I’ve changed the wording to “Only a few technical labs (OpenAI, DeepMind, Meta, etc) and people working with their models would be regulated currently.” The point of this sentence is to emphasize that this definition still wouldn’t apply to the vast majority of AI development—most AI development uses small systems, e.g. image classifiers, self driving cars, audio models, weather forecasting, the majority of AI used in health care, etc.
Credit for changing the wording, but I still feel this does not adequately convey how sweeping the impact of the proposal would be if implemented as-is. Foundation model-related work is a sizeable and rapidly growing chunk of active AI development. Of the 15K pre-print papers posted on arXiv under the CS.AI category this year, 2K appear to be related to language models. The most popular Llama2 model weights alone have north of 500K downloads to date, and foundation-model related repos have been trending on Github for months. “People working with [a few technical labs’] models” is a massive community containing many thousands of developers, researchers, and hobbyists. It is important to be honest about how they will likely be impacted by this proposed regulation.
I suspect that they didn’t think about their “frontier AI” criteria much, particularly the token criterion. I strongly expect they’re honestly mistaken about the implications of their criteria, not trying to deceive. I weakly expect that they will update their criteria based on considerations like those Quintin mentions, and that you could help inform them if you engaged on the merits.
If your interpretation is correct, it’s damning of their organization in a different way. As a research organization, their entire job is to think carefully about their policy proposals before they make them. It’s likely net-harmful to have an org lobbying for AI “safety” regulations without doing their due diligence on research first.
Nora didn’t say that this proposal is harmful. Nora said that if Zach’s explanation for the disconnect between their rhetoric and their stated policy goals is correct (namely that they don’t really know what they’re talking about) then their existence is likely net-harmful.
That said, yes requiring everyone who wants to finetune LLaMA 2 get a license would be absurd and harmful. la3orn and gallabyres articulate some reasons why in this thread.
Another reason is that it’s impossible to enforce, and passing laws or regulations and then not enforcing them is really bad for credibility.
Another reason is that the history of AI is a history of people ignoring laws and ethics so long as it makes them money and they can afford to pay the fines. Unless this regulation comes with fines so harsh that they remove all possibility of making money off of models, OpenAI et al. won’t be getting licenses. They’ll just pay the fines while small scale and indie devs (who allegedly the OP is specifically hoping to not impact) screech their work to a halt and wait for the government to tell them it’s okay for them to continue to do their work.
Also, such a regulation seems like it would be illegal in the US. While the government does have wide latitude to regulate commercial activities that impact multiple states, this is rather specifically a proposal that would regulate all activity (even models that never get released!). I’m unaware of any precedent for such an action, can you name one?
Also, such a regulation seems like it would be illegal in the US. While the government does have wide latitude to regulate commercial activities that impact multiple states, this is rather specifically a proposal that would regulate all activity (even models that never get released!). I’m unaware of any precedent for such an action, can you name one?
Drug regulation, weapons regulation, etc.
As far as I can tell, the commerce clause lets basically everything through.
Require people to have licenses to fine-tune llama 2?
For one thing this is unenforceable without, ironically, superintelligence-powered universal surveillance. And I expect any vain attempt to enforce it would do more harm than good. See this post for some reasons for thinking it’d be net-negative.
It’s more than misleading, it’s simply a lie, at least insofar as developers outside of Google, OpenAI, and co. use the Llama 2 models.
I’ve changed the wording to “Only a few technical labs (OpenAI, DeepMind, Meta, etc) and people working with their models would be regulated currently.” The point of this sentence is to emphasize that this definition still wouldn’t apply to the vast majority of AI development—most AI development uses small systems, e.g. image classifiers, self driving cars, audio models, weather forecasting, the majority of AI used in health care, etc.
Credit for changing the wording, but I still feel this does not adequately convey how sweeping the impact of the proposal would be if implemented as-is. Foundation model-related work is a sizeable and rapidly growing chunk of active AI development. Of the 15K pre-print papers posted on arXiv under the
CS.AI
category this year, 2K appear to be related to language models. The most popular Llama2 model weights alone have north of 500K downloads to date, and foundation-model related repos have been trending on Github for months. “People working with [a few technical labs’] models” is a massive community containing many thousands of developers, researchers, and hobbyists. It is important to be honest about how they will likely be impacted by this proposed regulation.I suspect that they didn’t think about their “frontier AI” criteria much, particularly the token criterion. I strongly expect they’re honestly mistaken about the implications of their criteria, not trying to deceive. I weakly expect that they will update their criteria based on considerations like those Quintin mentions, and that you could help inform them if you engaged on the merits.
If your interpretation is correct, it’s damning of their organization in a different way. As a research organization, their entire job is to think carefully about their policy proposals before they make them. It’s likely net-harmful to have an org lobbying for AI “safety” regulations without doing their due diligence on research first.
Sorry, what harmful thing would this proposal do? Require people to have licenses to fine-tune llama 2? Why is that so crazy?
Nora didn’t say that this proposal is harmful. Nora said that if Zach’s explanation for the disconnect between their rhetoric and their stated policy goals is correct (namely that they don’t really know what they’re talking about) then their existence is likely net-harmful.
That said, yes requiring everyone who wants to finetune LLaMA 2 get a license would be absurd and harmful. la3orn and gallabyres articulate some reasons why in this thread.
Another reason is that it’s impossible to enforce, and passing laws or regulations and then not enforcing them is really bad for credibility.
Another reason is that the history of AI is a history of people ignoring laws and ethics so long as it makes them money and they can afford to pay the fines. Unless this regulation comes with fines so harsh that they remove all possibility of making money off of models, OpenAI et al. won’t be getting licenses. They’ll just pay the fines while small scale and indie devs (who allegedly the OP is specifically hoping to not impact) screech their work to a halt and wait for the government to tell them it’s okay for them to continue to do their work.
Also, such a regulation seems like it would be illegal in the US. While the government does have wide latitude to regulate commercial activities that impact multiple states, this is rather specifically a proposal that would regulate all activity (even models that never get released!). I’m unaware of any precedent for such an action, can you name one?
Drug regulation, weapons regulation, etc.
As far as I can tell, the commerce clause lets basically everything through.
It doesn’t let the government institute prior restraint on speech.
For one thing this is unenforceable without, ironically, superintelligence-powered universal surveillance. And I expect any vain attempt to enforce it would do more harm than good. See this post for some reasons for thinking it’d be net-negative.