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I hope this doesn't become the new norm where government becomes the bottleneck for innovation in the AI space. It's worrying that with no formal and transpare
by razighter777 3mo ago
I hope this doesn't become the new norm where government becomes the bottleneck for innovation in the AI space.
It's worrying that with no formal and transparent policy framework that the government will be picking winners and losers and stifling innovation.
There's been no public policy, executive order, legislation, or otherwise on this, I wonder if anyone has filed FOIA requests for these decisions or the conversations between the Executive Branch and AI companies.
- vidarh 3mo agoIt will just mean US providers will rapidly loose their moat. Their moat is already shrinking. If they can't release their best models, it'll shrink a whole lot faster...
- blackqueeriroh 3mo agoIt won’t, the government will change its mind again
- tiahura 3mo agoJust because you don't get access, doesn't mean they're not innovating.
- logicchains 3mo agoTheir innovation relies on a huge amount of investment made under the assumption that they'll continue to be able to provide frontier models to a global audience. If it turns out the US government only lets them sell gimped models to non-citizens then they'll forfeit the whole global market to China and investors will flee like rats.
- cromka 3mo agoAlso applies to Chinese models. Give it 5 more months of US admin locking out US models and let's see what the market will look like for OoenAI and Anthropic IPO.
- esperent 3mo agoMaybe, but you know who is also innovating, not gating access, and at most 6-9 months away from reaching parity with US frontier labs?
- fartcoin67 3mo ago[dead]
- vonneumannstan 3mo ago[flagged]
- gxs 3mo agoWhat a terrible take First of all, who said this is a disaster? Second of all, OP never even said anything about no regulation - they specifically said they wanted transparency which is 100% valid and better than a world where the government baby proofs everything for you Models are already censored - and who they are or aren't uncensored for has a lot of implications which are way worse And the jets is a terrible example - you picked one of THE highest regulated industries where NOBODY has a problem with regulation
- vonneumannstan 3mo ago>And the jets is a terrible example - you picked one of THE highest regulated industries where NOBODY has a problem with regulation The potential risk from serious AI disasters far far outweighs anything the Airline industry has ever done. Like its a joke that I even have to invoke that in the first place.
- bigyabai 3mo ago> We don't let passengers fly on unvetted jumbo jets either and we prevent them from flying when they have problems. This is Mr. Fart's Favorite Colors all over again. Our "vetting" process is not any more useful than the billion-dollar metal detector you can skip with a TSA Precheck. It arguably does not deter the most dangerous attacks even slightly. What happens when a mentally-ill pilot locks their copilot out of the cockpit? Well, we write off a crowd of passengers and then "vet" the next jet as a safe vehicle. AI will be the same way. These "safety" measures are performative and do not even slightly address the actual threat surface of the technology. Arguably, it cannot even be done.
- alberto467 3mo agoWhat knowledge or skills do you have to be hating on the certification process for airplanes? It’s just getting ridiculous at this point. There are plenty of industries regulated and certified by national or international agencies. And no they don’t get to do what they want.
- postalcoder 3mo agoNot a fan of the phased release but I do remember when access to gpt-3 was gated and access to gpt-4 had a staged release. ppl are acting like limited release is unprecedented when, in fact, has been the norm until a few years ago.
- wahnfrieden 3mo agoWas it the norm for Trump's team to hand-select the specific customers who get access in the staged rollout, and to choose the date of wide release?
- postalcoder 3mo agoThe AI companies were all asking for the government to regulate them. The government is doing what the companies asked for them to do. You can argue that, by government, they meant some legislative process, but I'd argue that regulation via bad executive order is much better than regulation via bad legislation because the former is tractable. I say this as an EO minimalist.
- wahnfrieden 3mo agoOk so to be clear you agree this has not been the norm. It seemed like you were clarifying your original message but it was a change of topic, from "this has been the norm" to "this hasn't been the norm but they got what they were asking for" (or what they deserved if not exactly what they asked for). I'll dip out of that conversation.
- postalcoder 3mo agoWhat an unpleasant form of discourse.
- CamperBob2 3mo agoWelcome to HN. There's cake in the breakroom.
- rvz 3mo agoThis move was obvious the moment Anthropic pleaded to the government to regulate them. As predicted, [0] it has now been applied to OpenAI and soon anyone else releasing highly capable models. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48511849 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48511849
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- llelouch 3mo agoSeems like it hasn't been applied to openai. Anthropic can't even release this to partners. Openai can. I wonder why.
- jasonvorhe 3mo agoWondering how long it'll take for the US to make it... more difficult to use Chinese models once they've caught up.
- winterismute 3mo agoIndeed, I find quite ironic that some people in tech in the US complain about EU "regulations first" approach, but then their government seem to arbitrarily stop things from being released because, well, there is no established policy on safety guarantees or other similar aspects.
- criddell 3mo agoMaybe this is a good opportunity for the European AI companies to jump ahead?
- jessepasley 3mo agoLol
- dopidopHN2 3mo agoThe US is already behind and has been technically. Can't wait for that part to sink in. This start to be a source of second hand embarrassment when I see US folk think their country is still leading the race technically.
- villish 3mo agoDefine leading then. Mythos and GPT score higher on all the benchmarks versus Chinese models. I suppose your anti-american mindset has given you a different definition of leading than the rest of us.
- dopidopHN2 3mo agoI'm american btw. I define leading by : Renewable energy, EV, sustainable agriculture, Drone warfare, public infrastructure, soft power, Grid management, Nuclear. I use AI every day since 2 years and it did not really occurs to me. I think its as important as the crypto industry. Edit: fair, its unhinge of me to say that on a post about LLM regulations. I still feel the same way. We will wake up and be the UK.
- iAMkenough 3mo agoBut think about how terrible it would be if “foreigners” (including the ones that work on these models) got access! We must clutch our pearls and cite National Security as a reason to pick winners and losers, just like the government did for Fable.
- alberto467 3mo agoThere would be real risks yeah. This is not something to joke about, its real.
- tancop 3mo agofor america yeah. for the world the only real risks are american, chinese or corporate dominance. thats why its important to support open models wherever they come from and smaller players like mistral in france or black forest in germany.
- iAMkenough 3mo agoImagine what brown skinned people could do if they were granted the privilege of accessing the Internet! That’s a lot of information that could fall into the boogeyman’s hands.
- baq 3mo agoShadow of export controls is very long indeed. The Project is almost here.
- CamperBob2 3mo agoIt's worrying that with no formal and transparent policy framework that the government will be picking winners and losers and stifling innovation. The market will demand such a framework. I suspect that's the larger idea here, in that Amodei not only wants to be in the room when that framework is written, he wants to be at the head of the table. He apparently wants it so badly he's willing to set back his own company's IPO to make it happen, given that there can be no pure-play AI IPOs until the regulatory picture is sorted out.
- HumblyTossed 3mo agoWith _this_ admin? No way.
- CamperBob2 3mo agoChecks from the major model providers will already be on their way to Congress, hand-delivered by the highest-paid lobbyists on K Street. Look for them to wake from their ent-like slumber tout suite to pass legislation that the courts can use for guidance. What Trump is doing at the moment is, as usual, only a distraction.
- siva7 3mo agoSo OAI are you also silently dumbing down your models when you detect "inappropriate topics" like Anthropic did with Fable?
- consensus1 3mo agoFable didn't silently dumb it down. It printed a warning that it has detected a possible inappropriate topic and you are being switched back to Opus. I hate it, but it isn't dishonest.
- coreyh14444 3mo agoI'm going to get downvoted here, but all the E/acc people that loudly allocated for Trump, someone known for amassing power by any means necessary including strong arming industry should be publicly eating crow right now. This was something that was always in the cards when you vote for someone who only cares about himself.
- pu_pe 3mo agoI wonder what kind of scheme the administration is up to. The obvious play is a squeeze where OpenAI and Anthropic are forced to give parts of their company away, like Intel. But they could also be toying with the idea of limiting frontier AI access to companies that bend the knee, which would further cement their grasp on the tech industry.
- wqaatwt 3mo ago> what kind of scheme the administration is up to I’m sure they are wondering just as much. I assume exhorting Anthropic/OpenAI for personal bribes, favorable government contracts with no restrictions and public acts of submission.
- throwaway7356 3mo agoMaybe include some election guides for poor, misguided Americans that would hurt themselves by not voting for God President Donald Trump I as well? It's protecting people from themselves, so basically like the safeguards already included in the models.
- throwaway613746 3mo ago[dead]
- mips_avatar 3mo agoThis is what OpenAI/Anthropic want, it's better marketing than they can pay for -- and it creates a precedent for permanently banning the next generation of open weights models
- HumblyTossed 3mo agoYup, regulatory capture.
- theptip 3mo agoBut in this model, there is no regulator, there is just the Whitehouse deciding who gets to use the AI. Nobody has “captured” Trump here.
- mips_avatar 3mo agoThe problem is they've convinced mainstream people that a model that can find a bug in Microsoft Windows is a bigger problem than Microsoft not caring about fixing it.
- Avicebron 3mo agoI would really like to know how much of the anti AI sentiment is really just general economic precariousness mixed with seeing inequality skyrocket while the average persons material reality in the US is decreasing.. We really need to disentangle the technology from the economic inequality everyone is pissed about.
- forshaper 3mo agoThe nyancat is out of the bag.
- wqaatwt 3mo agoIt’s going to be a bit trickier to do that, even banning US providers from hosting them legally might be tricky to do.
- overgard 3mo agoWell, when the leaders of this movement go around doom-trolling for years on end this is what happens. It turns out you need to be careful what you say if you're a highly visible public figure. Amazing! Honestly, with open source models I don't think this regulation means anything because there's no way they can really regulate what's coming out of china. I don't think this affects innovation in AI much at all (unless your definition of innovation is "pour more money into diminishing scaling"). It's mostly just bad news for the US frontier labs, and based on their behavior I don't feel sad for them AT ALL. Like, they've basically alienated the vast majority of people by outright threatening their livelihoods or even society at large, and now we're supposed to feel sorry for them because they can't just go around saying "THIS WILL REPLACE ALL JOBS IN A MONTH!" without consequences?
- lucasban 3mo agoIt’s likely that this would slow down the rate of advancement at the Chinese labs as well
- overgard 3mo agoI don't see how, other than that it will make it harder for chinese labs to train their models on OpenAI/Anthropics' (which honestly I can't get that worked up about plagiarism in this space considering where they got their data from..)
- wqaatwt 3mo agoOr significantly increase their market share outside the US and give them some breathing space to catch up with the currently available closed models
- naturalmovement 3mo ago> because there's no way they can really regulate what's coming out of china Do you think the Chinese will go parading around that they've created the greatest cyberweapon known to man, and the CCP will be totally cool with the Americans being first in line to buy tokens, because hey, free market? They would sooner put all their own employees in an incinerator than allow that to happen.
- renegade-otter 3mo agoThat only happens in governments that treat regulations as a racket, not something to be used for public good.
- bastardoperator 3mo agoI remember when Republicans told us they want less regulation and smaller federal government. Now they want their dementia riddled god king to control everything from pool liners to the information you're allowed to see, which is all in books and readily available online.
- stouset 3mo agoIt was never about principles. It was always about justifying getting the things they wanted.
- afavour 3mo agoWhat surprises me more is that any of the AI CEOs believed them. They were in the tank for Trump because they thought Biden/Harris would stifle them… and here we are.
- slashdave 3mo agoYou're assuming that their base is rational
- groundzeros2015 3mo agoAlways good to dehumanize your enemies
- no-name-here 3mo agoAre you referring to saying his base isn't rational, or to Trump calling his political opponents “vermin”, etc?
- slashdave 3mo agoThey aren't my enemies and being irrational does not make you less human
- naturalmovement 3mo agoHow can you simultaneously be a bottleneck for innovation while being their largest customer, and pouring tons of money and resources into it to help accelerate development? The startup-brained among us never learned the first rule of business which is to not fuck over your benefactor.
- RIMR 3mo agoI'm honestly surprised there isn't more political outcry. The administration has a party affiliation that, typically, insists on free market principles and is against government overreach and regulation. You would think that this government, attempting to puppeteer the most rapidly growing industry in the world, would have more people outraged. Where are all of the people crying "Communist"? This is one of those moments where it is less of an overreaction.
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- api 3mo agoThe big companies want this. It's a moat for them, a way to keep competitors (especially overseas) out of the US market. They might try to extend it to downloadable open weight models, but honestly they might not even bother with that. The goal is to keep people from competing on lucrative contracts or the hosting market.
- hintymad 3mo agoI largely blame people like Amodei for such outcome. As product owners, they could've done it the old way: telling people how great this product is, how much potential it has, and what kind of guardrails the companies are building and etc. But oh no, Amodei has to do the doom trolling 24x7, while in the meantime plays a cult leader by telling people only he knows how to the guarding angel of the AI or the humanity thereof. Ironically, the same people also push their companies to develop more powerful AI in full speed. They think ordinary Americans are so stupid that they can't see through them?
- Certhas 3mo agoI agree that this is all ridiculously arbitrary right now, but it shouldn't be surprising either. I can't find the exact blog post (maybe on simonwillison.net ?) but I read people predicting that know your customer laws would be coming to AI if it gets more powerful several years ago already. Powerful technology that can do immense harm in the hand of individuals/small groups is the most obvious (and legitimate!) target for regulation. Maybe Anthropics hubbub around Mythos made all of this happen earlier than it would have, but it was going to happen (if the models are going to get as capable as valuations imply they will). (Edit: Of course this doesn't mean it can be effectively regulated in practice) Further more, no one actually gets hurt if we start rolling these things out more slowly. Rolling them out selectively according to the whims of an administration that disdains fair process, tears down the institutions that could potentially provide and legitimise reasonable regulation, etc... well, that's another topic.
- cbeach 3mo agoIn the EU that's the norm not the exception. A little taste of Europe for our American friends :-S
- epolanski 3mo agoExcept that EU has clear rules, not arbitrary lawless approvals.
- groundzeros2015 3mo agoYeah it’s called diffusion of responsibility and accountability. Impersonal forces slowly close in with no face.
- derefr 3mo ago> There's been no public policy, executive order, legislation, or otherwise on this I mean, insofar as you could frame each new model as its own patentable invention, "patent secrecy" would be an existing policy framework that clearly justifies what's been happening here. 1. Some private company or individual invents something. 2. But the state wants a monopoly on the new thing's military use-cases (against other states/militaries.) So the state forcibly classifies the invention at patent time. 3. But the individual/company still wants to make more money than the state is giving them as compensation for their own use of the patent. They want to sell to the private market. But, of course, the state doesn't want to permit this, as arbitrary private parties could in turn resell to foreign state actors. 4. So a compromise is struck: private use is now made deny-by-default. The state permits the individual or company to sell into the private market, given: a rigorous per-customer KYB background-checking process; strong supply-chain tracing; contractual stipulations prohibiting resale; and the customer use-case being transformative or cost-prohibitive to extract the original invention from. 5. As such, big established enterprise customers who want the invention for private use in their internal industrial processes, can somewhat-easily jump all those hoops to acquire access to it; but everyone else is now basically locked out. Sound familiar?
- bashtoni 3mo agoI don't see how you can make a case for a $700bn+ IPO when the government might not even let you sell your product. America is ceding the lead in the AI race. The winners here will be the Chinese AI companies. If the Chinese models remain predominantly open source then it would probably be for the best. Unfortunately I'm not convinced they will, with examples like Qwen Max showing what could happen.
- girvo 3mo agoZ.ai and MoonShot (and StepFun and some others who are another six months behind or targeting smaller use cases) are still open, surprisingly enough. Alibaba making Qwen close up shop for its best models isn’t that surprising, though sad. The worry is that if the US models are locked up like this, then there’s less reason for China to commodify its complement through open weights…
- matthest 3mo agoThe precedent for this is terrible. MAGA is bad enough. Imagine if the current batch of US progressives, who have 0 idea how any of this works, wins the presidency and gets to decide who gets to use it.
- marcosdumay 3mo agoFrom the other side of the world, the current batch of US progressives looks quite liberal. It looks to me they'll either completely restrict AI or not touch it at all. Do you think they'll try to dictate who gets to use it?
- throwaw12 3mo agoFor some conspirational reasons, I am thinking that this was the part of the deal between Anthropic and US government, all buzz was for PR, but behind the closed doors Anthropic asked US to regulate the LLM space
- TheBigSalad 3mo agoCaused by AI marketing teams hyping everyone up.
- luxuryballs 3mo agoI am still waiting for a government to try “nationalizing” AI by saying anything produced by AI belongs to “everyone” and thus hugely taxing the profits and proceeds from the product, as soon as Bernie Sanders thinks of it you can bet we’ll hear all about it.
- GolfPopper 3mo agoApparently your hearing isn't that good, since you haven't heard of the American AI Sovereign Wealth Fund Act. https://www.sanders.senate.gov/press-releases/news-sanders-introduces-legislation-to-create-7-trillion-ai-sovereign-wealth-fund/ https://www.sanders.senate.gov/press-releases/news-sanders-i...
- luxuryballs 3mo agoah I must have been out of audible range
- slashdave 3mo ago> conversations between the Executive Branch and AI companies You think there is a record?
- nerdsniper 3mo agoIt’s already the new norm.
- antfarm 3mo ago> I hope this doesn't become the new norm where government becomes the bottleneck for innovation in the AI space. I hope that not too far in the future a responsible government* will become the bottleneck for innovation in the AI space. *obviously not the current
- K0balt 3mo agoIt definitely will be. They are trying to preserve their offensive cyberwarfare and cyberespionage capabilities. It’s not about “bad actors”. It’s about defensive capabilities becoming pervasive and cheap.