5 ms·

There are almost 200 countries in the world. Even if the US and the EU and a bunch more ban open weight models, I doubt they'll succeed in convincing every coun

There are almost 200 countries in the world. Even if the US and the EU and a bunch more ban open weight models, I doubt they'll succeed in convincing every country to do so. And whichever countries decide not to follow the ban, could thereby give their own AI industries a big boost. As the world becomes ever more globalised, the potential effectiveness of these kinds of policies declines. Sure, they could try to negotiate some kind of UN convention for a coordinated global ban. But, given how fractured global diplomacy has become, I doubt the odds of something like that succeeding are particularly high.

antupis 3y ago
Money, talent, and institutions still cluster around the US and EU where the best universities are so this would hurt seriously AI development.
- skissane 3y ago
  I'm sure it would cause some harm, but exactly how much will depend on the details. For example, suppose the US makes it illegal to publicly distribute open weight models (maybe above a certain size) without a government license. What happens if someone sets up a website to distribute those models outside of US jurisdiction? It may well prosecute Americans it can demonstrate have uploaded models to that website, but will it also ban Americans from downloading from it? If you go back to the encryption export controls, the US banned encryption software from being exported from the US, but (unlike some other countries like France) it never tried to ban encryption software imports. And, it sounds like they are only thinking about banning public/"open" distribution, so once an institution downloads a model from outside the US, they may well be able to redistribute it internally without the ban applying. Suppose the US bans distribution of open weight models above size N–how will that apply to fine-tunes? If you have LoRA on top of a model >N, but the LoRA itself is <N, does the ban apply to it? If the answer is "no", people in the US could still contribute to openly distributing improvements to models that they couldn't themselves openly distribute.
- perihelions 3y ago
  Or it would seriously hurt US and EU universities. Is Western dominance of scientific academics automatic? Did we acquire it for free—no; it's the end-product of centuries of incremental cultural development, its openness and freedoms being core to that. Imagine Google-founding era, except it was illegal for 1990's Stanford to research CS theory without a license, so they didn't. And later someone else founded it anyway, in a different country (which now became the world's preeminent tech center). Let's put to a halt to these autoimmune attacks on our own civilization. This confusion that labels Western openness as a hazardous external substance.
ben_w 3y ago
Most of the researchers are specifically in a handful of big labs, most of which in turn are in the USA. As one who has done so, trust me when I say that relocation is harder than it seems on paper. Also note that both California and the EU are economically dominant enough that they tend to influence regulation outside their own borders: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brussels_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brussels_effect Further note how many people signed the Pause letter: https://futureoflife.org/open-letter/pause-giant-ai-experiments/ https://futureoflife.org/open-letter/pause-giant-ai-experime... In addition, given how much training data current models need, there would be a huge impact just by a handful of governments siding with all the copyright holders suing OpenAI, Midjourney, Stability AI, etc. And all that is without needing Yudkowsky's point that a ban isn't serious unless you're willing to escalate to performing airstrikes on data centres.
- plastic_enjoyer 3y ago
  > Most of the researchers are specifically in a handful of big labs, most of which in turn are in the USA. As one who has done so, trust me when I say that relocation is harder than it seems on paper. I think it's a bit short-sighted to assume that the future development of AI models will only come from large corporations or research institutions. At the moment, the training still requires a lot of computing resources and a lot of data - but these are limitations that are not permanent. Since the AI boom that Alex triggered in 2012, the development and optimization of models and training has improved very quickly, to the point that even hackers and enthusiasts can create very good models with a little money. Just because a government heavily regulates AI and possibly bans open weights doesn't mean that people on the fringes of legality will abide by it.
  - ben_w 3y ago
    > I think it's a bit short-sighted to assume that the future development of AI models will only come from large corporations or research institutions. If this was a "forever" solution, I would agree. I believe the goal is more along the lines of trying to make some progress with the foundation of what "safety" even means in this concept. > Just because a government heavily regulates AI and possibly bans open weights doesn't mean that people on the fringes of legality will abide by it. Nor nation states. However, we do have international treaties — flawed though they are — on things from nuclear proliferation to CFCs. As a smaller-scale example: we can't totally prevent gun crime, yet the UK manages to be so much safer in this regard than the USA that even the police in the UK say that they do not want to be armed in the course of their duties. I don't know how realistic the concerns are for any given model; unfortunately, part of the problem is that nobody else really knows either — if we knew how to tell in advance which models were and were not safe, nobody would need to ask for a pause in development. All we have is the age-old split of neophilia and neophobia, of trying things and of being scared of change. We get this right, it's supper happy fun post-scarcity fully automated luxury space communism for all. We get it wrong, and there's more potential dystopias than have yet been written.
torginus 3y ago
if unregulated AI is banned in the US/EU, good luck trying to sell services to US/EU companies from the outside
graemep 3y ago
It is something pretty much all big countries will back? Who do you think would oppose it?

antupis 3y ago

Money, talent, and institutions still cluster around the US and EU where the best universities are so this would hurt seriously AI development.

skissane 3y ago
I'm sure it would cause some harm, but exactly how much will depend on the details. For example, suppose the US makes it illegal to publicly distribute open weight models (maybe above a certain size) without a government license. What happens if someone sets up a website to distribute those models outside of US jurisdiction? It may well prosecute Americans it can demonstrate have uploaded models to that website, but will it also ban Americans from downloading from it? If you go back to the encryption export controls, the US banned encryption software from being exported from the US, but (unlike some other countries like France) it never tried to ban encryption software imports. And, it sounds like they are only thinking about banning public/"open" distribution, so once an institution downloads a model from outside the US, they may well be able to redistribute it internally without the ban applying. Suppose the US bans distribution of open weight models above size N–how will that apply to fine-tunes? If you have LoRA on top of a model >N, but the LoRA itself is <N, does the ban apply to it? If the answer is "no", people in the US could still contribute to openly distributing improvements to models that they couldn't themselves openly distribute.
perihelions 3y ago
Or it would seriously hurt US and EU universities. Is Western dominance of scientific academics automatic? Did we acquire it for free—no; it's the end-product of centuries of incremental cultural development, its openness and freedoms being core to that. Imagine Google-founding era, except it was illegal for 1990's Stanford to research CS theory without a license, so they didn't. And later someone else founded it anyway, in a different country (which now became the world's preeminent tech center). Let's put to a halt to these autoimmune attacks on our own civilization. This confusion that labels Western openness as a hazardous external substance.

ben_w 3y ago

Most of the researchers are specifically in a handful of big labs, most of which in turn are in the USA. As one who has done so, trust me when I say that relocation is harder than it seems on paper. Also note that both California and the EU are economically dominant enough that they tend to influence regulation outside their own borders: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brussels_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brussels_effect Further note how many people signed the Pause letter: https://futureoflife.org/open-letter/pause-giant-ai-experiments/ https://futureoflife.org/open-letter/pause-giant-ai-experime... In addition, given how much training data current models need, there would be a huge impact just by a handful of governments siding with all the copyright holders suing OpenAI, Midjourney, Stability AI, etc. And all that is without needing Yudkowsky's point that a ban isn't serious unless you're willing to escalate to performing airstrikes on data centres.

plastic_enjoyer 3y ago
> Most of the researchers are specifically in a handful of big labs, most of which in turn are in the USA. As one who has done so, trust me when I say that relocation is harder than it seems on paper. I think it's a bit short-sighted to assume that the future development of AI models will only come from large corporations or research institutions. At the moment, the training still requires a lot of computing resources and a lot of data - but these are limitations that are not permanent. Since the AI boom that Alex triggered in 2012, the development and optimization of models and training has improved very quickly, to the point that even hackers and enthusiasts can create very good models with a little money. Just because a government heavily regulates AI and possibly bans open weights doesn't mean that people on the fringes of legality will abide by it.
- ben_w 3y ago
  > I think it's a bit short-sighted to assume that the future development of AI models will only come from large corporations or research institutions. If this was a "forever" solution, I would agree. I believe the goal is more along the lines of trying to make some progress with the foundation of what "safety" even means in this concept. > Just because a government heavily regulates AI and possibly bans open weights doesn't mean that people on the fringes of legality will abide by it. Nor nation states. However, we do have international treaties — flawed though they are — on things from nuclear proliferation to CFCs. As a smaller-scale example: we can't totally prevent gun crime, yet the UK manages to be so much safer in this regard than the USA that even the police in the UK say that they do not want to be armed in the course of their duties. I don't know how realistic the concerns are for any given model; unfortunately, part of the problem is that nobody else really knows either — if we knew how to tell in advance which models were and were not safe, nobody would need to ask for a pause in development. All we have is the age-old split of neophilia and neophobia, of trying things and of being scared of change. We get this right, it's supper happy fun post-scarcity fully automated luxury space communism for all. We get it wrong, and there's more potential dystopias than have yet been written.

torginus 3y ago

if unregulated AI is banned in the US/EU, good luck trying to sell services to US/EU companies from the outside

graemep 3y ago

It is something pretty much all big countries will back? Who do you think would oppose it?