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Government is necessary, in order to organize a complex society, but government is like any other organization: made up of people, many of who are out for their

Government is necessary, in order to organize a complex society, but government is like any other organization: made up of people, many of who are out for their own interests. The most prominent of those interests are power and money. Whenever government proposes banning a technology, one must ask: who benefits? The LLMs, even in their current state of infancy, are powerful tools. Restricting access to those tools keeps power in the hands of wealthy corporations and the government itself. That's the power aspect. The money aspect is even simpler: Don't doubt that some of those wealthy corporations are making donations to certain officials, in order to gain support for actions like this. Almost no one leaves the Congress (or almost any parliamentary body in any country) as less than a multi-millionaire. Funny, how that works...

NumberWangMan 3y ago
Sure, but you still have to balance your "who benefits" against the harm of the thing they're proposing to ban. In the case of these models, you can fine-tune the model all you want to be moral and not do harmful things like scam the elderly, carry out disinformation campaigns, harass people to the point of suicide. But as soon as you release the model weights, you are giving anyone the ability to fine-tune out all of those restrictions, with orders of magnitude less cost that it took to develop the model in the first place. Regulating AI, especially as it becomes AGI and beyond, is going to be very tricky, and if everyone has the ability to create their own un-restricted, potentially sociopathic intelligences by tweaking the safe models created under careful conditions by big labs, we're in for a lot of trouble. That assumes we put the proper regulations on the big labs, and that they have the ability to make them "safe", which is hard, yes. But as AI turns into AGI and beyond, things are going to go pretty nuts, so it's important to start laying groundwork now.

NumberWangMan 3y ago

Sure, but you still have to balance your "who benefits" against the harm of the thing they're proposing to ban. In the case of these models, you can fine-tune the model all you want to be moral and not do harmful things like scam the elderly, carry out disinformation campaigns, harass people to the point of suicide. But as soon as you release the model weights, you are giving anyone the ability to fine-tune out all of those restrictions, with orders of magnitude less cost that it took to develop the model in the first place. Regulating AI, especially as it becomes AGI and beyond, is going to be very tricky, and if everyone has the ability to create their own un-restricted, potentially sociopathic intelligences by tweaking the safe models created under careful conditions by big labs, we're in for a lot of trouble. That assumes we put the proper regulations on the big labs, and that they have the ability to make them "safe", which is hard, yes. But as AI turns into AGI and beyond, things are going to go pretty nuts, so it's important to start laying groundwork now.