Many AI safety orgs have tried to criminalize currently-existing open-source AI(1a3orn.com)
1a3orn.com
Many AI safety orgs have tried to criminalize currently-existing open-source AI
https://1a3orn.com/sub/machine-learning-bans.html
389 comments
There is a bigger reason why the end of open source AI might be close: as soon as training data becomes licensed, that’s it for open source AI. Poof.
I wish I could be more eloquent on this point, but I’ve mostly just been depressed about this seeming inevitability.
Hopefully it won’t be the case. But how could it be otherwise? Hundreds of thousands of people are mad at openai and midjourney for doing exactly what open source AI needs to do in order to survive: fine tune or train from scratch.
As soon as some politician makes it a platform issue, it seems like the law will simply be rewritten to prevent companies from using training data at will. It’s such a compelling story: "big companies are stealing data owned by small businesses and individuals." So even if the court cases are decided in OpenAI’s favor, it’s not at all clear that the issue will be settled.
I wish I could be more eloquent on this point, but I’ve mostly just been depressed about this seeming inevitability.
Hopefully it won’t be the case. But how could it be otherwise? Hundreds of thousands of people are mad at openai and midjourney for doing exactly what open source AI needs to do in order to survive: fine tune or train from scratch.
As soon as some politician makes it a platform issue, it seems like the law will simply be rewritten to prevent companies from using training data at will. It’s such a compelling story: "big companies are stealing data owned by small businesses and individuals." So even if the court cases are decided in OpenAI’s favor, it’s not at all clear that the issue will be settled.
There are many types of safety. For example, protecting your profits! I'd imagine that if we trace the money back these organisations will look a lot like lobbyists for existing companies in the AI space. I recall Microsoft's licence enforcement effort was done with that sort of scheme, I think they used the BSA [0]. It has been a while though so maybe it was a different group.
Anyway, point being, if they can lobby for something unpopular under a different brand, that is how to do it. Much less PR risk.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_Alliance
Anyway, point being, if they can lobby for something unpopular under a different brand, that is how to do it. Much less PR risk.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_Alliance
I find it unhelpful that several different ideas are covered under the blanket term of AI safety.
- There is AI safety in terms of producing "safe", politically correct outputs, no porn, etc.
- There is AI safety in terms of mass society/election manipulation.
- There is AI safety in terms of strong AI that kills us all a la Eliezer Yudkowsky.
I feel like these three have very little in common and it makes all debates less efficient.
- There is AI safety in terms of producing "safe", politically correct outputs, no porn, etc.
- There is AI safety in terms of mass society/election manipulation.
- There is AI safety in terms of strong AI that kills us all a la Eliezer Yudkowsky.
I feel like these three have very little in common and it makes all debates less efficient.
Government knows that random people having the ability to use "AI" without their control and oversight reduces their ever expanding reach. As the article demonstrates, the groundwork is already being laid by these "think tanks" to prevent a repeat of Llama 2.
We truly need an AI Stallman. FOSS AI models need to become a movement, like the push for a FOSS UNIX became in the 80s and 90s. Sadly when I wrote to Stallman on the subject he seemed disinterested/defeatist, and mostly dismissed the idea of a GPL for model weights. Looks like millennials/gen Z must become more interested in these matters ourselves, however we seem to be disinterested in politics and even more disinterested in how the devices we use daily _actually_ work than Gen X.
We truly need an AI Stallman. FOSS AI models need to become a movement, like the push for a FOSS UNIX became in the 80s and 90s. Sadly when I wrote to Stallman on the subject he seemed disinterested/defeatist, and mostly dismissed the idea of a GPL for model weights. Looks like millennials/gen Z must become more interested in these matters ourselves, however we seem to be disinterested in politics and even more disinterested in how the devices we use daily _actually_ work than Gen X.
Most AI Safety folks do leave the feeling they strongly believe what they are preaching. Whether or not they are right is an entirely different discussion.
However, funding for AI Safety is clearly in some part motivated by either regulatory capture, or protectionism of some sort.
We need some well-meaning doomsayers so their claims can be used to advance whatever other goals (mostly creating barrier to entry on the market for economical or political reasons.)
However, funding for AI Safety is clearly in some part motivated by either regulatory capture, or protectionism of some sort.
We need some well-meaning doomsayers so their claims can be used to advance whatever other goals (mostly creating barrier to entry on the market for economical or political reasons.)
Never underestimate the desire of existing systems of control or power to self-propagate.
I'm sure there are many well meaning ai safety researchers, but I also see a lott of "ai for me but not for thee' moat digging safety hypocrisy.
1. Licensing of data will be huge bottleneck
2. Uncensored results will be used against opensource models questions hovering in dark or grey area
3. Limited compute compared to big corp and model size gap 7B for opensource and closed source would be magnitude bigger
It’s kind of funny to me that these organizations are naming FLOP thresholds and crowning MMLU as the relevant evaluation metric. Seems that several of them have copy-pasted similar thresholds. As compute becomes cheaper, these thresholds will become cheaper and cheaper. Perhaps we will look back on them as quaint and nearsighted.
Who are these people and where do they get their funding from? Feels like sock-puppets of sama or something? Is there any insight into that?
The ban of nuclear power plants is good example how regulation is working in the end. As almost everything this is double edged sword. From regulations this early everyone except us would profit. It is like regulate car's from going faster than horses in eighteen hundreds.
It’s extremely messed up and vindictive to try and turn people into criminals for your agenda or just for profit in a lot of cases.
Psycho behavior
Psycho behavior
"Technology policy should not unquestioningly assume that all technological progress is beneficial, or that complete scientific openness is always best, or that the world has the capacity to manage any potential downside of a technology after it is invented."
Don't watch the anime if you haven't read the manga: https://nickbostrom.com/papers/vulnerable.pdf
Don't watch the anime if you haven't read the manga: https://nickbostrom.com/papers/vulnerable.pdf
Wow, so many good comments here on the bullshit of people trying to ban access to open weight smaller models. Right on.
If you do want to worry about unsafe AI (I don't) then worry about GPT-5 and later huge multi-modal models.
As a (retired, but still playing) developer I love having open weight models available as a tool to use for both embedding in applications and as a tool for brainstorming, coding, and generally as a 'bicycle for my mind.'
If you do want to worry about unsafe AI (I don't) then worry about GPT-5 and later huge multi-modal models.
As a (retired, but still playing) developer I love having open weight models available as a tool to use for both embedding in applications and as a tool for brainstorming, coding, and generally as a 'bicycle for my mind.'
This won't protect jobs, it'll just make sure the profits from automating those jobs will go to those who can own the private AI models
Re the Center for AI Safety's sentence
>Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war.
It's fair enough but for that you should probably encourage mucking about with the present open source AI software which is quite a long way off extinction risk AGI but would let us try to figure how to deal with the stuff.
>Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war.
It's fair enough but for that you should probably encourage mucking about with the present open source AI software which is quite a long way off extinction risk AGI but would let us try to figure how to deal with the stuff.
I guess distributed training BitTorrent style over the darknet will be the workaround for this?
Also the forbidden nature of illicit AI might drive demand for it. Especially if it's really good.
We're seeing the same thing as the War on Drugs, and the state will never succeed at stamping it out. In fact it might even end up encouraging it.
Also the forbidden nature of illicit AI might drive demand for it. Especially if it's really good.
We're seeing the same thing as the War on Drugs, and the state will never succeed at stamping it out. In fact it might even end up encouraging it.
Just like most of the "ethics" stuff around ML/AI it is an attempt by big corps to create an artificial moat as the biggest issue with the technology is that almost nothing can be patented or somehow closed of effectively, at least in the long term which hinders monetization.
Fact: Current gen AI are alien intelligence built by brute force - nobody explicitly programmed them (loosely speaking) so the real problem of runaway AI is definitely something to consider, especially since everything is accessible via API nowadays.
I'm guessing this is at the request of Google, Amazon, OpenAI, and Microsoft. The goal IMO is for only their AIs to be sanctioned; everything else is criminal.
https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases...
"President Biden is convening seven leading AI companies at the White House today – Amazon, Anthropic, Google, Inflection, Meta, Microsoft, and OpenAI – to announce that the Biden-Harris Administration has secured voluntary commitments from these companies to help move toward safe, secure, and transparent development of AI technology."
https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases...
"President Biden is convening seven leading AI companies at the White House today – Amazon, Anthropic, Google, Inflection, Meta, Microsoft, and OpenAI – to announce that the Biden-Harris Administration has secured voluntary commitments from these companies to help move toward safe, secure, and transparent development of AI technology."
I’m curious if the board of Anthropic AI will eventually try and kill the company because if I’m not mistaken many of the members share this mindset
So they're the PETA of AI. It was bound to happen, AI stuff seems to strike a very emotional chord in some people.
Wish this wasn't as common as it turned out to be sadly. Best thing to hope for is that the ability to train models continue to get cheaper and more accessible over time. Figuring out how to go from tens/hundreds of millions of images needed for a foundation model to thousands or hundreds would be a start.
This majority of discussions/arguments/comments are summed up by the plot from this Rick and Morty episode: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rattlestar_Ricklactica
IMO
AI safety people seems like influencers to me. Useless anoying humans who pretend to be important.
Open-source AI is the only way forward now. The big players have neutered their offerings to an extent that entirely makes them lose their edge. It's one thing to have to account for hallucinations - that's something we can work with and around. It's another thing altogether to be constrained by deliberate "think of the children" ham-fisted censorship.
OpenAI was the undeniable go-to LLM service in 2023; I don't think they'll hold that position in 2024.
OpenAI was the undeniable go-to LLM service in 2023; I don't think they'll hold that position in 2024.
Is the left banner just random or does it encode a message?
I suspect a good chunk of "AI safety people" are just orgs propped up by the big corps to protect their interest in AI and reduce competition.
They are people who boo and people who do. As always.
I'm talking about the ability of any AI system to obfuscate plagiarism[0] and spam the Internet with technically distinct rewords of the same text. This is currently the most lucrative use of AI, and none of the AI safety people are talking about stopping it.
[0] No, I don't mean the training sets - though AI systems seem to be suspiciously really good at remembering them, too.