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California Senate Passes SB 1047
- jjtheblunt 2y agoWow : you can tell legislators add ad hoc laws galore, which seems so unaligned with the wisdom below. "A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away." attributed (perhaps not perfect translation) to Antoine de Saint-Exupery
- brigadier132 2y agoLaws like this that can be selectively enforced are loved by power hungry people.
- nozzlegear 2y agoAny law can be selectively enforced. Laws are not programs written in code and enforced by machines.
- brigadier132 2y agoIt's much easier to selectively enforce laws that are purposefully vague.
- aeternum 2y agoChatGPT and Claude can write better legislation than this.
- moneycantbuy 2y agothis may make me move out of california
- bob_theslob646 2y agoWhere would you go?
- nojvek 2y agoWashington, Alaska, Hawaii, Florida, Texas … US is a biiiiiiig country.
- Spivak 2y agoCheers to OpenAI who I'm sure is popping champagne that they actually got this garbage passed. I'm genuinely shocked that legislators don't see these models as sources of information -- there's no way they would pass a law requiring libraries certify that readers can't use any of the books for evil, but here we are. And weirder still criminally liable if someone checks out a chemistry textbook and cooks meth. These models are really cool and novel don't get me wrong but they're self-reading books on their training data and ought to be regulated as such. But hey, if it means that some other state is gonna be the hub for AI I'm all for it.
- para_parolu 2y agoI would nit be surprised if this is lobbied from openai, msft or google
- laweijfmvo 2y agoHow/why is OpenAI immune to this law?
- Spivak 2y agoThey're not immune to the law, the law is just written so that all AI companies have to do all the bullshit safety stuff that OpenAI was already doing. Now to be fair OpenAI's safety stuff is actually useful but it's useful for "programmable customer service agent" and companies that want to have a chatbot and not have it say fuck. But those tweaks aren't free, and come at the expense of model performance. So OpenAI pushed regulators hard on this and now everyone has to has to pay the same cost wooo! It means you can't chip away at OpenAI's market by being better than them at specialized tasks because you have a raw completely unaligned non-instruction tuned model you use for say generating code. Because that model could be used to write viruses oohhh spooky.
- rdtsc 2y ago> If you want to train a model that could conceivably fall into any of those three categories, you have to sign a document under pain of perjury (a felony) promising the Frontier Model Division that it is safe; That just sounds so strange. People will have to sign promises that their model is safe from possible end-user harm. It seems like they are setting up something for selective enforcement. > The California government is gearing up for the “increased incarceration costs” and other costs associated with criminalizing AI development if this bill passes That is just so odd. Weren't they the state focusing intently on quicker rehabilitation and alternatives to incarceration but now they are preparing to incarcerate more people over AI models? What is even going on that state. What's the obvious loophole for the companies here. Leave the state? Or can they just say "This model was designed and built in Nevada/Kansas/Kentucky/etc. Us (OpenAI) are just licensing this as an end-user from our partners in Kentucky, sorry, CA attorney general, /shrug/?".
- SllX 2y ago> What's the obvious loophole for the companies here. As with all things under California’s broken political system: the ballot initiative process. Get people to vote for a law that in effect repeals this one, and put repealing the repeal out of reach for the legislature.
- slg 2y agoFor those that aren't familiar, this is exactly what happened with rideshare and delivery companies in California. AB5 was passed in 2019 that reclassified those workers as employees and so Uber, Lyft, Instacart, and others spent over $200m on getting Prop 22 passed in 2020 to give them an exception to AB5. Part of Prob 22 was a requirement that a seven-eighths majority in the legislature would be needed to amend it.
- Arrath 2y ago7/8's majority requirement?? These kind of supermajority threshold requirements should not be allowed, they're simply outrageous and blatantly obstructionist. Might was well write "this is immutable ha ha suck it"
- ApolloFortyNine 2y agoWild California actually passed this, people joke about that state but I thought this was crazy even for them. The biggest points imo being >The Frontier Model Division has a wide scope to define the “perjury” charges the bill attaches to developers for end-user misconduct, including “the rigor and detail” of the developer’s safety protocols >So is any model trained with less compute but matching a 10^26 flops-model in “relevant benchmarks” (the bill doesn’t say which) >So is any model trained with less compute AND lower benchmarks, so long as it is of “similar general capability” (we do not know what this means) Actually legislating that the developer of the AI is liable for what end users do is absolutely wild. And the other clauses they added make this essentially apply to any developer AI that can form a sentence. They made the categories so broad that an argument could be made that the law applies to any AI at all.
- zamfi 2y agoJust the senate. Still needs to pass the house and get signed by the governor. Not clear it will be.
- foolswisdom 2y agoOkay, so they're regulating AI. What's most noteworthy to me is how applicability appears completely arbitrary and sounds like it could even be set after the fact by virtue of the jury instructions allowed. Some domains do require regulations updates do to changes in the field, in which case it may make sense to have a commission (sorta like they're doing here), but based on this post, they basically just gave a carte blanche to disallow everything (while not directly stating that nothing is allowed).
- brigadier132 2y agoI think this law is terrible but I'm happy about it from the perspective of being able to have a state self-destruct so gloriously that it can serve as an example for everyone else. Are Facebook AI researchers going to continue working in California when they can be put in jail? What about all the researchers in the UC system and Stanford?
- jackcviers3 2y agoThis is awful.
- trhway 2y agothe laws will more and more prohibit LLMs to produce "dangerous" information, "biological weapons" and the likes (down to the maps of public access to beaches). The information is coming from training data. And naturally that way the laws press for removing "dangerous" information from the training data. Once established as a matter of practice that you can't legally access "dangerous" info through the LLM, the natural question arises why you still can access it through the browser, and society will be mentally ready to prohibit the access through the browser too. Voila. Wet dream of the government. If you can't successfully mount frontal attack, you do flank maneuver.
- apsec112 2y agoThis is a really biased and misleading summary. In particular, it's vanishingly unlikely that anyone will have criminal penalties applied. More analysis here, going over the entire text of the bill in detail: https://thezvi.substack.com/p/on-the-proposed-california-sb-1047 https://thezvi.substack.com/p/on-the-proposed-california-sb-... https://thezvi.substack.com/p/q-and-a-on-proposed-sb-1047 https://thezvi.substack.com/p/q-and-a-on-proposed-sb-1047
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- dools 2y agoOh well, gotta start somewhere I guess
- option 2y agoshame on CA senate for being either too corrupt, too stupid or both for passing this. Congratulations to MSFT/OpenAI and Google for successful regulatory capture. Sorry future startups in this field - I guess when there are enough compute in few years to start hitting this bill definitions, you will need to move elsewhere.
- haswell 2y agoAs a thought experiment, I think it’s useful to try steel manning this bill, and assume for a minute that the potential risk of a sufficiently advanced and “unsafe” model is real and severe. It seems reasonable to regulate specific aspects of safety, e.g. it shouldn’t be possible to derive the formulas for chemical or nuclear weapons. If an AI company cannot be certain of this, it seems reasonable for the government to impose restrictions on the handling of such models. Where things get murky is how to define risk for things that are less obvious. There is deeply embedded in the tech community an ethos and belief that core tech is neutral, the potential for harmful use is an acceptable reality. I have lived and breathed this for 20 years. But information is not neutral, and the output of these models is derived from a corpus of information that is anything but neutral. A subset of this information is so incredibly harmful that the risk of its inclusion is high enough to warrant significant effort in ensuring safety. Again, assuming a sufficiently advanced model, might it be reasonable that the onus is on the creator of the model to understand what it can do and certify what it cannot do? Many have commented that the non-regulation of the early Internet was necessary and good, and that the same should be true for AI. But the eras are very unlike each other. The entire technology industry was still forming, and no one knew what would come of it. What grew was incredible. But with it came the data brokers, the worst aspects of social media, etc. It’s against this backdrop of an increasingly enshittefied landscape that regulators are looking at this potentially seismic shift in computing and not feeling willing to let the companies that cooked up the current mess go headlong into something potentially far more fantastical (for good or bad) without checks and balances. I still think the bill is far too vague and just drives AI development out of CA. But I can understand where it’s coming from, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see a push for this nationally, with similarly vague specifications because no one knows how to quantify AI risk. Edit: To be clear, I'm asking questions and trying to explore the legislator's angle here. I'm not saying I think this kind of legislation will be effective or that this is a good bill.
- MarkusQ 2y ago> it shouldn’t be possible to derive the formulas for chemical or nuclear weapons. This information is widely available in textbooks, so...what exactly is the problem? If it's just a lossy-compression parrot "AI" like ChatGPT it won't be able to spit out anything that wasn't somewhere (implicitly or explicitly) in the training data anyway.
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- XEKEP 2y agoI'd love to hear from a lawyer. Is this law even constitutional? Doesn't it violate the first amendment?
- polski-g 2y agoSee Bernstein v DOJ. It is not lawful to regulate software code.
- gmuslera 2y agoSo, just the AI developed, used and hosted only in California, US are covered, or they are trying to legislate over all over the world? They will ban the use of non-compliant models inside the California state borders, while they will could be used freely elsewhere? Using geography-limited legislation over things that are used countrywide or worldwide. for this or other laws from there or elsewhere is a bit overreaching. In the end, if the senate elected democratically for a territory, in representation of their citizens, decide something, is ok, as long as it only affects the people of that territory. Things gets very wrong when your elected governments impose their opinion over other territories/countries, there should a name for that.
- 65a 2y agoVoting for new legislators, personally. I wish they'd do something about PG&E or housing instead of criminalizing software development of chatbots. Truly useless, and I wish we had more choice of non-insane candidates.
- r00fus 2y agoCA is essentially a one-party state with a sprinkling of GOP votes thrown in (not unlike Red states where it's flipped). They do everything they can to reduce the pool of alternatives so they can keep the power and grift going.
- Aloisius 2y agoWait. The most advanced models have to be safe against mass monetary losses and mass casualties, but not the less advanced ones? How exactly does that make sense? That's like only regulating fighter jet safety while letting passenger jets do whatever they want.