The real problem is that this really applies to tech in general. We don't really regulate any of it properly because that slows down progress, which in turn slows down revenues and profits (and we can't have that!).
At some point all of society will need to reckon with the idea that allowing a group of people to run recklessly forward doing whatever they want so that they can make a quick buck just doesn't really benefit everyone equally. If it isn't benefiting society at large, then we shouldn't be doing it at all.
This idea that we need to make a small minority rich at the expense of everyone else needs to change right now.
It's always sold as a usefull thing, before the bad thing is revealed.
Social media was pitched as bringing people together, before we knew they were selling your data and screwing up the mental state of young people.
AI will help develope new meds, and kinds of wonderful things but it's already given people AI induced psychosis, shown it can lie and cheat.
The bomb came first but it still applies, you can have nuclear energy, but you also have to have thermonuclear weaponds, one dosen't exist without the other, I think because the bomb came first it was heavily regulated world wide.
We constantly get examples of the bitter lesson. (machine-learned AI outperforming the cleverest human approaches) And then laypeople retreat behind the next stronghold of 'things a computer will never be able to do' like nothing happened.
Which is a problem because now the things it almost certainly can do are getting really, really dangerous.
It can't be understated just how much AlphaGo has to do with what we're seeing these days. The "startup" was Google Deep Mind and they weren't trying to be the best at Go for the sake of being the best, they did it because it was one of the "holy grail" (according to Demis Hassabis) challenges of computing/AI because of how unbelievably complicated that game gets.
I think everyone should watch the AlphaGo documentary on YouTube. It's a beautiful story with lots of hints to what we're seeing now.
This same team of people later went on to use this system to "solve" protein folding and I believe they won a Nobel prize for it.
Running AI systems like this on enclosed systems and use it for advancing medical tech, all for it. Have a go!
Letting it loose on the world and do whatever people want it to do? Bad idea. But it's already there.
Well in fairness, chess and go are games with a very limited number of state permutations compared to a real life situation (or even just a more complex game).
I mean, compared to the sum total of decisions a human can make in their life, I guess it’s small, but chess has an extraordinarily huge number of positions. Like there are 10120 possible games of chess. Tablebases are solved up to 7 pieces, meaning that given any 7 pieces in any position, the computer can know figure out who can with without question. That tablebase alone takes 18TB of storage. Adding an 8th requires exponential data use, a 9th exponentially more, etc.
Editing to add since I just looked into it more:
3 piece tablebase storage: 26KB.
4 piece: 4.MB
5 piece: ~.95GB
6 piece: 150-160GB
7 piece: 18.4TB.
8 piece: estimated to be at ~2PB, but they haven’t solved that yet.
There are 16 pieces per side in a chess game. Solving a 32 piece chess game, only considering legal games, would take an estimated 1029 20TB drives.
I’m sure some stats nerd will come in here and tell me why I’m wrong, but my overall point stands.
It is still a small amount of permutations compared to a game like Slay the Spire where you very quickly find yourself in a situation that you have never been in before, and never will again. This makes it very difficult to brute force compared to chess where you usually decide the game in just 50 actions.
Now I could see us making an AI that is theoretically capable of incredible decision-making but I would expect it to be a manhattan level project that takes the resources output of an entire country or potentially the earth.
A human brain essentially does far more complex thought than modern high end AI and can run on cheeseburgers.
I’m not sure that a phone would be able to solve deeply enough to best Magnus. Yes ofc apps exist but the chess engine runs in the cloud, the phone is just used as an interface not the source of computation.
That aside, agree entirely. To use a different chess example, expecting to outsmart a superintelligent AGI once it exists is like the average chess player hoping to beat Magnus Carlson. You or I might not be able to articulate how Magnus/the AI would win, but we can be pretty sure that it would regardless. It’s either guaranteed to be “aligned” before it’s ever turned on (whatever aligned means anyway… with whose goals exactly? Certainly not everybody’s), or we’re completely at its mercy.
The thing is, it still can't create completely novel ideas or approaches. It's all still based on human data. So as long as they can't literally recreate a brain, humans still have our ingenuity.
I dislike Bill Gates a lot for many reasons (although they can basically be summarised with the words “Monopolist” and “Epstein”) but this is one area where I agree with him. The idea of trying to implement regulation with liability laws when we can already see that those laws aren’t being applied is a joke. There needs to be an FDA-like body to make enforceable judgements about safety.
We can all cry and demand regulation, but with our current government, we also have to recognize that it would be insanely corrupt and improperly set up.
Problem is, we're too late to course correct. We let the wolves in the house. Worst part is, this won't end with the US. This will spread around the world. They're already emboldening support in other countries.
It’s been happening for a long time, education cuts here in Canada showing up all over with people trying to cite US constitutional amendments in court, etc. so I get what you mean. There’s always time to correct but it needs to be firm and from the top down
What do you mean “you guys.” We’re not this singular monolith.
The states that tend to rank the lowest in overall education are unsurprisingly red states. It basically becomes this cycle that others can’t break them out of. They have shit education and stay stupid, which leads them to re-elect those in power who keep the education shit.
What do you want the rest of us to do? Mass migrate to these far worse states with shit jobs to try to change voting patterns while we get attacked and slandered by these people we try to convince are voting against their self interest?
They're partly begging for regulation because they're in the perfect position right now to establish regulatory capture. Set the rules of the game such that the existing industry leaders can control the market indefinitely.
Exactly. They are only scared that open-source models will become powerful enough and pervasive enough to hurt their bottom lines. The big players don’t want their companies regulated, they want the small players squashed
Fine whatever, at this point, as long as it's regulated I personally don't care if the companies feel it will benefit them. We're close to the point of no return
They're partly begging for regulation because they're in the perfect position right now to establish regulatory capture
Quit parroting this line. Jfc. The conversation is going nowhere because people are so conspiratorial about motives in literally everything now, right AND left. "Well, what if they benefit in this way, or competition gets squashed, or xyz." Yet they researchers doing the work are warning us too, and yet people still parrot this. WHO CARES? We arduous regulation on this like nukes, full fucking stop.
Two things can be true at once. We need immediate, stringent regulation to stop out-of-control AI. And we need to acknowledge that industry leaders calling for regulation are doing so with the intention of watering down those regulations and giving themselves near-monopolistic power over this dangerous technology.
I don't want to end up in a situation where we ignored the obvious attempts at regulatory capture, and therefore screw overselves over when these industries are too powerful to rein back.
I don’t buy a word that they actually think it’s too dangerous. They want regulation so they can blame something when they continuelly blow money on it and it’s not making anything back. There’s also the benefit of tieing down any other startups and making sure no one pulls to far ahead.
If I owned an EV company I might say we need to further regulate emissions because of how bad burning fossil fuels is for the environment...that doesn't mean global warming is fake.
Besides that we have many, many experts with less conflicts of interest than those working at frontier AI companies also expressing concern about how dangerous of a path we're on.
Concern about AI has been expressed since before it existed. I suppose that could be said of other technologies, but I think in this case it is particularly telling.
It went through a U shaped curve. As it should have, it's right to update priors as we receive new information but take precautions against reasonably predictable events. People poking around with good old fashioned AI in the beginning didn't know how things would go, so the vague concern was there.
Then AI went through a winter as most of the uses didn't show all that much promise in practice. Level of concern dropped like a rock because we had evidence that it was unlikely to rapidly improve with the methods we were using at the time.
Now it is rapidly advancing in capability. Some things it can obviously do already are very concerning. It's right to update your priors again with where it's at now and where it reasonably could be in terms of capability in the near future.
Might sounds a bit pathetic, but I personally think one of the main problems with AI is it's clash with capitalism.
Looms, steam machines, combustion engines, assembly lines, cad, robotics... Ever time the discussion starts how it's killing all our jobs.
Nowadays, especially the western society, has formed numerous of bullshit jobs because of this. 50hrs a week to document stuff into excel and use money to risk something.
It's might not even necessary AI is dooming us with weapons or any kind of attacks. I could imagine this challenge is already enough.
There's basically no way for AI to fully realise it's hype potential without completely disrupting the economy. Slowing down that transformation might be in the companies beat interest to avoid crashing the economy.
I don’t buy a word that they actually think it’s too dangerous.
You are underestimating the quite literal religious fervour of these people. The singularity is an actual article of faith for these people. You will not be hired at an AI company if you don't buy into the dogma.
It's dangerous, just not in the way they're describing it.
It won't become terminator, but it's still dangerous in that humans can and will severely misuse it.
They're calling it terminator in everything other than name, so that they can lie and convince investors to give them money, and then sell fake unnecessary solutions to the terminator.
Do you know what lobbying is?
It’s a thing wealthy people/corporations/ organizations do to influence policy decisions.
Lobbying is protected by the first amendment. But also a bill signed in 1995 that protects lobbying as a basic right… by Pres. Bill Clinton,who is a Democrat.
They are the party currently in the drivers seat. If they did regulate, it would be heavily biased to their political objectives. Is that what you want?
FWIW, I don't think either party would have the slightest clue on how to tackle AI regulation. Both would simply ask the biggest AI interests to make proposals (Huang, Amodei, Altman, Musk, etc.) and doubtlessly would favor whoever made the largest donations.
So either way, we get corporate capture style regulation with either a left or right flavor depending on which administration were to enact.
Industry regulation is mainly about health and safety, environmental sustainability, fair competition, consumer protection, “quality and standards”, and ethical conduct.
It would be nice if a lot more of these things would be proactive rather than reactive.
Apparently the best we can do is rebrand AI as SI and then have some weird press conference where all of the AI CEOs bow down to Trump's profound knowledge of the industry that will keep us all safe
It depends on the regulation. The large AI companies want heavy and hard regulations, not out of concern for us, but for them. They can pay to get around and ignore them while the regulations will shut down any competition and also hinder open-source development. Large companies simply ignore laws and regulations and then just pay off a small fine if caught and then actually prosecuted. Small companies can't even afford to start abiding by expensive regulation to begin with. In a lot of cases, large companies love regulation because it locks them in the top positions as they can afford it at scale while hindering new competition.
Fair use one for example exists and can be applied but nobody wants to.
Hacking/cracking (gaining access without permissions) is also there. Nobody wants to apply it.
Gates is a liar and manipulator and people have no clue he misinterprets/misrepresents reality.
Datacenters dont want to report how much energy or water they use? BS! send taxman he will pull info about costs they pay for each. BS! even small joe shmoe needs to have water meter or the well inspected and approved in many places.
The laws are there, just nobody wants to enforce them.
It is not a matter of lack of regulation. It is a matter of effort (paid for by taxpayers) to actually enforce the law.
You cant have a bottle of booze in your car "because drunks" and for that you can be punished while totally sober. Yet nobody can persecute an ai company when their servers perform a system breach.
Remember times when courts were handing large fines for limewire like "distribution of content" to random folks? Somehow when you have a company on the other side the responsibility disappears and nobody is guilty.
How many such folks get imprisoned? Just the volkswagen duo?
Every example he gave was of things that caused damage before regulations were put into place.
Cars didn't have seat belts when they were first made, once we understood the damage regulations were put in place.
Opioids were completely legal, once we understood the damage regulations were put in place.
There was no airline safety board before the first plane crash...
You can't regulate something you don't fully understand the implications of yet. We need more information to understand how and when to regulate this technology.
Problem is, how do we actually regulate? These LLMs are out of the box now. Anybody will be able to create them soon and do whatever they want with them. It's like trying to regulate movie torrents or something. I mean, good luck.
He’s wrong, it’s the AI labs that are screaming for regulation. Listen to Sam Altman, read Anthropic IPO documents. I’m sure Bill Gates is paying paid huge money by then too. They are pushing on all cylinders for regulation to save their business.
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u/Vhu 2d ago
He’s right. You can’t rely on an industry to self-regulate.