Thanks very much for writing this. We appreciate all the feedback across the board, and I think this a well done and in-depth write up.
On the specific numerical thresholds in the report (i.e., your Key Proposal section), I do need to make one correction that also applies to most of Brooks’s commentary. All the numerical thresholds mentioned in the report, and particularly in that subsection, are solely examples and not actual recommendations. They are there only to show how one can calculate self-consistent licensing thresholds under the principles we recommend. They are not themselves recommendations. We had to do it this way for the same reason we propose granting fairly broad rule-setting flexibility to the regulatory entity. The field is changing so quickly that any concrete threshold risks being out of date (for one reason or the other) in very short order. We would have liked to do otherwise, but that is not a realistic expectation for a report that we expect to be digested over the course of several months.
To avoid precisely this misunderstanding, the report states in several places that those very numbers are, in fact, only examples for illustration. A few screencaps of those disclaimers are below, but there are several others. Of course we could have included even more, but beyond a certain point one is simply adding more length to what you correctly point out is already quite a sizeable document. Note that the Time article, in the excerpt you quoted, does correctly note and acknowledge that the Tier 3 AIMD threshold is there as an example (emphasis added):
the report suggests, as an example, that the agency could set it just above the levels of computing power used to train current cutting-edge models like OpenAI’s GPT-4 and Google’s Gemini.
Apart from this, I do think overall you’ve done a good and accurate job of summarizing the document and offering sensible and welcome views, emphasis, and pushback. It’s certainly a long report, so this is a service to anyone who’s looking to go one or two levels deeper than the Executive Summary. We do appreciate you giving it a look and writing it up.
Excellent. On the thresholds, got it, sad that I didn’t realize this, and that others didn’t either from what I saw.
I appreciate the ‘long post is long’ problem but I do think you need the warnings to be in all the places someone might see the 10^X numbers in isolation, if you don’t want this to happen, and it probably happens anyway, on the grounds of ‘yes that was technically not a proposal but of course it will be treated like one.’ And there’s some truth in that, and that you want to use examples that are what you would actually pick right now if you had to pick what to actually do (or propose).
I do think the numbers I suggest are about as low as one could realistically get until we get much stronger evidence of impending big problems.
Thanks very much for writing this. We appreciate all the feedback across the board, and I think this a well done and in-depth write up.
On the specific numerical thresholds in the report (i.e., your Key Proposal section), I do need to make one correction that also applies to most of Brooks’s commentary. All the numerical thresholds mentioned in the report, and particularly in that subsection, are solely examples and not actual recommendations. They are there only to show how one can calculate self-consistent licensing thresholds under the principles we recommend. They are not themselves recommendations. We had to do it this way for the same reason we propose granting fairly broad rule-setting flexibility to the regulatory entity. The field is changing so quickly that any concrete threshold risks being out of date (for one reason or the other) in very short order. We would have liked to do otherwise, but that is not a realistic expectation for a report that we expect to be digested over the course of several months.
To avoid precisely this misunderstanding, the report states in several places that those very numbers are, in fact, only examples for illustration. A few screencaps of those disclaimers are below, but there are several others. Of course we could have included even more, but beyond a certain point one is simply adding more length to what you correctly point out is already quite a sizeable document. Note that the Time article, in the excerpt you quoted, does correctly note and acknowledge that the Tier 3 AIMD threshold is there as an example (emphasis added):
Apart from this, I do think overall you’ve done a good and accurate job of summarizing the document and offering sensible and welcome views, emphasis, and pushback. It’s certainly a long report, so this is a service to anyone who’s looking to go one or two levels deeper than the Executive Summary. We do appreciate you giving it a look and writing it up.
Excellent. On the thresholds, got it, sad that I didn’t realize this, and that others didn’t either from what I saw.
I appreciate the ‘long post is long’ problem but I do think you need the warnings to be in all the places someone might see the 10^X numbers in isolation, if you don’t want this to happen, and it probably happens anyway, on the grounds of ‘yes that was technically not a proposal but of course it will be treated like one.’ And there’s some truth in that, and that you want to use examples that are what you would actually pick right now if you had to pick what to actually do (or propose).
I do think the numbers I suggest are about as low as one could realistically get until we get much stronger evidence of impending big problems.