[throwaway1851]

If we continue on this trajectory, I have a suspicion that the big players will increasingly cry “danger!” and, as Sam Altman has done already, call for government regulation of AI. Having potential upstarts buried in red tape is how monopolies and oligopolies sustain their positions in a lot of industries.

[dragonwriter]

Altman and OpenAI have been stoking AI safety fears and using it as a selling point for narrow control and regulation since the same time they stopped pretending the “Open” in their name was meaningful. It’s clearly central to their business strategy. The best way to keep a head start is to use the government to put up roadblocks for your competitors.

[jpgvm]

I think their realisation was that the models themselves aren't actually that difficult to replicate even in absence of patent or description.

i.e they can't adequately defend their business with trade secrets.

Patents probably wouldn't work either because the structures are too easily recombined to bypass any conceivable patent that would be enforceable.

That said I think all of this is actually emblematic of a deeper problem with the space which is that none of the LLM stuff recently has been groundbreaking but rather just just continual refinement of a given branch. We aren't seeing evolution, just increasing either number of parameters or quality thereof + additional context. Which is why it was so easy for other folks to make the same progress in similar time periods.

Time will tell if we are about to slam into a local maxima or if someone finds a significant evolution or better yet stumbles on a way to properly combine LLM for context + NLP with traditional AI/logic/expert systems to engineer something that actually thinks and learns rather than regurgitating statistics.

[seydor]

We can also start suing NotOpenAI in many countries for copyright infringment stuff in their trainig data. They need to come up with a 'social contract' for AI models, in the same way that google made a synergistic relationship with publishers in the past

[bootsmann]

Actually, using public but copyrighted data is explicitly allowed by the digital single market directive in the EU, precisely to allow new entrants to enter the market and to keep big tech from gatekeeping the access to competitive data.

[Sharlin]

Some of those industries being heavily regulated for very good reasons.

[londons_explore]

Although there are also typically very good reasons not to regulate the industry, which will never be discovered if the industry is regulated.

For example, imagine that engines were regulated earlier, because steam engines could blow up and kill people. That's a good reason to regulate steam engines. But then we probably would have never invented other engine types like gasoline engines and jet engines. With that, we'd never have invented planes or flight, because a regulation steam engine would have been too heavy.

[RandomLensman]

Steam engines were in a way self-regulated by industry in quite a few countries from about mid-1800s (because of the boiler explosion risks).

[omgwtfbyobbq]

Why would regulating steam engines have led to never inventing other types of engines?

[UncleEntity]

Because the engines would have to conform to the strict mandates of the regulations and any innovations would have to seek regulatory approval with the usual ‘regulatory capture’ rules in effect.

[ethbr0]

See: nuclear power

[oceanplexian]

The problem with "heavy regulation" for anything to do with tech is it puts you at a technological disadvantage.

The only thing AI regulation would do is hand AI supremacy to China. This is the case with almost every other technological development that we kneecap ourselves with, nuclear power, high speed rail, etc. We waste endless energy on bureaucracy while China is building.

[Sharlin]

And Moloch laughs in the background.

[seydor]

These are not the good ones

[thrown123098]

Oh no someone said something mean on Twitter. How ever will we survive.

The only reason why propaganda is so effective is because life is so terrible. No one bought USSR propaganda in the 60s that the US was terrible because people remembered growing up without electricity. A majority believe Russian propaganda about the US today because life expectancy in Thailand is higher.

[davesque]

The folks at OpenAI have already started doing this. Just the other day, their chief scientist was making noises along those lines.

[petra]

Can AI really be regulated When China could release an app?

[ChatGTP]

I don't think China would release an app, it's a country which highly values censorship and hiding information, why would they want ChaGPT like systems that aren't heavily censored / broken from entering the public sphere.

[ElFitz]

If they were to train their own, wouldn’t they only train it on "approved" content?

In which case, it wouldn’t even need to be censored, would it?

[zamnos]

Wouldn't it go the other way? Train it on dissident content, so that it's able to detect it and alert the censors so they can send the police to reducate the user?

[ElFitz]

Well, you could use both. One model for content generation, one for moderation and censorship.

But, in this case, as already discussed in other threads, why not simply transform everything people write or say? They still get to see what they wrote. Others only see a cleaned up and supportive of the gouvernement version. And to that on texts, chat, social networks,… everywhere you can.

And suddenly, you actually are in 1984. Except you don’t even have to send the police, or beat up people: they’ll all be deeply convinced they are part of a very small minority. If not alone.

ie https://xkcd.com/2015/

[user_named]

Isn't ChatGPT heavily censored?

[FractalHQ]

Quite poorly. Look up “chatGPT jailbreaking”.

[user_named]

Irrelevant. ChatGPT is heavily censored.

[nindalf]

Hilarious that you asked a question and then immediately changed that to a statement 20 minutes later when challenged. Why didn’t you just make it a statement to begin with?

[Sharlin]

If you have to ask, you don’t have any idea what actual censorship is.

[user_named]

I don't have to ask. ChatGPT is heavily censored. Rhetorical question.

[Erem]

The point your rhetorical question tries to drive home is bad which is why other commenters didn't let it sit. Thanks to dang hacker news has rules of conduct that prevent this place from degenerating into a cesspool, but now that another company applied similar rules to its AI then the free speech absolutists decry at the podium.

If you want a generative AI without any decency then make it yourself, but don't act like this AI is censored just because it communicates in the way that everyone in society does when they are not protected by the veil of online anonymity

[Sharlin]

Rhetorical questions don’t work the way you think they do then. Asking a question whose answer is controversial and which is phrased as an innocent inquiry is not rhetorical. At best it’s a tired ingroup membership signal rather than a honest attempt at discourse.

[petra]

So not necesserily China, any other company in any country.

[ftxbro]

It sounds like regulatory capture!