Sam Altman has been spending the past few weeks advocating in favor of AI regulations.
In terms of both potential upsides and downsides, superintelligence will be more powerful than other technologies humanity has had to contend with in the past. We can have a dramatically more prosperous future; but we have to manage risk to get there.
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We are likely to eventually need something like an IAEA for superintelligence efforts; any effort above a certain capability (or resources like compute) threshold will need to be subject to an international authority that can inspect systems, require audits, test for compliance with safety standards, place restrictions on degrees of deployment and levels of security, etc.
To be fair, they say open source models are totally fine… as long as they don’t get too good:
We think it’s important to allow companies and open-source projects to develop models below a significant capability threshold, without the kind of regulation we describe here… the systems we are concerned about will have power beyond any technology yet created, and we should be careful not to water down the focus on them by applying similar standards to technology far below this bar.
Last week, Altman was in Washington DC discussing these topics with lawmakers.
Cat Zakrzewski, The Washington Post:
OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman delivered a sobering account of ways artificial intelligence could “cause significant harm to the world” during his first congressional testimony, expressing a willingness to work with nervous lawmakers to address the risks presented by his company’s ChatGPT and other AI tools.
Altman advocated a number of regulations — including a new government agency charged with creating standards for the field — to address mounting concerns that generative AI could distort reality and create unprecedented safety hazards.
In October, 2022 Sam Bankman Fried published a “draft of a set of standards” for the cryptocurrency industry. He had previously been spearheading the effort to lobby congress to adopt similar regulatory measures industry-wide.
Less than one month later, his exchange, FTX declared bankruptcy. He was subsequently indicted with “wire fraud, conspiracy to commit commodities fraud, conspiracy to commit securities fraud and conspiracy to commit money laundering” among other charges.
It’s actually kind of typical: when companies get big enough and fear newer upstart competition, they’re frequently quite receptive to regulations… established companies often want those regulations in order to lock themselves in as the dominant players, and to saddle the smaller companies with impossible to meet compliance costs.
OpenAI should be commended for kickstarting our current generative AI development explosion and they are still, without question, the leader in this space.
This move should be called out for what it is, though—a blatant ploy for regulatory capture.