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OpenAI Lobbied the E.U. To Water Down AI Regulation
- stingraycharles 3y agoIs this any surprise? Of course OpenAI now wants to maintain the status quo, so while they do want regulation to make it more difficult for new players to enter the market, they don’t want regulation to hinder their own business model. So they’re lobbying for exactly that. They’re a for-profit business doing what for-profit businesses do. All I hope is that the politicians make a sensible choice, and find a balance between innovation and regulation.
- ben_w 3y agoThey've been saying "hmm, this could be dangerous" since GPT-2. They've also said that if they can't do business under some new regulation, they will stop doing business. These do not seem like the actions of a sneaky sneaky double-bluff, but who knows — perhaps Sam Altman has automated himself away with an unannounced version of GPT-5.
- sigmoid10 3y agoIt's not a surprise, but the hypocrisy is unfathomable. The same company who has kept nearly everything about GPT closed source since v2 because they said "it would be too dangerous to release" now says that an even more powerful version of the same model is not supposed to be classified as dangerous, because... reasons. And the EU legislators bought it. Just shows again that money is the only real policymaker in the world.
- sfg 3y agoIf the tech is so dangerous that a closed market is necessary, then maybe it should be nationalised.
- joeythedolphin 3y agoBut then Sam won't make any money :(
- ben_w 3y agoI have no reason to think 200 nations nationalising AI are going to be any safer than 200 companies, even if the companies are the hubristic archetype beloved by Hollywood scripts. PopeGPT debating آیت الله-GPT about theology could be interesting; but do you want to wake up to the news that советский-GPT is running a successful propaganda war in the USA and now the American Communist Party is likely to win the next presidential election? That ChatKimJongUn is successfully boosting the industrial capacity of the North despite sanctions? That's why international agreements are also relevant, even if you don't share Yudkowsky's fear of alignment failures paper-clipping everyone.
- rhyme-boss 3y agoBeing for-profit doesn't work as a blanket excuse for shitty behavior.
- pharmakom 3y agoWait, I though HN came to consensus that OpenAI wants regulation to bar competition?
- yieldcrv 3y agoI mean it might have affected them so they wanted it watered down If we’re following that theory and playing devils advocate
- DarkNova6 3y agoThey want regulation which doesn't hurt their business model.
- huijzer 3y agoYou are downvoted but I agree with you. HN was pretty convinced about that and, as it turns out, wrong. (Or, maybe partially wrong because OpenAI probably wants more regulation that helps them and less regulation that hinders them.)
- Guthur 3y agoGood grief, I'm part of a hive mind, why isn't there some sort of warning on the site.
- bioemerl 3y agoThey submitted a paper to congress talking about how they should regulate AI. HN is not wrong about the fact that there were trying to push regulation in the United States that would help their business. It just turns out the European laws will actually hurt their business.
- throwaway290 3y agoThis article is about how they convinced EU that GPT is not "high risk AI". But the very idea of "high risk AI" in general is great for ClosedAI business because any of their competitors would have to convince EU their LLM or whatever is not "high risk" too. And no other competitor has billions of Microsoft's USD to spend on lobbying lawmakers.
- zoobab 3y agoI thought after QatarGate the EU would do something to get rid of foreign influence.
- Guthur 3y agoDid you forget the /sarcasm Nothing has ever nor will ever remove the corruption from big government. It has been demonstrably present for 100s of years.
- HPsquared 3y agoSmall government, too. (by that I mean local)
- wolverine876 3y agoIn fact, corruption is greatly reduced by techniques such as democracy, a free press, transparency, etc. There's plenty of research to show it. It's like saying we'll never be rid of cancer; that's true, but the number of cancer deaths is greatly reduced. The choice isn't binary, 0% corrupt or 100% corrupt. The issue is where we fall on that scale. You are an unwitting agent of the corrupt by repeating the trope that we are powerless.
- Guthur 3y agoI'm sorry that's just not true. You are being too myopic in terms of when you look for evidence for that. Ancient Greece had democracy and ended up with an oligarchy, that's what happens.
- wolverine876 3y agoWhat you said doesn't conflict with what I said. Your attack on me only demonstrates you lack anything better to say. Just because something happened thousands of years ago doesn't mean it will happen now.
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- sebzim4500 3y agoI know a guy who thinks that driving at 60mph on a freeway should be legal but driving at 200mph shouldn't. What a hypocrite.
- chmorgan 3y agoWe need regulation of AI because something on the Internet could confuse or mislead someone? Not every potential problem needs a law to protect us. What things is AI doing that existing laws against fraud aren't protecting us from?
- TheFattestNinja 3y agoMost things become a "different" problem (from legal enforcement perspective) when the scale changes. Without entering in the merit of whether laws in question are good/bad, it's understandable to have a different legal regime at larger scale, such as harsher punishment above certain thresholds. And AI-generated content changes the scale of many many things you can do.
- HPsquared 3y agoFraud has pretty steep punishments already, I'd have thought?
- notTooFarGone 3y agoSo what if the fraud is happening automatically from countries like China/ India on western civilization? Have some voice generation, phone data from millions of people, data on who's related, a scam trained AI and some crypto wallets and let it run wild.
- HPsquared 3y agoThat's more an area where executive action is required, not legislation.
- JohnFen 3y agoIn the US, that entirely depends on how rich/powerful you are and who you defraud.
- bsaul 3y agoThe question of a priori regulations is interesting because you basically have three options : - ask people not involved in the field, and risk not understanding enough - ask people involved in the field, and risk conflicts of interests - don’t do it, and be blamed by future generations when a disaster happen.
- GTP 3y ago> ask people involved in the field, and risk conflicts of interests True, but in this case you can greatly mitigate the risk of conflict of interest by asking researchers that aren't directly involved with companies making money with AI. There are many of those researchers working in universities, make sure to filter out those that also work for some AI company and you still have a long list of possible candidates for expert consultancy.
- bsaul 3y agoDo you think researchers that really have 0 conflicts or interest with other researchers working in those companies really are up-to-date as to what the real capabilities of NN will be in the coming years ? We all know there's a huge gap between what researchers think is possible in theory and what's actually released as a working product in the industry. My intuition is nobody saw chatGPT coming, and only if you were inside openAI a few months before the release could you have anticipated the impact.
- GTP 3y agoI think it's exactly the opposite: researchers are currently studying models that are better than ChatGPT. The reason why when we use one of the open source models those tend to feel worse than ChatGPT is twofold: 1. Those models are usually optimized to run on an average PC, at the cost of accuracy 2. The researchers behind it don't have the kind of money that OpenAI has for training, but this doesn't mean that the model itself is less advanced than ChatGPT. I also suggest to read a somewhat famous Google memo that leaked a few months ago [1]. [1] https://www.semianalysis.com/p/google-we-have-no-moat-and-neither https://www.semianalysis.com/p/google-we-have-no-moat-and-ne...
- Tiereven 3y agoReading through the white paper leaves me feeling that some commenters here may have had an axe to grind already. The positions raised by OpenAI seemed to be focused on tailoring overly-broad language, and curtailing phrasing which confused possibility of misuse for intent to misuse. The ai regulations have the possibility of becoming a GDPR-like boondoggle in the absence of domain-expertise from people in the field. Researchers without a conflict of interest should also be heavily be engaged in this dialog as well, and the law specifically made flexible enough to adapt in the face of rapid change.
- commitpizza 3y ago"Open"AI seems more and more like a douche bag company. Sure they have a great product which is better than most competitors but now they try and use their new money to prohibit others of making progress. I really hope regulators doesn't get fooled by this old trick. Fuck OpenAI.
- stevespang 3y ago[dead]
- dfsl 3y ago[dead]
- hospitalJail 3y agoIt makes the case for local models even more urgent. Between ClosedAI not giving me GPT4 API access, and how effective it is at medical diagnosis(The AMA is going to ban it after it kills 1 person, just watch); we need local models.
- andrewstuart 3y agoSo Sam Altman gets in front of governments around the world, alarms everyone with science fiction about how he’s created the technology that might be the doom of the human race, asks for regulation, now doesn’t want regulation even though he’s stirred up a hornets nest of government panic. There’s leadership for you. (Edit remove criticism of Altman too negative) I suppose I should be careful saying stuff about zuckerberg like that. He might want to cage fight me.
- gmerc 3y agoIt’s an open secret that Elon is running around trying to get a foundational shop off the ground and it doesn’t take rocket scientist to understand that the chaos monkey won’t be paying any alignment tax Given those dynamics it’s entirely obvious why Sam may want to force a level playing field - they can only lose against both open source and WhiteSupremacistDogwhistle GPT
- CatWChainsaw 3y agoI don't know if any criticism can be "too negative". All of these SV "luminaries" are on an ego trip and willing to use functioning global civilization as collateral.
- lisasays 3y agoThere’s leadership for you. Yup, and this was of course the whole point of getting up on a soap box and "calling for" regulation in the first place. To make sure that at the end of the day, this "regulation" was thoroughly defanged, declawed, and ultimately -- pliable to the company's interest.
- dfsl 3y ago[dead]
- golergka 3y agoThat's not how companies usually lobby for regulations. Much more often, they get regulation that is full of fangs, laws and rules which made specifically for them and that they can navigate with their huge legal departments, but which would deter any smaller competitors. So all of this "end of civilisation" talk from OpenAI and other AI company leaders is nothing more than a competitive play to secure their position in the space.
- mtkhaos 3y agoThreads like these make me realize how little foresight there is into the genuine creation of Frankenstein's Monster Situation. Because you never learn the Monsters Name, nor was the Monster a Monster. Just Poof Here he is and there is a Mob with Torches. Rather than being seen in wonder and possibilities. Not to mention at what Scale can we see one of these models in this Light? As Life enough for a Mob and Torches. Or how soon that will be. And who wants to be Frankenstein? As they remember his Name as the Monster's.
- 29athrowaway 3y agoRegulators are essentially mafias. "You have to buy protection from us" = "You have to lobby to influence our decisions"
- wolverine876 3y agoFor example, are the people who regulate air traffic safety similar to organized crime? Drug safety? How so? How do they differ? Also, these are legislators who are being lobbied, not regulators.
- wolverine876 3y agoSV leaders often aim for disruption. One hypothesis is that Altman is maximizing OpenAI's disruption with the publicity campaign. There is also the megalomania trend. As Meredith Whittaker says: "It's a significant thing to cast yourself as the creator of an entity that could be more powerful than human beings," https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/06/19/1075140/how-existential-risk-became-biggest-meme-in-ai/ https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/06/19/1075140/how-exis...
- kalkin 3y agoI don't think "disruption" in the sense of "disruptive innovation" actually is synonymous with just causing chaos, and the latter doesn't seem like a very coherent theory of Altman's motives.
- wolverine876 3y agoWould you expand on what you mean by the differences, and how they apply here? Also, what do you mean by 'coherent' in this context?
- kalkin 3y agoWikipedia: "disruptive innovation is innovation that creates a new market and value network or enters at the bottom of an existing market and eventually displaces established market-leading firms, products, and alliances" ChatGPT is at least arguably disruptive innovation, but this sense of disruption is not something you can maximize or minimize with a publicity campaign. And by "coherent", I mean a theory of Altman's motives that is consistent with at least some of his incentives. I don't see what he would get out of generally causing chaos.
- wolverine876 3y agoYet that's what many SV powers do; look at Musk for a more obvious example. Some have bunkers in New Zealand to survive the chaos.
- wolverine876 3y agoFor others having trouble accessing the OpenAI whitepaper: https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/23850240/ares20226851313-openai_aia_white-paper.pdf https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/23850240/ares20226851...
- jasmer 3y ago[dead]