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There are physical limits to what can make an effective and efficient computational substrate. There are physical limits to how fast/cheap these GPUs can be mad

There are physical limits to what can make an effective and efficient computational substrate. There are physical limits to how fast/cheap these GPUs can be made. It is highly doubtful that some rogue nation is going to invent some entirely unknown but equally effective computational method or substrate. Controlling the source of the known substrate is possible and effective. Most nations aren't in a position to just develop their own using purely internal resources without being noticed by effective monitoring agencies. Any nation that could plausibly do that would have to be a party to the agreement. This fatalism at the impossibility of monitoring is pure gaslighting.

vidarh 3y ago
Unless you're going to ban the sales of current capacity gaming level gpus and destroy all of the ones already in the market, the horse bolted a long time ago, and even if you managed to do that it'd still not be enough. As it is, we keep seeing researchers with relatively modest funding steadily driving down the amount of compute required for equivalent quality models month by month. Couple that with steady improvements in realigning models for peanuts reducing the need to even start from scratch. There's enough room for novel reductions in compute to keep the process of cost reducing training going for many years. As it is, I can now personally afford to buy hardware sufficient to train a GPT3 level model from scratch. I'm well off, but I'm not that well off. There are plenty of people just on HN with magnitudes more personal wealth, and access to far more corporate wealth. Even a developing country can afford enough resources to train something vastly larger already today. When your premise requires fictional international monitoring agencies and fictional agreements that there's no reason to think would get off the ground in anything less than multiple years of negotiations to even create a regime that could try to limit access to compute, the notion that you would manage to get in place such a regime before various parties will have stockpiled vast quantities in preparation is wildly unrealistic. Heck, if I see people start planning something like that, I'll personally stockpile. It'll be a good investment. If anything is gaslighting, it's pushing the idea it's possible to stop this.
- hackinthebochs 3y ago
  >Unless you're going to ban the sales of current capacity gaming level gpus and destroy all of the ones already in the market, the horse bolted a long time ago, and even if you managed to do that it'd still not be enough. That's silly. We can detect the acquisition of tens of thousands of high end GPUs by a single entity. And smaller nations training their own models is besides the point. The issue isn't to stop random nation from training their own GPT-4, it's to short circuit the possibility of training a potentially dangerous AGI, which is at least multiple game changing innovations down the line. The knowledge to train GPT-4 is already out there. The knowledge to train an AGI doesn't exist yet. We can ensure that only a few entities are even in a position to take a legitimate stab at it, and ensure that the knowledge is tightly controlled. We just have to be willing. The precedence is nuclear arms controls and the monitoring of the raw materials to develop deadly pathogens. The claim that this monitoring isn't possible doesn't pass the smell test.

vidarh 3y ago

Unless you're going to ban the sales of current capacity gaming level gpus and destroy all of the ones already in the market, the horse bolted a long time ago, and even if you managed to do that it'd still not be enough. As it is, we keep seeing researchers with relatively modest funding steadily driving down the amount of compute required for equivalent quality models month by month. Couple that with steady improvements in realigning models for peanuts reducing the need to even start from scratch. There's enough room for novel reductions in compute to keep the process of cost reducing training going for many years. As it is, I can now personally afford to buy hardware sufficient to train a GPT3 level model from scratch. I'm well off, but I'm not that well off. There are plenty of people just on HN with magnitudes more personal wealth, and access to far more corporate wealth. Even a developing country can afford enough resources to train something vastly larger already today. When your premise requires fictional international monitoring agencies and fictional agreements that there's no reason to think would get off the ground in anything less than multiple years of negotiations to even create a regime that could try to limit access to compute, the notion that you would manage to get in place such a regime before various parties will have stockpiled vast quantities in preparation is wildly unrealistic. Heck, if I see people start planning something like that, I'll personally stockpile. It'll be a good investment. If anything is gaslighting, it's pushing the idea it's possible to stop this.

hackinthebochs 3y ago
>Unless you're going to ban the sales of current capacity gaming level gpus and destroy all of the ones already in the market, the horse bolted a long time ago, and even if you managed to do that it'd still not be enough. That's silly. We can detect the acquisition of tens of thousands of high end GPUs by a single entity. And smaller nations training their own models is besides the point. The issue isn't to stop random nation from training their own GPT-4, it's to short circuit the possibility of training a potentially dangerous AGI, which is at least multiple game changing innovations down the line. The knowledge to train GPT-4 is already out there. The knowledge to train an AGI doesn't exist yet. We can ensure that only a few entities are even in a position to take a legitimate stab at it, and ensure that the knowledge is tightly controlled. We just have to be willing. The precedence is nuclear arms controls and the monitoring of the raw materials to develop deadly pathogens. The claim that this monitoring isn't possible doesn't pass the smell test.