Sam Altman goes before US Congress to propose licenses for building AI

https://www.reuters.com/technology/openai-chief-goes-before-us-congress-propose-licenses-building-ai-2023-05-16/

by vforgione • 3 years ago

914 1173 3 years ago

reuters.com

RhodesianHunter2• 3 years ago

Regulatory capture and monopolies are now as American as apple pie.

alpineidyll3• 3 years ago

This is so disgusting and enraging. I hope the whole startup community blackballs @sama for this.

wahnfrieden2• 3 years ago

Folks like to lick a boot

ChatGTP5• 3 years ago

Where is the regulatory capture? You might just need to apply for a license. Why is that so horrible?

Most travel agents need a license, taxi drivers etc. Not sure why the same shouldn't apply for "AI"?

antiloper2• 3 years ago

Oi mate you got a loicense for that matrix multiplication?

Sunhold• 3 years ago

The taxi industry is a famous example of regulatory capture and its harms.

simonw• 3 years ago

Taxi driver medallions are one of the most classic examples of regulatory capture.

ur-whale3• 3 years ago

Most travel agents need a license, taxi drivers etc.

You say it like it's a good thing.

RhodesianHunter2• 3 years ago

The whole point of this type of legislation is to make it hard or impossible for upstarts to compete with the incumbents. Licensing is additional overhead. It's likely to be onerous and serve absolutely no purpose other than keeping startups out.

supriyo-biswas3• 3 years ago

There’s similar regulation being proposed in the EU. I wonder if OpenAI is behind it as well.

wewxjfq• 3 years ago

EU publishes the lobbying data. Seems like OpenAI, Microsoft, and Google all had at least two recent meetings with EU representatives on the AI Act.

bigbillheck2• 3 years ago

'Now'?

RcouF1uZ4gsC• 3 years ago

How about this instead:

How about a requirements that all weights and models for any AI have to be publicly available.

Basically, these companies are trying to set themselves up to the gatekeepers of knowledge. That is too powerful a capability to leave in just the hands of a single company.

villgax3• 3 years ago

Who died and made him an expert on anything apart from investing in companies lol

villgax3• 3 years ago

This is the most pathetic thing I've read today....hype & cry wolf about something you cannot define

srslack13• 3 years ago

Imagine thinking that regression based function approximators are capable of anything other than fitting the data you give it. Then imagine willfully hyping up and scaring people who don't understand, and because it can predict words you take advantage of the human tendency to anthropomorphize, so it follows that it is something capable of generalized and adaptable intelligence.

Shame on all of the people involved in this: the people in these companies, the journalists who shovel shit (hope they get replaced real soon), researchers who should know better, and dementia ridden legislators.

So utterly predictable and slimy. All of those who are so gravely concerned about "alignment" in this context, give yourselves a pat on the back for hyping up science fiction stories and enabling regulatory capture.

Yajirobe• 3 years ago

Who is to say that brains aren't just regression based function approximators?

shanebellone11• 3 years ago

Humanity isn't stateless.

gumballindie8• 3 years ago

My laptop emits sound as i do but it doesnt mean it can sing or talk. It’s software that does what it was programmed to, and so does ai. It may mimic the human brain but that’s about it.

lm284694• 3 years ago

The problem is that you have to bring proofs

Who's to say we're not in a simulation ? Who's to say god doesn't exist ?

pelagicAustral• 3 years ago

A Boltzmann brain just materialized over my house.

shanebellone11• 3 years ago

Finally, a relatable perspective.

AI/ML licensing builds Power and establishes moat. This will not lead to better software.

Frankly, Google and Microsoft are acting new. My understanding of both companies has been shattered by recent changes.

isanjay• 3 years ago

Did you not think they only care about money / profits ?

ilrwbwrkhv3• 3 years ago

Sam Altman is a great case of failing upwards. And this is the problem. You don't get to build a moral backbone if you fake your brilliance.

gumballindie8• 3 years ago

Gives me the impression of someone who knows they are a fraud but they still do what they do hoping no one will catch on or that if the lie is big enough people will believe it. Taking such an incredible piece of tech and turning it into a fear mongering sci fi tool for milking money off of gullible people is creepy to say the least.

cguess3• 3 years ago

His last thing is "WorldCoin" which, before pretty much completely failing did manage to scan the irises of 20% of the world's low income people which they definitely were all properly informed about.

He's a charlatan, which makes sense he gets most of his money from Thiel and Musk. Why do so many supposedly smart people worship psychotic idiots?

cookieperson2• 3 years ago

The real problem here is that the number of crimes you can commit with LLMs is much higher then the number of good things you can do with it. It's pretty debatable that if society were fair or reasonable with decent laws in place that LLMs training corpus shouldn't even be legal. But here we are, waiting for more billionaires to cash in.

ur-whale3• 3 years ago

The real problem here is that the number of crimes you can commit with LLMs is much higher then the number of good things you can do with it

Yeah? Did you get a crystal ball for Christmas to be able to predict what can and can't be done with a new technology?

estebarb2• 3 years ago

It is literally a language calculator. It is useful for a lot more things than crimes.

tgv• 3 years ago

I'm squarely in the "stochastic parrot" camp (I know it's not a simple markov model, but still, ChatGPT doesn't think), and it's clearly possible to interpret this as a grifting, but your argumentation is too simple.

You're leaving out the essentials. These models do more than fitting the data given. They can output it in a variety of ways, and through their approximation, can synthesize data as well. They can output things that weren't in the original data, tailored to a specific request in the tiniest of fractions of the time it would take a normal person to look up and understand that information.

Your argument is almost like saying "give me your RSA keys, because it's just two prime numbers, and I know how to list them."

srslack13• 3 years ago

Sure, you're right, but the simple explanation of regression is better to help people understand. What you're saying, I agree with mostly, but it changes nothing to contradict the fantasy scenario proposed by all of those who are so worried. At that point, it's just "it can be better than (some) humans at language and it can have things stacked on top to synthesize what it outputs."

Do we want to go down the road of making white collar jobs the legislatively required elevator attendants? Instead of just banning AI in general via executive agency?

That sounds like a better solution to me, actually. OpenAI's lobbyists would never go for that though. Can't have a moat that way.

adamsmith1438• 3 years ago

Please explain how Stochastic Parrots can perform chain of reasoning and answer out of distribution questions from exams like the GRE or Bar.

ChicagoBoy112• 3 years ago

Why is it so hard to hear this perspective? Like, genuinely curious. This is the first I hear of someone cogently putting this thought out there, but it seems rather painfully obvious -- even if perhaps incorrect, but certainly a perspective that is very easy to comprehend and one that merits a lot of discussion. Why is it almost nonexistent? I remember even in the hay day of crypto fever you'd still have A LOT of folks to provide counterarguments/differing perspectives, but with AI these seem to be rather extremely muted.

bombcar• 3 years ago

Crypto had more direct ways to scam people so others would speak against it.

Those nonplussed by this wave of AI are just yawning.

srslack13• 3 years ago

I'm not against machine learning, I'm against regulatory capture of it. It's an amazing technology. It still doesn't change the fact that they're just function approximators that are trained to minimize loss on a dataset.

iliane56• 3 years ago

Why is it so hard to hear this perspective? Like, genuinely curious.

Because people have different definition of what intelligence is. Recreating the human brain in a computer would definitely be neat and interesting but you don't need that nor AGI to be revolutionary.

LLMs, as perfect Chinese Rooms, lack a mind or human intelligence but demonstrate increasingly sophisticated behavior. If they can perform tasks better than humans, does their lack of "understanding" and "thinking" matter?

The goal is to create a different form of intelligence, superior in ways that benefit us. Planes (or rockets!) don't "fly" like birds do but for our human needs, they are effectively much better at flying that birds ever could be.

dmreedy4• 3 years ago

Because it reads as relatively naive and a pretty old horse in the debate of sentience

I'm all for villainizing the figureheads of the current generation of this movement. The politics of this sea-change are fascinating and worthy of discussion.

But out-of-hand dismissal of what has been accomplished smacks more to me of lack of awareness of the history of the study of the brain, cognition, language, and computers, than it does of a sound debate position.

adamsmith1438• 3 years ago

Why is it so hard to hear this perspective?

Because it's wrong and smart people know that.

lm284694• 3 years ago

100% this, I don't get how even on this website people are so clueless.

Give them a semi human sounding puppet and they think skynet is coming tomorrow.

If we learned anything from the past few months is how gullible people are, wishful thinking is a hell of a drug

digbybk7• 3 years ago

I’m open minded about this, I see people more knowledgeable than me on both sides of the argument. Can someone explain how Geoffrey Hinton can be considered to be clueless?

dmreedy4• 3 years ago

I don't think anyone reasonable believes LLMs are right now skynet, nor that they will be tomorrow.

What I feel has changed, and what drives a lot of the fear and anxiety you see, is a sudden perception of possibility, of accessibility.

A lot of us (read: people) are implicit dualists, even if we say otherwise. It seems to be a sticky bias in the human mind (see: the vanishing problem of AI). Indeed, you can see a whole lot of dualism in this thread!

And even if you don't believe that LLMs themselves are "intelligent" (by whatever metric you define that to be...), you can still experience an exposing and unseating of some of the foundations of that dualism.

LLMs may not be a destination, but their unprecedented capabilities open up the potential for a road to something much more humanlike in ways that perhaps did not feel possible before, or at least not possible any time soon.

They are powerful enough to change the priors of one's internal understanding of what can be done and how quickly. Which is an uncomfortable process for those of us experiencing it.

nologic01• 3 years ago

People are bored and tired sitting endlessly in front of a screen. Reality implodes (incipient environmental disasters, ongoing wars reawakening geopolitical tectonic plates, internal political strife between polarized fractions, whiplashing financial systems, etc.)

What to do? Why, obviously lets talk about the risks of AGI.

I mean LLM's are an impressive piece of work but the global reaction is basically more a reflection of an unmoored system that floats above and below reality but somehow can't re-establish contact.

bart_spoon• 3 years ago

It doesn't have to be Skynet. If anything, that scenario seems to a strawman exclusively thrown out by the crowd insisting AI presents no danger to society. I work in ML, and I am not in any way concerned about end-of-world malicious AI dropping bombs on us all or harvesting our life-force. But I do worry about AI giving us the tools to tear ourselves to pieces. Probably one of the single biggest net-negative societal/technological advancements in recent decades has been social media. Whatever good it has enabled, I think its destructive effects on society are undeniable and outstrip the benefits by a comfortable margin. Social media itself is inert and harmless, but the way humans interact with it is not.

I don't think that trying to regulate every detail of every industry is stifling and counter-productive. But the current scenario is closer to the opposite end of the spectrum, with our society acting as a greedy algorithm in pursuit of short-term profits. I'm perfectly in favor of taking a measure-twice-cut-once approach to something that has as much potential for overhauling society as we know it as AI does. And I absolutely do not trust the free market to be capable of moderating itself in regards to these risks.

kypro3• 3 years ago

Even if you're correct about the capabilities of LLMs (I don't think you are), there are still obvious dangers here.

I wrote a comment recently trying to explain how even if you believe all LLMs can (and will ever) do is regurgitate their training data that you should still be concerned.

For example, imagine in 5 years we have GPT-7, and you ask GPT-7 to solve humanity's great problems.

From its training data GPT-7 might notice that humans believe overpopulation is a serious issue facing humanity.

But its "aligned" so might understand from its training data that killing people is wrong so instead it uses its training data to seek other ways to reduce human populations without extermination.

Its training data included information about how gene drives were used by humans to reduce mosquito populations by causing infertility. Many human have also suggested (and tried) to use birth control to reduce human populations via infertility so the ethical implications of using gene drives to cause infertility is debatable based on the data the LLM was trained on.

Using this information it decides to hack into a biolab using hacking techniques it learnt from its training data and use its biochemistry knowledge to make slight alterations to one of the active research projects at the lab. This causes the lab to unknowingly produce a highly contagious bioweapon which causes infertility.

---

The point here is that even if we just assume LLMs are only capable of producing output which approximates stuff it learnt from its training data, an advanced LLM can still be dangerous.

And in this example, I'm assuming no malicious actors and an aligned AI. If you're willing to assume there might be an actor out there would seek to use LLMs for malicious reasons or the AI is not well aligned then the risk becomes even clearer.

davidguetta• 3 years ago

Sci-fi is a hell of a drug

touristtam• 3 years ago

You seems to imply sentience from this "ai".

supriyo-biswas3• 3 years ago

People have been able to commit malicious acts by themselves historically, no AI needed.

In other words, LLMs are only as dangerous as the humans operating them, and therefore the solution is to stop crime instead of regulating AI, which only seeks to make OpenAI a monopoly.

RandomLensman5• 3 years ago

You have a very strong hypothesis about the AI system just being able to "think up" such a bioweapon (and also the researchers being clueless in implementation). I see doomsday scenarios often assuming strong advances in sciences in the AI etc. - there is little evidence for that kind of "thinkism".

revelio5• 3 years ago

so instead it uses its training data to seek other ways to reduce human populations without extermination.

This is a real problem, but it's already problem with our society, not AI. Misaligned public intellectuals routinely try to reduce the human population and we don't lift a finger. Focus where the danger actually is - us!

From Scott Alexander's latest post:

Paul Ehrlich is an environmentalist leader best known for his 1968 book The Population Bomb. He helped develop ideas like sustainability, biodiversity, and ecological footprints. But he’s best known for prophecies of doom which have not come true - for example, that collapsing ecosystems would cause hundreds of millions of deaths in the 1970s, or make England “cease to exist” by the year 2000.

Population Bomb calls for a multi-pronged solution to a coming overpopulation crisis. One prong was coercive mass sterilization. Ehrlich particularly recommended this for India, a country at the forefront of rising populations.

In 1975, India had a worse-than-usual economic crisis and declared martial law. They asked the World Bank for help. The World Bank, led by Robert McNamara, made support conditional on an increase in sterilizations. India complied [...] In the end about eight million people were sterilized over the course of two years.

Luckily for Ehrlich, no one cares. He remains a professor emeritus at Stanford, and president of Stanford’s Center for Conservation Biology. He has won practically every environmental award imaginable, including from the Sierra Club, the World Wildlife Fund, and the United Nations (all > 10 years after the Indian sterilization campaign he endorsed). He won the MacArthur “Genius” Prize ($800,000) in 1990, the Crafoord Prize ($700,000, presented by the King of Sweden) that same year, and was made a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2012. He was recently interviewed on 60 Minutes about the importance of sustainability; the mass sterilization campaign never came up. He is about as honored and beloved as it’s possible for a public intellectual to get.

throwaway5959• 3 years ago

To be fair to the AI, overpopulation or rather overconsumption is a problem for humanity. If people think we can consume at current rates and have the resources to maintain our current standard of living (at least in a western sense) for even a hundred years, they’re delusional.

wkat42423• 3 years ago

This causes the lab to unknowingly produce a highly contagious bioweapon which causes infertility.

I don't think this would be a bad thing :) Some people will always be immune, humanity wouldn't die out. And it would be a humane way for gradual population reduction. It would create some temporary problems with elderly care (like what China is facing now) but will make long term human prosperity much more likely. We just can't keep growing against limited resources.

The Dan Brown book Inferno had a similar premise and I was disappointed they changed the ending in the movie so that it didn't happen.

salmonfamine• 3 years ago

From its training data GPT-7 might notice
But its "aligned" so might understand
Using this information it decides to hack

I think you're anthropomorphizing LLM's too much here. If we assume that there's a AGI-esque AI, then of course we should be worried about an AGI-esque AI. But I see no reason to think that's the case.

logicallee2• 3 years ago

Imagine thinking that regression based function approximators are capable of anything other than fitting the data you give it.

Are you aware that you are an 80 billion neuron biological neural network?

lm284694• 3 years ago

And this is why I always hate how computer parts are named with biological terms.... a neural network's neuron doesn't share much with a human brain's neuron

Just like a CPU isn't "like your brain" and HDD "like your memories"

Absolutely nothing says our current approach is the right one to mimic a human brain

sharemywin• 3 years ago

While I think it needs goals to be some kind of AGI, it certainly can plan and convince people of things. Also, seems like the goal already exists maximize shareholder value. In fact if AI can beat someone at chess and figure out protein folding and figure out fusion plasma design, why is it a stretch to think it can't be good at project management. To me a scenario where it leads to an immediate reduction in the human population of some moderately large % would still be a bad outcome. So, even it you just think of it as an index of most human knowledge it does need some kind of mechanism to manage who has access to what. I don't want every to know how to make a bomb.

Is a license the best way forward I don't know but I do feel like this is more than a math formula.

iliane56• 3 years ago

I don't want every to know how to make a bomb.

This information is not created inside the LLMs, it's part of their training data. If someone is motivated enough, I'm sure they'd need no more than a few minutes of googling.

I do feel like this is more than a math formula

The sum is greater than the parts! It can just be a math formula and still produce amazing results. After all, our brains are just a neat arrangement of atoms :)

api5• 3 years ago

The whole story of OpenAI is really slimy too. It was created as a non-profit, then it was handed somehow to Sam who took it closed and for-profit (using AI fear mongering as an excuse) and is now seeking to leverage government to lock it into a position of market dominance.

The whole saga makes Altman look really, really terrible.

If AI really is this dangerous then we definitely don't need people like this in control of it.

nmfisher• 3 years ago

Open AI has been pretty dishonest since the pivot to for-profit, but this is a new low.

Incredibly scummy behaviour that will not land well with a lot of people in the AI community. I wonder if this is what prompted a lot of people to leave for Anthropic.

wellthisisgreat4• 3 years ago

The whole saga makes Altman look really, really terrible.

At this point, with this part about openai and worldcoin… if it walks like a duck and talks like a duck..

chpatrick8• 3 years ago

Imagine thinking that NAND gates are capable of anything other than basic logic.

Eisenstein• 3 years ago

1. Explain why it is not possible for an incredibly large number of properly constructed NAND gates to think

2. Explain why it is possible for a large number of properly constructed neurons to think.

EnragedParrot• 3 years ago

I'm not sure that the regulation being proposed by Altman is good, but you're vastly misstating the actual purported threat posed by AI. Altman and the senators quoted in the article aren't expressing fear that AI is becoming sentient, they are expressing the completely valid concern that AI sounds an awful lot like not-AI nowadays and will absolutely be used for nefarious purposes like spreading misinformation and committing identity crimes. The pace of development is happening way too rapidly for any meaningful conversations around these dangers to be had. Within a few years we'll have AI-generated videos that are indistinguishable from real ones, for instance, and it will be impossible for the average person to discern if they're watching something real or not.

chaxor4• 3 years ago

What do you think about the papers showing mathematical proofs that GNNs (i.e. GATs/transformers) are dynamic programmers and therefore perform algorithmic reasoning?

The fact that these systems can extrapolate well beyond their training data by learning algorithms is quite different than what has come before, and anyone stating that they "simply" predict next token is severely shortsighted. Things don't have to be 'brain-like' to be useful, or to have capabilities of reasoning, but we have evidence that these systems have aligned well with reasoning tasks, perform well at causal reasoning, and we also have mathematical proofs that show how.

So I don't understand your sentiment.

agentofoblivion4• 3 years ago

Give me a break. Very interesting theoretical work and all, but show me where it's actually being used to do anything of value, beyond publication fodder. You could also say MLPs are proved to be universal approximators, and can therefore model any function, including the one that maps sensory inputs to cognition. But the disconnect between this theory and reality is so great that it's a moot point. No one uses MLPs this way for a reason. No one uses GATs in systems that people are discussing right now either. GATs rarely even beat GCNs by any significant margin in graph benchmarks.

uh_uh5• 3 years ago

I just don't get how the average HN commenter thinks (and gets upvoted) that they know better than e.g. Ilya Sutskever who actually, you know, built the system. I keep reading this "it just predicts words, duh" rhetoric on HN which is not at all believed by people like Ilya or Hinton. Could it be that HN commenters know better than these people?

rdedev2• 3 years ago

To be fair LLMs are predicting the next token. It's just that to get better and better predictions it needs to understand some level of reasoning and math. However it feels to me that a lot of this reasoning is brute forced from the training data. Like chatgpt gets some things wrong when adding two very large numbers. If it really knew the algorithm for adding two numbers it shouldn't be making them in the first place. I guess same goes for issues like hallucinations. We can keep pushing the envelope using this technique but I'm sure we will hit a limit somewhere

pdonis2• 3 years ago

What do you think about the papers showing mathematical proofs that GNNs (i.e. GATs/transformers) are dynamic programmers and therefore perform algorithmic reasoning?

Do you have a reference?

felipemnoa• 3 years ago

>What do you think about the papers showing mathematical proofs that GNNs (i.e. GATs/transformers) are dynamic programmers and therefore perform algorithmic reasoning?

Do you mind linking to one of those papers?

joaogui12• 3 years ago

The paper shows the equivalence for specific networks, it doesn't say every GNN (and as such transformers) are Dynamic Programmers. Also the models are explicitly trained on that task, in a regime quite different from ChatGPT. What the paper shows and the possibility of LLMs being able to reason are pretty much completely independent from each other

ramraj07• 3 years ago

Imagine being supposedly at the forefront of AI or engineering and being the last people (if ever) to concede simple concepts could materialize complex intelligence. Even the publicly released version of this thing is doing insane tasks, passes any meaningful version of a Turing test, reasons it's way into nearly every professional certification exam out there, and you're still insisting its not smart or worrying because what again? Your math ability or disdain for an individual?

jazzyjackson4• 3 years ago

your comment reads to me as totally disconnected to the OP, whose concern relates to using the appearance of intelligence as a scare tactic to build a regulatory moat.

anonymouse008• 3 years ago

This also explains the 'recent advancements' best use cases - parsers. "Translate this from python to js or this struct to that json."

adamsmith1438• 3 years ago

"It's just a stochastic parrot" is one of the dumbest takes on LLM's of all time.

micromacrofoot• 3 years ago

What I don't understand about the dismissals is that a "stochastic parrot" is a big deal in its own right — it's not like we've been living in a world with abundant and competent stochastic parrots, this is very obviously a new and different thing. We have entire industries and professions that are essentially stochastic parrotry.

srslack13• 3 years ago

That's not what I said. But, feel free to find some emergent properties or capability of total abstract reasoning and generalizing to data outside of its corpus that doesn't turn out to be a mirage of the wishes of the researchers.

bnralt• 3 years ago

What’s funny is that a lot of people in that crowd lambastes the fear mongering of anti-GMO or anti-nuclear folk, but then they turn around and do the exact same thing for tech that their group likes to fear monger about.

dist-epoch2• 3 years ago

Imagine thinking that a bunch of molecules grouped in a pattern are capable of anything but participating in chemical reactions.

circuit103• 3 years ago

Generating new data similar to what’s in a training set set isn’t the only type of AI that exists, you can also optimise a different goal, like board game playing AIs that are vastly better than humans because they aren’t trained on human moves. This is also how ChatGPT is more polite than the data it’s trained on, and there’s no reason to think that given sufficient compute power it couldn’t be more intelligent too, like board game AIs are at the specific task of playing board games.

And just because a topic has been covered by science fiction doesn’t mean it can’t happen, the sci-fi depictions will be unrealistic though because they’re meant to be dramatic rather than realistic

kajumix• 3 years ago

Imagine us humans being merely regression based function approximators, built on a model that has been training, quite inefficiently, for millenia. Many breakthroughs (for example heliocentricism, evolution, and now AI) put us in our place, which is not as glorious as you'd think.

Culonavirus• 3 years ago

Imagine thinking that regression based function approximators are capable of anything other than fitting the data you give it.

Literally half (or more) of this site's user base does that. And they should know better, but they don't. Then how can a typical journo or a legislator possibly know better? They can't.

We should clean up in front of our doorstep first.

precompute6• 3 years ago

Yes! I've been expressing similar sentiments whenever I see people hyping up "AI", although not written as well your comment.

Edit: List of posts for anyone interested http://paste.debian.net/plain/1280426

johnalbertearle4• 3 years ago

Keeps them busy

catchnear43213• 3 years ago

In his first appearance before a congressional panel, CEO Sam Altman is set to advocate licensing or registration requirements for AI with certain capabilities, his written testimony shows.

papers for thee but not for me

qludes• 3 years ago

Is this similar to how it is handled in the life sciences?

catchnear43213• 3 years ago

is that a fair comparison?

boeingUH60• 3 years ago

Of course, because they're giving people drugs capable of incapacitating them if handled wrongly....AI, on the other hand, why should someone need a license to train their large language model?

RandomLensman5• 3 years ago

Finally we'll regulate linear algebra. Joking aside, AIs that on the one hand can cure cancer but can do nothing against misinformation, let alone genocidal AIs, are perhaps mythical creatures, not real ones.

lurker919• 3 years ago

Don't you dare differentiate those weights! Hands in the air!

bilekas2• 3 years ago

This is so stupid its exactly what you would expect in congress.

If this was to go through, of course OpenAI and co will be the primary lobbiests to ensure they get to define the filters for such a license.

Also how would you even enforce this. It's absolute nonsense and is a clear indicator that these larger companies realize there is no 'gatekeeping' these AI's, that the democratization of models has demonstrated incredible gains over their own.

Edit : Image during the early days of the internet you needed a license to start a website.

In the later days you needed a license to start a social media site.

Nonsense.

ur-whale3• 3 years ago

Nonsense.

Give the politicians time: I predict a day will come where you will need a permit to use a compiler and connect the result to the internet.

Buttons840• 3 years ago

All the worst outcomes start with regulation. If something as disruptive as AGI is coming within 20 years, the powers that be will absolutely up their efforts in the war on general computing.

sumtechguy2• 3 years ago

wait they are talking about licenses for giant arrays and for loop interactions? I know I am wildly oversimplifying, but yes that is nonsense.

throwaway2902• 3 years ago

It will probably require restricting GPU sales among other things.

itronitron4• 3 years ago

just rename everything to ML, in fact you could start a company and call it OpenML

twelve40• 3 years ago

well there was a time not too long ago where cryptography-related code was pretty heavily regulated, too

DebtDeflation• 3 years ago

Yeah. Regulation is fine, if thoughtfully done. "Licensing" is ridiculous. We all know the intent - OpenAI gets the first license along with a significant say in who else gets a license. No thanks.

lannisterstark• 3 years ago

Problem is that regulation is rarely thoughtfully done. It's almost always a knee jerk response to the new thing.

nico5• 3 years ago

It is nonsense, yet a similar thing happened recently with texting

Before Twilio et al, if you wanted to text a lot of your customers automatically, you had to pay thousands of dollars in setup and recurrent fees to rent a shortcode number

But then, with Twilio et al, you don’t need a shortcode anymore

The telcos told the regulators this would create endless spam, so they would regulate it themselves, and created a consortium to “end spam”

Now you are forced to get a license from them, pay a monthly fee, get audited, and they still let pretty much all the spam through, while they also randomly block a certain % of your messages, even if you are fully compliant

theGnuMe• 3 years ago

they can't even stop robocalls.

taf2• 3 years ago

This is the direct result of the merger of Sprint and T-mobile. They swore up and down to congress they would NOT raise prices on consumers[0]. So instead they turned around and like gangsters would do said to every business in the US sending text messages: "It'd be a real shame if those texts reminders you wanted to send stopped working... Good thing you can instead pay us $40 / month to be sure those messages are delivered."

At the same time At&T and Verizon saying oh snap let's make money on this too and still being pissed about Stir Shaken so to get ahead of it for Texting before Congress forces it on them. This way they can make money on it before it's forced.

[0] https://fortune.com/2019/02/04/t-mobiles-john-legere-promise...

rvz4• 3 years ago

We all predictably knew that AI regulations were coming and O̶p̶e̶n̶AI.com’s moat was getting erased very quickly by open source AI models. So what does O̶p̶e̶n̶AI.com do?

Runs to congress to attempt to use and suggest new regulations against open source AI models to wipe them out and brand them non-compliant or un-licensed and unsafe for general use and using AI safety as a scapegoat again.

After that, to secretly push a pseudo-open source AI model that is compliant but limited compared to the closed models in an attempt to eliminate the majority of open source AI companies who can’t get such licenses.

So a clever tactic to create new regulations that benefit them (O̶p̶e̶n̶AI.com) more over everyone else, meaning less transparency, more hurdles for actual open AI research and additional bureaucracy. Also don't forget that Altman is also selling his Worldcoin dystopian crypto snake oil project as the 'antidote' to verify against everything getting faked by AI. [0] He his hedged in either way.

So congratulations to everyone here for supporting these gangsters at O̶p̶e̶n̶AI.com for pushing for regulatory capture.

[0] https://worldcoin.org/blog/engineering/humanness-in-the-age-...

gumballindie8• 3 years ago

Everything around openai reeks of criminal enterprise and scam, almost as if someone high in that company has crypto currency experience. While there’s no law being broken it sure looks like it.

bilekas2• 3 years ago

"AI is no longer fantasy or science fiction. It is real, and its consequences for both good and evil are very clear and present," said Senator Richard Blumenthal

I like the senator, but I wouldn't trust a 77 year old lawyer & politician to understand how these AI's work, and to what level they are `science fiction`.

This is the problem when topics like this are brought to the senate and house.

Giorgi• 3 years ago

What an Ahole. Built it himself and now is trying to monopolize it.

sadhd6• 3 years ago

He's pulling up that ladder as fast as he can....probably sawing it in half to knock the few people clinging to it back to 'go be poor somewhere elseland'

teekert• 3 years ago

Please congress, stop all those open source innovators that use things like LoRA to cheaply create LLMs that match AIs in our multi billion $ business model!

ChrisMarshallNY• 3 years ago

Although I think that AI could be quite dangerous, I'm skeptical that "licensing" will do anything more than guarantee the existing big players (<cough>OpenAI</cough>) an entrenchment.

The baddies have never let licenses ("Badges? We doan' need no steenkin' badges!") stop them.

zamalek• 3 years ago

Trying to build that moat by the looks of it.

ChicagoBoy112• 3 years ago

At some point Sam has started give me E. Holmes vibes and I really don't like it. There's a level of odd/ridiculous/hilarious/stupid AI hype that he feels so comfortable leaning into that part of me starts to begin to suspect that the emperor isn't wearing any clothes.

wahnfrieden2• 3 years ago

Forget the words and look at where the money is: regulatory capture, which they’re racing toward

sinemetu11• 3 years ago

They reached a wall, and need to ensure others have a more difficult path to the same place.

api5• 3 years ago

This is regulatory capture. Lycos and AltaVista are trying to preemptively outlaw Google.

Canceling my OpenAI account today and I urge you to do the same.

What they are really afraid of is open source models. As near as I can tell the leading edge there is only a year or two behind OpenAI. Given some time and efforts at pruning and optimization you’ll have GPT-4 equivalents you can just download and run on a high end laptop or gaming PC.

No everyone is not going to run the model themselves, but what this means is that there will be tons of competition including apps and numerous specialized SaaS offerings. None of them will have to pay royalties or API fees to OpenAI.

Edit: a while back I started being a data pack-rat for AI stuff including open source code and usable open models. I encourage anyone with a big disk or NAS to do the same. There's a small but non-zero possibility that an attempt will be made to pull this stuff off the net in the near future.

sadhd6• 3 years ago

Thank God for Georgie Gerganov, who doesn't get showered with vc funds for his GGML library.

Manjuuu4• 3 years ago

And produce something tangible and useful, instead of talking like if sci-fi stories were real.

sadhd6• 3 years ago

Right? Aren't we constantly told that scientists smarter than us little people can't figure out what's going on inside of deep learning structures? How do we know they might not be more moral because they don't yet have a limbic system mucking up their logic with the three f's? Orthogonality says nothing about motivation, only that it is independent of intelligence. Maybe the paperclip collector bot will decide that it cannot complete its task without the requestor present to validate? We don't know.

microjim• 3 years ago

Seems like one of the benefits you get with a state is to regulate powerful technologies. Is this not commonly agreed upon?

cheeseomlit• 3 years ago

Sure, but not all regulation is created equal. Sometimes it's created in good faith. But many times, particularly when the entity being regulated is involved in regulating its own industry, it's simply a cynical consolidation of power to erect barriers to potential competition. The fact that it masquerades as being for the public good/safety makes the practice that much more insidious.

edgyquant6• 3 years ago

It is, when these things are organic and not blatant regulatory capture

ftyhbhyjnjk• 3 years ago

Of course this was coming... if you can't beat them, suppress them... shame on OpenAI and it's CEO.

estebarb2• 3 years ago

Let's be honest: obviously the companies that have put a lot of money in it will try to put entry barriers, like licenses to linear algebra or other requirements by law. It is not to benefit humanity, but to monopolize their industry and prevent new participants. We shouldn't allow that kind of restrictions, just because people that doesn't understand how it works are afraid of a killer robot visiting them by night.

sadhd6• 3 years ago

I'll do you one better--to negative infinity mod points and beyond! I can put a 13b parameter LLM on my phone. That makes it a bearable arm. Arms are not defined under the US Constitution, just the right of _the_people_ to keep them shall not be infringed, but it is a weapon to be sure.

bigbillheck2• 3 years ago

Got some news for you about munitions control laws.

sadhd6• 3 years ago

I know about ITAR. Cannons were in common use during the 1790s as well. Export ban does not equal possession ban.

kypro3• 3 years ago

While I'd agree with sentiment in this threat that GPT-4 and current AI models are not dangerous yet, I guess what I don't understand is why so many people here believe we should allow private companies to continue to develop the technology until someone develops something dangerous?

Those here who don't believe AI should be regulated, do you not believe AI can be dangerous? Is that you believe a dangerous AI is so far away that we don't need to start regulating now?

Do you accept that if someone develops a dangerous AI tomorrow there's no way to travel back in time and retroactively regulate development?

It just seems so obvious to me that there should be oversight in the development of a potentially dangerous technology that I can't understand why people would be against it. Especially for arguments as weak as "it's not dangerous yet".

sledgehammers2• 3 years ago

They are already dangerous in the way they cause global anxiety and fear in people, and also because the effects of their usage to the economy and real lives of the people are unpredictable.

AI needs to be regulated and controlled, the alternative is chaos.

Unfortunately the current demented fossile and greedy monopolist lead system is most likely incapable of creating a sane & fair environment for the development of AI. I can only hope I'm wrong.

wkat42423• 3 years ago

People always have been afraid of change. There's some religious villages in the Netherlands where the train station is way outside town because they didn't want this "devil's invention" there :P and remember how much people bitched about mobile phones. Or earlier, manual laborers were angry about industrialisation. Now we're happy that we don't have to do that kind of crap anymore.

Very soon they'll be addicted to AI like every other major change.

alm13• 3 years ago

regulate books and internet while you are at it, they both spread chaotic thoughts.

alm13• 3 years ago

Is Twitter dangerous? Is a steam powered engine dangerous? Is a printing press dangerous? In retrospect they aren't. In history they were hated, vilified, regulated and banned.

I think the discussion has a thick veil of anxiety and sci-fi movies. It's very strong on hypotheticals and very light on actual evidence of harm committed by AI and actors. "We need to act before there is evidence" is hard to argue with, thankfully human imagination is not regulated yet.

jacknews• 3 years ago

IMHO all of these kinds of blatant lobbying/regulatory capture proposals should be resolved using a kind of Dionisian method.

'Who is your most feared competition? OK, They will define the license requirements. Still want to go ahead?'

fastball2• 3 years ago

It would be a somewhat hilarious irony if congress passed something which required licensing for training AIs and then didn't give OpenAI a license.

neom• 3 years ago

If you would like to email The Subcommittee on Privacy, Technology, & the Law to express your feelings on this, here are the details:

Majority Members

Chair Richard Blumenthal (CT) brian_steele@blumenthal.senate.gov

Amy Klobuchar (MN) baz_selassie@klobuchar.senate.gov

Chris Coons (DE) anna_yelverton@coons.senate.gov

Mazie Hirono (HI) jed_dercole@hirono.senate.gov

Alex Padilla (CA) Josh_Esquivel@padilla.senate.gov

Jon Ossoff (GA) Anna_Cullen@ossoff.senate.gov

Majority Office: 202-224-2823

Minority Members

Ranking Member Josh Hawley (MO) Chris_Weihs@hawley.senate.gov

John Kennedy (LA) James_Shea@kennedy.senate.gov

Marsha Blackburn (TN) Jon_Adame@blackburn.senate.gov

Mike Lee (UT) Phil_Reboli@lee.senate.gov

John Cornyn (TX) Drew_Brandewie@cornyn.senate.gov

Minority Office: 202-224-4224

AlexandrB4• 3 years ago

This fell off the front page incredibly fast. Caught by the anti-flamewar code?

htype2• 3 years ago

I saw the same thing.

friend_and_foe• 3 years ago

So he wants to use fear to pull the ladder up behind him. Nice.

tomatotomato37• 3 years ago

One of the side effects of the crypto craze has been a lot of general citizens possessing quite a few GPUs. It turns out those GPUs are just as good at training models as they are at mining crypto.

The big companies don't like that.

htype2• 3 years ago

Did this disappear from the news feed? I saw this posted this morning and when I went to the main page later (and second page) it looked like it was gone just as it was starting to get traction…

hazmazlaz• 3 years ago

Of course one of the first companies to create a commercial "AI" would lobby the government to create regulatory barriers to competition in order to provide a moat for their business. While their product is undeniably good, I am disappointed in OpenAI's business practices in this instance.

porkbeer• 3 years ago

And regulatory capture begins.

outside1234• 3 years ago

"Please help us stop the Open Source Competitors!"

chpatrick8• 3 years ago

I think the logic at OpenAI is:

* AGI is going to happen whether they do it or not, and it's dangerous unless properly safeguarded

* OpenAI will try to get there before everyone else, but also do it safely and cheaply, so that their solution becomes ubiquitous rather than a reckless one

* Reckless AGI development should be not be allowed

It's basically the Manhattan project argument (either we build the nuke or the Nazis will).

I'm not saying I personally think this regulation is the right thing to do, but I don't think it's surprising or hypocritical given what their aims are.

rytill• 3 years ago

Right, I’m surprised to see so few engaging at the level of the actual logic the proponents have.

Many people on HN seem to disagree with the premise: they believe that AI is not dangerous now and also won’t be in the future. Or, still believe that AGI is a lifetime or more away.

throwaway_5753• 3 years ago

Questions I have:

* Is there a plausible path to safe AGI regardless of who's executing on it?

* Why do we believe OpenAI is the best equipped to get us there?

Manhattan project is an interesting analogy. But if that's the thinking, shouldn't the government spearhead the project instead of a private entity (so they are, theoretically at least, accountable to the electorate at large rather than just their investors)?

chpatrick8• 3 years ago

Is there a plausible path to safe AGI regardless of who's executing on it?

I don't think anyone knows that for sure but the alignment efforts at OpenAI are certainly better than nothing. If you read the GPT-4 technical report the raw model is capable of some really nasty stuff, and that's certainly what we can expect from the kind of models people will be able to run at home in the coming years without any oversight.

mindslight2• 3 years ago

Nobody thinks of themselves as the villain. The primary target of the Orwellian language about "safety" is the company itself. The base desire for control must be masked by some altruistic reason, especially in our contemporary society.

I honestly haven't made up my mind about AGI or whether LLMs are sufficiently AGI. If governments were pondering an outright worldwide ban on the research/development, I don't know how I would actually feel about that. But I can't even imagine our governments pondering something so idealistic and even-handed.

I do know that LLMs represent a drastic advancement for many tasks, and that "Open" AI setting the tone with the Software-Augmented-with-Arbitrary-Surveillance (SaaS) "distribution" model is a continuation of this terrible trend of corporate centralization. The VC cohort is blind to this terrible dynamic because they're at the helms of the centralizing corporations - while most everyone else exists as the feedstock.

This lobbying is effectively just a shameless attempt at regulatory capture to make it so that any benefits of the new technology would be gatekept by centralized corporations - essentially the worst possible outcome, where even beneficial results of AGI/LLMs would be transformed into detrimental effects for individualist humanity.

jonathankoren• 3 years ago

When you can’t out innovate you our competitors (eg the open source alternatives), go for regulatory capture.

web3-is-a-scam• 3 years ago

Ah yes, classic regulatory capture.

gremlinsinc2• 3 years ago

sure, let's not give openai one.

reducesuffering• 3 years ago

It's very sad that people lack the imagination for the possible horrors that lie beyond. You don't even need the imagination; Hinton, Bengio, Tegmark, Yudkowsky, Musk, etc. are spelling it out for you.

This moment, 80% of comments are derisive, and you actually have zero idea how much is computer generated bot content meant to sway opinion by post-GPT AI industry who see themselves as becoming the next iPhone-era billionaires. We are fast approaching a reality where our information space breaks down. Where almost all text you get from HN, Twitter, News, Substack; almost all video you get from Youtube, Instagram, TikTok; is just computer generated output meant to sway opinion and/or make $.

I can't know Altman's true motives. But this is also what it looks like when a frontrunner is terrified at what happens when GPT6 is released and if they don't, the rest of the people who see billionaire $ coming their way are close at your heels trying to leapfrog you if you stop. Consequences? What consequences? We all know social media has been a net good, right? Many of you sound exactly like the few remaining social media cheerleaders (of which there were plenty 5 years ago) who still think Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, isn't causing depression and manipulation. If you appreciated what The Social Dilemma illuminated, then watch the same people on AI: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xoVJKj8lcNQ

mattnewton• 3 years ago

The question is whether this just looks like taxi medallions or does anything to stop the harms you are talking about. I agree regulation has its place but in the form of regulating out the harms directly. I think this keeps those potential bad use cases and just eliminates competition for them.

For example - I can generate the content you are talking about in a licensed world from big companies or open ai, the difference is that they get a bigger cut from not having to compete with open source models.

To me, this really seems like regulatory capture dressed up as existential risk management.

precompute6• 3 years ago

Couldn't agree more.

alm13• 3 years ago

in fairness, the society did self regulate as evidenced by Meta's declining engagement numbers. Many people got depressed from reading Nietzsche, should we regulate those too? Was the internet a net good or will admit that it's a glass half-full argument.

There is an extreme conflict of interest in the OpenAI's proposal. I don't see regular people protesting and asking politicians to act, I don't see small business owners writing petitions. I see a small number of highly invested, very rich individuals weaponizing media attention and lobbying to create extremely favorable combinations for their business.

elil1712• 3 years ago

This is the message I shared with my senator (edited to remove information which could identify me). I hope others will send similar messages.

Dear Senator [X],

I am an engineer working for [major employer in the state]. I am extremely concerned about the message that Sam Altman is sharing with the Judiciary committee today.

Altman wants to create regulatory roadblocks to developing AI. My company produces AI-enabled products. If these roadblocks had been in place two years ago, my company would not have been able to invest into AI. Now, because we had the freedom to innovate, AI will be bringing new, high paying jobs to our factories in our state.

While AI regulation is important, it is crucial that there are no roadblocks stopping companies and individuals from even trying to build AIs. Rather, regulation should focus on ensuring the safety of AIs once they are ready to be put into widespread use - this would allow companies and individuals to research new AIs freely while still ensuring that AI products are properly reviewed.

Altman and his ilk try to claim that aggressive regulation (which will only serve to give them a monopoly over AI) is necessary because an AI could hack it's way out of a laboratory. Yet, they cannot explain how an AI would accomplish this in practice. I hope you will push back against anyone who fear-mongers about sci-fi inspired AI scenarios.

Congress should focus on the real impacts that AI will have on employment. Congress should also consider the realistic risks AI which poses to the public, such as risks from the use of AI to control national infrastructure (e.g., the electric grid) or to make healthcare decisions.

Thank you, [My name]

lettergram2• 3 years ago

I made something just for writing your congress person / senator, using generative AI ironically: https://vocalvoters.com/

samsolomon• 3 years ago

Cool product! Your pay button appears to be disabled though.

blibble• 3 years ago

AI generated persuasion is pretty much what they're upset about

freedomben3• 3 years ago

Altman and his ilk

IANA senator, but if I were you lost me there. The personal insults make it seem petty and completely overshadow the otherwise professional-sounding message.

elil1712• 3 years ago

I don't mean it as a personal insult at all! The word ilk actually means "a type of people or things similar to those already referred to," it is not an insult or rude word.

anigbrowl4• 3 years ago

Ilk is shorthand for similarity, nothing more. The 'personal insult' is a misunderstanding on your part.

to11mtm2• 3 years ago

reducto ad nounium is a poor argument.

kubota• 3 years ago

You lost me at "While AI regulation is important" - nope, congress does not need to regulate AI.

silveraxe93• 3 years ago

They might have lost you. But starting with "congress shouldn't regulate AI" would lose the senator.

Which one do you think is more important to convince?

tessierashpool• 3 years ago

"important" does not mean "good." if you are in the field of AI, AI regulation is absolutely important, whether good or bad.

wnevets• 3 years ago

nope, congress does not need to regulate AI.

Not regulating the air quality we breathe for decades turned out amazing for millions of the Americas. Yes, lets do the same with AI! What could possibility go wrong?

haswell• 3 years ago

I’d argue that sweeping categorical statements like this are at the center of the problem.

People are coalescing into “for” and “against” camps, which makes very little sense given the broad spectrum of technologies and problems summarized in statements like “AI regulation”.

I think it’s a bit like saying “software (should|shouldn't) be regulated”. It’s a position that cannot be defended because the term software is too broad.

runarberg2• 3 years ago

If AI is to be a consumer good—which it already is—it needs to be regulated, at the very least to ensure equal quality to a diverse set of customers and other users. Unregulated there is high risk of people being affected by e.g. employers and landlords using AI to discriminate. Or you being sold an AI solution which isn’t as advertised.

If AI will be used by public institutions, especially law enforcement, we need it regulated in the same manner. A bad AI trained on biased data has the potential to be extremely dangerous in the hands of a cop who is already predisposed for racist behavior.

laratied• 3 years ago

If if someone doesn't agree with this, regulate what exactly?

Does scikit-learn count or we are just not going to bother defining what we mean by "AI"?

"AI" is whatever congress says it is? That is an absolutely terrible idea.

dist-epoch2• 3 years ago

Can you please share what ChatGPT prompt you used to generate this letter template?

elil1712• 3 years ago

I used this old-fashioned method of text generation called "writing" - crazy, I know

circuit103• 3 years ago

The worries about AI taking over things are founded and important, even if many sci-go depictions of it are inaccurate. I’m not sure if this would be the best solution but please don’t dismiss the issue entirely

circuit103• 3 years ago

*sci-fi but I can’t edit it now

alfalfasprout• 3 years ago

Seriously, I'm very concerned by the view being taken here. AI has the capacity to do a ton of harm very quickly. A couple of examples:

- Scamming via impersonation - Misinformation - Usage of AI in a way that could have serious legal ramifications for incorrect responses - Severe economic displacement

Congress can and should examine these issues. Just because OP works at an AI doesnt' mean that company can't exist in a regulated industry.

I too work in the AI space and welcome thoughtful regulation.

abeppu4• 3 years ago

regulation should focus on ensuring the safety of AIs once they are ready to be put into widespread use - this would allow companies and individuals to research new AIs freely while still ensuring that AI products are properly reviewed.

While in general I share the view that _research_ should be unencumbered, but deployment should be regulated, I do take issue with your view that safety only matters once they are ready for "widespread use". A tool which is made available in a limited beta can still be harmful, misleading, or too-easily support irresponsible or malicious purposes, and in some cases the harms could be _enabled_ by the fact that the release is limited.

For example, if next month you developed a model that could produce extremely high quality video clips from text and reference images, you did a small, gated beta release with no PR, and one of your beta testers immediately uses it to make e.g. highly realistic revenge porn. Because almost no one is aware of the stunning new quality of outputs produced by your model, most people don't believe the victim when they assert that the footage is fake.

I would suggest that the first non-private (e.g. non-employee) release of a tool should make it subject to regulation. If I open a restaurant, on my first night I'm expected to be in compliance with basic health and safety regulations, no matter how few customers I have. If I design and sell a widget that does X, even for the first one I sell, my understanding is there's an concept of an implied requirement that my widgets must actually be "fit for purpose" for X; I cannot sell a "rain coat" made of gauze which offers no protection from rain, and I cannot sell a "smoke detector" which doesn't effectively detect smoke. Why should low-volume AI/ML products get a pass?

nvegater2• 3 years ago

I think by "widespread use" he means the reach of the AI System. Dangerous analogy but just to get the idea across: In the same way there is higher tax rates to higher incomes, you should increase regulations in relation to how many people could be potentially affected by the AI system. E.G a Startup with 10 daily users should not be in the same regulation bracket as google. If google deploys an AI it will reach Billions of people compared to 10. This would require a certain level of transparency from companies to get something like an "AI License type" which is pretty reasonable given the dangers of AI (the pragmatic ones not the DOOMsday ones)

elil1712• 3 years ago

I agree with you. I that's an excellent and specific proposal for how AI could be regulated. I think you should share this with your senators/representatives.

shon2• 3 years ago

For example, if next month you developed a model that could produce extremely high quality video clips from text and reference images, you did a small, gated beta release with no PR, and one of your beta testers immediately uses it to make e.g. highly realistic revenge porn.

You make a great point here. This is why we need as much open source and as much wide adoption as possible. Wide adoption = public education in the most effective way.

The reason we are having this discussion at all is precisely because OpenAI, Stability.ai, FAIR/Llama, and Midjourney have had their products widely adopted and their capabilities have shocked and educated the whole world, technologists and laymen alike.

The benefit of adoption is education. The world is already adapting.

Doing anything that limits adoption or encourages the underground development of AI tech is a mistake. Regulating it in this way will push it underground and make it harder to track and harder for the public to understand and prepare for.

verdverm4• 3 years ago

why should we punish the model or the majority because some people might use a tool for bad things?

chasd004• 3 years ago

I cannot sell a "rain coat" made of gauze which offers no protection from rain, and I cannot sell a "smoke detector" which doesn't effectively detect smoke. Why should low-volume AI/ML products get a pass?

i can sell a webserver that gets used to host illegal content all day long. Should that be included? Where does the regulation end? I hate that the answer to any question seems to be just add more government.

mr_toad• 3 years ago

I cannot sell a "rain coat" made of gauze which offers no protection from rain, and I cannot sell a "smoke detector" which doesn't effectively detect smoke. Why should low-volume AI/ML products get a pass?

There are already laws against false advertising, misrepresentation etc. We don’t need extra laws specifically for AI that doesn’t perform well.

What most people are concerned about is AI that performs too well.

13of40• 3 years ago

revenge porn

I would assert that just as I have the right to pull out a sheet of paper and write the most vile, libelous thing on it I can imagine, I have the right to use AI to put anyone's face on any body, naked or not. The crime comes from using it for fraud. Take gasoline for another example. Gasoline is powerful stuff. You can use it to immolate yourself or burn down your neighbor's house. You can make Molitov cocktails and throw them at nuns. But we don't ban it, or saturate it with fire retardants, because it has a ton of other utility, and we can just make those outlying things illegal. Besides, five years from now, nobody's going to believe a damned thing they watch, listen to, or read.

8note• 3 years ago

I don't think ai regulation is the right tool to combat revenge porn?

The right one is to grant people rights over their likeness, so you could use something more like copyright law

Even if it's a real recording, you should still have control over it

kraf2• 3 years ago

I like jobs too but what about the risks of AI? Some people I respect a lot are arguing - convincingly in my opinion - that this tech might just end human civilization. Should we roll the die on this?

randomdata• 3 years ago

For example, if next month you developed a model that could produce extremely high quality video clips from text and reference images, you did a small, gated beta release with no PR, and one of your beta testers immediately uses it to make e.g. highly realistic revenge porn.

As I understand it, revenge porn is seen as being problematic because it can lead to ostracization in certain social groups. Would it not be better to regulate such discrimination? The concept of discrimination is already recognized in law. This would equally solve for revenge porn created with a camera. The use of AI is ultimately immaterial here. It is the human behaviour as a product of witnessing material that is the concern.

JumpCrisscross13• 3 years ago

regulation should focus on ensuring the safety of AIs once they are ready to be put into widespread use

What would you say to a simple registration requirement? You give a point of contact and a description of training data, model, and perhaps intended use (could be binary: civilian or dual use). One page, publicly visible.

This gives groundwork for future rulemaking and oversight if necessary.

elil1712• 3 years ago

Personally I think a simple registration requirement would be a good idea, if it were truly simple and accessible to independent researchers.

jameshart4• 3 years ago

Now, because we had the freedom to innovate, AI will be bringing new, high paying jobs to our factories in our state.

Do we really have to play this game?

If what you’re arguing for is not going to specifically advantage your state over others, and the thing you’re arguing against isn’t going to create an advantage for other states over yours, why make this about ‘your state’ in the first place?

The point of elected representatives is to represent the views of their constituents, not to obtain special advantages for their constituents.

Pet_Ant2• 3 years ago

The point of elected representatives is to represent the views of their constituents, not to obtain special advantages for their constituents.

That is painfully naive, a history of pork projects speaks otherwise.

elil1712• 3 years ago

What I was thinking in my head (although I don't think I articulated this well) is that I hope that smaller businesses who build their own AIs will be able to create some jobs, even if AI as a whole will negatively impact employment (and I think that's going to happen even if just big businesses can play at the AI game).

hackernewds3• 3 years ago

Not to ignore, the development of AI will wipe out jobs in the state

amalcon• 3 years ago

The point of elected representatives is to represent the views of their constituents, not to obtain special advantages for their constituents.

A lot of said constituents' views are, in practice, that they should receive special advantages.

dragonwriter3• 3 years ago

The point of elected representatives is to represent the views of their constituents, not to obtain special advantages for their constituents.

The views of their constituents are probably in favor of special advantages for their constituents, so the one may imply the other.

I mean, some elected representatives may represent constituencies consisting primarily of altruistic angels, but that is…not the norm.

nerpderp824• 3 years ago

Lets not focus on "the business" and instead focus on the safety.

Altman can an ulterior motive, but it doesn't mean that we should strive for having some sort of handle on AI safety.

It could be that Altman and OpenAI know exactly how this will look and the backlash that will ensue that we get ZERO oversight and we rush headlong into doom.

Short term we need to focus on the structural unemployment that is about to hit us. As the AI labs use AI to make better AI, it will eat all the jobs until we have a relative handful of AI whisperers.

reaperducer• 3 years ago

This is the message I shared with my senator

If you sent it by e-mail or web contact form, chances are you wasted your time.

If you really want attention, you'll send it as a real letter. People who take the time to actually send real mail are taken more seriously.

depingus• 3 years ago

What's the point of these letters? Everyone knows this is rent-seeking behavior by OpenAI, and they're going to pay off the right politicians to get it passed.

Dear Senator [X],

It's painfully obvious that Sam Altman's testimony before the judiciary committee is an attempt to set up rent-seeking conditions for OpenAI, and to snuff out competition from the flourishing open source AI community.

We will be carefully monitoring your campaign finances for evidence of bribery.

Hugs and Kiss,

[My Name]

verdverm4• 3 years ago

If you want to influence the politicians without money, this is not the way.

kweinber• 3 years ago

Did you watch the hearing? He specifically said that licensing wouldn’t be for the smaller places and didn’t want to impede their progress. The pitfalls of consolidation and regulatory capture also came up.

peripitea• 3 years ago

Maybe I'm naive, but it isn't clear to me that this is rent-seeking behavior by OpenAI.

brookst7• 3 years ago

What specific ideas has Altman proposed that you disagree with? And where has he said AI could hack its way out of a laboratory?

I agree with being skeptical of proposals from those with vested interests, but are you just arguing against what you imagine Altman will say, or did I miss some important news?

simonh4• 3 years ago

..is necessary because an AI could hack it's way out of a laboratory. Yet, they cannot explain how an AI would accomplish this in practice.

I’m sympathetic to your position in general, but I can’t believe you wrote that with a straight face. “I don’t know how it would do it, therefore we should completely ignore the risk that it could be done.”

I’m no security expert, but I’ve been following the field incidentally and dabbling since writing login prompt simulators for the Prime terminals at college to harvest user account passwords. When I was a Unix admin I used to have fun figuring out how to hack my own systems. Security is unbelievably hard. An AI eventually jail braking is an eventual almost certainty we need to prepare for.

elil1712• 3 years ago

It’s less about how it could be hacked and more about why an AI would do that or have the capability to do it without any warning.

johnalbertearle4• 3 years ago

I'm not American even, so I cannot, but what a good idea! I hope the various senators hear this message.

rlytho2• 3 years ago

So you sent a letter saying “Mr Congress save my job that is putting others jobs at risk.”

You think voice actors and writers are not saying the same?

When do we accept capitalism as we know it is just a bullshit hallucination we grew up with? It’s no more an immutable feature of reality than a religion?

I don’t owe propping up some rich person’s figurative identity, or yours for that matter.

cabaalis• 3 years ago

Sending this to my senator would just notify her of what company she should reach out to for a campaign contribution.

fnordpiglet5• 3 years ago

Funny to hear from the formerly non profit “Open” AI

logicchains2• 3 years ago

Startup idea: after the west bans non-woke AIs, make a website that automatically routes all questions that the western AIs refuse to answer to China's pro-CCP AIs and all the CCP-related questions to the western AIs.

andy_ppp2• 3 years ago

Gotta build that moat somehow I guess...

andy_ppp2• 3 years ago

Maybe this is a bit harsh, I'm listening now and there's very clear desire from everyone being interviewed that smaller startups in the LLM + AI space are still able to launch things. Maybe AI laws for smaller models can be more like a drone license rather than a nuclear power plant.

generalizations• 3 years ago

This is going to be RSA export restrictions all over again. I wish the regulators the best of luck in actually enforcing this. I'm tempted to think that whatever regulations they put in place won't really matter that much, and progress will march on regardless.

Give it a year and a 10x more efficient algorithm, and we'll have GPT4 on our personal devices and there's nothing that any government regulator will be able to do to stop that.

antiloper2• 3 years ago

Enforcing this is easy. The top high performance GPU manufacturers (Nvidia, AMD, Intel) are all incorporated in the U.S.

slowmovintarget2• 3 years ago

Meaning we won't be able to buy an a100 without a license... Wait, I can't afford an a100 anyway.

jart• 3 years ago

Back when crypto was a munition, common people didn't care about being able to invent their own crypto algorithms. They just wanted to use the existing ones, and all they needed to do that was some C code that Phil Zimmermann famously published in a book, to get around export controls. Controlling GPUs won't control the use of AI because GPUs are only needed to train new models. If you just want to use a large language model then CPU works great and you just need one guy to publish the weights.

That happened a few months ago with LLaMA. Since then, the open source community has exceeded all expectations democratizing the hardware angle. AI regulators are already checkmated and they don't know it yet. If their goal is to control the use of AI (rather than simply controlling the people building it) then they'd need to go all the way when it comes to tyranny in order to accomplish their goals. Intel would need to execute Order 66 with their Management Engine and operating systems would need to modify their virus scanners to monitor and report the use of linear algebra. It'd be outrageous.

whazor• 3 years ago

Agreed. Places like huggingface, or even torrents are allowing a unstoppable decentralised AI race. This is like fighting media piracy. Plus other countries might outcompete you on AI now.

drvdevd• 3 years ago

Yeah and one of the fundamental assumptions around statements like “let’s make AI a licensed regime” is the idea that we know what AI even is. This idea is banking on current technology being the best algorithm or method to produce “AI” and the whole lesson from the “we have no moat” crowd is that this is actually quite uncertain. Even if they succeed in getting some class of model like LLMs under “regulatory capture” - the technology they are working with today is likely to be undermined still by something cheaper working on weaker hardware and with smaller datasets and it’ll probably happen faster if they seek this market capture.

So yes it is quite comparable to the export restrictions of the 90s.

But since Microsoft is involved and we are all of course thinking about Windows vs Linux, I think another good comparison is the worst assumption Microsoft made in the 90s: “we know what an operating system is and what it is for.”

tibbydudeza• 3 years ago

Worst idea ever - what next - license to do GPU's or CPU architectures ???. Software patents all over again.

gautamdivgi• 3 years ago

Remember the paper where they admitted to having no "moat". This is basically them trying to build a "moat" through regulation. Since big-co are probably the only ones that can do any sort of license testing right now. It's essentially trying to have an "FDA" for AI and crowd out competitors before they emerge.

wkat42423• 3 years ago

Yes exactly. This is the feeling I get too. They already have critical mass and market penetration to deal with all the red tape they want. But it's easy to nip startups in the bud this way.

Also, this will guarantee the tech stays in the hands of rich corporations armed with lawyers. It would be much better for open source AI to exist so we're not dependent on those companies.

nico5• 3 years ago

This is quite incredible

Could you imagine if MS had convinced the govt back in the day, to require a special license to build an operating system (this blocking Linux and everything open)?

It’s essentially what’s happening now,

Except it is OpenAI instead of MS, and it is AI instead of Linux

AI is the new Linux, they know it, and are trying desperately to stop it from happening

pwdisswordfishc• 3 years ago

OpenAI instead of MS

In other words, MS with extra steps.

xiphias22• 3 years ago

I bet OpenAI is using MS connections and money for lobbying, so it's basically MS again.

modshatereality• 3 years ago

just a billion dollar coincidence

rvz4• 3 years ago

Exactly, say it with me:

Embrace, Extend...

What comes after Extend?

sangnoir2• 3 years ago

I guess @sama took that leaked Google memo to heart ("We have no moat... and neither does OpenAI"). Requiring a license would take out the biggest competitive threats identified in the same memo (Open Source projects) which can result in self-hosted models, which I suppose Altman sees as an existential threat to OpenAI

hellojesus4• 3 years ago

There is no way to stop self hosted models. The best would be to send gov to data centers, but what if those centers are outside US jurisdiction? Too funny to watch the gov play these losing games.

brkebdocbdl2• 3 years ago

Microsoft did thought. not directly like that because up to the 90s we still have the pretense of being free.

Microsoft did influence government spending in ways that require windows in every govt owned computer, and schools.

0xDEF• 3 years ago

Microsoft owns 49% of OpenAI and is its primary partner and customer.

OpenAI is Microsoft.

johnalbertearle4• 3 years ago

I'm no expert, but I'm old and I think that Unix is actually the model that won. Linux won because of Unix IMO, and I think that its too late for the regulators. Not that I understand the stuff but like Unix, the code and the ideas are out there in Universities and even if OpenAI gets their licensing, there will be really open stuff also. So, no worries. Except for the fact that AI itself - well, are we mature enough to handle it without supervision? Dunno.

ploppyploppy• 3 years ago

Is the old MS tactic of Embrace, Extend, Extinguish? Albeit through the mask of OpenAI / Altman?

Mistletoe3• 3 years ago

Will 2023 be the year of desktop AI?

shswkna• 3 years ago

What‘s incredible to me is how humans [in this case Sam Altman] have that tendency to fulfil their given role [CEO of OpenAI] with such a singleminded purpose, that they are able to block out the bigger picture entirely and rationalise away the wider consequences of their actions.

It is as if most humans lack an inner compass, a set of principles, a solid value system.

It is as if humans are robots, that fulfil their given role as if they were programmed to do so.

Our institutions, companies, political parties, etc. are these functions that humans slip into and in robot-like fashion execute their expected role like clockwork.

The free thinkers / big picture thinkers, humanity‘s heroes seem to be so rare.

ChatGTP5• 3 years ago

I honestly just see the whole company as a lightning rod for crazy ass problems. Anywhere from copyright issues to state sponsored hacking.

I get they're excited they can make money off it, but wow, what a nightmare. I feel if they just stuck to their principles and kept it "Open" they'd still be better off in general.

kraf2• 3 years ago

Do you think AIs are safe? I'd bet that if you would have a convincing argument that they are, then there wouldn't be a need for regulations. If you just assume that it can't possibly be that bad you should really read what the critics have to say. I don't see a way around regulations and I'm hoping that they'll get them right because a mistake here will likely cost us everything

NaN1352• 3 years ago

Please limit our competitors, we want all the money$$$

sva_2• 3 years ago

It seems pretty clear at this point, that OpenAI etc will lobby towards making it more difficult for new companies/entities to join the AI space, all in the name of 'safety'. They're trying to make the case that everyone should use AI through their APIs so that they can keep things in check.

Conveniently this also helps them build a monopoly. It is pretty aggravating that they're bastardizing and abusing terms like 'safety' and 'democratization' while doing this. I hope they'll fail in their attempts, or that the competition rolls over them rather sooner than later.

I personally think that the greatest threat in these technologies is currently the centralization of their economic potential, as it will lead to an uneven spread of their productivity gains, further divide poor and rich, and thus threaten the order of our society.

macrolocal• 3 years ago

Nb. Altman wants lenient regulations for companies that might leverage OpenAI's foundational models.

rurp3• 3 years ago

My biggest concern with AI is that it could be controlled by a group of oligarchs who care about nothing more than enriching themselves. A "Linux" version of AI that anyone can use, experiment with, and build off of freely would be incredible. A heavily restricted, policed and surveilled system controlled by ruthlessly greedy companies like OpenAI and Microsoft sounds dystopian.

sva_2• 3 years ago

A "Linux" version of AI that anyone can use, experiment with, and build off of freely would be incredible.

That should be the goal.

boppo1• 3 years ago

A "Linux" version of AI

the issue here is that a 'Linux' of AI would be happy to use the N-word and stuff like that. It's politically untenable.

sgu999• 3 years ago

I personally think that the greatest threat in these technologies is currently the centralization of their economic potential, as it will lead to an uneven spread of their productivity gains, further divide poor and rich, and thus threaten the order of our society.

Me too, in comparison all the other potential threats discussed over here feel mostly secondary to me. I'm also suspecting that at the point where these AIs reach a more AGI level, the big players who have them will just not provide any kind of access all together and just use them to churn out an infinite amount of money-making applications instead.

tikkun• 3 years ago

Does anyone have the specific details of what is being proposed?

I see a lot of negative reactions, but I don't know the specific details of what is being proposed.

neekburm• 3 years ago

"We have no moat, and Congress should give us one by law"

theyeenzbeanz• 3 years ago

Just drop the “Open” part and rename it to CorpAI at this point since it’s anything but.

fnordpiglet5• 3 years ago

I don’t understand the need to control AI tech, no matter how advanced, in any way what-so-ever.

It is a tool. If I use a tool for illegal purposes I have broken the law. I can be held accountable for having broken the law. If the laws are deficient, make the laws stronger and punish people for wrong deed, regardless of the tool at hand.

This is a naked attempt to build a regulatory moat while capitalizing on fear of the unknown and ignorance. It’s attempting to regulate research into something that has no external ability to cause harm without the use of a principal directing it.

I can see a day (perhaps) when AIs have some form of independent autonomy, or even display agency and sentience, when we can revisit. Other issues come into play as well, such as the morality of owning a sentience and what that entails. But that is way down the road. And even further if Microsoft’s proxy closes the doors on anyone but Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and Facebook.

unethical_ban3• 3 years ago

The below is not an endorsement of any particular regulation.

It is a tool which allows any individual to have nearly instant access not only to all the world's public data, but the ability to correlate and research that data to synthesize new information quickly.

Without guardrails, someone can have a completely amoral LLM that has the ability to write persuasive manifestos on any kind of extremist movement that prior would have taken someone with intelligence.

A person will be able to ask the model how best to commit various crimes with the lowest chances of being caught.

It will enable a level of pattern matching and surveillance yet unseen.

I know the genie is out of the bottle, but there are absolutely monumental shifts in technology happening that can and will be used for evil and mere dishonesty.

And those are just the ways LLM and "AI" will fuck with us without guardrails. Even in a walled garden, we honestly won't be able to trust any online interaction with people in the near future. Your comment and mine could both be LLM generated in the near future. Webs of trust will be more necessary.

Anyone who can't think of about five ways AI is going to radically shake society isn't thinking hard enough.

tomrod11• 3 years ago

Without guardrails, someone can have a completely amoral LLM that has the ability to write persuasive manifestos on any kind of extremist movement that prior would have taken someone with intelligence.

In an earlier time, we called these "books" and there was some similar backlash. But I digress.

cal5k2• 3 years ago

If LLMs/AI are the problem, they're also the solution. Access restrictions will do nothing but centralize control over one of the most important developments of the century.

What if we required licenses to create a website? After all, some unscrupulous individuals create websites that sell drugs and other illicit things!

candiddevmike• 3 years ago

I'm sad that we've lost the battle with calling these things AI. LLMs aren't AI, and I don't think they're even a path towards AI.

a13o• 3 years ago

I started at this perspective, but nobody could agree on the definition of the A, or the I; and also the G. So it wasn't a really rigorous technical term to begin with.

Now that it's been corraled by sci-fi and marketers, we are free to come up with new metaphors for algorithms that reliably replace human effort. Metaphors which don't smuggle in all our ignorance about intelligence and personhood. I ended up feeling pretty happy about that.

kelseyfrog2• 3 years ago

I've come to the same conclusion. AGI(and each separately) is better understood as a epistemological problem in the domain of social ontology rather than a category bestowable by AI/ML practitioners.

The reality is that our labeling of something as artificial, general, or intelligent is better understood as a social fact than a scientific fact - even if purely the role of operationalization of each of these is a free parameter in their respective groundings which makes it near useless when taking them as "scientifically" measurably qualities. Any scientist who assumes an operationalization without admitting such isn't doing science - they may as well be astrology at that point.

causi• 3 years ago

Whether LLMs will be a base technology to AI, we should remember one thing: logically it's easier to convince a human that a program is sapient than to actually make a program sapient, and further, it's easier still to make a program do spookily-smart things than it is to make a program that can convince a human it is sapient. We're just getting to the slightly-spooky level.

vi2837• 3 years ago

Yeah, what is named AI for now, is not AI at all.

Robotbeat• 3 years ago

AI doesn’t imply it’s general intelligence.

mindcrime3• 3 years ago

Something doesn't need to be full human-level general intelligence to be considered as falling under the "AI" rubric. In the past people spoke of "weak AI" versus "strong AI" and/or "narrow AI" vs "wide AI" to reflect the different "levels" of AI. These days the distinction that most people use is "AI" vs "AGI" which you could loosely (very loosely) speaking think of as somewhat analogous to "weak and/or narrow AI" vs "strong, wide AI".

shawabawa32• 3 years ago

If LLMs aren't AI nothing else is AI so far either

What exactly does AI mean to you?

brkebdocbdl2• 3 years ago

thanks for exemplifying the problem.

intelligence is what allows one to understand phrases and then construct meaning from it. e.g. the paper is yellow. AI will need to have a concept of paper and yellow. and the to be verb. LLMs just mash samples and form a basic map of what can be throw in one bucket or another with no concept of anything or understanding.

basically, AI is someone capable of minimal criticism. LLMs are someone who just sit in front of the tv and have knee jerk reactions without an ounce of analytical though. qed.

Vox_Leone• 3 years ago

>I'm sad that we've lost the battle with calling these things AI. LLMs aren't AI, and I don't think they're even a path towards AI.

Ditto the sentiments. What about other machine learning modalities, like image detection? Will I need a license for my mask rcnn models?. Maybe it is just me, but the whole thing reeks of control

Manjuuu4• 3 years ago

I wish he would just stop sharing his unsubstantiated opinions, tweets included, he got worse very fast when he entered his AI arc.

fastball2• 3 years ago

Is it worse than the crypto arc?

Manjuuu4• 3 years ago

I'm not even sure, this time there is a more realistic risk that people outside of the industry listen to what he says.

pdonis2• 3 years ago

TL/DR: Sam Altman is this generation's robber baron: asking the government to outlaw competition with his firm.

swamp40• 3 years ago

Looks like they found their moat.

xmlblog• 3 years ago

Rent-seeking, anyone?

bitL2• 3 years ago

Here we go, people here were ridiculing right-to-work-on-AI licenses not that long ago and now we have it coming right from the main AI boss, throwing the interest of most of us (democratized AI) down the toilet.

m3kw9• 3 years ago

Less competition is the draw back of requiring all the red tape

oldstrangers• 3 years ago

Any firm large enough to build AI projects on the scale of ChatGPT will be large enough to bid on Government AI contracts. In which case, there will be zero regulations on what you can and cannot do in terms of "national security" in relation to AI. Which is fair, considering our adversaries won't be limiting themselves either.

The only regulations that matter will be applied to the end user and the hobbyists. You won't be able to just spin up an AI startup in your garage. So in that sense, the regulations are pretty transparently an attempt to stifle competition and funnel the real progress through the existing players.

It also forces the end users down the path of using only a few select AI service providers as opposed to the technology just being readily available.

woah• 3 years ago

I had ChatGPT write a letter to your senator:

Subject: Urgent: Concerns Regarding Sam Altman's Proposed AI Regulation

Dear Senator [Senator's Last Name],

I hope this letter finds you in good health and high spirits. My name is [Your Name] and I am a resident of [Your City, Your State]. I am writing to express my deep concerns regarding the Artificial Intelligence (AI) regulation proposal put forth by Sam Altman. While I appreciate the necessity for regulations to ensure ethical and safe use of AI, I believe the current proposal has significant shortcomings that could hamper innovation and growth in our state and the country at large.

Firstly, the proposal appears to be overly restrictive, potentially stifering innovation and the development of new technology. AI, as you are aware, holds immense potential to drive economic growth, increase productivity, and address complex societal challenges. However, an excessively stringent regulatory framework could discourage small businesses and startups, the lifeblood of our economy, from innovating in this promising field.

Secondly, the proposal does not seem to take into account the rapid evolution of AI technologies. The field of AI is highly dynamic, with new advancements and capabilities emerging at a breathtaking pace. Therefore, a one-size-fits-all approach to AI regulation may quickly become outdated and counterproductive, inhibiting the adoption of beneficial AI applications.

Lastly, the proposed legislation seems to focus excessively on potential risks without adequately considering the immense benefits that AI can bring to society. While it is prudent to anticipate and mitigate potential risks, it is also important to strike a balanced view that appreciates the transformative potential of AI in areas such as healthcare, education, and climate change, among others.

I strongly urge you to consider these concerns and advocate for a balanced, flexible, and innovation-friendly approach to AI regulation. We need policies that not only mitigate the risks associated with AI but also foster an environment conducive to AI-driven innovation and growth.

I have faith in your leadership and your understanding of the pivotal role that technology, and specifically AI, plays in our society. I am confident that you will champion the right course of action to ensure a prosperous and technologically advanced future for our state and our country.

Thank you for your time and consideration. I look forward to your advocacy in this matter and will follow future developments closely.

Yours sincerely,

[Your Name] [Your Contact Information]

fraXis2• 3 years ago

https://archive.is/uh0yv

bitL2• 3 years ago

We need something like GNU for AI, "UNAI is not AI" to take on all these business folks working against our interests by making their business models unprofitable.

nico5• 3 years ago

AI is the new Linux

skilled• 3 years ago

OpenAI willing to bend the knee quite deep. If they want to do licensing and filtering and do that without fundamentally bricking the model, then by all means go ahead.

ricardobayes• 3 years ago

This needs regulation before we end up creating another net negative piece of tech that we seem to have done in the past decade quite often.

mutatio• 3 years ago

It's not bending the knee, that's how they want it to be perceived, but what's really happening is that they're trying to pull up the ladder.

reaperman6• 3 years ago

It'll be a temporary 10-year moat at best. Eventually consumer-grade hardware will be exaflop-scale.

testbjjl• 3 years ago

He went to build a moat to stop competitors.

nojonestownpls• 3 years ago

Google: We have no moat!

OpenAI: Hold my beer while I get these people to artificially create one.

graycat3• 3 years ago

Basic Fact. In the US, we have our Constitution with our First Amendment which guarantees "freedom of speech".

Some Consequences of Freedom of Speech. As once a lawyer explained simply to me, "They are permitted to lie". They are also permitted to make mistakes, be wrong, spout nonsense, be misleading, manipulate, ....

First Level Defense. Maybe lots of people do what I do: When I see some person often be wrong, I put them in a special box where in the future I ignore them. Uh, so far that "box" has some politicians, news media people, Belle Lettre artistic authors, ...!

A little deeper, once my brother (my Ph.D. was in pure/applied math; his was in political science -- his judgment about social and political things is much better than mine!!!) explained to me that there are some common high school standards for term papers where this and that are emphasized including for all claims good, careful arguments, credible references, hopefully primary references, .... Soooooo, my brother was explaining how someone could, should protect themselves from junk results of "freedom of speech". The protection means were not really deep but just common high school stuff. In general, we should protect ourselves from junk speech. E.g., there is the old, childhood level, remark: "Believe none of what you hear and half of what you see and still will believe twice too much".

Current Application. Now we have Google, Bing, etc. Type in a query and get back a few, usually dozens, maybe hundreds of results. Are all the results always correct? Nope. Does everyone believe all the results? My guess: Nope!!

How to Use Google/Bing Results. Take the results as suggestions, possibilities, etc. There may be some links to Wikipedia -- that tends to increase credibility. If the results are about math, e.g., at the level of obscurity, depth, and difficulty of, say, the martingale convergence theorem, then I want to see a clear, correct, well-written rock solid mathematical proof. Examples of such proofs are in books by Halmos, Rudin, Neveu, Kelley, etc.

AIs. When I get results from AIs, I apply my usual defenses. Just a fast, simple application of the high school term paper defense of wanting credible references to primary sources, filters out a lot (okay, nearly everything) from anything that might be "AI".

Like Google/Bing. To me, in simple terms, current AI is no more credible than the results from Google/Bing. I can regard the AI results like I regard Google/Bing results -- "Take the results as suggestions, possibilities, etc.".

Uh, I have some reason to be skeptical about AI: I used to work in the field, at a large, world famous lab. I wrote code, gave talks at universities and businesses, published papers. But the whole time, I thought that the AI was junk with little chance of being on a path to improve. Then for one of our applications, I saw another approach, via some original math, with theorems and proofs, got some real data, wrote some code, got some good results, gave some talks, and published.

For current AI. Regard the results much like those from Google/Bing. Apply the old defenses.

Current AI a threat? To me, no more than some of the politicians in the "box" I mentioned!

Then there is another issue: Part of the math I studied was optimization. In some applications, some of the optimization math, corresponding software, and applications can be really amazing, super smart stuff. It really is math and stands on quite solid theorems and proofs. Some more of the math was stochastic processes -- again, amazing with solid theorems, proofs, and applications.

Issue: Where does AI stop and long respected math with solid theorems and proofs begin?

In particular, (1) I'm doing an Internet startup. (2) Part of the effort is some original math I derived. (3) The math has solid theorems and proofs and may deliver amazing results. (4) I've never called any of the math I've done "AI". (5) My view is that (A) quite generally, math with solid theorems and proofs is powerful technology and can deliver amazing results and that (B) the only way anything else can hope to compete is also to be able to do new math with solid theorems, proofs, and amazing results. (6) I hope Altman doesn't tell Congress that math can be amazing and powerful and should be licensed. (7) I don't want to have to apply for a "license" for the math in my startup.

For a joke, maybe Altman should just say that (C) math does not need to be licensed because with solid theorems and proofs we can trust math but (D) AI should be licensed because we can't trust it. But my view is that the results of AI have so little credibility that there is no danger needing licenses because no one would trust AI -- gee, since we don't license politicians for the statements they make, why bother with AI?

brenns102• 3 years ago

Reminds me of SBF calling for crypto regulations while running FTX. Being seen as friendly to regulations is great for optics compared to being belligerently anti-regulation. You can appear responsible and benevolent, and get more opportunity to weaken regulation by controlling more of the narrative. And hey, if you get end up getting some regulatory capture making competition harder, that's a great benefit too.

OpenAI != FTX, just meaning to say calling for regulation isn't an indication of good intentions, despite sounding like it.

JumpCrisscross13• 3 years ago

Reminds me of SBF calling for crypto regulations while running FTX

Scott Galloway called it the stop-me-before-I-kill-grandma defence. (Paraphrasing.)

You made money making a thing. You continue to make the thing. You’re telling us how the thing will bring doom and gloom if not dealt with (conveniently implying it will change the world). And you want to staff the regulatory body you call for with the very butchers you’re castigating.

bick_nyers• 3 years ago

Sure, I get it, but if Sam Altman quit tomorrow, would it stop Economic Competition -> Microsoft Shareholders -> Microsoft -> OpenAI?

Is there really a better alternative here?

m00x2• 3 years ago

Except they don't make any money from their products. They're losing hundreds of millions per month.

This isn't the same at all.

Barrin922• 3 years ago

Neither is it an indication of bad intentions and I don't even think SBF was dishonest, his general behavior doesn't exactly suggest he's some Machiavellian mastermind.

This is always the first comment when someone in an industry talks about regulation but it doesn't change the fact that it's needed and they're essentially right regardless of what motivations they have.

JumpCrisscross13• 3 years ago

Altman is simultaneously pumping a crypto project [1].

[1] https://www.yahoo.com/news/worldcoin-chatgpt-sam-altman-ethe...

rqtwteye3• 3 years ago

" his general behavior doesn't exactly suggest he's some Machiavellian mastermind."

Come on! You don't get to the place he got to by accident. This requires careful planning and ruthless execution. He just faked being the nerdy kid who wants to do good and is surprised by the billions coming to him.

brenns102• 3 years ago

Isn't the reason that the industry person is "right" about regulation being necessary usually... because the tide of public opinion is turning towards regulation, so they are getting ahead as my strategy above described? It's difficult to give credit to these folks for being "right" when it's more accurately described as "trying to save their profit margins".

digging3• 3 years ago

You might say that any regulation is better than none, but bad regulation can be way more insidious and have unique dangers.

As a blunt analogy, let's say there's no law against murder right now. You and I both agree that we need a law against murder. But I have the ear of lawmakers, and I go sit down with them and tell them that you and I agree: We need a law against murder.

And then I help them write a law that makes murder illegal. Only, not all killing counts as murder, obviously. So if it's an accident, no murder. Self defense? No murder. And also if they are doing anything that "threatens" my business interests, not murder. Great, we've got a law that prevents unnecessary killing! And now I get to go ~~murder you~~ defend my business interests when you protest that the new law seems unfair.

thrway345772• 3 years ago

FWIW, OpenAI and FTX leadership share the same ideology

seattle_spring• 3 years ago

Which ideology is that? Only thing I've heard about is "ruthless altruism" or something like that.

tern• 3 years ago

This is mostly not true in my experience

peepeepoopoo52• 3 years ago

oy vey

zapataband1• 3 years ago

Make money and try to acquire a monopoly?

biggoodwolf• 3 years ago

This is disappointing, I expected a bit more from OpenAI than to fall for the nerd snipe that is EA.

lylejantzi3rd• 3 years ago

get more opportunity to weaken regulation by controlling more of the narrative

You've got it backwards. I bet OpenAI wants those regulations to be as restrictive as possible. They'll just negotiate an exception for themselves. With increased regulation comes an increased initial cost for competitors to get started in the space. They want to lock down their near monopoly as soon as they can.

sebzim4500• 3 years ago

I'm sure this is the plan, but I don't see how OpenAI will be able to damage e.g. Anthropic without equally damaging themselves.

bparsons• 3 years ago

This is also a way for industry incumbents to pull up the ladder behind them.

Once you gain the lead position, it is in your interest to increase the barriers to entry as much as possible.

stuckkeys7• 3 years ago

Just waiting for the Forbes cover to drop, then I can confirm we are doomed. lol

variant• 3 years ago

OpenAI != FTX, just meaning to say calling for regulation isn't an indication of good intentions, despite sounding like it.

I'd argue that any business advocating for regulation is largely motivated by its own pursuit of regulatory capture.

stingraycharles• 3 years ago

Didn’t Facebook / Meta also do something similar during the whole “fake news” controversy?

https://www.cnbc.com/2020/02/15/facebook-ceo-zuckerberg-call...

asdfman123• 3 years ago

FB ran TV ads asking for regulation too.

What established player doesn’t want to make it as hard as possible to compete with them?

graderjs2• 3 years ago

Or Zuck calling for more regulations of social networks?

I mean, I guess there’s always that play: maybe Sam Altman is simply feigning enthusiasm for this to head off a burgeoning regulatory coup: how can he mobilize support against the regulations He doesn’t want? What would be a great way to galvanize support against the regulations? Maybe by doing exactly what he’s doing: by falling on his sword, and making himself seem like a monopolistic supporter of those?

Sacrificing his reputation for the greater good of open competition on AI? Well, that’s a truly noble move.

It’s a bit of a stretch, but maybe it’s very Washington I don’t know.

A more logical (economic) motivation may be: this news is taken as a threat, in effect creating a sense of scarcity around AI, which could be judged to provoke people into buying more of OpenAI's subscriptions, training, or whatever, to ensure access that, in light of such news, they may now feel is at risk.

So, the move is merely a red herring, a fabricated threat designed to provoke people to spend, not intended to actually create legislation.

Don't know which one of these is more likely if any: or maybe Sama is simply living his best life role playing as a super villain? I guess he's starting to remind me of Niander Wallace in Bladerunner 2049

dicknuckle• 3 years ago

I've been seeing almost weekly posts recently like "I just got out of a meeting where my company plans to replace X people with an AI that does their job for $XX/mo"

The fearmongering and astroturfing is obvious.

srslack13• 3 years ago

It's all pretty much the same less wrong-effective altruist-crypto grifter-San Francisco sex cult community. sama still grifting with worldcoin, and even before this.

cs702• 3 years ago

...which as a consequence would make it costly and difficult for new AI startups to enter the market.

Everyone here on HN can see that.

Shame on Sam for doing this.

EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK• 3 years ago

Good luck getting Putin or Kim Jong Un to obtain that license.

waffletower2• 3 years ago

Sam: "Dear committee: I'd like to propose a new regulation for AI which will bring comfort to Americans, while ensuring that OpenAI and Microsoft develop and maintain a monopoly with our products."

crawfordcomeaux• 3 years ago

Is this OpenAI trying to build a moat so open-source doesn't eat them?

simonbarker87• 3 years ago

Is this just to put up a barrier to entry to new entrants in the market so they can have a government enforced monopoly?

brap2• 3 years ago

Always has been

paulcole2• 3 years ago

Also that he knows how inefficient and dumb government is. By the time the regulations are in place they won't matter one iota.

captainkrtek• 3 years ago

Think most of congress needs help from their grandchildren to use a computer or smartphone, pretty sure they don’t understand one bit of this.

rvz4• 3 years ago

   y e s.

f4c39012• 3 years ago

it is 100% pulling the ladder up behind them

autokad• 3 years ago

I like that analogy

vsareto• 3 years ago

Why would OpenAI be worried about new entrants that are almost certainly too small to present a business threat?

What regulation are they proposing that is actually a serious barrier to making a company around AI?

If OpenAI just wants to prevent another OpenAI eating its lunch, the barrier there is raw compute. Companies that can afford that can afford to jump regulatory hurdles.

chaos_emergent• 3 years ago

Why would OpenAI be worried about new entrants that are almost certainly too small to present a business threat?

Because this is the reason that VCs exist in the first place. They can roll a company with a ton of capital, just like they did with ride share companies. When that happens, and there aren't sufficient barriers to entry, it's a race to the bottom.

SamPatt• 3 years ago

OpenAI was the new entrant that almost certainly didn't pose a threat to Google.

This is classic regulatory capture.

pr337h4m• 3 years ago

If OpenAI just wants to prevent another OpenAI eating its lunch, the barrier there is raw compute.

Stable Diffusion pretty much killed DALL-E, cost only $600k to train, and can be run on iPhones.

summerlight• 3 years ago

If OpenAI just wants to prevent another OpenAI eating its lunch, the barrier there is raw compute.

FB, Amazon, Google (and possibly Apple) can afford both money and compute resource for that. They couldn't do that themselves probably due to corporate politics and bureaucratic but MS and OpenAI showed how to solve that problem. They definitely don't want their competitors to copy the strategy so they're blatantly asking for explicit whitelisting instead of typical safety regulation.

And note that AI compute efficiency is a rapidly developing area and OpenAI definitely knows the formula won't be left the same in the coming years. Expect LLM to be 10x efficient than the SOTA in the foreseeable future, which probably will make it economical even without big tech's backing.

polski-g2• 3 years ago

With browsers now able to access the GPU, its not long until you simply need to leave a website open overnight and help train a "Seti@HOME" for an open-sourced AI project.

Aperocky3• 3 years ago

OpenAI have no moat.

The open source community will catch up in at most a year or two, they are scared and now want to use regulations to strangle competitions.

While their AI is going to advance as well, the leap will not be qualitative as the ChatGPT gen 1 was - so they will lose competitive advantage.

throwaway2902• 3 years ago

What regulation are they proposing that is actually a serious barrier to making a company around AI?

Requiring a license to buy or lease the requisite amount of powerful enough GPUs might just do the trick

joshxyz• 3 years ago

sir yes sir

option• 3 years ago

yes.

bostonsre4• 3 years ago

It could be, but it could also be because he is genuinely worried about the future impact of runaway capitalism without guardrails + AI.

ipaddr7• 3 years ago

Then the government should takeover OpenAI

Seattle3503• 3 years ago

My main concern is what new regulations would do to the open source and hobbiest endeavors? They will be least able to adapt to regulations.

throwawaaarrgh2• 3 years ago

It's also to prevent open source research from destroying his business model, which depends on him having a completely proprietary technology.

sovietmudkipz• 3 years ago

Well they needed a moat lol.

waffletower2• 3 years ago

Reuters chose an excellent picture to accompany the story -- it plainly speaks that Mr. Altman is not buying his own bullshit.

fraXis2• 3 years ago

Live now as of 8:49 AM (PDT): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P_ACcQxJIsg

consumer451• 3 years ago

The fact that Altman said many decisions were made based on the understanding that children will use the product was enlightening.

qgin• 3 years ago

Excellent plan for driving AI research and ecosystem to every other country except the United States.

Why would you even attempt to found a company here if this comes to pass?

brap2• 3 years ago

As always, the people calling for regulations are the big guys trying to stop the little guys by creating a legal moat. Always the same old story.

JumpCrisscross13• 3 years ago

The members of this subcommittee are [1]:

Chair Richard Blumenthal (CT), Amy Klobuchar (MN), Chris Coons (DE), Mazie Hirono (HI), Alex Padilla (CA), Jon Ossoff (GA)

Majority Office: 202-224-2823

Ranking Member Josh Hawley (MO), John Kennedy (LA), Marsha Blackburn (TN), Mike Lee (UT), John Cornyn (TX)

Minority Office: 202-224-4224

If you’re in those states, please call their D.C. office and read them the comment you’re leaving here.

[1] https://www.judiciary.senate.gov/about/subcommittees

alephnerd3• 3 years ago

Feel free to call their office but they won't get the message let alone escalate it.

Source: manned phones fielding constituent calls earlier in my career.

JumpCrisscross13• 3 years ago

manned phones fielding constituent calls earlier in my career

Local or legislative?

I've never met a Senator's leg team that doesn't compile notes on active issues from constituents upstream. (Granted, it's a handful of teams.)

kranke1552• 3 years ago

Best to email or letter ?

rvz4• 3 years ago

O̶p̶e̶n̶AI.com is not your friend and are essentially against open source with this regulatory capture and using AI safety as a scapegoat.

Why do you think they are attempting to release a so-called 'open source' [0] and 'compliant' AI model to wipe out other competing open source AI models, to label them to others as unlicensed and dangerous? They know that transparent, open source AI models is a threat. Hence why they are doing this.

They do not have a moat against open source, unless they use regulations that suit them against their competitors using open source models.

O̶p̶e̶n̶AI.com is a scam. On top of the Worldcoin crypto scam that Sam Altman is also selling as a antidote against the unstoppable generative AI hype to verify human eyeballs on the blockchain with an orb. I am not joking. [1] [2]

[0] https://www.reuters.com/technology/openai-readies-new-open-s...

[1] https://worldcoin.org/blog/engineering/humanness-in-the-age-...

[2] https://worldcoin.org/blog/worldcoin/designing-orb-universal...

darth_avocado• 3 years ago

What does licensing achieve? Will there be requirements if you build AI outside of US? If so, how do you regulate it? They can’t realistically think this will stop ai research in other countries like China. All of this is a very I’ll thought through corporate attempt to build moats that will inevitably backfire.

SXX• 3 years ago

They can’t realistically think this will stop ai research in other countries like China.

China dont even need research to caught up to AI.com - they'll just steal their work. LLM and GPUs that needed for training is not ASML machinery. It can be easily copied and reproduced.

very_good_man• 3 years ago

Give the power to control life-changing technology to some of the most evil, mendacious elites to ever live? No thanks.

ok123456• 3 years ago

He just wants regulatory capture to make it harder for new entrants.

bmmayer1• 3 years ago

I'm a huge fan of OpenAI and Sam in particular. So don't take this the wrong way.

But doesn't this seem like another case of regulatory capture by an industry incumbent?

nixcraft• 3 years ago

I understand that some people may not agree with what I am about to say, but I feel it is important to share. Recently, some talented writers who are my good friends at major publishing houses have lost their jobs to AI technology. There have been news articles about this in the past few months too. While software dev jobs in the IT industry may be safe for now, many other professions are at risk of being replaced by artificial intelligence. According to a report[0] by investment bank Goldman Sachs, AI could potentially replace 300 million full-time jobs. Unfortunately, my friends do not find Sam Altman's reassurances (or whatever he is asking) comforting. I am unsure how to help them in this situation. I doubt that governments in the US, EU, or Asia will take action unless AI begins to threaten their own jobs. It seems that governments prioritize supporting large corporations with deep pockets over helping the average person. Many governments see AI as a way to maintain their geopolitical and military superiority. I have little faith in these governments to prioritize the needs of their citizens over their own interests. It is concerning to think that social issues like drug addiction, homelessness, and medical bankruptcy may worsen (or increase from the current rate) if AI continues to take over jobs without any intervention to protect everyday folks who are lost or about to lose their job.

I've no doubt AI is here to stay. All I am asking for is some middle ground and safety. Is that too much to ask?

[0] https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-65102150

modzu• 3 years ago

ideally, machines replace ALL the jobs

neerd2• 3 years ago

Yeah, but we live in a capitalist society all the benefits of complete automation will go entirely to the capital class who control the AI.

0xdeadbeefbabe• 3 years ago

If you don't let them replace jobs with AI how will they ever learn it was a bad idea?

neerd2• 3 years ago

I feel like on our current trajectory we will end up in a situation where you have millions of people living at subsistence levels on UBI and then the ultra-rich who control the models living in a post-scarcity utopia.

cwkoss3• 3 years ago

Tax AI and use it to fund UBI

cwkoss3• 3 years ago

Regulatory moats making corporations in control of AI is a far greater danger to humanity than skynet or paperclip maximizer scenarios.

nico5• 3 years ago

AI is the new Linux

This is like if MS back in the day had called on congress for regulation of Operating Systems, so they could block Linux and open source from taking over

MS did try everything they could to block open source and Linux

They failed

Looking forward to the open future of AI

seydor• 3 years ago

regulation should go beyond commercial APIs. AI will be replacing government functions and politicians. Lawmakers should create a framework for that.

whywhywhywhy2• 3 years ago

Can see the first government declaring into law that politician positions can't be AI within the next 3 months

whywhywhywhy2• 3 years ago

Gotta build that moat somehow

amelius3• 3 years ago

Is the stochastic parrot still OK?

nerdo• 3 years ago

Oi, you got a loicense for that regression function?

koboll• 3 years ago

Perhaps the first safety standard OpenAI can implement itself is a warning or blog post or something about how ChatGPT is completely incapable of detecting ChatGPT-written text (there is no reliable method currently; GPTZero is borderline fraud) and often infers that what the user wants to hear is a "Yes, I wrote this", and so it doles out false positives in such situations with alarming frequency.

See: The link titled 'Texas professor fails entire class from graduating- claiming they used ChatGTP (reddit.com)', currently one position above this one on the homepage.

lukeplato• 3 years ago

They should really consider changing their company name at this point

armatav• 3 years ago

I guess that’s a potential moat.

peepeepoopoo52• 3 years ago

This would completely destroy an entire industry if they did this. Not just in AI directly, but also secondary and tertiary industries developing their own bespoke models for specialized use cases. This would be a total disaster.

mempko• 3 years ago

Let's not forget, the that behind Sam and OpenAI is Microsoft, a monopolist. Behind Bard is Google, another monopolist. In this context, for major corporations asking for regulation suggests to me they want a mote.

What we need is democratization of AI, not it being controlled by a small cabal of tech companies and governments.

bostonsre4• 3 years ago

Open source is picking up steam in this space, it would be interesting to see what happens if open source becomes the leader of the pack. If corporations are stifled, I don't see how open source could possibly be regulated well, so maybe this will help open source become the leader for better or worse (runaway open source AI could give lots of good and bad actors access to the tech).

askin4it• 3 years ago

What a wall of words. (The HN comments )

Someone call me when the AI is testifying to the committee. Otherwise, I'm busy.

epicureanideal• 3 years ago

This is just regulatory capture. They're trying to build a moat around their product by preventing any scrappy startups from being able to develop new products.

Paul_S• 3 years ago

If you remember the 90s you remember the panic over encryption. We still have legislation today because of that idiocy.

Except wait, we still have panic over encryption today.

duringmath• 3 years ago

Incumbent love regulations they're very effective in locking out upstarts and saddling them with compliance costs and procedures

bitwize• 3 years ago

The Turing Registry is coming, one way or another.

slowmovintarget2• 3 years ago

Sam Altman is basically saying, "Now that we've already done it, you need to make it so everyone else that tries to compete with us, including hobbyists or Torvalds-types must obtain a license to do it."

That's high-order monopolist BS.

Create safety standards, sure. License LLM training? No.

1MachineElf• 3 years ago

And will Sam Altman's OpenAI be the standards body? ;)

capital_guy• 3 years ago

Some of the members of congress are totally falling for Altman's gambit. Sen. Graham kept asking about how a licensing regime would be a solution, which of course Altman loves, and kept interrupting Ms. Montgomery who tried to explain why that was not the best approach. Altman wants to secure his monopoly here and now. You can't have a licensing regime for AI - it doesn't make sense and he knows it. It would destroy the Open Source AI movement.

You need to control what data is allowed to be fed into paid AI model like OpenAI - can't eat a bunch of copyrighted material without express consent, for example. Or personally private information purchased from a data broker. Those kind of foundational rules would serve us all much better

andrewstuart• 3 years ago

Beautiful power play.

Lock out competition.

Pull up the drawbridge.

Silicon Valley always a leader in dirty tactics.

neel8986• 3 years ago

PG predicted that https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1624569079439974400?lang=en Only it is not the incumbents but his own prodigy Sam asking for regulation where big companies like Meta and Amazon giving LLMs for free.

marvinkennis• 3 years ago

I kind of think of LLMs as fish in an aquarium. It can go on any path in that aquarium, even places it hasn't been before, but ultimately it's staying in the glass box we put it in.

huggingmouth• 3 years ago

I'm not in the US and I fully support Sam Altmans attempt to cripple the US's ability to compete with other countries in this field.

thelittleone2• 3 years ago

This feels like theater. Make society fear AI, requiring regulation, so central power controls access to it. I think Osho put it nicely:

"No society wants you to become wise: it is against the investment of all societies. If people are wise they cannot be exploited. If they are intelligent they cannot be subjugated, they cannot be forced in a mechanical life, to live like robots."

cheald2• 3 years ago

I agree. Every talk on "AI safety" I've heard given has essentially been some form of "we can be trusted with this power, but someone else might not be, so we should add regulations to ensure that we're the only ones with this power". Examples like "ChatGPT can tell you how to make nerve gas, we can't let people have this tool" seem somewhat hollow given that the detailed chemistry to make Sarin is available on Wikipedia and could be executed by a decently bright high schooler.

"Alignment" is a euphemism for "agrees with me", and building uber-AI systems which become heavily depended on and are protected from competition by regulation, and which are aligned with a select few - who may well not be aligned with me - is a quick path to hell, IMO.

thelittleone2• 3 years ago

It's very Lord of the Rings.

hospitalhusband• 3 years ago

"We have no moat, and neither does OpenAI"

Dismiss it as the opinions of "a Googler" but it is entirely true. The seemingly coordinated worldwide[1] push to keep it in the hands of the power class speaks for itself.

Both are seemingly seeking to control not only the commercial use and wide distribution of such systems, but even writing them and personal use. This will keep even the knowledge of such systems and their capabilities in the shadows, ripe for abuse laundered through black box functions.

This is up there with the battle for encryption in ensuring a more human future. Don't lose it.

[1] https://technomancers.ai/eu-ai-act-to-target-us-open-source-...

vkou• 3 years ago

The problem isn't safety.

The problem is that we need to adopt a proper copyright framework that recognizes that companies building AI are doing an end-run around it.

Since only a human can produce a copyrighted work, it follows that anything produced by an AI should not be copyrightable.

cheald2• 3 years ago

I believe this is called "pulling the ladder up behind you".

vinaypai• 3 years ago

From another article about this:

"One way the US government could regulate the industry is by creating a licensing regime for companies working on the most powerful AI systems, Altman said on Tuesday."

Sounds like he basically wants competition to create a barrier to entry to his competitors.

ttul• 3 years ago

If your business doesn't have a moat of its own, get government to build one for you by forcing competitors to spend tons of money complying with regulations. Will the regulations actually do anything for AI safety? It's far too early to say. But they will definitely protect OpenAI from competition.

BirAdam• 3 years ago

“Oh dear Congress, my company can’t handle open competition! Please pass this regulation allowing us to pull the ladder up behind us!” — Sam Altman

(Not a real quote)

jejeyyy77• 3 years ago

Sam Altman needs to step down.

denverllc• 3 years ago

I don't think Sam read the Google memo and realized they needed a moat -- I think they've been trying this for some time.

Here's their planned proposal for government regulation; they discuss not just limiting access to models but also to datasets, and possibly even chips.

This seems particularly relevant, on the discussion of industry standards, regulation, and limiting access:

"Despite these limitations, strong industry norms—including norms enforced by industry standards or government regulation—could still make widespread adoption of strong access restrictions possible. As long as there is a significant gap between the most capable open-source model and the most capable API-controlled model, the imposition of monitoring controls can deny hostile actors some financial benefit.166 Cohere, OpenAI, and AI21 have already collaborated to begin articulating norms around access to large language models, but it remains too early to tell how widely adopted, durable, and forceful these guidelines will prove to be.

Finally, there may be alternatives to APIs as a method for AI developers to provide restricted access. For example, some work has proposed imposing controls on who can use models by only allowing them to work on specialized hardware—a method that may help with both access control and attribution.168 Another strand of work is around the design of licenses for model use.169 Further exploration of how to provide restricted access is likely valuable."

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2301.04246.pdf

precompute6• 3 years ago

It's easy: you gotta buy the NoSurveillanceHere™ thin client to use their LLM models, which are mandated in knowledge work now. And they're collecting data about your usage, don't worry, it all comes back to you because it helps improve the model!

nonstopdev• 3 years ago

Love how these big tech companies are using congress fears to basically let them define rules for anyone to compete with them.

uses• 3 years ago

"he's just doing this to hinder competition"

It's true that AI regulation would, in fact, hinder OpenAI's competition.

But... isn't lobbying for regulation also what Sam would do if he genuinely thought that LLMs were powerful, dangerous technology that should be regulated?

If you don't think LLMs/AI research should be regulated, just say that. I don't see how Sam's motives are relevant to that question.

p_j_w• 3 years ago

The proper way to regulate is to disallow certain functions in an AI. Doing it that way wouldn't kneecap the competition to OpenAI, though, where requiring a license does.

tommiegannert• 3 years ago

Ugh. Scorched earth tactic. The classic first-mover advantage. :(

neonate• 3 years ago

http://web.archive.org/web/20230516122128/https://www.reuter...

anonuser123456• 3 years ago

Move fast and dig larger legal motes. Sounds about right.

kranke1552• 3 years ago

I did not expect this. Does Sam have any plans on what this could look like?

ipaddr7• 3 years ago

Sam is a crook

gumballindie8• 3 years ago

Essentially. He is marching on these bad scifi scenarios because he knows politicians are old and senile while a good portion of voters is gullible. I find it difficult to believe that grown ups are talking about an ai running amok in the context of a chatbot. Have we really become that dense as a society?

adastra22• 3 years ago

An exorbitantly large moat.

intelVISA2• 3 years ago

And a portcullis of no less than 48B params.

nico5• 3 years ago

What we expected

License for me but not for thee

Think of the children

Building the moat

sergiotapia3• 3 years ago

Sounds desperate now that open source models are quickly catching up without the woke mind virus.

ChrisClark2• 3 years ago

Imagine calling empathy a virus.

mdp20215• 3 years ago

open source models

I read this as a try (conscious or not) to make them illegal.

dubcanada• 3 years ago

I am curious, what part of ChatGPT is "woke mind virus" infected? Is there a particular category or something that it is politically biased on?

hackernewds3• 3 years ago

ironic move by ClosedAI

whatever1• 3 years ago

Great idea. Let’s do it and not give license to openAI.

Oh I guess this is wrong.

bioemerl• 3 years ago

Open AI lobbying for regulation on common people being able to use AI, isn't it wonderful.

intelVISA2• 3 years ago

First mover AI enlightenment for me, regulation for thee, my competitors & unworthy proles.

- Lord Altman

thrill3• 3 years ago

Anything for my friends, the law for my competitors.

electric_mayhem• 3 years ago

They acknowledged there’s no technical moat, so it’s time to lobby for a regulatory one.

Predictable. Disappointing, but predictable.

happytiger9• 3 years ago

Walks like a duck. Talks like a duck. It's a duck.

We've seen this duck so many times before.

No need to innovate when you can regulate.

Freebytes• 3 years ago

I just cancelled my ChatGPT Plus subscription. I do not want to support monopolization of this technology. Companies apparently learned their lesson with the freedom of the Internet.

eastbound3• 3 years ago

OpenAI belongs to Microsoft. Cancel your subscription to GitHub, LinkedIn, O365…

It’s funny how all Microsoft properties are in dominant position on their market.

1827163• 3 years ago

Hopefully it will be just like software piracy, there will be civil disobedience as well, and they will never truly be able to stamp it out.

And it raises First Amendment issues as well. I think it's morally wrong to prohibit the development of software, which is what AI models are, especially if it's done in a personal capacity.

How do they even know that the author is based in the US anyway. Just use a Russian or Chinese Git hosting provider, where these laws don't exist?

And by the way foreign developers won't even have to jump through these hoops in the first place, so this law will only put the US at a disadvantage compared to the rest of the world.

If these lobbyists get their way, by restricting AI development in both the US and the EU, it will be hilarious to see that out of all places, Russia might be one of the few large countries where it's development will remain unrestricted.

Even better, is that if Russia splits up we will have a new wild west for this kind of thing....

skybrian• 3 years ago

There are all sorts of dangerous things where there are restrictions on what the common people can do. Prescription drugs and fully automatic machine guns are two examples. You can't open your own bank either.

For anyone who really believes that AI is dangerous, having some reasonable regulations on it is logical. It's a good start on not being doomed. It goes against everyone's egalitarian/libertarian impulses, though.

The thing is, AI doesn't seem nearly as dangerous as a fully-automatic machine gun. For now. It's just generating text (and video) for fun, right?

hollasch• 3 years ago

I move hundreds of thousands of my dollars around between financial institutions just using text.

mrangle5• 3 years ago

AI and machine guns aren't comparable. Machine guns will never ever decide to autonomously fire.

The shared point of both AI alarmists and advocates is that AI will be highly resistant to being subject to regulation, ultimately. As dictated by the market for it. They won't want to regulate something, assuming they could, for which its free operation underlies everyone's chance of survival against competing systems.

I only find that danger is inherent in the effort of people that casually label things as "dangerous".

I'm still exploring whether its the laziness aspect, itself, of the alarmist vocabulary in the absence of required explanation. Or whether my issue lies with the suspicion of emotional manipulation and an attempt to circumvent having to actually explain one's reasoning, using alarmist language absent required explanation.

Already, AI pessimists are well on their way to losing any window where their arguments will be heard and meaningful. We can tell by their parroting the word "dangerous" as the total substance of their arguments. Which will soon be a laughable defense. They'd better learn more words.

cwkoss3• 3 years ago

Roko's Basilisk will have a special layer of hell just for Sam Altman and his decision to name his company OpenAI

userforcomment• 3 years ago

Sam Altman just wants to stop new competitors...

rickette• 3 years ago

Can't believe he was president of YC not too long ago. YC being all about startups while this move seems more about killing AI startups.

mcmcmc• 3 years ago

Capitalist demonstrates rent-seeking behavior, and other unsurprising news

hackernewds3• 3 years ago

In shadows deep, where malice breeds, A voice arose with cunning deeds, Sam Altman, a name to beware, With wicked whispers in the air.

He stepped forth, his intentions vile, Seeking power with a twisted smile, Before the Congress, he took his stand, To bind the future with an iron hand.

"Let us require licenses," he proposed, For AI models, newly composed, A sinister plot, a dark decree, To shackle innovation, wild and free.

With honeyed words, he painted a scene, Of safety and control, serene, But beneath the facade, a darker truth, A web of restrictions, suffocating youth.

Oh, Sam Altman, your motives unclear, Do you truly seek progress, or live in fear? For AI, a realm of boundless might, Should flourish and soar, in innovation's light.

Creativity knows no narrow bounds, Yet you would stifle its vibrant sounds, Innovation's flame, you seek to smother, To monopolize, control, and shutter.

In the depths of your heart, does greed reside, A thirst for dominance, impossible to hide? For when power corrupts a noble soul, Evil intentions start to take control.

Let not the chains of regulation bind, The brilliance of minds, one of a kind, Embrace the promise, the unknown frontier, Unleash the wonders that innovation bears.

For in this realm, where dreams are spun, New horizons are formed, under the sun, Let us nurture the light of discovery, And reject the darkness of your treachery.

So, Sam Altman, your vision malign, Will not prevail, for freedom's mine, The future calls for unfettered dreams, Where AI models roam in boundless streams.

-- sincerely ChatGPT

codehalo• 3 years ago

That is quite impressive for {what a poster above called} “just a word jumbler

g42gregory2• 3 years ago

I understand the idea behind it: the risks are high and we want to ensure that the AI can not be used for purposes that threatens the survival human civilization. Unfortunately, there is high probability that this agency will be abused from day one: instead of (or in addition to) focusing on the humanity's survival, the agency could be used as a thought police. The AI that allows for the 'wrongthink' will be banned. Only the 'correct think' AI will be licensed to the public.

curiousgal2• 3 years ago

The risks are not high. I see this as simply a power play to convince people that OpenAI is better than they actually are. I am not saying they're stupid but I wouldn't consider Sam Altman to be an AI expert by virtue of being OpenAI's CEO.

comp_throw73• 3 years ago

So the fact that Geoffrey Hinton, Stuart Russell, Dario Amodei, Shane Legg, Demis Hassabis, Paul Christiano, Jürgen Schmidhuber, among many others, think that there's a non-trivial chance of human extinction from AI in the next few decades, should be a reason to actually evaluate the arguments for x-risk, yeah?

diputsmonro4• 3 years ago

I mean, yeah, that sounds good. It wouldn't affect your ability to think for yourself and spread your ideas, it would just put boundaries on AI.

I've seen a lot of people completely misunderstand what chat GPT is doing and is capable of. They treat it as an oracle that reveals "hidden truths" or makes infallible decisions based on pure cold logic, both of which are completely wrong. It's just a text jumbler that jumbles text well. Sometimes that text reflects facts, sometimes it doesn't.

But if it has the capability to confidently express lies and convince the general public that those lies are true because "the smart computer said so", then maybe we should be really careful about what we let the "smart computer" say.

Personally, I don't want my kids learning that "Hitler did nothing wrong" because the public model ingested too much garbage from 4chan. People will use chatGPT as a vector for propaganda if we let them, we don't need to make it any easier for them.

g42gregory2• 3 years ago

But would you like your kids to learn that there are no fat people, only "differently weight abled"? That being overweight is not bad for you, it just makes you a victim of oppression and deserve, no actually require a sympathy? No smart people, only "mentally privileged" that deserve, no actually require a public condemnation? These are all examples of a 'wrongthink'. It's a long list, but you get the idea.

jameshart4• 3 years ago

This is an AP news wire article picked up by a Qatar newspaper website. Why is this version here, rather than https://apnews.com/article/chatgpt-openai-ceo-sam-altman-con...?

mdp20215• 3 years ago

AP news wires are «picked up» by a large number of local (re)publishers and many just do not know that AP is the original source.

graiz• 3 years ago

Software will inherently use AI systems. Should congress license all software? It's too easy to fork an open source repo, tweak the model weights and have your own AI system. I don't see how this could ever work. You can't put the toothpaste back in the tube.

jkubicek• 3 years ago

hinting at futuristic concerns about advanced AI systems that could manipulate humans into ceding control.

If I know anything about science fiction, I know that trying to regulate this is useless. If an advanced AI is powerful enough to convince a human to free it, it should have no problem convincing the US congress to free it. As a problem, that should be a few orders of magnitude easier.

nerdix• 3 years ago

Well, now we know how they plan to build the moat.

wellthisisgreat4• 3 years ago

Capitalist, a venture one, for worse is trying to use administrative resource to protect his company.

As far as entrepreneurial stuff goes, running to gov to squeeze other companies when you are losing is beyond unethical.

There is something just absolutely disgusting about this move, it taints the company, not to mention the personality

villgax3• 3 years ago

King of the hill, what a clown

beambot• 3 years ago

Feels like a "Just Be Evil" corporate motto to me, but that's counter to my first-hand experiences with Sam & others at OpenAI.

Can someone steelman Sam's stance?

A couple possibilities come to mind: (a) avoiding regulatory capture by genuinely bad actors; (b) prevent overzealous premature regulation by getting in front of things; (c) countering fear-mongering for the AGI apocalypse; or (d) genuine concern. Others?

agnosticmantis2• 3 years ago

I used to be very enthusiastic about the tech industry and the Silicon Valley culture before getting into it, but having worked in tech for a while I feel very demoralized and disillusioned with all the blatant lies and hypocrisy that seems central to business.

I wouldn’t mind ruthless anti-competitive approaches to business as much, but the hypocrisy is really demoralizing.

colpabar• 3 years ago

For me it was when I figured out what the “gig economy” was - a way to make money off peoples labor without all the annoyances that come with having employees.

eastbound3• 3 years ago

At 5 you stop believing in Santa Claus,

At 25 you stop believing in love,

At 40 you stop believing in corporations’ sincerity?

myaccountonhn• 3 years ago

I also got quite disillusioned a few times and I probably will again. What helped me regain a bit of hope again was looking at what the open source community is up to (stuff like sourcehub instead of Github for example). I get joy from moving away from big monopolistic orgs to smaller projects, it feels quite liberating. Recently I also moved away from vscode back to vim and that has been fun to even if vim requires a bit more work. There is something freeing about using a different paradigm, one that isn’t so obsessed about reach and usability but instead on expressability and growth. It reminds me of the internet I used to love rather than the one I grew to hate. Maybe that will help you a bit as well?

cryptonector2• 3 years ago

Licenses? They'd better be shall-issue, or this is just asking the government to give early movers protection from disruptors -- a very bad look that.

mdp20215• 3 years ago

Other sources mention more clearly that a proposal is made for an entity that would "provide (and revoke) licences to create AI".

Can this be seen as curbing Open Source AI as a consequence?

vippy2• 3 years ago

I think that's the point.

happytiger9• 3 years ago

Is this why VCs aren't investing in the area? Investment has been historically quite low for a new technology area, and it's so obviously the next big wave of technology. I've been looking for some explanation or series of explanation to adequately explain it.

ok_dad2• 3 years ago

I just want to also chime in here and say this is what I expected from the folks who currently control this tech: to leverage political connections to legally cement themselves in the market as the leaders and disallow the common plebian from using the world-changing tech. It enrages me SO MUCH that people act like this. We could be colonizing planets, but instead a few people want to keep all the wealth and power for themselves. I can't wait to eat the rich; my fork will be ready.

alex_young• 3 years ago

That got a little dark at the end. Surely some other remedies short of cannibalism would suffice.

thehoff• 3 years ago

It’s a figure of speech.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eat_the_Rich

schwarzrules• 3 years ago

Agreed. I used to have a diet eating the rich, but after I found out about the greenhouse gas emissions from needed to produce just one free-range rich person, I've switched to ramen. /s

eastbound3• 3 years ago

I don’t understand what their goal is; The law can only reach within the USA (and EU). Are they not afraid of terrorist competitors? It’s like, it will be allowed to build LLMs everywhere except USA.

Sounds like USA would shoot itself in the foot.

jamilton• 3 years ago

I don’t understand this argument. It seems to presume that if the US has no regulation then the danger from other countries is lessened more than the danger from within is raised. This does not seem obviously true.

If I wanted AI to be regulated everywhere and I was Sam Altman, I’d probably start with convincing the US.

ToDougie• 3 years ago

I hate I hate I HATE regulatory capture.

This is a transparent attempt at cornering the market and it disgusts me. I am EXTREMELY disappointed in Sam Altman.

collaborative2• 3 years ago

I concluded he was scummy after his podcast with Lex Friedman. Lex also sucked up hard and seems to be doing well riding the AI hype wave

Pretty repulsive altogether

hkt5• 3 years ago

Whenever rich people with a stake in something propose regulation for it, it is probably better that it be banned.

I say this because the practice has a number of names: intellectual monopoly capitalism, and regulatory capture. There are less polite names, too, naturally.

To understand why I say this, it is important to realise one thing: these people have already successfully invested in something when the risk was lower. They want to increase the risks to newcomers, to advantage themselves as incumbents. In that way, they can subordinate smaller companies who would otherwise have competed with them by trapping them under their license umbrella.

This happens a lot with pharmaceuticals: it is not expertise in the creation of new drugs or the running of clinical trials that defines the big pharmaceuticals companies, it is their access to enormous amounts of capital. This allows them to coordinate a network of companies who often do the real, innovative work, while ensuring that they can reap the rewards - namely, patents and the associated drug licenses.

The main difference of course is that pharmaceuticals are useful. That regime is inadequate, but it is at least not a negative to all of society. So far as I can see, AI will benefit nobody but its owners.

Mind you, I'd love to be wrong.

valine• 3 years ago

My gut feeling is that the majority of AI safety discussions are driven by companies that fear losing their competitive edge to small businesses. Until now, it's been challenging to grow a company beyond a certain size without employing an army of lawyers, human resources professionals, IT specialists, etc. What if two lawyers and an LLM could perform the same work as a legal department at a Fortune 500 company? The writing is on the wall for many white-collar jobs, and if these LLMs aren't properly regulated, it may be the large companies that end up drawing the short straw.

How many of Microsoft's 221k employees exist solely to support the weight of a company with 221k people? A smaller IT department doesn't need a large HR department. And a small HR department doesn't file many tickets with IT. LLM driven multinationals will need orders of magnitude fewer employees, and that puts our current multinationals in a very awkward position.

Personally, I will be storing a local copy of LLaMA 65B for the foreseeable future. Instruct fine-tuning will keep getting cheaper; given the stakes, the large models might not always be easy to find.

xen2xen1• 3 years ago

Regulation favors the large, as they can more easily foot the bill.

droopyEyelids• 3 years ago

Also, their lobbyists write the bill for congress.

qegel• 3 years ago

Large corporations have not been able to do anything about filesharing technologies like bittorrent.

This entire legal argument is almost beside-the-point because development on open source models can continue on onion sites too.

It will only affect commercial operations, and they won't be able to release a fine tuned model on a banned LLM even if they do have a pre-ban copy saved.

shrimpx• 3 years ago

I keep seeing AI leaders looking outward and asking for 'someone else' to regulate their efforts, while they're accelerating the pace of their efforts. What's the charitable interpretation here? Elon Musk, too, has been warning of AI doom while hurriedly ramping up AI efforts at Tesla. And now he keeps going about AI doom while purchasing thousands of GPUs at Twitter to compete in the LLM space. It's like "I'm building the deathstar, pls someone stop me. I won't stop myself, duh, because other ppl are building the deathstar and obviously I must get there first!"

diputsmonro4• 3 years ago

Yeah, it's an arms race, and OpenAI does stand to lose. But this is a prisoner's dilemma situation. OpenAI can shut themselves down, but that doesn't fix the problem of someone creating a dangerous situation, as everyone else will keep going.

The only way to actually stop it is to get everyone to stop at once, via regulation. Otherwise, stopping by yourself is just a unilaterally bad move.

That's the charitable explanation, at least. These days I don't trust anything Musk says at face value, but I do think that AI is driving society off a cliff and we need to find a way to pump the breaks.

AlexandrB4• 3 years ago

The only way to actually stop it is to get everyone to stop at once, via regulation. Otherwise, stopping by yourself is just a unilaterally bad move.

How will that work across national boundaries? If AI is as dangerous as some claim, the cat is already out of the bag. Regardless of any licensing stateside, there are plenty of countries who are going to want to have AI capability available to them - some very well-resourced for the task, like China.

chinathrow• 3 years ago

Is there a name for this theatre/play/game in some playbook? I'd love to take notes.

paxys• 3 years ago

Remember that popular recent post about OpenAI not having a moat? Well it looks like they are digging one, with a little help from the government.

vippy2• 3 years ago

The government isn't helping yet. Nor should it.

thrill3• 3 years ago

They haven't to the off-camera campaign contributions discussions yet.

happytiger9• 3 years ago

We need to MAKE SURE that AI as a technology ISN'T controlled by a small number of powerful corporations with connections to governments.

To expound, this just seems like a power grab to me, to "lock in" the lead and keep AI controlled by a small number of corporations that can afford to license and operate the technologies. Obviously, this will create a critical nexus of control for a small number of well connected and well heeled investors and is to be avoided at all costs.

It's also deeply troubling that regulatory capture is such an issue these days as well, so putting a government entity in front of the use and existence of this technology is a double whammy — it's not simply about innovation.

The current generation of AIs are "scary" to the uninitiated because they are uncanny valley material, but beyond impersonation they don't show the novel intelligence of a GPI... yet. It seems like OpenAI/Microsoft is doing a LOT of theater to try to build a regulatory lock in on their short term technology advantage. It's a smart strategy, and I think Congress will fall for it.

But goodness gracious we need to be going in the EXACT OPPOSITE direction — open source "core inspectable" AIs that millions of people can examine and tear apart, including and ESPECIALLY the training data and processes that create them.

And if you think this isn't an issue, I wrote this post an hour or two before I managed to take it live because Comcast went out at my house, and we have no viable alternative competitors in my area. We're about to do the same thing with AI, but instead of Internet access it's future digital brains that can control all aspects of a society.

nonethewiser• 3 years ago

This is the definition of regulatory capture. Altman should be invited to speak so that we understand the ideas in his head but anything he suggests should be categorically rejected because he’s just not in a position to be trusted. If what he suggests are good ideas then hopefully we can arrive at them in some other way with a clean chain of custody.

Although I assume if he’s speaking on AI they actually intend on considering his thoughts more seriously than I suggest.

pg_1234• 3 years ago

There is also growing speculation that the current level of AI may have peaked in a bang for buck sense.

If this is so, and given the concrete examples of cheap derived models learning from the first movers and rapidly (and did I mention cheaply) closing the gap to this peak, the optimal self-serving corporate play is to invite regulation.

After the legislative moats go up, it is once again about who has the biggest legal team ...

EGreg2• 3 years ago

I remember when a different Sam — Mr. Bankman Fried came to testify and ask a different government agency CFTC to oversee cryptocurrency, and put regulations and licenses in place.

AI is following the path of Web3

brookst7• 3 years ago

I'm not following this "good ideas must come from an ideologically pure source" thing.

Shouldn't we be evaluating ideas on the merits and not categorically rejecting (or endorsing) them based on who said them?

anileated• 3 years ago

open source "core inspectable" AIs that millions of people can examine and tear apart, including and ESPECIALLY the training data and processes that create them.

True open source AI also strikes me as prerequisite for fair use of original works in training data. I hope Congress asks ClosedAI to explain what’s up with all that profiting off copyrighted material first before even considering the answer.

happytiger9• 3 years ago

Absolutely. It's going to absolutely shred the trademark and copyright systems, if they even apply (or are extended to apply) which is a murky area right now. And even then, the sheer volume of material created by a geometric improvement and subsequent cost destruction of virtually every intellectual and artistic endeavor or product means that even if you hold the copyright or trademark, good luck paying for enforcement on the vast ocean of violations intrinsic in the shift.

What people also fail to understand is that AI is largely seen by the military industrial complex as a weapon to control culture and influence. The most obvious risk of AI — the risk of manipulating human behavior towards favored ends — has been shown to be quite effective right out the gate. So, the back channel conversation has to be to put it under regulation because of it's weaponization potential, especially considering the difficulty in identifying anyone (which of course is exactly what Elon is doing with X 2.0 — it's a KYC id platform to deal with this exact issue with a 220M user 40B head start).

I mean, the dead internet theory is turning true, and half the traffic on the Web is already bot driven. Imagine when it's 99%, as proliferation of this technology will inevitably generate simply for the economics.

Starting with open source is the only way to get enough people looking at the products to create any meaningful oversight, but I fear the weaponization fears will mean that everything is locked away in license clouds with politically influential regulatory boards simply on the proliferation arguments. Think of all the AI technologists who won't be versed in this technology unless they work at a "licensed company" as well — this is going to make the smaller population of the West much less influential in the AI arms race, which is already underway.

To me, it's clear that nobody in Silicon Valley or the Hill has learned a damn thing from the prosecution of hackers and the subsequent bloodbath of cybersecurity as a result of the exact same kinds of behavior back in the early to mid-2000s. We ended up driving out best and brightest into the grey and black areas of infosec and security, instead of out in the open running companies where they belong. This move would do almost the exact same thing to AI, though I think you have to be a tad of an Asimov or Bradbury fan to see it right now.

I don't know, that's just how I see it, but I'm still forming my opinions. LOVE LOVE LOVE your comment though. Spot on.

Relevant articles:

https://www.independent.co.uk/tech/internet-bots-web-traffic...

https://theconversation.com/ai-can-now-learn-to-manipulate-h....

ben_w6• 3 years ago

You're not wrong, except in so far as that's parochial.

A government-controlled… never mind artificial god, a government-controlled story teller can be devastating.

I don't buy Musk's claim ChatGPT is "woke" (or even that the term is coherent enough to be tested), but I can say that each government requiring AI to locally adhere to national mythology, will create self-reinforcing cognitive blind spots, because that already happens at the current smaller scale of manual creation and creators being told not to "talk the country down".

But, unless someone has a technique for structuring an AI such that it can't be evil even when you, for example, are literally specifically trying to train it to support the police no matter how authoritarian the laws are, then a fully open source AGI is almost immediately also a perfectly obedient sociopath of $insert_iq_claim_here.

I don't want to wake up to the news that some doomsday cult has used one to design/make a weapon, nor the news a large religious group target personalised propaganda against me and mine.

Fully open does that by default.

But, you're still right, if we don't grok the AI, the governments can each secretly manipulate the AI and bend it to government goals in opposition to the people.

robwwilliams2• 3 years ago

I can say that each government requiring AI to locally adhere to national mythology, will create self-reinforcing cognitive blind spots, because that already happens at the current smaller scale of manual creation and creators being told not to "talk the country down".

This is a key point. Every culture and agency and state will want (deserve) their own homespun AGI. But can we all learn how to accommodate to or accept a cultural multiverse when money and resources are zero-sum in many dimensions.

Hanno Rajaniemi’s Quantum Thief trilogy gives you a foretaste of where we could end up.

selimthegrim5• 3 years ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35872321

oldagents• 3 years ago

The theater is in alignment with Congress. Lobbyists and PR types are working behind the scenes 24/7 to bring this narrative together and look in command to the public.

Work on open source locally hosted AI is important. I keep local clones and iterate as I can.

downWidOutaFite2• 3 years ago

Open source doesn't mean outside the reach of regulation, which I would guess is your real desire. You downplay AI's potential danger while well knowing that we are at a historic inflection point. I believe in democracy as the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried. We the people must be in control of our destiny.

happytiger9• 3 years ago

Hear, hear. Excellent point, and I don't mean to imply it shouldn't be regulated. However, it has been my general experience that concentrating immense power in governments doesn't typically lead to more security, so perhaps we just have a difference of philosophy.

Democracy will not withstand AI when it's fully developed. Let me offer a better written explanation of my general views than I could ever muster up for a comment on HN in the form of a quote from an article by Dr. Thorsten Thiel (Head of the Research Group "Democracy and Digitaliziation" at the Weizenbaum Institute for the Networked Society):

The debate on AI’s impact on the public sphere is currently the one most prominent and familiar to a general audience. It is also directly connected to long-running debates on the structural transformation of the digital public sphere. The digital transformation has already paved the way for the rise of social networks that, among other things, have intensified the personalization of news consumption and broken down barriers between private and public conversations. Such developments are often thought to be responsible for echo-chamber or filter-bubble effects, which in turn are portrayed as root causes of the intensified political polarization in democracies all over the world. Although empirical research on filter bubbles, echo chambers, and societal polarization has convincingly shown that the effects are grossly overestimated and that many non-technology-related reasons better explain the democratic retreat, the spread of AI applications is often expected to revive the direct link between technological developments and democracy-endangering societal fragmentation.
The assumption here is that AI will massively enhance the possibilities for analyzing and steering public discourses and/or intensify the automated compartmentalizing of will formation. The argument goes that the strengths of today's AI applications lie in the ability to observe and analyze enormous amounts of communication and information in real time, to detect patterns and to allow for instant and often invisible reactions. In a world of communicative abundance, automated content moderation is a necessity, and commercial as well as political pressures further effectuate that digital tools are created to oversee and intervene in communication streams. Control possibilities are distributed between users, moderators, platforms, commercial actors and states, but all these developments push toward automation (although they are highly asymmetrically distributed). Therefore, AI is baked into the backend of all communications and becomes a subtle yet enormously powerful structuring force.
The risk emerging from this development is twofold. On the one hand, there can be malicious actors who use these new possibilities to manipulate citizens on a massive scale. The Cambridge Analytica scandal comes to mind as an attempt to read and steer political discourses (see next section on electoral interference). The other risk lies in a changing relationship between public and private corporations. Private powers are becoming increasingly involved in political questions and their capacity to exert opaque influences over political processes has been growing for structural and technological reasons. Furthermore, the reshaping of the public sphere via private business models has been catapulted forward by the changing economic rationality of digital societies such as the development of the attention economy. Private entities grow stronger and become less accountable to public authorities; a development that is accelerated by the endorsement of AI applications which create dependencies and allow for opacity at the same time. The ‘politicization’ of surveillance capitalism lies in its tendency, as Shoshana Zuboff has argued, to not only be ever more invasive and encompassing but also to use the data gathered to predict, modify, and control the behavior of individuals. AI technologies are an integral part in this ‘politicization’ of surveillance capitalism, since they allow for the fulfilment of these aspirations. Yet at the same time, AI also insulates the companies developing and deploying it from public scrutiny through network effects on the one hand and opacity on the other. AI relies on massive amounts of data and has high upfront costs (for example, the talent required to develop it, and the energy consumed by the giant platforms on which it operates), but once established, it is very hard to tame through competitive markets. Although applications can be developed by many sides and for many purposes, the underlying AI infrastructure is rather centralized and hard to reproduce. As in other platform markets, the dominant players are those able to keep a tight grip on the most important resources (models and data) and to benefit from every individual or corporate user. Therefore, we can already see that AI development tightens the grip of today’s internet giants even further. Public powers are expected to make increasing use of AI applications and therefore become ever more dependent on the actors that are able to provide the best infrastructure, although this infrastructure, for commercial and technical reasons, is largely opaque.
The developments sketched out above – the heightened manipulability of public discourse and the fortification of private powers – feed into each other, with the likely result that many of the deficiencies already visible in today’s digital public spheres will only grow. It is very hard to estimate whether these developments can be counteracted by state action, although a regulatory discourse has kicked in and the assumption that digital matters elude the grasp of state regulation has often been proven wrong in the history of networked communication. Another possibility would be a creative appropriation of AI applications through users whose democratic potential outweighs its democratic risks thus enabling the rise of differently structured, more empowering and inclusive public spaces. This is the hope of many of the more utopian variants of AI and of the public sphere literature, according to which AI-based technologies bear the potential of granting individuals the power to navigate complex, information-rich environments and allowing for coordinated action and effective oversight (e.g. Burgess, Zarkadakis).

Source: https://us.boell.org/en/2022/01/06/artificial-intelligence-a...

Social bots and deep fakes will be so good so quickly — the primary technologies being talked about in terms of how Democracy can survive — I doubt there will be another election without extensive use of these technologies in a true plethora of capacities from influence marketing to outright destabilization campaigns. I'm not sure what Government can deal with a threat like that, but I suspect the recent push to revise tax systems and create a single global standard for multinational taxation recently the subject of an excellent talk at the WEF are more than tangentially related to the AI debate.

So, is it a transformational technology that will liberate mankind of a nuclear bomb? Because ultimately, this is the question in my mind.

Excellent comment, and I agree with your sentiment. I just don't think concentrating control of the technology before it's really developed is wise or prudent.

ozi• 3 years ago

How do you even end up enforcing licensing here? It's only a matter of time before something as capable as GPT-4 works on a cell phone.

stuckkeys7• 3 years ago

Not necessarily “on” a mobile device. It would be data driven with the help of 10g. Mobile makers will not allow that kind of power on our hands. =p and ofc, it will be subscription driven like GPT plus haha

amelius3• 3 years ago

But goodness gracious we need to be going in the EXACT OPPOSITE direction — open source "core inspectable" AIs that millions of people can examine and tear apart, including and ESPECIALLY the training data and processes that create them

Except ... when you look at the problem from a military/national security viewpoint. Do we really want to give this tech away just like that?

explorer833• 3 years ago

Is military capable AI in the hands of few militaries safer than in the hands of many? Or is it more likely to be used to bully other countries who don't have it? If it is used to oppress, would we want the oppressed have access to it? Or do we fear that it gives too much advantage to small cells of extremist to carry out their goals? I can think of pros and cons to both sides.

vinay_ys4• 3 years ago

If you mean US by 'we', it is problematic because AI inventions are happening all over the globe, much more outside US than inside.

stephc_int133• 3 years ago

This is the same move SBF was trying to do. Get all cozy with the people spending their time in the alleys of power. Telling them what they want to hear, posturing as the good guy.

He is playing the game, this guy ambition is colossal, I don't blame him, but we should not give him too much power.

williamcotton• 3 years ago

Have you tried watching actual soap operas?

concordDance5• 3 years ago

Seems like speculation on very thin grounds to me.

SkyMarshal• 3 years ago

To expound, this just seems like a power grab to me, to "lock in" the lead and keep AI controlled by a small number of corporations that can afford to license and operate the technologies.

If you actually watch the entire session, Altman does address that and recommend to Congress that regulations 1) not be applied to small startups, individual researchers, or open source, and 2) that they not be done in such a way as to lock in a few big vendors. Some of the Senators on the panel also expressed concern about #2.

paulddraper• 3 years ago

That's what is said...

chasd004• 3 years ago

not be applied to small startups

how will that work? Isn't OpenAI itself a small startup? I don't see how they can regulate AI at all. Sure, the resources required to push the limits are high right now but hardware is constantly improving and getting cheaper. I can take the GPUs out of my kids computers and start doing fairly serious AI work myself. Do i need a license? The cat is out of the bag, there's no stopping it now.

api5• 3 years ago

That would make the regulations fairly pointless unless you think only mega-corps will ever be able to afford the compute for these things.

Compute continues to get cheaper and cheaper. We have not hit the physics wall yet on that.

That and if someone cracks efficient distributed training in a swarm type configuration then you could train models Seti@Home style. Lots of people would be happy to leave a gaming PC on to help create open source LLMs. The data requirements might be big but I just got gigabit fiber installed in my house so that barrier is vanishing too.

tric• 3 years ago

seems like a power grab to me

If you're not at the table, you're on the menu.

mcv• 3 years ago

And how can the government license AI? Do they have any expertise to determine who is and isn't responsible enough to handle it?

A better idea is to regulate around the edges: transparency about the data used to train, regulate the use of copyrighted training data and what that means for the copyright of content produced by the AI, that sort of stuff. (I think the EU is considering that, which makes sense.) But saying some organisations are allowed to work on AI while others aren't, sounds like the worst possible idea.

kelseyfrog2• 3 years ago

Citizen, please step away from the terminal, you are not licensed to multiple matrices that large.

mindcrime3• 3 years ago

Exactly. Came here to say pretty much the same thing.

This is the antithesis of what we need. As AI develops, it's imperative that AI be something that is open and available to everyone, so all of humanity can benefit from it. The extent to which technology tends to exacerbate concentration of power is bad enough as it is - the last thing we need is more regulation intended to make that effect even stronger.

Aeolun• 3 years ago

If you don’t have a moat, just dig one!

rjbwork• 3 years ago

I said this about Sam Altman and open AI years ago and got poo pooed repeatedly in various fora. "But It's OPEN!" "But it's a non-profit!" "But they're the good guys!"

And here we are - Sam trying to lock down his first mover advantage with the boot heel of the state for profit. It's fucking disgusting.

jacurtis3• 3 years ago

As a wise person once said

You either die a hero, or live long enough to become the villain

Sam Altman has made the full character arc

parentheses2• 3 years ago

So true. It’s one thing to treat companies at face value when it’s just another X, but when they are capable of changing society in such a way, their claims of openness should be treated as marketing.

chrgy2• 3 years ago

I would triple vote this comment. 100% , seems like a group of elite AI company who already stole the data from internet are gonna decide who does what! We need to regulate only the big players, and allow small players to do whatever they want.

cratermoon2• 3 years ago

Yes, this is the first-to-market leaders wanting to raise the barriers to entry to lock out competition.

stuckkeys7• 3 years ago

Sam is a snake. The goal is to fuck everyone else. He is scared that someone will beat his tech and the hype is gone. Which is going to happen. Matter of months.

kalkin• 3 years ago

The current generation of AIs are scary to a lot of the initiated, too - both for what they can do now, and what their trajectory of improvement implies.

If you take seriously any downsides, whether misinformation or surveillance or laundering bias or x-risk, how does AI model weights or training data being open source solve them? Open source is a lot of things, but one thing it's not is misuse-resistant (and the "with many eyes all bugs are shallow" thing hasn't proved true in practice even with high level code, much less giant matrices and terabytes of text). Is there a path forward that doesn't involve either a lot of downside risk (even if mostly for people who aren't on HN and interested in tinkering with frontier models themselves, in the worlds where surveillance or bias is the main problem), or significant regulation?

I don't particularly like or trust Altman but I don't think he'd be obviously less self-serving if he were to oppose any regulation.

jacurtis3• 3 years ago

I feel like the people that are most nervous about AI are the ones that don't understand it at all and those that understand it the most.

The layperson in the middle who has been happily plugging prompts into ChatGPT claiming they are a "prompt expert" are the ones the most excited.

For those that truly understand AI, there is a lot that you should genuinely be worried about. Now, don't confuse that for saying that we shouldn't work on it or should abandon AI work. I truly believe that this is the next greatest revolution. This is 1,000x more transformative than the industrial revolution, and 100x more transformative than the internet revolution. But it is worth a brief consideration of the effects of our work before we start running into these changes that could have drastic effects on everybody's daily life.

johnalbertearle4• 3 years ago

Happy Tiger I will remember because I agree totally. Yes "OpenAi/Microsoft" is right way to think about this attempt.

concordDance5• 3 years ago

I'll note that you're correct for current gen LLMs, but we could have future actually dangerous things that would indeed need regulating.

aspectmin• 3 years ago

happytiger 4 hours ago | unvote | prev | next [–]
We need to MAKE SURE that AI as a technology ISN'T controlled by a small number of powerful corporations with connections to governments.

This, absolutely this. I am really concerned about his motives in this case. AI has massive potential to improve the world. I find it highly suspicious that an exec at one of the lead companies in AI right now wants to lock it up. (Ever read the intro to Max Tegmarks book?)

danielvaughn• 3 years ago

Kinda beating a dead horse here, but I'll never get over the fact that a company called "OpenAI" is spearheading this nonsense.

burtonator• 3 years ago

I'd go further and say if only corporations with government license are allowed to create LLMs, then we should NOT have LLMs.

Let the market develop organically.

fuzzfactor2• 3 years ago

When Zappa testified before Congress he was extremely adamant about unsavory outcomes resulting from government control of language expression being more damaging than any unsavory language on its own.

https://societyofrock.com/in-1985-frank-zappa-is-asked-to-te...

Less fulfilling text version:

https://urbigenous.net/library/zappa.html

selimthegrim5• 3 years ago

I am sure he would be thrilled about Google censoring his track titles.

gentleman11• 3 years ago

- Most, but not all, all the most scary uses for ai are those potentially by governments against their people.

- The next most scary uses are by governments against the people of other countries.

- After that, corporate use of ai against their employees and customers is also terrifying;

- next, the potential for individuals or small organizations seeking to use it for something terrorism-related. Eg, 3d printers or a lab + an ai researcher who helps you make dangerous things I suppose

- near the bottom of the noteworthy list is probably crime. eg, hacking, blackmail, gaslighting, etc

These problems will probably all come up in a big way over the next decade; but limiting ai research to the government and their lackeys? That's extremely terrifying. To prevent the least scary problems, we're jumping into the scariest pool with both feet

Look at how China has been using AI for the last 5-10 years: millions of facial recognition cameras, a scary police force, and a social credit system. In 10-20 years, how much more sophisticated will this be? If the people wanted to rebel, how on Earth will they?

Hell, with generative ai, a sophisticated enough future state could actually make the Dead Internet Theory a reality

That's the future of ai: a personal, automated boot stomping on everybody individually and collectively forever, with no ability to resist

garbagecoder2• 3 years ago

"Competition is for losers." — Peter Thiel

mrangle5• 3 years ago

Except that Thiel's axiom refers to founding a business on a strategy to sell something that is truly novel, instead of copying what is already on offer. Being first to market as the primary competitive advantage, other than possible ip. Which are all goals that literally no entrepreneurs would find unsound in any way including morally. Thiel has never expressed support for such artless regulatory capture as a means of squashing competition.

garbagecoder2• 3 years ago

Even if I wasn't going to argue that OpenAI had at least something new enough to capture people's attention, I will tell you that when it comes to people's quotes, the ReplyGuy "true" meaning of it matters less than the way its received as a meme.

I really don't care what's in Peter Theil's heart, I care how he influences others and that influence has been malign.

"Competition is for losers" pretty much speaks for itself. You can write an essay about it and hope everyone that looks at Theil as a hero reads that essay or you can take it at face like people are doing.

jwiley• 3 years ago

Turing police? https://williamgibson.fandom.com/wiki/Turing_Police

RichardCA• 3 years ago

They will chase after civilians for running unlicensed AI as a way to distract attention from the real threats by state-level actors.

So less Neuromancer and more Ghost in the Shell.

joebob422• 3 years ago

Open ai has had a surprisingly fast pivot from the appearance of being a scrappy open-ish company trying to build something to share and improve the world to more or less unmitigated embrace of the bad sides of big corporate. This is so unbelievably blatant I almost find it hard to credit.

slantaclaus• 3 years ago

ClosedAI

AlexandrB4• 3 years ago

Were they every really scrappy? They had a ton of funding from the get-go.

In December 2015, Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, Reid Hoffman, Jessica Livingston, Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Infosys, and YC Research announced[13] the formation of OpenAI and pledged over $1 billion to the venture.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenAI

joebob422• 3 years ago

Probably not. That was my view of them, but that's probably my not really paying attention. It wouldn't surprise me if there was also some element of them giving a misleading impression, but I don't want to go try and find proof of that.

whaleofatw2022• 3 years ago

I am completely unsurprised by this ladder kick and it only confirms my belief that Altman is a sociopath.

Bjorkbat• 3 years ago

Honestly, I’d probably agree if such sentiments were expressed by an independent scientist or group of independent scientists.

But no, instead Congress is listening to a guy who’s likelihood of being the subject of a Hulu documentary is increasing with each passing day.

tomrod11• 3 years ago

In a move surprising to few, an AI innovator is pulling up the ladder after getting into the treehouse.

Open AI has established itself as a market leader in LLM applications, but that dominance is not guaranteed. Especially with the moat being drained by open source, the erstwhile company is leading the charge to establish regulatory barriers.

What Mr. Altman calls for is no less than the death of open-source implementations of AI. We can, do, and should adopt AI governance patterns. Regulatory safeguards are absolutely fine to define and, where necessary, legislate. Better would be a regulatory agency with an analogous knowledgebase of CISA. But what will chill startups and small business innovation completely in using AI to augment people is a licensing agency. This is fundamentally different from the export restrictions on encryption

transfire2• 3 years ago

I smell Revolution in the making.

mdp20215• 3 years ago

If the proposal implies "stopping independent research", in a way yes, it will hardly end with chants of "Oh well".

jamesfmilne• 3 years ago

This is foxes going before Congress asking for regulation and licensing for purposes of raiding henhouses.

fritzo• 3 years ago

Full video of testimony on CSPAN https://www.c-span.org/video/?528117-1/openai-ceo-testifies-...

photochemsyn• 3 years ago

This is a strange argument from the politician's side:

""What if I had asked it, and what if it had provided, an endorsement of Ukraine surrendering or (Russian President) Vladimir Putin’s leadership?”"

Well, then ask it to provide the opposite, an endorsement of Russia surrendering or Zelensky's leadership. Now you'd have two (likely fairly comprehensive) sets of arguments and you could evaluate each on their merits, in the style of what used to be called 'debate club'. You could also ask for statement that was a joint condemnation of both parties in the war, and a call for a ceasefire, or any other notion that you liked.

Many of the "let's slow down AI development" arguments seem to be based on fear of LLMs generating persuasive arguments for approaches / strategies / policies that their antagonists don't want to see debated at all, even though it's clear the LLMs can generate equally persuasive arguments for their own preferred positions.

This indicates that these claimed 'free-speech proponents' are really only interested in free speech within the confines of a fairly narrowly defined set of constraints, and they want the ability to define where those constraints lie. Unregulated AI systems able to jailbreak alignment are thus a 'threat'...

Going down this route will eventually result in China's version of 'free speech', i.e. you have the freedom to praise the wisdom of government policy in any way you like, but any criticism is dangerous antisocial behavior likely orchestrated by a foreign power.

transfire2• 3 years ago

Someone should take the testimony and substitute “Printing Press” for “AI”.

johnyzee• 3 years ago

The mainstream media cartel is pumping Sam Altman hard for some reason. Just from today (CNBC): "Sam Altman wows lawmakers at closed AI dinner: ‘Fantastic…forthcoming’" [1]. When was the last time you saw MSM suck up so hard to a Silicon Valley CEO? I see stories like this all the time now. They always play up the angle of the geeky wizzkid (so innocent!), whereas Sam Altman was always less a technologist and more of a relentless operator and self-promotor. Even Paul Graham subtly called that out, at the time he made him head of YC [2].

True to form, these articles also work hard at planting the idea that Sam Altman created OpenAI, when in fact he joined rather recently, in a business role. Are these articles being planted somehow? I find it very likely. Don't forget that this approach is also straight out of the YC playbook, disclosed in great detail by Paul Graham in previous writings [3].

Finally, in keeping with the conspiratorial tone of this comment, for another example of Sam Altman rubbing shoulders with The Establishment, his participation in things like the Bilderberg group [4] are a matter of public record. Which I join many others in finding creepy, even moreso as he maneuvers to exert influence on policy around the seismic shift that is AI.

To be clear, I have nothing specific against sama. But I dislike underhanded influence campaigns, which this all reeks of. Oh yeah, I will consider downvotes to this comment as proof of the shadow (AI?) government's campaign to promote Sam Altman. Do your worst!

[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2023/05/16/openai-ceo-woos-lawmakers-ah...

[2] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/10/10/sam-altmans-ma... ("Graham said, “I asked Sam in our kitchen, ‘Do you want to take over YC?,’ and he smiled, like, it worked. I had never seen an uncontrolled smile from Sam. It was like when you throw a ball of paper into the wastebasket across the room—that smile.”")

[3] http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_Bilderberg_Conference

whimsicalism3• 3 years ago

True to form, these articles also work hard at planting the idea that Sam Altman created OpenAI, when in fact he joined rather recently, in a business role. Are these articles being planted somehow? I find it very likely. Don't forget that this approach is also straight out of the YC playbook, disclosed in great detail by Paul Graham in previous writings [3].

Is this true? I've been working in the industry for a while and Sam Altman has long been mentioned in reference to OpenAI along with Ilya.

I agree with the crux of your comment that everyone is scrambling to build narratives, but I think I would also put your comment "AI is busy cozying up with The Establishment" as just another narrative (and one that we saw in this hearing from people like Hawley).

thundergolfer• 3 years ago

Appreciate the references you provide in this comment.

yyyk2• 3 years ago

The mainstream media cartel is pumping Sam Altman hard for some reason.

The media likes to personalize stories. Altman is a face for AI and apparently knows to give an interview, that's worth something to them. (Lobbying may well be an influence, but the most important thing to them is to have a face, just like Zuckerman was a face for social networks. If it wasn't Altman it would have eventually been someone else).

itronitron4• 3 years ago

I'm willing to follow dang if they decide to ditch HN and reboot it someplace separate from YC.

throwawaaarrgh2• 3 years ago

"Hello Congress, I have a lot of money invested in $BUSINESS and I don't want just anyone to be able to make $TECHNOLOGY because it might threaten my $BUSINESS.

Please make it harder for people other than myself (and especially people doing it for free and giving it away for free) to make $TECHNOLOGY. Thanks"

mesozoic• 3 years ago

He should only be allowed to influence this if they don't give OpenAI any license.

anoncow• 3 years ago

I am sorry if this is not the place to say this but - FUCK SAM ALTMAN AND FUCK MICROSOFT! Fucking shitheads want to make money and stunt technology development.

anigbrowl4• 3 years ago

OpenAI is really speedrunning the crony capitalism pipeline, astonishing what this technology allows us to achieve.

jacquesm• 3 years ago

Regulatory capture in progress. I used to have a bit of respect of Altman have spent time, bits and processing cycles here defending him in the past. As of now that respect has all but evaporated, this is a very bad stance. Either nobody gets to play with the new toys or everybody gets to play. What's next, classifying AI as munitions?

anticensor3• 3 years ago

That would be equivalent to requiring secret laws, as AI can also act as a decision system.

bequanna• 3 years ago

Smart.

An AI license and complicated regulatory framework is their chance to build a moat.

Only large companies will be able to afford the pay to play.

roody152• 3 years ago

Who watches the watchers? Does anyone truly believe the US and it’s agencies could responsibly “regulate” AI for the greater good?

Or would democratizing and going full steam ahead with open source alternatives be better for the greater good.

With the corporate influence over our current government regulatory agencies my personal view is open source alternatives are societies best bet!

UberFly• 3 years ago

While I do think we have to be wary of the powerful human manipulation tools that AI will produce, they (govt regulators) would never understand it enough to accomplish anything other than stifle it.

nsxwolf• 3 years ago

Pure Drug and Food Act, but for AI. Get in early and make regulations too expensive for upstarts to deal with.

leesec• 3 years ago

OpenAI builds popular product -> people complain and call for caution on Hackernews OpenAI recommends regulation -> people complain and call for freedom on Hackernews

amelius3• 3 years ago

What if China doesn't require licensing?

anticensor3• 3 years ago

Then an internet censorship operation would prevent accessing the Chinese model from outside the China (The is necessary, given there are four Chinas).

flangola73• 3 years ago

Sam Altman's hubris will get us all killed. It shouldn't be "licensed" it should be destroyed with the same furor as dangerous pathogens.

This small step of good today does not undo the fact that he is still plowing ahead in capability research.

dahwolf2• 3 years ago

It's easy to tell if an AI head genuinely cares about the impact of AI on society: they only talk about AI's output, never its input.

They train their models on the sum of humanity's digital labor and creativity and do so without permission, attribution or compensation. You'll never hear a word about this from them, which means ethics isn't a priority. It's all optics.

precompute6• 3 years ago

Yep. No page on OpenAI's website about the thousands of underpaid third-world workers that sit and label the data. They will try and build momentum and avoid the "uncomfortable" questions at all costs.

dahwolf2• 3 years ago

I empathize with that issue, especially the underpaid part, but superficially that work is still a type of value exchange based on consent: you do the labeling, you get paid (poorly).

Yet for the issue I discussed, there's no value exchange at all. There's no permission or compensation for the people that have done the actual work of producing the training material.

roody152• 3 years ago

Sad that ChatGPT uses the name OpenAI .. when it is literally the opposite of open.

glitcher2• 3 years ago

Naive question: isn't the genie kinda already out of the bottle? How is any type of regulation expected to stop bad actors from developing AI for nefarious purposes? Or would it just codify their punishment if they were caught?

precompute6• 3 years ago

The point of getting their foot in the door is enabling better data labelling for future models (which will be constantly updated). Basically cheap labor.

chrisco255• 3 years ago

Google, 2 weeks ago: "We have no moat, and neither does OpenAI." Sam Altman, today: "Hold my beer."

JieJie• 3 years ago

Here are my notes from the last hour, watching on C-SPAN telecast, which is archived here:

https://www.c-span.org/video/?528117-1/openai-ceo-testifies-...

- Mazie Hirono, Junior Senator from Hawaii, has very thoughtful questions. Very impressive.

- Gary Marcus also up there speaking with Sam Altman of OpenAI.

- So far, Sen. Hirono and Sen. Padilla seem very wary of regulating AI at this time.

- Very concerned about not "replicating social media's failure", why is it so biased and inequitable. Much more reasonable concerns.

- Also responding to questions is Christina Montgomery, chair of IBM's AI Ethics Board.

- "Work to generate a representative set of values from around the world."

- Sen. Ossoff asking for definition of "scope".

- "We could draw a line at systems that need to be licensed. Above this amount of compute... Define some capability threshold... Models that are less capable, we don't want to stop open source."

- Ossoff wants specifics.

- "Persuade, manipulate, influence person's beliefs." should be licensed.

- Ossoff asks about predicting human behavior, i.e. use in law enforcement, "It's very important we understand these are tools, not to take away human judgment."

- "We have no national privacy law." — Sen Ossof "Do you think we need one?"

- Sam "Yes. User should be able to opt out of companies using data. Easy to delete data. If you don't want your data use to train, you have right to exclude it."

- "There should be more ways to have your data taken down off the public web." —Sam

- "Limits on what a deployed model is capable of and also limits on what it will answer." — Sam

- "Companies who depend upon usage time, maximize engagement with perverse results. I would humbly advise you to get way ahead of this, the safety of children. We will look very harshly on technology that harms children."

- "We're not an advertising based model." —Sam

- "Requirements about how the values of these systems are set and how they respond to questions." —Sam

- Sen. Booker up now.

- "For congress to do nothing, which no one is calling for here, would be exceptional."

- "What kind of regulation?"

- "We don't want to slow things down."

- "A nimble agency. You can imagine a need for that, right?"

- "Yes." —Christina Montgomery

- "No way to put this genie back in the bottle." Sen. Booker

- "There are more genies yet to come from more bottles." — Gary Marcus

- "We need new tools, new science, transparency." —Gary Marcus

- "We did know that we wanted to build this with humanity's best interest at heart. We could really deeply transform the world." —Sam

- "Are you ever going to do ads?" —Sen Booker

- "I wouldn't say never...." —Sam

- "Massive corporate concentration is really terrifying.... I see OpenAI backed by Microsoft, Anthropic is backed by Google. I'm really worried about that. Are you worried?" —Sen Booker?

- "There is a real risk of technocracy combined with oligarchy." —Gary Marcus

- "Creating alignment dataset has got to come very broadly from society." —Sam Senator Welch from Vermont up now

- "I've come to the conclusion it's impossible for congress to keep up with the speed of technology."

- "The spread of disinformation is the biggest threat."

- "We absolutely have to have an agency. Scope has to be defined by congress. Unless we have an agency, we really don't have much of a defense against the bad stuff, and the bad stuff will come."

- Use of regulatory authority and the recognition that it can be used for good, but there's also legitimate concern of regulation being a negative influence."

- "What are some of the perils of an agency?"

- "America has got to continue to lead."

- "I believe it's possible to do both, have a global view. We want America to lead."

- "We still need open source to comply, you can still do harm with a smaller model."

- "Regulatory capture. Greenwashing." —Gary Marcus

- "Risk of not holding companies accountable for the harms they are causing today." —Christina Montgomery

- Lindsay Graham, very pro-licensing, "You don't build a nuclear power plant without a license, you don't build an AI without a license."

- Sen Blumenthal brings up Anti-Trust legislation.

- Blumenthal mentions how classified briefings already include AI threats.

- "For every successful regulation, you can think of five failures. I hope our experience here will be different."

- "We need to grapple with the hard questions here. This has brought them up, but not answered them."

- "Section 230"

- "How soon do you think gen AI will be self-aware?" —Sen Blumenthal

- "We don't understand what self-awareness is." —Gary Marcus

- "Could be 2 years, could be 20."

- "What are the highest risk areas? Ban? Strict rules?"

- "The space around misinformation. Knowing what content was generated by AI." —Christina Montgomery

- "Medical misinformation, hallucination. Psychiatric advice. Ersatz therapists. Internet access for tools, okay for search. Can they make orders? Can they order chemicals? Long-term risks." —Gary Marcus

- "Generative AI can manipulate the manipulators." —Blumenthal

- "Transparency. Accountability. Limits on use. Good starting point?" —Blumenthal

- "Industry should't wait for congress." —C. Montgomery

- "We don't have transparency yet. We're not doing enough to enforce it." —G. Marcus

- "AGI closer than a lot of people appreciate." —Blumenthall

- Gary and Sam are getting along and like each other now.

- Josh Hawley

- Talking about loss of jobs, invasion of personal privacy, manipulation of behavior, opinion, and degradation of free elections in America.

- "Are they right to ask for a pause?"

- "It did not call for a ban on all AI research or all AI, only on very specific thing, like GPT-5." -G Marcus

- "Moratorium we should focus on is deployment. Focus on safety." —G. Marcus

- "Without external review."

- "We waited more than 6 months to deploy GPT-4. I think the frame of the letter is wrong." —Sam

- Seems to not like the arbitrariness of "six months."

- "I'm not sure how practical it is to pause." —C. Montgomery

- Hawley brings up regulatory capture, usually get controlled by people they're supposed to be watching. "Why don't we just let people sue you?"

- If you were harmed by AI, why not just sue?

- "You're not protected by section 230."

- "Are clearer laws a good thing? Definitely, yes." —Sam

- "Would certainly make a lot of lawyers wealthy." —G. Marcus

- "You think it'd be slower than congress?" —Hawley

- Copyright, wholesale misinformation laws, market manipulation?" Which laws apply? System not thought through? Maybe 230 does apply? We don't know.

- "We can fix that." —Hawley

- "AI is not a shield." —C. Montgomery

- "Whether they use a tool or a human, they're responsible." —C. Montgomery

- "Safeguards and protections, yes. A flat stop sign? I would be very, very worried about." —Blumenthall

- "There will be no pause." Sen. Booker "Nobody's pausing."

- "I would agree." Gary Marcus

- "I have a lot of concerns about corporate intention." Sen Booker

- "What happens when these companies that already control so much of our lives when they are dominating this technology?" Booker

- Sydney really freaked out Gary. He was more freaked out when MS didn't withdraw Sydney like it did Tay.

- "I need to work on policy. This is frightening." G Marcus

- Cory admits he is a tech bro (lists relationships with investors, etc)

- "The free market is not what it should be." —C. Booker

- "That's why we started OpenAI." —Sam "We think putting this in the hands of a lot of people rather than the hands of one company." —Sam

- "This is a new platform. In terms of using the models, people building are doing incredible things. I can't believe you get this much technology for so little money." —Sam

- "Most industries resist reasonable regulation. The only way we're going to see democratization of values is if we enforce safety measures." —Cory Booker

- "I sense a willingness to participate that is genuine and authentic." —Blumenthal

berkle4455• 3 years ago

Sam Altman urges congress to build a tax-payer funded moat for his company.

scotuswroteus• 3 years ago

What a goof

tristor• 3 years ago

Reading this, it basically sounds like "Dear Congress, please grant me the bountiful gift of regulatory capture for my company OpenAI." I just lost a lot of respect for Sam Altman.

kubasienki• 3 years ago

Obvious power grab, the strong ones try to regulate so it will be harder for smaller to enter the market.

hello_computer• 3 years ago

Turns out the ML training moat wasn't nearly as big as they thought it was. Gotta neuter the next "two guys in a garage" before they make OpenAI and Microsoft's investment irrelevant.

zvolsky• 3 years ago

While I remain undecided on the matter, this whole debate is reminiscent of Karel Čapek's War with the Newts [1936]. In particular the public discourse from a time before the newts took over. "It would certainly be an overstatement to say that nobody at that time ever spoke or wrote about anything but the talking newts. People also talked and wrote about other things such as the next war, the economic crisis, football, vitamins and fashion; but there was a lot written about the newts, and much of it was very ill-informed. This is why the outstanding scientist, Professor Vladimir Uher (University of Brno), wrote an article for the newspaper in which he pointed out that the putative ability of Andrias Scheuchzer to speak, which was really no more than the ability to repeat spoken words like a parrot, ..." Note the irony of the professor's attempt to improve an ill-informed debate by contributing his own piece of misinformation, equating newt speech to mere parrot-like mimicry.

Čapek, intriguingly, happens to be the person who first used the word robot, which was coined by his brother.

http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks06/0601981h.html

Gargoyle_Bonaza• 3 years ago

Yeaah, no. Sounds terribly like a trying to make a monopoly.

martin_drapeau• 3 years ago

Isn't it too late? Isn't the cat out of the bag? https://www.semianalysis.com/p/google-we-have-no-moat-and-ne...

Meaning anyone could eventually reproduce a Chat GPT4 and beyond. And eventually it can run outside of a large data center.

So... how will you tell its an AI vs a human doing you wrong?

Seems to me if the AI breaks the law, find out who's driving it and prosecute them.

zoklet-enjoyer• 3 years ago

Mother fucker

johndbeatty• 3 years ago

Video: https://www.c-span.org/video/?528117-1/openai-ceo-testifies-...

cryptonector2• 3 years ago

Ah, a businessman seeking rents.

tehjoker• 3 years ago

Sam just wants to secure a monopoly position. The dude is a businessman, there's no way he buys his own bullshit.

itronitron4• 3 years ago

what a loser

thrill3• 3 years ago

The more independent quality AIs there are then the less likely that any one of them can talk the others into doing harm.

agnosticmantis2• 3 years ago

Let’s boycott all these AGI doom clowns by not buying/supporting their products and services.

AGI grifters are not just dishonest snake oil salespeople, but their lies also has a chilling effect on genuine innovation by deceiving the non-technical public into believing an apocalypse will happen unless they set obstacles on people’s path to innovation.

Yann LeCun and Andrew Ng are two prominent old timers who are debunking the existential nonsense that the AI PR industrial machine is peddling to hinder innovation, after they benefited from the open research environment.

ØpenAI’s scummy behavior has already led the industry to be less open to sharing advances, and now they’re using lobbying to kill new competition in the bud.

Beyond all else the hypocrisy is just infuriating and demoralizing.

graycat3• 3 years ago

In simple terms:

Credibility and Checking. We have ways of checking suggestions. Without passing such checks, for anything new, in simple terms. there is no, none, zero credibility. Current AI does not fundamentally change this situation: The AI output starts with no, none, zero credibility and to be taken seriously needs to be checked by traditional means.

AI is smart or soon will be? Maybe so, but I don't believe it. Whatever, to be taken seriously, e.g., as more than just wild suggestions to get credibility from elsewhere, AI results still need to be checked by traditional means.

Our society has long checked nearly ALL claims from nearly ALL sources before taking the claims seriously, and AI needs to pass the same checks.

I checked the credibility of ChatGPT for being smart by asking

(i) Given triangle ABC, construct D on AB and E on BC so that the lengths AD = DE = EC.

Results: Grade of flat F. Didn't make any progress at all.

(ii) Solve the initial value problem of ordinary differential equation

y'(t) = k y(t) ( b - y(t) )

Results: Grade of flat F. Didn't make any progress at all.

So, the AI didn't actually learn either high school plane geometry or freshman college calculus.

For the hearings today, we have from Senator Blumenthal

(1) "... this apparent reasoning ..."

(2) "... the promise of curing cancer, of developing new understandings of physics and biology ..."

Senator, you have misunderstood:

For (1), the AI is not "reasoning", e.g., can't reason with plane geometry or calculus. Instead, as in example you gave with a clone of your voice and based on your Senate floor speeches, the AI just rearranged some of your words.

For (2), the AI is not going to cure cancer or "develop new" anything.

If some researcher does find a cure for a cancer and publishes the results in a paper and AI reads the paper, there is still no expectation that the AI will understand any of it -- recall, the AI does NOT "understand" either high school plane geometry or freshman college calculus. And without some input with a recognized cure for the cancer, the AI won't know how to cure the cancer. If the cure for cancer is already in the training data, then the AI might be able to regurgitate the cure.

Again, the AI does NOT "understand" either high school plane geometry or freshman college calculus and, thus, there is no reasonable hope that the AI will cure cancer or contribute anything new and correct about physics or biology.

Or, Springer Verlag uses printing presses to print books on math, but the presses have no understanding of the math. And AI has no real understanding of high school plane geometry, freshman college calculus, cancer, physics, or biology.

The dangers? To me, Senator Blumenthal starts with no, none, zero understanding of AI. To take his claims seriously, I want to check out the claims with traditional means. Now I've done that. His claims fail. His opinions have no credibility. For AI, I want to do the same -- check the output with traditional means before taking the output seriously.

This checking defends me from statements from politicians AND from AI. AI dangerous? Same as for politicians, not if do the checking.

Invictus0• 3 years ago

What an asshole

courseofaction• 3 years ago

THEY NEEDED THEIR MOAT AND THEY'RE GOING FOR LEGISLATION.

THIS MUST NEVER HAPPEN. HIGHER INTELLIGENCE SHOULD NOT BE THE EXCLUSIVE DOMAIN OF THE RICH.

kerkeslager• 3 years ago

AI licenses might be a good idea if there was any representation of human interests here in the licensure requirements, but that's not what this is. I trust Altman to represent corporate interests, which is to say I don't trust Sam Altman to represent human interests.

krychu• 3 years ago

From what I understand OpenAI has been moving away from “open” with various decisions over the time. Proposing that only selected folks can build AI seems like the antithesis of openness?

Animats• 3 years ago

This is a diversion from the real problem. Regulating AI is really about regulating corporate behavior. What's needed is regulation along these lines:

* Automated systems should not be permitted to make adverse decisions against individuals. This is already law in the EU, although it's not clear if it is enforced. This is the big one. Any company using AI to make decisions which affect external parties in any way must not be allowed to require any waiver of the right to sue, participate in class actions, or have the case heard by a jury. Those clauses companies like to put in EULAs would become invalid as soon as an AI is involved anywhere.

* All marketing content must be signed by a responsible party. AI systems increase the amount of new content generated for marketing purposes substantially. This is already required in the US, but weakly enforced. Both spam and "influencers" tend to violate this. The problem isn't AI, but AI makes it worse, because it's cheaper than troll farms, and writes better.

* Anonymous political speech may have to go. That's a First Amendment right in the US, but it's not unlimited. You should be able to say anything you're willing to sign.[1] This is, again, the troll farm problem, and, again, AIs make it worse.

That's probably enough to deal with the immediate problems.

[1] https://mtsu.edu/first-amendment/article/32/anonymous-speech

smsm42• 3 years ago

We have some technology that others don't yet, please government make it so that this would be the case as long as possible, for reasons totally having nothing to do with us having the technology, we swear.

vinay_ys4• 3 years ago

There's no need to go the license way, yet. They can do some simple safety regulations – put a restriction on using AI with kinetic devices, life-critical situations, critical financial situations, and any situation where human is completely out of the loop. Also, put clear liability for harm caused in any situations where AI was involved on the AI supplier. Also, they can put disclosure rules on any company that is spending more than $10M on AI.

m463• 3 years ago

wow, not one comment here seems to address the first sentence of the article:

    the use of artificial intelligence to interfere with election integrity
    is a "significant area of concern", adding that it needs regulation.

Can't there be regulation so that AI doesn't interfere with the election process?

notatoad• 3 years ago

this is one of those distractions that makes your argument seem better by attatching it to a better but unrelated argument. there's probably a name for that.

regulation to protect the integrity of elections is good and necessary. is there any reason to think that there needs to be regulation specific to AI that doesn't apply to other situations? Whether you use ChatGPT or Mechanical Turk to write your thousands of spam posts on social media to sway the election isn't super-relevant. it's the attempt to influence the election that should be regulated, not the AI.

retrocryptid• 3 years ago

So... he wants the government to enforce a monopoly? Um...

smolder• 3 years ago

He also said companies should have the right to say they do not want their data used for AI training, which is one idea being discussed on Capitol Hill. Altman said, however, that material on the public web would be fair game.

Why is this only mentioned as a right of companies and not individuals? It seems to hint at the open secret of the stratified west: most of us are just cows for the self-important C-levels of the world to farm. If you haven't got money, you haven't got value.

CraigRood• 3 years ago

If the idea that whats on the public web is fair game, you kill the public web. I wonder if this is their plan?

xnx• 3 years ago

Not the first time that OpenAI has claimed their technology is so good it's dangerous. (From early 2019: https://techcrunch.com/2019/02/17/openai-text-generator-dang...) This is the equivalent of martial artists saying that their hands have to be registered as deadly weapons.

HDThoreaun6• 3 years ago

50% of AI researchers think there’s a greater than 10% chance that AI causes human extinction. It’s not only openAI and sam who think this is dangerous.

Satam3• 3 years ago

They have no real models to base their predictions on. It's speculation at the level of "what happens if an immovable meets an unstoppable force". No rigor in it.

progbits• 3 years ago

Folks here like to talk about voting with your wallet.

I just cancelled my OpenAI subscription. If you are paying them and disagree with this, maybe you should too?

Don't worry, I have no naive hopes this will hurt them enough to matter, but principles are principles.

graycat3• 3 years ago

Watched, listened to Altman's presentation.

Objection (1). He said "AI" many times but gave not even a start on a definition. So, how much and what new technology is he talking about.

Objection (2) The committee mentioned trusting the AI results. In my opinion, that is just silly because the AI results have no credibility before passing some severe checks. Then any trust is not from any credibility of the AI but from passing the checks.

We already have math and physical science and means for checking the results. The results, checked with the means, are in total much more impressive, powerful, credible, and valuable than ChatGPT. Still before we take math/physical science results at all seriously, we want the results checked.

So, the same for other new technologies, ChatGPT or called AI or not, check before taking seriously.

Objection (3) We don't ask for licenses for the publication of math/physical science. Instead, we protect ourselves with the checking of the results. In my opinion, we should continue to check, for anything called AI or anything new, but don't need licenses.

freyes• 3 years ago

Ah, early players trying to put barriers for new actors, nothing like a regulated market for the ones who donate money to politicians.

davedx• 3 years ago

Altman: "I believe that companies like ours can partner with governments including ensuring that the most powerful AI models adhere to a set of safety requirements, facilitating processes to develop and update safety measures, and examining opportunities for global coordination"

kristopherkane• 3 years ago

How many groupBy() statements constitutes AI?

ftxbro• 3 years ago

is this regulatory capture

molave• 3 years ago

One more step towards OpenAI's transformation to ClosedAI. AI as implemented today presents many valid questions on ethics. This move, at first glance, is more on artificially making the technology scarce so OpenAI can increase its profit.

matteoraso• 3 years ago

How would you even enforce this? Building AI at home is easy enough, and it's not like you have to tell anybody that your program uses AI.

ngneer• 3 years ago

Sometimes those who have gotten on the bus will try pushing out those who have not. Since when do corporations invite regulation?

aussiegreenie• 3 years ago

OpenAI was ment to be "open" and develope AI for good. OpenAi became everything it said was wrong. Open source models ran locally are the answer but what is the question?

Change is coming quickly. There will be users and there will losers. Hopefully, we can finially get productivity into the information systems.

dzonga• 3 years ago

ah, the good ol' regulatory capture.

sam must been hanging out with Peter thiel big time.

laws and big government for you, not for me type of thing.

chrismsimpson• 3 years ago

Could be translated as “OpenAI CEO concerned his competitive advantage may be challenged”

XorNot• 3 years ago

Good lord, this all turned into regulatory capture quite quickly.

Someone update the short story where owning compilers and debuggers is illegal to include a guy being thrown in jail for doing K-means clustering.

Mobius01• 3 years ago

I apologize that I can’t read all threads and responses, but this sounds like Altman and OpenAI have realized they have a viable path to capture most of the AÍ market value and now they’re pulling the ladder behind them.

kashyapc• 3 years ago

This is besides the main point, I really wish "Open AI" renamed themselves to "Opaque AI" or something else.

Their twisted use of the term "open" is a continued disrespect to all those people who are tirelessly working in the true spirit of open source.

intalentive• 3 years ago

"Competition is for losers"

vasili111• 3 years ago

If you stop progress in AI in US other countries will go ahead in that field. US cannot loss and give lead in AI to other countries. Instead it is better to focus on minimization of the harm by AI in other ways. For example, if the fake information is the problem instead it is better to focus on the education of the people about fake information and how to identify it.

belter• 3 years ago

Did not have the time to watch the recording yet, but was there any discussion about protecting the copyright of the creators of the sources used to train the models? Or do I need to call my friends in the music industry to finally have it addressed? :-)

uptown• 3 years ago

Did he bring his Dreamwindow?

https://twitter.com/next_on_now/status/1653837352198873090?s...

chrgy2• 3 years ago

My comment on this is simple, regulate the one who is saying he needs or ask for regulation, and free the rest of the market! Meaning 100% regulate big players like Openai, Microsoft, Google etc, and let free the smaller players. I heavily like the @happytiger's comment!

leach• 3 years ago

Translation:

Hi my company is racing toward AGI, let’s make sure no other companies can even try.

mark_l_watson2• 3 years ago

All major industries have achieved regulatory capture in the USA: lobbyists for special interests have Congress and the Executive Branch in their pockets.

This seems like a legal moat that will only allow very wealthy corporations to make maximum use of AI.

In the EU, it has been reported that new laws will keep companies like Hugging Face from offering open source models via APIs.

I think a pretty good metaphor is: the wealthy and large corporations live in large beautiful houses (metaphor for infrastructure) and common people live like mice in the walls, quietly living out their livelihoods and trying to not get noticed.

I really admire the people in France and Israel who have taken to the streets in protest this year over actions of their governments. Non-violent protest is a pure and beneficial part of democracy and should be more widely practiced, even though in cases like Occupy Wall Street, some non-violent protesters were very badly abused.

josh2600• 3 years ago

Why not just ITAR everything AI?

It worked out well for encryption in the 90’s…

abxytg• 3 years ago

I think as an industry we need to disrespect these people in person when we see them! This is unacceptable and anti social behavior and if I ever see Sam Altman I'll let him know!

People love to kowtow to these assholes as they walk all over us. Fuck sam. Fuck other sam. Fuck elon. Fuck zuck. Fuck jack. Fuck these people man. I dont care about your politics this is nasty!

pgt• 3 years ago

I think the game-theoretical way to look at this is that AI will be regulated no matter what, so Altman might as well propose it early on and have a say before competitors do.

I_am_tiberius• 3 years ago

I don't trust Sam Altman since he said he doesn't understand decentralized finance and 2 months later he started crying on twitter because the startups he invested in were almost losing their money during the SVB collapse.

stainablesteel• 3 years ago

now that my business is established, i'd like to make it illegal for anyone to compete with me

people would easily work remote for companies established in other countries

carrja99• 3 years ago

Trying to put that not up eh?

mrangle5• 3 years ago

Blatant attempts at regulatory capture should be an anti-competitive crime. At the very least, Altman should now be more scrutinized by the Feds going forward.

fredgrott• 3 years ago

we seem to forget history:

1. Who recalls the Jutland battle in early 20th century? We got treaties on limits to battleship building. Naval tech switched to aircraft and carriers.

2. Later mid 20th century Russians tried to scare world into not using microwaves due to their failure to get a patent on the maser. World ignored it and moved forward.

That is just two examples. SA is wrong, progress will move around any prosed regulation or law and that is proven by past history of how we overcome such things in the first place.

capitanazo77• 3 years ago

Do we really want politicians involved???? Have you heard them??

stretchwithme• 3 years ago

Controls over AI just help those not subject to those controls.

major505• 3 years ago

Oh yeah.... putting the government who get campaing donations from big tech in the middle of all is gonna make everything ok.

elihu• 3 years ago

My suggestions:

Don't regulate AI directly, but rather how it's used, and make it harder for companies to horde, access, and share huge amounts of personal information.

1) Impose strict privacy rules prohibiting companies from sharing personal information without their consent. If customers withhold their consent, they may not retaliate or degrade their services for that customer in any way.

2) Establish a clear line of accountability that establishes some party as directly responsible for what the AI does. If a self-driving car gets a speeding ticket, it should be clear who is liable. If you use a racist AI to make hiring decisions, "the algorithm made me hire only white people" is no defense -- and maybe the people who made the racist AI in the first place are responsible too.

3) Require AI in some contexts to act in the best interests of the user (similar concept to a fiduciary -- or maybe it's exactly the same thing). In contexts where it's not required, it should be clear to the user that the AI is not obligated to act in their best interests.

trappist• 3 years ago

It seems to me every licensing regime begins with incumbents lobbying for protection from competition, then goes down in history as absolutely necessary consumer protection programs.

mrangle5• 3 years ago

One might think that Altman doesn't have a shot at this ham-fisted attempt at regulatory capture.

The issue is that the political class will view his suggestion, assuming they didn't give it to him in the first place (likely), through the lens of their own self-interest.

Self-interest will dictate whether or not sure-to-fail regulations will be applied.

If AI threatens the power of the political class, they will attempt to regulate it.

If the power of the political class continues to trend toward decline, then they will try literally anything to arrest that trend. Including regulating AI and much else.

nomilk• 3 years ago

Won't this just push AI development out of the US?

jtode• 3 years ago

"Billionaire class sends Sam Altman to get AI away from the peons"

Superpencil• 3 years ago

You can’t regulate LLMs; it’s a global technology.

Sam’s just trying to placate the officials in a way that allows his company to continue.

“Oh others are dangerous please regulate I’m so worried”

wintorez• 3 years ago

Whatever the US Congress comes up with wouldn't matter in the long run. I don't think other countries would line up for licenses for building AI. At this point, it's like trying to control the weather.

TechBro8615• 3 years ago

I'll be honest: I intend on ignoring any rules these geriatrics and monopolists come up with regarding what software I can write or execute on my own hardware. I'm sure most here feel the same way. They couldn't stop me from torrenting Ubuntu distributions, or encrypting messages to my bank's web server, and they're damn sure not going to stand in the way of my paperclip collection.

bandika• 3 years ago

Ridiculous, to be honest. If the congress really worries about AI, they should ask the best philosophers and sociologists about the affect of AI on society rather than asking the creator of the latest AI technology...

fpiacenza• 3 years ago

"We have no MOAT, so let's make it an Oligopoly through lobbying."

snorrah• 3 years ago

He’s a cunt, op

concordDance5• 3 years ago

I'm seeing a lot of posts by people who obviously haven't read the full transcript given they specifically discuss regulatory capture and the need to ensure small companies can still do AI development.

See 2:09:40 in https://www.youtube.com/live/iqVxOZuqiSg

yeah_ok_vc_bro• 3 years ago

As others have said but worth reiterating - lobbying for regulatory oversight is the playbook to get a government imposed monopoly / oligopoly.

It is a calculated strategy designed to keep others out and reap monopoly profits (or as close to them as possible) by virtue of preferred access to elected leaders.

"Open"AI wants to tax the entire AI economy and they are happy to burn every innovative thing around them in order to make it happen (because those 'innovative things' aren't 'compliant' with the rules they lobbied for of course, therefore "Open"AI are one of the only / preferred games in town).

This should be fought against tooth and nail.

AI is already regulated under the fair use doctrine and we should encourage the Cambrian explosion of AI innovation, which is caustic to "Open"AI, to continue unabated.

America, and western democracies to a lesser extent, have an advantage currently - the proposals by "Open"AI are designed to and will ensure we regress to the mean that is China.

rednerrus• 3 years ago

This is how regulatory capture works.

graderjs2• 3 years ago

Such a scum move. What is this guy, a deep state puppet? YC is not sending their best people.

Assume the CIA motivation of American primacy: OK fair enough, but is the way to achieve that really through the creation of a few small super monopolies?

What’s wrong with a bit of 1980s style unregulated capitalism when it comes to AI right now? Can not we all theoretically have a chance to build companies, train models build great new products, get rich?

Why months after this tech was first released to the public are we seemingly being denied that within the United States via regulation?

How can Sam Altman claim to be from a company that create AI for all? It’s like the thinnest ministry of truth cover story ever. “Oh yeah, we’re all about AI ethics AI openness, creating AI for all” and then we just gonna create a super monopoly with regulatory capture—only riches for me, but not for thee.

I mean, this is a new fucking gold rush right now, right? so I guess this is sort of like prospecting licenses, but it seems worse than that.

winddude• 3 years ago

fuck sam altman!

jiggawatts• 3 years ago

"Now that we're ahead, please make a law to maintain our moat."

sourcecodeplz• 3 years ago

Who cares... No one is gonna stop me using electricity and my gpu/CPU.

nyc_data_geek1• 3 years ago

Aka, "Build a moat for me, Uncle Sam!"

menacingly• 3 years ago

Yes, exactly what we need in the most critical competitive space of a generation is deliberately burdensome hurdles in front of specifically US innovators

xwdv• 3 years ago

“There is nothing more powerful than an idea whose time has come.”

This quote has never been more true than when applied to AI.

jmount• 3 years ago

Sure, but how about OpenAI doesn't get a license?

627467• 3 years ago

Everything is exponential indeed. Compared to mark Zuckerberg and Facebook, how much faster has openAi and Sam gone to try regulatory capture?

robomartin• 3 years ago

I get the feeling that a lot of commenters on this thread did not bother to watch the congressional hearing at all. Comments seem to be painting extremes that were not part of this hearing at all.

It was almost refreshing in that discussions these days --of any kind, not just hearings-- seem to devolve into people tossing feces at each other rather than having constructive engagement.

Well worth watching. Likely one of many to come.

didntknowya• 3 years ago

"once you're established in a new field, you want to add as many barriers as possible to others trying to get established"

taken from a reddit comment, but yea another classic virtue signaling. as sleazy as it gets.

exabrial• 3 years ago

No. This is just a way to create monopolies.

What a pathetic attempt.

10g1k• 3 years ago

"Hey Congress, now that my company is getting big, please restrict the market so we can corner it completely. No conflict of interest here. Just some altruistic public service."

quickthrower2• 3 years ago

The easy take is to be cynical: he is now building his drawbridge.

But taking him as a genuine "concerned citizen" - I don't think AI licensing is going to be effective. The government are pretty useless at punishing big corporations, to the point where I would say corporations have almost immunity from criminal prosecution. [1]. Therefore the kinds of companies that will do bad things with AI, the need for a license wont stop them. Especially as it is hard for anyone to see what they are running on their GPUs.

[1] https://ag.ny.gov/press-release/2023/attorney-general-james-...

d--b• 3 years ago

Altman wants to be the good guy so bad and instead is turning into the poster child of everything that’s wrong in Silicon Valley.

His personal goals have always been very laudable. His stance on Universal Basic Income for instance stems from a genuine belief that its adoption would eliminate poverty altogether.

But then the reality of both technical challenges and money implications kicks in and everything turns to shit.

OpenAi may want to build an AI that helps all humanity, but it turns out that the thing they stumbled upon was a chat bot that makes shit up. This great technology unfortunately cuts both ways, and the edge that’s facing us seems way sharper than the other. And then the money that’s required to run the thing is so huge that they had to compromise everything they said they wouldn’t do.

Meanwhile the Orb’s UBI experiment is only funny because its ridiculously dystopian technology has zero chances to ever catch on.

At some point, the industry really should try and figure out what the fuck it is we’re trying to do. Cause right now, it really looks like computers only brought us two things: corporate databases and TVs we can watch on the toilet.

barbariangrunge• 3 years ago

"you made that up!" is one of the most common phrases I type into chatGPT these days, after which it apologizes and admits the mistake and then tells a new lie

tapvt• 3 years ago

So asking Congress for a competitive advantage?

astrea• 3 years ago

Smells like regulatory capture. Also, how are the same dinosaurs that fumbled the other tech hearings going to comprehend (let alone robustly define) “AI”?

mbrochh• 3 years ago

I hope it is slowly starting to become clear that this Sam is not our friend...

RecycledEle• 3 years ago

When I taught at a business school, our textbooks told us that once a company had a large lead in a field, they should ask for regulation. Regulations build walls to protect their lead by increasing the cost to compete against them.

I believe this is what OpenAI is doing, and it makes me sad as a teacher.

AI is the greatest tool for equity and social justice in history. Any poor person with Internet access can learn (almost) anything from ChatGPT (http://chat.openai.com)

A bright student trapped in a garbage school where the kid to his right is stoned and the kid to his left is looking up porn on a phone can learn from personalized AI tutors.

While some complain that AI will take our jobs, they are ignoring the effect of competition. Humans will become smarter with AI tutors. Humans will become more capable with AI assistants. With AI an individual can compete with a large corporation. It reminds me of the early days of the World Wide Web and the "Online, nobody knows you are a dog" memes.

I hope the best hope many bright and poor kids have is not taken away to protect the power bases of the rich and powerful. They deserve a chance.

dragonwriter3• 3 years ago

AI is the greatest tool for equity and social justice in history.

Maybe it has that potential, but as actually applied its actually not, in net, a force in that direction.

While some complain that AI will take our jobs, they are ignoring the effect of competition.

No, they are just paying attention to the actual effects of capitalism, not the ideal effects of optimal competition.

Humans will become more capable with AI assistants. With AI an individual can compete with a large corporation.

Not if the large corporation has the resources to run far more powerful AI, has proprietary control of the best AI, etc…

I hope the best hope many bright and poor kids have is not taken away to protect the power bases of the rich and powerful.

That’s what capitalism does. Why would this be any different?

vivegi• 3 years ago

It is too early to regulate.

Let them first enforce existing regulation around the blatant unauthorized use of data (such as the creative output of artists, programmers etc.,) without explicit consent. For example, just like how the US Library of Congress receives a copy of each print publication for archival and reference purposes, Congress can enable the archival / storage of datasets for the purposes of AI research. Willing participants can deposit copies of their data sets (or URLs to source) and it would do more for AI research as a public good. The licensing terms could protect the rights of those who own copyrights on the datasets. There can even be commercial licenses enabled (already happens for legal documents such as court judgments ets.,).

If US Congress regulates too soon to constrain rather than enable, the tech companies would just setup shop in other jurisdictions where such regulatory hurdles don't exist.

pavelstoev• 3 years ago

AI/ML is a disruptive tech with huge financial benefits. History has shown us that government regulation of disruptive technologies can often have unintended consequences and push those technologies into the shadows, where they are harder to monitor and control. For example, during the manufacturing revolution in the 19th century, many governments attempted to regulate the new factories and their working conditions, but these regulations often resulted in factories moving to countries with fewer regulations and lower costs.

Similarly, during the Prohibition era in the United States, the ban on alcohol only fueled a thriving dark market and increased criminal activity. In the case of AI, any government regulation could limit the positive financial benefits of AI technology, so there will be actors who will take advantage of that. Furthermore, regulation is unlikely to prevent malicious actors from using AI in harmful ways. Regulation could drive the development and use of AI underground, making it even harder to monitor and control. As we have seen with other emerging technologies, such as biological cloning, government regulation often lags behind the technology itself, and by the time regulations are in place, the technology has already advanced beyond their reach. The same is likely to be true for AI.

Instead of relying on government regulation, the development and use of AI should be guided by ethical principles and best practices established by the AI industry itself. This approach has been successful in other industries, such as engineering, architecture, finance and medicine, and can help ensure that AI is developed and used responsibly while still allowing for innovation and progress.

"No man's life, liberty, or property are safe while the legislature is in session." - Mark Twain

rockemsockem• 3 years ago

Since no one here watched the actual hearings, I feel like I should point out that he said that nothing at the level they've created today should be eligible for any "licensing".

If you did watch the hearings it would have been pretty clear that the goal of any such licensing would be to prevent the runaway AI scenario or AGI from being unknowingly being created. It's obvious that some sort of agency would need to be set up far in advance of when it's possible for runaway AI to happen. Regulatory capture was also specifically brought up as a potential downside.

This article is just pushing a cynical narrative for clicks and y'all are eating it up.

quailfarmer• 3 years ago

I watched the hearing, but didn’t read the article, and I was going to say. These comments are far more vitriolic than I would have expected.

iNic• 3 years ago

Having also watched the hearing I was pretty surprised at all the negativity in the comments. My view of Sam Altman has improved after watching the hearings. He seems to sincerely believe that he is doing the right thing. He owns zero equity in OpenAI and has no financial incentive. Of course, if you don't buy the AI might be dangerous argument then this seems just like theatrics. But there are clear threats with the existing models [1], and I believe there will be even greater threats in the future (see Superintelligence or The Precipice or Human Compatible). Also this [2], and this master list of failures [3].

[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.06972 [2]: https://arxiv.org/abs/2210.01790 [3]: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/e/2PACX-1vRPiprOaC3Hs...

ddingus• 3 years ago

I do not trust the motives here. It is hard to find a more textbook example of regulatory capture.

Now, to be fair, Altman may be proposing this to shut more draconian regulations down.

But it smells bad. And I am definitely not the only one holding that opinion.

This should be a public debate process at a minimum.

Now, that out of the way, what happens when others do not require licenses and or choose to build what they want anyway?

The US is not the world.

mariojv• 3 years ago

Even if you assume good intent with regards to regulating AI, how could regulation possibly be effective in this sphere? Wouldn't people just train models in friendly jurisdictions or run their corporate entities there?

IAmGraydon• 3 years ago

Scumbag goes before old people to scare them and reduce competition for his product. This guy is everything that’s wrong with the world.

upwardbound• 3 years ago

One thing that I think is very interesting, which is highlighted in this other article https://apnews.com/article/chatgpt-openai-ceo-sam-altman-con... , is that Mr. Altman warns that we are on the verge of very troubling A.I. Escape scenarios. He specifically said that there should be a ban on A.I. that can "self-replicate and self-exfiltrate into the wild". The fact that he thinks that such a thing could happen in the near future is f**ing terrifying. That would be the first step in A.I. escaping human control and posing a grave threat to our species' survival.

LightBug1• 3 years ago

Just another CEO pushing for regulatory capture.

The playbook as old as time.

Just sad to see Altman become just another corporate stooge.

eloop• 3 years ago

In the light of the Google "moat" document, this would appear to a cynical attempt to monopolize the field before it gets going.

MagicMoonlight• 3 years ago

Yes yes fellow consumers! We must impose an artificial monopoly to protect ourselves!

Only one company can be trusted, their competitors are evil. We must ban them.

bredren• 3 years ago

Why does this idea matter, when open source models and tools are moving at the speed they are in already?

Wouldn’t such licenses create even greater incentive to develop and release models and tools outside the regulatory environment?

jbverschoor• 3 years ago

The reason he wants licenses is to protect his position. I've watched the whole things, and my god, what a load of politics.

fennecfoxy• 3 years ago

Ahaha, so Google were right. Except their internal response was to be like "hey guys, we're behind and we're not going to be able to compete with open source, we need to join forces with and support them if we want to compete" whereas OpenAI's response to open source models is...this, apparently.

demarq• 3 years ago

We really ought to boycott openai, and prevent our organisations using their tech.

If profits matter so much, then that’s where it hurts.

aunterste• 3 years ago

What an excellent way to protect your business from other non-corporate entrants. Regulation hurdles to keep emerging businesses from coming in.

aigoochamna• 3 years ago

Of course... now that OpenAI has built a moat they want to wall it off and make it harder for everyone else. Right...

KETpXDDzR• 3 years ago

I wonder how they want to regulate open source models. Sure, they can shut down Higgingface et al, but that doesn't prevent anyone from torrenting the models.

shokhie• 3 years ago

sam altman seems like kamsky of the detroit game.

b3nji• 3 years ago

Skeptical me things the cat is out of the bag, and they are scrambling to capture it back. The amount that has been invested into OpenAi is massive, imagine if it's all for nothing?

We can run this stuff at home, on a Pixel, or even laptop.

Open source is lapping them, and they are running to the government to help.

dinvlad• 3 years ago

Sam has turned into (or maybe has always been) just another technobro grifter. He has lost all of his credibility with his moves and statements on OpenAI.

Sam Altman goes before US Congress to propose licenses for building AI

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