In a parallel universe where we have Biden (or Democratic Party) administration, how different do you think the regulations / approach would be for this fast moving and unpredictable technology?
Refusing to enact new laws around a thing most people don’t like, don’t want, and don’t care about (oh and is used for scams often) is quite different than a secret back door war.
The crypto "industry" had a series of multi-$B scams, seems like strong regulation would be called for. On the other hand, Trump executed a rug pulling token for himself and his wife days before his 2nd term and sells pardons to fraudsters and money launders. I know that inspires confidence.
The ideal case is a statutory agency with regulatory authority that sets very clear standards for what model capabilities can and cannot release. Those are set ahead of time and well known by frontier model providers.
Most normal regulations are managed through the administrative procedures act process. That’s a legal requirement that involves deliberation and public comment.
I’d argue you could pretty easily enumerate most capabilities that have been obvious concerns for a while. For example, cyber security.
This structure can last decades and reassure players they can operate in the market without rules changing suddenly without warning.
Some kind of sudden, temporary action like this export control tool is legally fragile. Even if sometimes necessary in exceptional cases. But if the administration sees this as a permanent way of working, they won’t be helping anyone (but maybe themselves through grift).
If the administration truly cares about functional regulation (which maybe they don’t) they need a sturdier legal structure that lasts past Trump. Not flimsy edicts that change with the wind
I wholeheartedly agree with what you’re saying in general. I do wonder though, given how rapid advancements in AI are occurring, if even an agency with statutory authority would be able to establish a predictable regulatory environment, let alone do so while maintaining a lengthy public comment period and a whole of government approach. There are obvious flaws with the current administration’s approach to, well, almost everything. But I’m not sure if this is even a tractable problem with the governance structures we have been employing over the last 50 years.
Nothing being talked about with Mythos wasn’t a known AI risk 12 months ago. Those rules could have been established to guide frontier labs.
But yes crazy things happen. Maybe it won’t catch everything.
The right answer are giving the govt / this agency explicit legal, short term model pause capabilities to let the rule making process happen if something completely out of band happens. Or let the agency study/approve models prior to release.
Not sudden, unexpected application of export laws.
Yet in this case, for Fable, cybersecurity risks have been well know for some time. A rule created years ago when we knew this would happen could have given frontier labs and the market predictability.
They probably would have been in line with Executive Order 14110, the Biden administration's detailed description of a principled approach to regulation of the AI industry. It would have been aligned with the Trump administration's stated goals as well, but a coalition of rich VCs successfully bribed him to rescind it as one of his first acts in office, because the primary principle of Trumpist government is that people who pay Donald Trump a lot of money get what they want.
People who look up to Donald Trump unsurprisingly feel his genius moves are hard to read. They are not though, if you are familiar with petty thug mentality: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46474173
This prediction is quite falsifiable too so anyone is free to rub it in my face if it fails. If it's really a speculative insider trade the reversal will be done in the space of 2-3 weeks tops, but likely even faster. Probably on a workday. Kinda the same pattern they were doing with tariff swings until the market figured it out and stopped reacting.
"unsurprisingly": these people are predictable (by you, in this case)
"his genius moves": hyperbole, you clearly think they are not
You're saying people predictably like Trump's obviously bad moves AND are simultaneously incapable of reading these obvious moves (to paraphrase you without the snark). Then you're associating that with "petty thug mentality", as if people were too stupid not to look up to a criminal.
You are the edgy one here, and in fact smug about it. At least post proof of stock positions, otherwise you're just confidently accusing people of being stupid while not putting your money where your mouth is.
Do you think it is good policy for a country to cap its population? Can you envision the consequences for Switzerland in particular, given it is part of the Schengen area (the article covers a breadth)?
How would you enforce it? For instance, would Swiss citizens be required to get permission to have children?
> Do you think it is good policy for a country to cap its population?
That's a misconception. The goal of the initiative is to limit immigration and infrastructure strain. As a Swiss myself I can only talk about my country, and yes, it makes very much sense not to simply leave the floodgates open and allow the infrastructure to become completely overburdened, requiring constant expansion at the expense of quality of life and the natural environment. Schengen is largely a toothless tiger; the past few decades have made that clear. Germany, Austria, France, Denmark, Sweden, and Norway have all reintroduced border controls since 2015.
> It is not just about capabilities, it is about racism and nationalism. If you have the wrong passport, you are not to be trusted. This is a very different thing from safety, and Europeans should pay close attention to it.
And this is where one might as well stop reading.
This is standard practice for nation states. To call it racism is braindead and lazy.
It's completely naive. To say "we need to be better," you first have to define who "we" are and, by extension, *who isn't*.
Drawing that line is what constitutes a community in the first place. It's the entire reason the EU was created: to define a "we".
The idealistic no-borders vision is only achievable by expanding the nation-state until it covers the whole planet. And probably will only happen when it find outsiders to define itself against, Mars, aliens, whatever ends up counting as "not us."
though there are so many pernicious language patterns that projects like E-Prime (the verb “to be” goes to together with nominalization like peanut butter goes with jelly) are doomed
I agree with you on this point. This is a very weak line in an otherwise interesting post. Sometimes it feels like people have forgotten what nation states are.
> This is standard practice for nation states. To call it racism is braindead and lazy.
Author here. Just because something is standard practice does not mean this should be a goal. I do not want to live in a world where the north star is dividing people based on their birthplace lottery. I might accept it as a temporary local maximum that countries are optimizing towards but that does not mean I have to subscribe to that as a general destination or even the most optimal one.
I get that many of us were all technologists here. But it’s a weird inclusion because - it seems to imply that this was your red line and when you became aware that this administration might be racist and nationalist?
I don’t think export controls on large language models would enter my top 50 in terms of actions this administration has taken to show that.
> it seems to imply that this was your red line and when you became aware that this administration might be racist and nationalist?
If you read my blog you should have seen plenty of content before to get an idea why my red lines are. I even have a separate blog on that entirely: dark.ronacher.eu. My line is not here.
“Race”, such as it is, is orthogonal to place of origin.
If you’re arguing for abolishing the nation state or any concept the establishes right and obligations based on you being born there, then it would help your cause to not entangle it with racism. It would also be more interesting if you can explain how you imagine we’d even get to a place where there is only a single earthly jurisdiction with free movement etc. now THAT would be an interesting thought experiment.
> If you’re arguing for abolishing the nation state or any concept the establishes right and obligations based on you being born there, then it would help your cause to not entangle it with racism.
Racism in one form or another is at the very core of the nation state. I disagree with the very notion that rights should be established with a razor that cuts by citizenship. It’s a blunt tool that might work to some degree but clearly the US shows that citizenship is an insufficient measurement to the positive contribution to GDP or entrepreneurship.
> It would also be more interesting if you can explain how you imagine we’d even get to a place where there is only a single earthly jurisdiction with free movement etc. now THAT would be an interesting thought experiment.
I don’t know the path to there. That does not mean I can’t see that as a goal worth perusing and to see things they take humanity further from that goal as a regression.
> It would also be more interesting if you can explain how you imagine we’d even get to a place where there is only a single earthly jurisdiction with free movement etc. now THAT would be an interesting thought experiment.
There is so much that goes into 'birthplace lottery' ignoring what created the place, how people/family got to that point, systems that attract people, systems that people created. It's such a non-serious ridiculous term that has zero understanding of outcomes. Can't wait until it dies as a buzzword/signal/whistle.
My family died to come to the USA (from Ireland) and multiple grandmothers arrived very young orphans. My family from other places gave up friends/family/everything they knew to come here. There was a ton of suffering and sacrifice, no 'winning the lottery' for them. They sacrificed to place me where I am, no 'lottery ticket' got me here. Their intention did. My dad's dad worked in a horrible meat packing plant as part of that 'lottery ticket'.
My family sacrificed and clawed their way to get to a point to afford college for my father. They sacrificed to place me where I am, no 'lottery ticket' got me here. Their intention did.
My country fought a war for independence and a civil war to establish the freedoms I enjoy. Both my grandfathers fought/sacrificed hard in WW2 to get to the modern world. No 'lottery' created this world. Their effort/sacrifice did in part though.
All of those things were effortintentionwork and sacrifice by people. What they created wasn't a 'lottery land'. People have to plant the trees for others to sit under. I didn't win a lottery. Generations of family effort/pain/struggle went into getting me to where I started in life. Generations of people working on building a better society went into it.
Fuck anyone that minimizes everything my family did for me, I know I don't and am grateful every day for the people that chose to sacrifice to get me here. Growing up in Santa Cruz many of my friends who are now very successful had parents who were farm workers. They sacrificed their bodies to create a life for their kids, their kids didn't 'win the lottery'.
When born, you're handed a set of cards that you 'play' life with. Among others:
Genes (affecting gender, skin color, attractiveness & more). Birthplace (affecting citizenship, or 1st-learned language). Wealth of parents and/or that country. Upbringing (including religion). Sisters/brothers or single child. Parents who stayed together or single parent. Etc etc.
For your family: great they worked to get you where you are. And yes that was work not a lottery. No need to minimize their effort.
But for you as recipient of that, it was a lottery ticket. You did not work, or decide what your family did for you. You did not decide what genes you wanted to inherit from them. You did not pick your birthplace.
So the "lottery" part does apply: for each recipient of a set of cards.
I think you two commenters have both expressed the opposing ideas at the core of so much of the political/worldview divide of the world today.
Position 1: a human is an entity distinct from their family.
Position 2: a family is an entity that exists across generations, and no individual in the family can be abstracted from it.
I don’t think you two, or anyone else, is ever really going to suddenly change their mind on this point. It’s at the foundation of the irreconcilable divide between leftism and conservatism.
Ultimately, since we have plenty of evidence to show that people will just shout past each other when they hit this ideological sticking point, I think a better approach would be to individually answer the question: “Which is a better model for predicting the world?”
> might earn far in the future tied to accomplishments such as shooting computer data centers into space and creating a human settlement on Mars
I think it is cool that he ties his reward to some of the most audacious goals. Setting an almost impossible bar to reach to motivate, because it isn't going to come from an external source.
Technically, the proto-Sinaitic script is an abjad, with the Greek alphabet being the first true alphabet (symbols for both consonants and vowels).
Proto-Sinaitic/Phoenician can be described as the “first alphabetic system,” Greek the “first true alphabet.”
Fun fact: Greek is the world’s oldest recorded living language.
The Greek alphabet has been in use for approximately 2,800 years; previously, Greek was recorded in writing systems such as Linear B and the Cypriot syllabary.
> "Violence is present when human beings are being influenced so that their actual somatic and mental realizations are below their potential realizations."
Violence is the intentional use of physical force or power to threaten, damage, or harm people, property, or oneself.
I want to distinguish between a mission and a mission statement. I will not help you wordsmith your mission statement. I frankly don't think it matters.
But a great mission generally combines three things:
1. a long-term commitment to maximize some aspect of human flourishing (in the book I explain how this is the true definition of what it means to create a for-profit venture)
2. a set of values that include a determination to make principled decisions aligned with this goal, such that every decision the org makes is coherent
3. the strength to resist both the inner temptation and the outer pressure to defect, betray, or otherwise abandon the long-term goal
In the book I go into a lot more detail about how to do this, including how to make fiduciary commitments to the human beings you'd rather die than betray.
"1. a long-term commitment to maximize some aspect of human flourishing (in the book I explain how this is the true definition of what it means to create a for-profit venture"
How does this square with the widely taught business-school definition of a for-profit entity being something that aims to maximize shareholder value?
Not eries (obviously) but if you switch out shareholder for stakeholder i.e. maximise stakeholder value, you gain a wider set of responsibilities more aligned with Eric's comment. This is in itself not a new idea, it partly emerged out of the work of R. Edward Freeman. His original book on stakeholder management was published in 1984 and over the last decade has become at least a regular discussion topic at many business schools. However, the idea needs to gain far more momentum. Hopeful Eric Reis's new book also helps move the discussions forward - looking forward to reading it.
Boy, do I make my best effort in the book to take this idea out to the woodshed and show how this is a complete misunderstanding of what it means to be a for-profit entity. I hope you'll read the book and then come back and let me know if you think I was able to make a convincing case.
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