The White House is coming out in favor of “open-source” artificial intelligence technology, arguing in a report Tuesday that there’s no need right now for restrictions on companies making key components of their powerful AI systems widely available. The report sought by President Joe Biden is the U.S. government’s first to delve into a tech industry debate between developers who advocate closing off the inner workings of their most advanced AI models to guard against misuse, and others who have lobbied for a more open approach they say favors innovation.
No surprise, since there’s not a lot of pressure to do any other regulation on the closed source versions. Self monitoring of a profit company always works out well…
And for any of the “AGI won’t happen, there’s no danger”…what if on the slightest chance you’re wrong? Is the maddening rush to get the next product out without any research on what we’re doing worth a mistake? Scifi is fiction, but there’s lessons there too, and we’re ignoring them all because “that can’t happen” is stronger than “let’s be sure”.
Besides, even with no AGI, humans alone can do huge damage with “bad” AI tools, that we’re not looking into either.
What sorts of scenarios involving the emergence of AGI do you think regulating the availability of LLM weights and training data (or of more closely regulating AI training, research, and development within the “closed source” shops like OpenAI) would help us avoid?
And how does that threat compare to impending damage from climate change if we don’t reduce energy consumption + reliance on fossil fuels?
When I search for “misuse of AI” I get a ton of results from people talking about exactly that.
Good questions.
Honestly, we might be too late anyway for avoidance, but it’s specifically research of the alignment problem that I think regulation could help with, and since they’re still self regulation and free to do what OpenAI did with their department for that…it’s akin to someone manufacturing a new chemical and not bothering any research on side effects, only what they can gain from it. Oh shit, never mind, that’s standard operating procedure isn’t it, at least as long as the government isn’t around to stop it.
Another topic that I personally think we’re doomed to ignore until things get so bad they affect more than poor people and countries. How does it compare? Climate change and the probable directions it takes the planet are much more of a certainty than the unknown of if AGI is possible and what effects AGI could have. Interesting that we’re taking the same approaches though, even if it’s more obvious a problem. Plus profiting via greenwashing rather than a concentrated effort to do effective things to mitigate what we could.