmin 3y ago

> happytiger 4 hours ago | unvote | prev | next [–] > We need to MAKE SURE that AI as a technology ISN'T controlled by a small number of powerful corporations with connections to governments. This, absolutely this. I am really concerned about his motives in this case. AI has massive potential to improve the world. I find it highly suspicious that an exec at one of the lead companies in AI right now wants to lock it up. (Ever read the intro to Max Tegmarks book?)

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danielvaughn 3y ago

Kinda beating a dead horse here, but I'll never get over the fact that a company called "OpenAI" is spearheading this nonsense.

burtonator 3y ago

I'd go further and say if only corporations with government license are allowed to create LLMs, then we should NOT have LLMs. Let the market develop organically.

fuzzfactor 3y ago

When Zappa testified before Congress he was extremely adamant about unsavory outcomes resulting from government control of language expression being more damaging than any unsavory language on its own. https://societyofrock.com/in-1985-frank-zappa-is-asked-to-testify-in-front-of-congress-instantly-stunned-the-entire-room/ https://societyofrock.com/in-1985-frank-zappa-is-asked-to-te... Less fulfilling text version: https://urbigenous.net/library/zappa.html https://urbigenous.net/library/zappa.html

selimthegrim 3y ago
I am sure he would be thrilled about Google censoring his track titles.
- fuzzfactor 3y ago
  We need someone like him today to take old Fidel DeSantis down a notch or two.
  - selimthegrim 3y ago
    He and Gene Siskel were a very good good cop bad cop pair.

gentleman11 3y ago

- Most, but not all, all the most scary uses for ai are those potentially by governments against their people. - The next most scary uses are by governments against the people of other countries. - After that, corporate use of ai against their employees and customers is also terrifying; - next, the potential for individuals or small organizations seeking to use it for something terrorism-related. Eg, 3d printers or a lab + an ai researcher who helps you make dangerous things I suppose - near the bottom of the noteworthy list is probably crime. eg, hacking, blackmail, gaslighting, etc These problems will probably all come up in a big way over the next decade; but limiting ai research to the government and their lackeys? That's extremely terrifying. To prevent the least scary problems, we're jumping into the scariest pool with both feet Look at how China has been using AI for the last 5-10 years: millions of facial recognition cameras, a scary police force, and a social credit system. In 10-20 years, how much more sophisticated will this be? If the people wanted to rebel, how on Earth will they? Hell, with generative ai, a sophisticated enough future state could actually make the Dead Internet Theory a reality That's the future of ai: a personal, automated boot stomping on everybody individually and collectively forever, with no ability to resist

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