I'm not under the impression that the EA movement is better suited to steward AI development than other groups, but even assuming they were, there is no chance for an initiative like this to work unless every country agreed to it and followed it.
At a glance it looks like it's not going to affect AI projects that are basically consumers of existing models, which is most projects.
Could you at least consider that the group’s entire premise seems like nothing more than the post hoc rationalization of a bunch of wealthy educated elites with low social and emotional intelligence? The levels of tone deaf I perceive as someone who doesn’t have, can’t have that much wealth to even begin my journey in their little club are enormous.
There’s very little that is subtle about it and it’s frankly offensive and _clearly_ used as a justification for insecure Bay Area “liberals” who find themselves with lots of money and a political identity that makes them insecure about that fact.
The answer? You’re actually saving mankind with your money! It’s just simple Bayesian logic! The same thing that got you here! (Spoiler alert: it was more to do with luck than skill).
If you’re on board, I guess it’s not as offensive? But for me and others, it’s like elites trying to brag about how great they are while the rest of us fight for scraps.
So when you see someone with an axe to grind, maybe consider that EA’s messaging is not as universally appealing as you think, and may even be outright tone deaf enough to cause one to reasonably find it disgusting.
> and he was reportedly ousted from the board by EA-aligned folk.
It seems naive to me to assume that members of EA in positions of power don’t secretly have their own motivations. Furthermore it’s not very “Bayesian” to assume that a implies b here with so many hidden variables at play.
I'm not sure if this was directed at my comment, but I'll clarify that my comment wasn't in defense of EA. My position is: setting up a regulatory moat is not a strategy exclusive to EA. Many incumbents - including sama - are overtly (and likely coverly) attempting regulatory capture, regardless of their 'politics'
If it affects the base projects (especially the open source ones like Llama) then it affects the consumers. And it certainly looks like it's planning to affect the base projects, in a lot of negative ways.
If this bill passed in any way remotely similar to what it is now, Meta would have to entirely stop releasing open source Llama updates.
Which is perhaps the intent of the legislation.
> SB 1047 creates an unaccountable Frontier Model Division that will be staffed by EAs with police powers, and which can throw model developers in jail for the thoughtcrime of doing AI research
If the bill says nothing about who will be staffing this agency, and there are indeed no ties to EA (which seems unlikely to me if EA is behind the bill), then the author of the article is doing us a disservice by misrepresenting it.
Also, from a moral philosophy point of view, "this is wrong but if we don't do it, someone else will collect the profits and the bad thing will happen anyway - hence we'll do this wrong thing" is not sound. Applied generally it would lead to a lot of bad stuff (moral race to the bottom).
Whether or not you believe this is the case with AI is not what I'm getting at, but a lot of people believe AI has the potential to cause more damage than nuclear weaponry technology, as well as the potential to suspend aging, end all natural causes of death, regrow limbs, fix any bodily ailments.
There will be countries that embrace AI out of potential for the latter, and capitalists who do their capitalist thing and make as much money off of the perceived latent power.
There is no prospect of achieving a truly international consensus (meaning applied the same way by every country, we don't even have that with copyright, though that's the closest example I can think of) on AI policy. Given that, do you really think the U.S. is going to sit by and watch as the majority of AI research is conducted in other countries?
California has too much regulatory burden and taxation.
Am I jumping to conclusions and is there a different interpretation you think I should be coming away with?
But there is also another interpretation, which is that the new thing is going to happen in whatever place has the least stringent rules anyway, so more stringent rules don't improve safety, they just deprive your jurisdiction of any potential rewards from keeping the activity local, and provide people in other jurisdictions the benefit of the influx of people you're inducing to leave.
I'm not sure in the general context your first came is super applicable, given that there's a lot of exposure and worry about this topic. Laws and regulation can apply to use as well as development, and large markets can have outsized effects when they require things (such as how CA emissions laws and GDPR have), and I'm not sure worrying about chasing away business is a worthwhile concern when many people are very afraid of a societal consequences of the thing in question.
For what it's worth I don't really follow the same stance when it comes to military technology, because that's meant to be used in a situation when local (which in that case can be national) laws have little or no sway, but I'm open to arguments about how viewing them differently isn't useful.
It doesn’t make any sense to talk about the number of regulations. What matters is what those regulations are. Likewise, it doesn’t make sense to talk about the amount of taxation without talking about who is being taxed.