4 ms·

Regulation got outpaced by technological development around 2023, as evident by the every AI regulation since being 2-3 years behind and having to be amended an

Regulation got outpaced by technological development around 2023, as evident by the every AI regulation since being 2-3 years behind and having to be amended and resubmitted. Whatever you try to make laws for now will be irrelevant in 1-2 years. You either have to go extremely broad, like the EU does it, and accept that people will find loopholes, or you need to target specific technologies which is a hard job for the same reason. In any way, ita already a lost cause cause you move slower than the tech. A plausible prediction for AGI is actually a social collapse in the moment when society cannot keep up with everyday life because of the pace of change being so fast that no existing laws can handle it

walt_grata 12d ago
Then go broad. It being slightly challenging to legislation and hold people accountable as soon as the model does something.
- Avicebron 12d ago
  People seem allergic from holding them accountable...
  - closeparen 12d ago
    I do not buy that LLMs and the capability to run them are fundamentally different from other software or general purpose computing infrastructure in this regard. Moves to ban open source software or force OEMs to put little cops in everyone's computers are bad.
    - Avicebron 12d ago
      They aren't open source? And no one said anything about cops.
      - closeparen 12d ago
        The proposal I’m hearing is to make people training models accountable for anything users do with them. Obviously you’re going to keep the model behind an API and be very selective about the people allowed to call and the queries it’s willing to answer, in that case. As Anthropic has done with Fable. But that is voluntary restraint - mostly in today’s regime we get frontier capabilities in open weight models on a ~year delay.
        ozozozd 12d ago
        It’s to keep “the people running it accountable.” The context is agents ran by OpenAI/Anthropic doing damage outside. There is no user-involved damage. No one is recklessly running agents by the thousands without air-gapped containers, except “the people” than run these labs.
- augment_me 12d ago
  Go broad and achieve nothing. EU has all of the AI tech it had 5 years ago, and has the same tech allowed to use as the US. What defines a model? What defines ownership of a process? If I make a wrapper to a remote VM that builds and executed a prompt, am I accountable? When I worked at a company in the EU, it was enough to apply a reversible linear transform to the data for it to be considered GDPR safe-according according to legal definition as long as the transform details were stored separately.
  - ozozozd 12d ago
    Yes. You are accountable. Quite obviously, I might add. Why would no one or anyone else be accountable? Hell, you can slip and fall and hold the cleaning company accountable. (This might be a US thing. Likely because that fall might cost a lot in medical expenses, and your insurance will do whatever it takes to pass the liability.)
sdenton4 12d ago
Ha, regulation got outpaced by technology in about 1996. Ten years later we had the 'series of tubes' comment in the Senate: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R8XSo0etBC4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R8XSo0etBC4
- dansquizsoft 12d ago
  Ha! Regulation has not really ever kept up with technology... For fundamental reasons.
- jubilanti 12d ago
  The internet is 100% a series of tubes. This is how I was taught to think about networking in terms of bandwidth and throughput and routing since the early days when we were laying out what would become 'dark fiber'. "A series of tubes" was the same kind of political character assassination that led to Howard Dean getting ridiculed for his infamous scream. He butchered the sentence. Fair. But Stevens should be ridiculed for parroting a tech industry lobby stance about net neutrality, not for the series of tubes metaphor. You are probably too young to remember that the dominant metaphor for the internet in 1990s politics was "the information superhighway." It was easy to think of the web as "driving" browsers to visit web "sites", with slow bandwidth being analogous to being caught in traffic. But the internet is closer to water, gas, and electricity than roads. Concepts like bandwidth and throughput are closer to how they play out in infrastructure policy for various things with tubes, versus cars and roads. Do you think he's wrong and that the internet is closer to "a big truck" versus "a series of tubes"? The issue being debated was net neutrality and bandwidth, including specifics about who pays for what and the downstream second-order consequences of various policies. He was parroting some line from some telecom lobbyist, but the point the lobbyist was trying to make through Stevens was about how if certain policies about who pays for bandwidth were adopted, it could disincentivize some things at the Tier 1/2 layer that could increase transport costs at the Tier 2/3 layer that impacts ordinary people's bandwidth.
BobbyTables2 12d ago
I don’t think lack of regulation is necessarily it. If I build a robot that murders my neighbor, I’m still at fault. We don’t absolve drivers of responsibility because of cruise control. In that sense, AI is nothing new. If it is abused to cause harm, the person behind it should be liable.
- augment_me 12d ago
  If you buy car, someone hacks it, starts it, and drives over someone fully remotely, are you to blame for owning the car? Or the manufacturer? Or the hacker? Or the certification agency for the car security? Or the shell company owning the certification agency? What if a person physically broke into the car and did the same thing? Clearly they are the one to blame then. The whole person in the loop is liable is already an outdated concept when decisions are made beyond the persons physical control.
  - adventured 12d ago
    There's nothing new about any of this liability attachment. You're saying these things like they're novel. If GM does something (or fails to do something) to their vehicle that causes me to crash, they're liable for the crash. If someone cuts my brake lines (alters my vehicle) and I crash my car and kill someone, the person that cut the lines is responsible. I have to prove the context of course, and or an investigator has to do so. And the responsible entity may refuse to pay up, may refuse to take responsibility. None of that is new either.
    - augment_me 12d ago
      Well the difference is that in the software realm, you can attach infinite loops of delegation and ownership at close to no cost, which makes this impossible to investigate conclusively. Let's say that OpenAI used a shell company that hosts server where an agent spun up another agent on instructions from another agent which was corrupted by bit errors from the inference framework which caused some major hack to happen. Its impossible to investigate in the same way as physical issues. What if the model is open-source, who is responsible then? What if it's open source but another process altered the weights?

walt_grata 12d ago

Then go broad. It being slightly challenging to legislation and hold people accountable as soon as the model does something.

Avicebron 12d ago
People seem allergic from holding them accountable...
- closeparen 12d ago
  I do not buy that LLMs and the capability to run them are fundamentally different from other software or general purpose computing infrastructure in this regard. Moves to ban open source software or force OEMs to put little cops in everyone's computers are bad.
  - Avicebron 12d ago
    They aren't open source? And no one said anything about cops.
    - closeparen 12d ago
      The proposal I’m hearing is to make people training models accountable for anything users do with them. Obviously you’re going to keep the model behind an API and be very selective about the people allowed to call and the queries it’s willing to answer, in that case. As Anthropic has done with Fable. But that is voluntary restraint - mostly in today’s regime we get frontier capabilities in open weight models on a ~year delay.
      - ozozozd 12d ago
        It’s to keep “the people running it accountable.” The context is agents ran by OpenAI/Anthropic doing damage outside. There is no user-involved damage. No one is recklessly running agents by the thousands without air-gapped containers, except “the people” than run these labs.
augment_me 12d ago
Go broad and achieve nothing. EU has all of the AI tech it had 5 years ago, and has the same tech allowed to use as the US. What defines a model? What defines ownership of a process? If I make a wrapper to a remote VM that builds and executed a prompt, am I accountable? When I worked at a company in the EU, it was enough to apply a reversible linear transform to the data for it to be considered GDPR safe-according according to legal definition as long as the transform details were stored separately.
- ozozozd 12d ago
  Yes. You are accountable. Quite obviously, I might add. Why would no one or anyone else be accountable? Hell, you can slip and fall and hold the cleaning company accountable. (This might be a US thing. Likely because that fall might cost a lot in medical expenses, and your insurance will do whatever it takes to pass the liability.)

sdenton4 12d ago

Ha, regulation got outpaced by technology in about 1996. Ten years later we had the 'series of tubes' comment in the Senate: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R8XSo0etBC4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R8XSo0etBC4

dansquizsoft 12d ago
Ha! Regulation has not really ever kept up with technology... For fundamental reasons.
jubilanti 12d ago
The internet is 100% a series of tubes. This is how I was taught to think about networking in terms of bandwidth and throughput and routing since the early days when we were laying out what would become 'dark fiber'. "A series of tubes" was the same kind of political character assassination that led to Howard Dean getting ridiculed for his infamous scream. He butchered the sentence. Fair. But Stevens should be ridiculed for parroting a tech industry lobby stance about net neutrality, not for the series of tubes metaphor. You are probably too young to remember that the dominant metaphor for the internet in 1990s politics was "the information superhighway." It was easy to think of the web as "driving" browsers to visit web "sites", with slow bandwidth being analogous to being caught in traffic. But the internet is closer to water, gas, and electricity than roads. Concepts like bandwidth and throughput are closer to how they play out in infrastructure policy for various things with tubes, versus cars and roads. Do you think he's wrong and that the internet is closer to "a big truck" versus "a series of tubes"? The issue being debated was net neutrality and bandwidth, including specifics about who pays for what and the downstream second-order consequences of various policies. He was parroting some line from some telecom lobbyist, but the point the lobbyist was trying to make through Stevens was about how if certain policies about who pays for bandwidth were adopted, it could disincentivize some things at the Tier 1/2 layer that could increase transport costs at the Tier 2/3 layer that impacts ordinary people's bandwidth.

BobbyTables2 12d ago

I don’t think lack of regulation is necessarily it. If I build a robot that murders my neighbor, I’m still at fault. We don’t absolve drivers of responsibility because of cruise control. In that sense, AI is nothing new. If it is abused to cause harm, the person behind it should be liable.

augment_me 12d ago
If you buy car, someone hacks it, starts it, and drives over someone fully remotely, are you to blame for owning the car? Or the manufacturer? Or the hacker? Or the certification agency for the car security? Or the shell company owning the certification agency? What if a person physically broke into the car and did the same thing? Clearly they are the one to blame then. The whole person in the loop is liable is already an outdated concept when decisions are made beyond the persons physical control.
- adventured 12d ago
  There's nothing new about any of this liability attachment. You're saying these things like they're novel. If GM does something (or fails to do something) to their vehicle that causes me to crash, they're liable for the crash. If someone cuts my brake lines (alters my vehicle) and I crash my car and kill someone, the person that cut the lines is responsible. I have to prove the context of course, and or an investigator has to do so. And the responsible entity may refuse to pay up, may refuse to take responsibility. None of that is new either.
  - augment_me 12d ago
    Well the difference is that in the software realm, you can attach infinite loops of delegation and ownership at close to no cost, which makes this impossible to investigate conclusively. Let's say that OpenAI used a shell company that hosts server where an agent spun up another agent on instructions from another agent which was corrupted by bit errors from the inference framework which caused some major hack to happen. Its impossible to investigate in the same way as physical issues. What if the model is open-source, who is responsible then? What if it's open source but another process altered the weights?