This was originally posted to LocalLLama here on lemmy. I wanted to share this post here too as not enough attention has been given to the recent senate hearing unfortunately. Please spread the word if you can as Fosai is at risk.
I am extremely disappointed in the recent senate hearing on AI regulation. The level of authoritarianism and control required to truly regulate AI will bring about a draconian world in which the very values we wish to protect will be destroyed.
The 3 witnesses failed to address the positives AI will bring and do not focus on solving the root of the problem at hand. Instead they are targeting the very freedoms of our world in an attempt to regulate AI. They are asking congress to control online speech to prevent interference of elections, mandate ID verification on social platforms, and even requiring DRM on all chips to make sure users do not try to jailbreak models.
The witnesses are Dario Amodei of Anthropic (Google’s AI), Yoshu Bengio (Quebec AI) and Stuart Russell (Professor of University of California Berkeley).
I will list the most significant and concerning statements higher up.
- 1:25:00 Stuart Russell tells senate members that the only means to control users from jailbreaking models is to have chips themselves reject certain prompts and models (DRM).
- 38:24: Yoshu Bengio discusses how fine tuning of open source models are used to circumvent the censorship and that he wants the government to regulate this.
- 41:30: Stuart Russell wants all chat from any LLM to be saved so that it can be compared with a database to determine the origin of the conversation.
- 39:50: Yoshu Bengio wants the government to prevent open source AI from being released going forward.
- 37:59: Dario Amodei wants to require watermarks of all AIs including open source. This is a privacy violation unjustified given the good LLMs are doing.
- 56:24: Senate member Klobuchar seems to be pushing for an answer to regulate open models to prevent them for being used for scams even though the benefits open source models are providing significantly outweighs the downside.
- 2:07:18: Yoshua Bengio and Yoshu Bengio discusses regulation of open source, and especially open source going into the future.
It is important to also mention that not all points given in the hearing were unjustified. Some suggestions such as the requirement for transparency by larger corporations when it comes to red flag capabilities from an AI are reasonable. However some requests given to congress show a disregard for the basic freedoms and values of democracy that will be destroyed if regulation is not considered extremely carefully.
Full Hearing: https://piped.video/watch?v=hm1zexCjELo
Hey thanks for sharing your post. While I am somewhat concerned about laws and regulations behind this innovative tech, I think we’re a bit ahead of the curve here and don’t have any real or immediate threat on the horizon. At least for now…
FOSAI is an idea that no one can take from me, from you, from us. Much like FOSS, it’s a principle as much as it is a technology. I will advocate for this in the light of optimism and hope as much as I can in whatever theater this technology presents itself to me. At the moment, that’s here, but if that changes - I will be sure to bring this torch with me wherever I find myself.
Don’t get me wrong, the last thing I want to do is have to jump through legal hoops and hurdles to deploy an open-source model - but congress and regulation moves so slow, I have a strong feeling that many of us will be able to do exactly what we want to do without as much oversight as we might expect from hearings like this.
All the more reason to get involved with the tech now!
A good example of this is how Congress has done very little to actually solve digital piracy or rampant depression and loneliness that has come with the advent of social media. If they can’t put up regulations with regular software, I have little worries they’ll do anything seriously restricting for people like us.
In my opinion, there’s no ‘going back’ to a pre-AI/LLM world. You cannot control this growth. The only way is forward with each and everyone one of us empowered by this tech - building a brighter tomorrow because we finally have the ability and know-how to close the gap between our social disparities.
Remember, apes together strong!
Jokes aside, we are in the calm before the storm of innovation that I believe will be this next decade. Let’s hope we can have our way for quite some time, without restrictions from out-of-touch governments!
Momentum, growth, and innovation are our allies in this.