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Licensing is neither feasible nor effective for addressing AI risks
- Eumenes 3y agoRegulate large GPU clusters, similar to bitcoin mining.
- monetus 3y agoThis seems intuitive.
- hosteur 3y agoIsn’t that only working until all regular gpus catch up?
- dontupvoteme 3y agoHow do you get all the other large nation states/blocs on board with this?
- gmerc 3y agoThere’s only one competitive GPU company in town. Ids actually supremely easy to enforce it for any of 3 governments in the world. US, TW, CN
- dontupvoteme 3y agoWhat about all those GPUs they've already made?
- gmerc 3y agoThat’s not how growth works. The moment the current subsidized growth stops the ecosystem would come to a screeching halt.
- dontupvoteme 3y agoGrowth is not always so simple. The countless GPUs previously used for PoW crypto - Where have they gone?
- gmerc 3y agothe GPUs that matter here are A/H100s not randomly 30x consumer cards or mining specific chips there is a 30x performance difference between generations on AI, the cards from the crypto hypecycle don’t do much anymore for the type of AI work that matters.
- dontupvoteme 3y agoAt the moment, because the current meta is 100B+ Parameter LLMs to do everything. I would not discount chaining specialized smaller models together as a viable approach, and those can run on 24GB or even less.
- jhptrg 3y ago"If we don't do it, the evil people will do it anyway" is not a good argument. Military applications are a small subset and are unaffected by copyright issues. Applications can be trained in secrecy. The copyright, plagiarism and unemployment issues are entirely disjoint from the national security issues. If North Korea trains a chat bot using material that is prohibited for training by a special license, so what? They already don't respect IP.
- Enginerrrd 3y agoI for one, do not want to see this technology locked behind a chosen few corporations, whom have already long since lost my trust and respect. I can almost 100% guarantee, with regulation, you'll see all the same loss of jobs and whatnot, but only the chosen few who are licensed will hold the technology. I'm old enough to have seen the interplay of corporations, the government, and regulatory capture, and see what that's done to the pocketbook of the middle class. No. Thank. You.
- pixl97 3y agoWelcome to Moloch. Damned if we do, damned if we don't.
- Enginerrrd 3y agoJust to expand upon this further. I am also deeply frustrated that my application for API access to GPT4 appears to have been a whisper into the void, meanwhile Sam Altman's buddies or people with the Tech-Good-Ol-Boy connections have gotten a multi-month head-start on any commercial applications. That's not a fair and level playing field. Is that really what we want to cement in with regulation??
- gl-prod 3y agoMay I also expand this even further. I'm frustrated that I don't have access to OpenAI. I can't use it to build any applications, and they are putting us behind in this market. Only as customers not as a developers.
- seydor 3y agoSam Altman is either running for US government soon, or is looking for some post in the UN. just look up how many heads of government he has visited last month
- klysm 3y agoIt’s insane to me that he of all people is doing all this talking. He has massive conflicts of interest that should be abundantly obvious
- aleph_minus_one 3y ago> It’s insane to me that he of all people is doing all this talking. He has massive conflicts of interest that should be abundantly obvious This might also give evidence that OpenAI has interests that it has not yet publicly talked about. Just some food for thought: which kind of possible interests that OpenAI might have are consistent with Sam Altman's behaviour?
- DebtDeflation 3y ago>which kind of possible interests that OpenAI might have are consistent with Sam Altman's behaviour? Securing a government enforced monopoly on large language models?
- jeremyjh 3y agoThat’s a long shot at best. It would be much more lucrative to lock up some DOD spend.
- cyanydeez 3y agoIt means he's marketing. He was to ensure lawmakers overlook the immediate danger of AI Systems and focus on only conceptual danger
- wahnfrieden 3y agoHe is pursuing regulatory capture. Capitalist playbook.
- z5h 3y agoAs a species, we need to commit to the belief that a powerful enough AI can prevent/avoid/vanquish any and all zero-sum games between any two entities. Otherwise we commit to adversarial relationships, and plan to use and develop the most powerful technology against each other.
- tomrod 3y agoPareto improvements don't always exist.
- z5h 3y agoI’m suggesting we (AI) can find alternative and preferable “games”.
- tomrod 3y agoDelegating the structure of engagement to a pattern matcher doesn't change fundamentals. Consider Arrow's Impossibility Theorem: can't have all the nice properties of a social choice function without a dictator. So your AI needs to have higher level definitions in its objective to achieve some allocative efficiency. Examples abound, common ones are utilitarianism (don't use this one, this results in bad outcomes) and egalitarianism. Fortunately, we can choose this with both eyes open. The field that considers this type of research is Mechanism Design, an inverse to Game Theory where you design for a desired outcome through incentives. Would it be correct to suggest your suggestion to delegate to AI the design of games means you trust people are ineffectual at identifying when certain game types, such as zero sum games, are all that are possible?
- salawat 3y agoIf just believing made things happen, w'd have no climate crisis, overpopulation wouldn't be a thing to worry about, and we wouldn't be staring down half the issue we are with trying to bring short-term profit at the expense of long term stability to heel.
- nradov 3y agoYou have not provided any evidence for such a claim. I prefer to act based on facts or at least probabilities, not belief.
- dwallin 3y agoAny laws should be legislating the downstream effects of AI, not the models themselves. Otherwise we will quickly get to a place where we have a handful of government-sanctioned and white-washed “safe” models responsible for deleterious effects on society, with plausible deniability for the companies abusing them. Legislating around the model is missing the point. There is no evidence that a runaway artificial intelligence is even possible. The focus on this is going to distract us from the real and current issues with strong AI. The real risks are societal instability due to: - Rapid disruption of the labor market - Astroturfing, psyops, and disruption of general trust (commercially and maliciously, both domestic and foreign) - Crippling of our domestic ai capabilities, leading to cutting edge development moving overseas, and a loss of our ability to influence further development. - Increased concentration of power and disruption of decentralized and democratic forms of organization due to all of the above.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- circuit10 3y ago> There is no evidence that a runaway artificial intelligence is even plausible Really? There is a lot of theory behind why this is likely to happen and if you want a real example there is a similar existing scenario we can look at, which is how humans have gone through an exponential runaway explosion in capabilities in the last few hundred years because of being more intelligent than other species and being able to improve our own capabilities through tool use (in the case of AI it can directly improve itself so it would likely be much faster and there would be less of a cap on it as we have the bottleneck of not being able to improve our own intelligence much)
- civilitty 3y agoYes, really. Scifi fantasies don’t count as evidence and we’ve learned since the Renaissance and scientific revolution that all this Platonic theorizing is just an intellectual circle jerk.
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- efficientsticks 3y agoAnother AI article on the front page since an hour previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36271120 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36271120
- exabrial 3y agoBut it is a good way to dip your hands into someone else's pocket, which is the actual goal.
- arisAlexis 3y agoWhile running a non profit with noequity and telling everyone to be careful with your product. Makes sense.
- arisAlexis 3y agoWhy is a contrarian biased substack writer so often in front page. His opinion is literally that AI is snake oil. Populist.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- braindead_in 3y ago> OpenAI and others have proposed that licenses would be required only for the most powerful models, above a certain training compute threshold. Perhaps that is more feasible Somebody is bound to figure out how to beat threshold sooner or later. And given the advances in GPU technology, this compute threshold will itself keep going down exponentially. This is a dumb idea.
- EamonnMR 3y agoI think this is missing the key change licensing would effect: it would crush the profit margins involved. I think that alone would drastically reduce 'AI risk' (or more importantly the negative effects of AI) because it would remove the motivation to build a company like OpenAI.
- jupp0r 3y agoTo phrase it more succinctly: it's a stupid idea because a 12 year old teenager will be able to train these models on their phone in a few years. This is fundamentally different from enriching Uranium.
- Andrex 3y agoCounterpoint: https://www.businessinsider.com/12-year-old-builds-nuclear-reactor-at-home-with-equipment-from-ebay-2019-4 https://www.businessinsider.com/12-year-old-builds-nuclear-r...
- gmerc 3y agothat’s orthogonal not counter
- rnd0 3y ago>To phrase it more succinctly: it's a stupid idea because a 12 year old teenager will be able to train these models on their phone in a few years. No -they won't. Legislation will be written which will forbid companies such as github and gitlab to host models or any sort of AI building programs or data. Think of the ban on cryptography in the 70's up to the 90's, but on steroids (with the very rich in on the ban, and not just the military). The 12 year old won't build jack nor shit because he won't have the means to get the software to do so. This will be treated like munitions -and back "in the day" even professionals had issues around that (didn't dmr have to explain himself over crypto back in the 70's; or am I misremembering that?) We -by "we" I mean "consumers"- have maybe 5 years, tops, of unfettered ability to play with generative software of any sort.
- crooked-v 3y ago> Legislation will be written which will forbid companies such as github and gitlab to host models or any sort of AI building programs or data. Too late. That's stuff's already everywhere on the Internet. It would be about as effective as attempts at banning piracy already are.
- killjoywashere 3y agoThe only way to address generative AI is to strongly authenticate human content. Camera manufacturers, audio encoders, etc, should hold subordinate CAs and issue signing certs to every device. Every person should have keys, issued by the current CA system, not the government (or at least not necessarily). You should have a ability, as part of the native UX, to cross-sign the device certificate. Every file is then signed, verifying both the provenance of the device and the human content producer. You can imagine extensions of this: newspapers should issue keys to their journalists and photographers, for the express purpose of countersigning their issued devices. So the consumer can know, strongly, that the text and images, audio, etc, came from a newspaper reporter who used their devices to produce that work. Similar for film and music. Books. They can all work this way. We don't need the government to hold our hands, we just need keys. Lets Encrypt could become Lets Encrypt and Sign (the slogans are ready to go: "LES is more", "Do more with LES", "LES trust, more certification"). Doctors already sign their notes. SWEs sign their code. Attorneys could do the same. I'm sure there's a straight forward version of this that adds some amount of anonymity. You could go into a notary, in person, who is present to certify an anonymous certificate was issued to a real person. Does the producer give something up by taking on the burden of anonymity? Of course, but that's a cost-benefit that both society and the producer would bear.
- m4rtink 3y agoSeems like something that could be very easily missused for censorship, catching whistleblowers and similar.
- killjoywashere 3y agoThat's actually why it's urgent to set this up outside of government, like the browser CA system, and develop methods to issue verification of "human" while preserving other aspects of anonymity.
- Zuiii 3y agoThere is no universe where governments will make the mistake of allowing something like the browser CA to come with into existence without "oversight" twice. That the browser CA still exists independently is nothing short of a miracle.
- guy98238710 3y agoArtificial intelligence is a cognitive augmentation tool. It makes people smarter, more competent, and faster. That cannot be. Intelligent people are dangerous people! Just consider some of the more sinister hobbies of intelligent people: - denying that religion is true - collecting and publishing facts that contradict our political beliefs - creating opensource and open content (communists!) - rising in the social hierarchy, upsetting our status - operating unsanctioned non-profits - demanding that we stop stealing and actually do something useful Fortunately, once augmented, part of their mind is now in technology we control. We will know what they are thinking. We can forbid certain thoughts and spread others. We even get to decide who can think at all and who cannot. We have never been this close to thought control. All we need to do now is to license the tech, so that it always comes bundled with rules we wrote.
- gumballindie 3y agoLicensing ai use is like requiring a license from anyone using a pc. Pretty silly.
- anlaw 3y agoOh but it is; they can demand hardware based filters and restrictions. “Hardware will filter these vectors from models and block them from frame buffer, audio, etc, or require opt in royalty payments to view them.”
- drvdevd 3y agoThis is an interesting idea but is it feasible? What does “filter these vectors” mean? In the context of deep models are we talking about embedding specific models, weights, parameters, etc at some point in memory with the hardware? Are we taking about filtering input generally and globally (on a general purpose system)?
- anlaw 3y ago[dead]
- egberts1 3y agoThere are too many variants to legislate AI. DeCSS debacle, anyone? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/DeCSS https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/DeCSS
- rnd0 3y agoThat's a pleasant thought, but I'm pretty sure that the decision makers have learned from that experience and it won't be repeated.
- discardedrefuse 3y agoInteresting, but ultimately irrelevant, discussion. AI licensing is just evil megacorp's attempt to strangle the nascent AI industry, because they are quickly losing dominance, and maybe even relevance. Every logical argument you throw falls on deaf ears. Their reasons for pushing licensing are not based on good faith. It was only 6 moths ago that Microsoft invested $10,000,000,000 into OpenAI. At the time, their product was davinci-003 (aka gpt-3). Now, anyone can run inference at that level at home. You really think Microsoft is going to just sit there and take the loss on that $10B gamble?
- jeremyjh 3y agoThey didn’t pay 10B for the model, but for the market potential of the company creating it, and their human capital. I think calling this a bad bet is … premature to say the least.
- discardedrefuse 3y agoObviously they paid for the whole enchilada. My point is that last year only the richest megacorps could afford to run these models. The industry was self-selecting in their favor. I think no one predicted just how fast we would blow through those hardware barriers. And now they're scrambling to throw up new, regulatory barriers to maintain market share. OpenAI's behavior is nothing more than rent-seeking. And I guess I'm just kinda tired of seeing all this discussion on the topic of licensing like its anything other.
- NoZebra120vClip 3y agoI feel that the clear and present danger from AI at this point is where we set up AI to all be the gatekeepers for our access to the normal things in life: food, shelter, clothing, banking, communications services, etc. And then the power and complexity of the AI gatekeepers becomes intractable such that none of us can really understand or troubleshoot when it goes wrong. And then it does go wrong somehow: perhaps there are just innocent malfunctions, or perhaps threat actors install malicious AIs to replace the benign gatekeepers that had been in place. And then the gates slam shut, and we're standing there like "open the pod bay doors please" and entire swaths of society are disenfranchised by AI gatekeepers that nobody can understand or troubleshoot or even temporarily disable or bypass. And it seems utterly plausible since this is already the reality of people who are denied access to Google or Facebook accounts and such. All it needs is to get a little more widespread and come to something truly essential, like your bank or your grocery store.
- stanislavb 3y ago...and that's when it gets scary :/
- NoZebra120vClip 3y agoI predict that there will be a new class of homeless/street people growing in our midst: people who became utterly dependent on computers and Internet in every way, and then simply glitched out, and a house of cards collapsed beneath them, leaving them no way to access their bank funds, their employment, or housing, and denied access to any and all personal devices, they have no way to live the life they had been accustomed to.
- pixl97 3y agoHow to die by Google AI