General / Off-Topic AI Developers Want To Be Regulated. And With Good Reason.

Thought this might be a fun debate!

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You've probably noticed that various AI luminaries have been calling for everything from regulation of their industry up to a complete pause for new product releases.

It's easy to see these calls as an attempt to freeze the marketplace while they're in a dominate position. But I'd say there's more than that going on...

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Mutually Assured Discussion:

As the existing court cases over copyright demonstrate, there's a whole new legal world to be explored. And given the current tools contain capabilities that even their creators don't know about (cutely described as 'capability overhang'), it seems reasonable to assume that this legal world is going to get fairly ample fairly quickly.

As much as businesses love being the new disruptor, they like the predictability of a settled battlefield too. And my suspicion is: These guys know they're sitting on the most disruptive set of innovations in a helluva long time. Ones that may well run out of their control in various ways, and smash a few more norms than they're comfortable with. And they'd quite like to be prepared...

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Can We Do That Dave?:

To delve into why they might feel that way, we'd have to get more technical.

But thankfully there's a simple overview of the key negatives at play (which are gliding along somewhat unseen, thanks to the many positive advancements that these technologies are also bringing).

It's great, and you should watch it :)

Source: https://youtu.be/xoVJKj8lcNQ


Unfortunately it's also an hour long, and contains some TED-talk tech-bro framing that may put some people off before they get to the meat. So I'll do my best to summarise the key contentions:

  • Current LLM techs are potent and bring large challenges for social norms and institutions.
  • The growth of many current capabilities are 'exponential', and can boost other capabilities in turn.
    • This synthesis, speed of growth, and potential for novelty means we should expect more extremely disruptive techs and applications to arrive with increasing rapidity.
  • Putting these technologies at the heart of an arms race for public adoption & market share will only drive the worst end of the above.
    • A pause on new public builds, and a cap on compute for R&D, would give the world time to catch up on what we've already got.

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A Positive Spin, And Then Back Again:

  • There are some very cool technologies being juiced by LLMs as well. It's crazy to see some known ones zoom along suddenly, and crazy to think what will be achievable next. (Crazy in a good way, as much as possibly crazy in a sharply disruptive way. Recreating dreams is insane. Decoding someone's thoughts without their permission, equally so...).
  • Some of the trends may cap out. (Just because GPT models have demonstrated the 'Theory of Mind' of a 9 year old in the space a few years doesn't mean they'll keep rocketing along that road). But it's still worth being prepared for a world where they stay on trend.
  • None of the above is suggesting 'AI sentience' is imminent, with all the Sci-Fi movie plots that would imply. (But that is still on the long list for later on ;)).

What I found mind-blowing about the video, at core, was that I've watched a lot of these technologies inch along over the last decade. And seen them start to explode in the last few years. And taken individually, I've always been dazzled by their positive potentials first, and left their negatives very much in the background.

But I think stripping away the dazzle, and just noting how the negatives synthesise alone, is instructive in this case. They are equally potent. And ignoring them won't make them go away.

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Too Long, Got a Bot to Summarise:

The genie is out of the bottle. We should enjoy the magic it can perform, and have a play. But personally I'm all for a 'pause' in further public deployments. For a detente in the arms race. For some social breathing space to figure this stuff out. Because as societies and individuals we've barely caught up with what last year brought. We are woefully underprepared for the next.
 
I always tend to think, that what ever is shown to the public, already been done years ago in secret.
Now it's just about letting public absorb the new reality that is coming.
There was a lot of talk about Drones in Warefare last year, and now A.I is making headlines. Not to hard to see where all of this is going. Don't think it would be as spectacular as in the movies and games, but inevitable for sure.
Yea, sucks for the current and future generations, they will never see the real world that was. But you can't stop it, once they militarize A.I. us mandane humans won't have much use for anymore.
 
But personally I'm all for a 'pause' in further public deployments. For a detente in the arms race.

Restraining public deployments is one thing, but a detente in the arms race is wishful thinking. Any entity that honestly (rather than just saying they will, then not) puts the breaks on the development of this feild risks falling behind the curve. Regulating software development is easier said than done, even when the software can't write itself.

Personally, I think driving such development underground would be a bad move. It needs to be done in the open to be audited.
 
When the industry begs for regulation you know we're in deep doo doo.
I always tend to think, that what ever is shown to the public, already been done years ago in secret.
Now it's just about letting public absorb the new reality that is coming.
So, what you're saying is our AI overlords are already in charge? 😄
 
I always tend to think, that what ever is shown to the public, already been done years ago in secret.
Now it's just about letting public absorb the new reality that is coming.

I agree that levels of 'next gen' are doubtless still behind closed doors, and the rollout has been a long time in the making. These are norms.

I think in practice it's proved more disordered than usual this time though. It's not just the unseemly rush to market, that's not entirely unusual. (Although as a rule of thumb Alphabet wouldn't usually dump out a product which tanks their share price due to flawed output and comes with disclaimers about offensive content ;)). It's the fact that they don't fully understand their own product, I suspect. And they're learning more about it in real-time with us as it enters mass public testing. (The 'patch week' from hell, if you like ;)).

Throw in the likely reality that any next gen products in the wings will be displaying even more outlandish and surprising abilities, and I suspect this isn't quite business as usual.
 
Restraining public deployments is one thing, but a detente in the arms race is wishful thinking. Any entity that honestly (rather than just saying they will, then not) puts the breaks on the development of this feild risks falling behind the curve. Regulating software development is easier said than done, even when the software can't write itself.

Personally, I think driving such development underground would be a bad move. It needs to be done in the open to be audited.

Yep absolutely agree that an actual R&D cap on compute is pie in the sky. (Although I genuinely wouldn't be surprised if some of the top capos would welcome it. Predicting the future in such a fast-changing landscape is tough. Even the smartest guys in the room won't like it when the room changes shape that fast...)

Actually executing such a stall is nigh impossible though, given that there will always be rogue players. (It's just still what I'd like to see ;)).

Personally, I think driving such development underground would be a bad move. It needs to be done in the open to be audited.

It's a good principle. I think some wrinkles for me would be that:

A) 8 billion monkeys working this particular typewriter may discover and deploy the tech's negative social potentials at a faster rate.
B) Society is brittle in various areas, regarding trust and inequality in particular. Running the experiment in the open means more social tests in quick sucession, and more likelihood of a concentrated run of initial job losses etc.
 
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