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White House says no need to restrict 'open-source' AI at least for now
- stonethrowaway 2y agoSee my comment here on FBs strategic positioning: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41090142 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41090142 Updated link.
- rvnx 2y agoMight change after getting lobbying checks from Google, Microsoft and Apple.
- talldayo 2y agoWhy? All three of those companies have an obvious and outspoken commitment to releasing models for free, they aren't trying to manipulate fear to sell a product like OpenAI.
- chatmasta 2y agoMicrosoft is invested in OpenAI. Have they released any open weight models themselves? Apple is similarly partnering with OpenAI. Google has released nerfed versions of its Gemini models (Gemma 2B and Gemma 7B). It seems the only company truly setting an example for open weights is Meta. Hopefully the other companies realize that it’s in their best interest to do the same (as it seems Google is begrudgingly realizing with its nerfed releases). Eventually open weights will win, and if OpenAI (the most ironically named company) continues to rely on closed models as its moat, it will lose.
- roywiggins 2y ago> Microsoft is invested in OpenAI. Have they released any open weight models themselves? Phi-3? https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/products/phi-3 https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/products/phi-3
- lsaferite 2y ago> Microsoft is invested in OpenAI. Have they released any open weight models themselves? Do the Phi series models not count?
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- kkielhofner 2y ago“AI” is much more than LLMs… Not only have all three of these companies released LLM model weights, Google and Microsoft especially have released nearly countless model architectures, weights, evaluation/training/inference/etc frameworks, toolkits, etc across an extremely wide spectrum.
- rvnx 2y agoThey mainly offer open tooling to help you adopt their closed-source tech (e.g. RAG frameworks) but you don't get the freedom to do what you want with the model (which is the core). At some point, these big companies may even want to put more regulation or restrictions on their open-weights / open-source competitors. "Hey this is not validated for safety, you can use only Gemini"
- talldayo 2y agoThey don't? Microsoft and Google both promote Open Source inferencing frameworks, and while both also have proprietary products I think it's completely dishonest to say they "mainly" support them. ONNX and Tensorflow have been supported longer and more productively than any of the closed-source AI frameworks Google or Microsoft offer.
- rvnx 2y agoLet’s see what the future holds. I’m feeling that the next step will be for regulators to start restricting more and more open-source/open-weight LLMs (and their equivalent Diffusion models), in the name of safety. Perhaps requiring certifications in professional use for example. I see it as a happy coincidence for these large players if this is the case, because only folks with large pockets and the right thoughts will be able to get certified.
- talldayo 2y agoYou are currently posting in a thread where the root article is a press release detailing why open weight LLMs aren't going to get restricted by the incumbents. I also have seen no indication that any president-hopefuls intend to regulate the tech either. There are no demonstrated dangers yet, the value of exporting this digital snake-oil far outweighs the cost of other people asking ChatGPT how to make a fertilizer bomb.
- apwell23 2y ago> Apple is similarly partnering with OpenAI. I think this is too generous of an interpretation for their deal.
- yjk 2y agoReally makes me wonder what the angle here is for them. With open source, I can somewhat understand given market standards become easier to hire for and you get feedback on your tooling. It seems unlikely that either will be true for open-weight models. It also seems unlikely they would be able to establish market domination and then increase prices if everything remains open.
- sblom 2y agoIn all three cases, they own hardware (Apple in a slightly different sense) that they'd love for you to pay to run your favorite models on, open or closed.
- apwell23 2y ago[flagged]
- nozzlegear 2y agoSorry, I’m no JD Vance fan but what on earth do you mean he was installed by Silicon Valley? Who installed him, and where did they install him to? Do you mean “Silicon Valley” installed him as Trump’s VP pick? Or just that SV installed him as one of two senators from Ohio — in which case, how did they do that, and more importantly why would they choose a senator from Ohio instead of California? I know Vance is friendly to SV but the idea that there’s some nefarious shadow council of SV tech nerds installing politicians into nebulous places without the public or opposition being generally aware of it is preposterous.
- KRAKRISMOTT 2y agoThe Elon and Thiel gang, they are not pro "SV" insomuch as being pro Thiel/Elon oligopolies. If open source AI one day threatens their livelihoods and career, the tune from the WH will change overnight. Right now the SV conservatives are playing catch up on AI so they are happy to push for laissez-faire instead of regulatory capture. I won't be suprised that should the cost of running and finetuning FB Llama models become so cheap that they start to eat into x.ai's business, all of a sudden AI is a massive national security issue and AI safety academics will go back to regurgitating talking points about imaginatory AGI terminator bots.
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- hnhg 2y agoBy SV, I think he might mean Peter Thiel and his associates: https://archive.is/1oVs2 https://archive.is/1oVs2 "Narya was backed with about $100mn from Thiel and a cadre of his acquaintances, including former Google chief executive Eric Schmidt and prominent venture capitalists Marc Andreessen and Scott Dorsey."
- laweijfmvo 2y agoWould love to hear the White House explain to me what Open-Source AI is, in their own words.
- talldayo 2y agoSeems pretty clear to me they're using it colloquialism for freely distributed weights.
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- jimsimmons 2y agoIs that "umm ackshually .." bit really worth doing here? Open weights vs training code is not a distinction worth drawing for the average person
- bravetraveler 2y agoI'm just barely more informed than the average person... and I still don't think it is worth drawing. Perhaps I'm wrong, willing to discuss. I'm simple so my thoughts on this are also. Weights, training code, or... CAD files that just so happen to make child-size cages. Until I'm actually caging children - buzz off.
- burkaman 2y agoThis sounds sarcastic, but as is often the case the White House has quite competent people working on this who have put a lot of thought into it already: https://www.ntia.gov/federal-register-notice/2024/dual-use-foundation-artificial-intelligence-models-widely-available-model-weights https://www.ntia.gov/federal-register-notice/2024/dual-use-f... Unfortunately it's past the deadline for you to add your own comments on this, but I'm sure there will be future RFCs if you have thoughts.
- jahewson 2y agoIn the spirit of this pedantry I’d like to point out that the NTIA is not the White House.
- m3kw9 2y ago[flagged]
- sandworm101 2y agoBetter question: Is it possible to restrict open source AI? If it is open then everyone has access. Any restrictions would be akin to demanding that linux not use strong encryption or firefox implement content censorship.
- Legend2440 2y agoUntil 1996 they did put restrictions on strong encryption, and everyone had to implement weak 40-bit encryption.
- perihelions 2y agoThose restrictions were unconstitutional for the entire duration they were in effect.
- michaelt 2y agoIt hasn't proven possible yet but who knows what will be developed the future? A lot of open source efforts depend on big companies training million-dollar models and giving them away. These companies will often apply some censoring adjustment to the weights, which the open source community then undoes through fine tuning. But perhaps in the future new methods of censorship will be developed, which are radically harder to undo? And of course, there's always heavy-handed options available - if we can require hairdressers to hold professional licenses, we could require the same of anyone who wants to upload to huggingface or civitai.
- grumpyinfosec 2y agoIts possible to restrict DIY building of pretty much anything if your end goal was to stop people from doing something outside of their basement with it. I can't build my own open source coal fired power plant and except to sell power without the EPA coming to kill me. Same would be if i used a open source AI that violated some new consumer protection / anti fraud law if i choose to use it over the public internet / build it into a product. Hell you could probably go after the devs for being accessory if you really wanted to. The license really does nothing to protect your project from regulation its just that the government doesn't care about open source yet.
- OldGreenYodaGPT 2y agoRegulating open-source AI will only help giants like Google and OpenAI, stifling innovation. It creates barriers only they can afford, limiting competition and diversity. Open-source fosters transparency and rapid progress. We do not need government regulations, or we'll end up like Europe with China leading.
- talldayo 2y ago> It creates barriers only they can afford, limiting competition and diversity. I would argue this is inherent to the training and compute cost of all large language models.
- binary132 2y agoQuantized Llama 3.1 can run on an Amazon GPU instance for $32/hr now
- talldayo 2y agoThat's still prohibitively expensive for anyone that doesn't intend to make their money back. For training it's even more outrageous.
- binary132 2y ago$64K isn’t even one developer’s salary.
- talldayo 2y agoAnd how many people can afford to pay a developer's salary after utilities and mortgage?
- binary132 2y agoI think you’re missing my point: hiring someone is not that costly relative to training a billion-dollar model from scratch, so the barrier is definitely getting lower. An individual proprietor with a moderately successful business (or just business loans, let’s face it) can hire at least a couple of employees.
- MP_1729 2y agoGood. Effective Austruism is trying to destroy democratic institutions and it's likely a bigger threat to society than fascism. The pro-progress people needs to organize themselves to stop types like SBF from giving AI to China.
- didntcheck 2y agoCan you elaborate on what you're referring to?
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- ChrisArchitect 2y agoSource: https://apnews.com/article/ai-open-source-white-house-f62009172c46c5003ddd9481aa49f7c3 https://apnews.com/article/ai-open-source-white-house-f62009...
- bananapub 2y agofascinating how successful the bullshit rebranding of "sometimes we upload a TB file of weights" as "open source" has gone for them politically. I can't really imagine they thought it would go this well. will be interesting to see how this unexpected boon of a loophole will change their strategy, particularly """OpenAI""", who didn't think to do give themselves enough cover.
- _fat_santa 2y agoSay the government actually wanted to regulate open source AI, how exactly would they do that? If the govt wants to regulate commercial AI, they can do that by going to the companies responsible for building that AI and say "do X, Y and Z or else we will punish you with A, B or C". But what do you say to a collective of developers that could be all around the globe? What stops that group from just saying "F* You" and continuing on?
- war321 2y agoYa love to see it.