Humans dont really grasp exponential improvements. You wont have much time to regulate something that is improving exponentially.

Humans also don't grasp that things can improve exponentially until they stop improving exponentially. This belief that AGI is just over the hill is sugar-water for extracting more hours from developers.

The nuclear bomb was also supposed to change everything. But in the end nothing changed, we just got more of the same.

https://kagi.com/proxy/battle_deaths_chart.png?c=qmSKsRSwhgA...

The USA and USSR would almost certainly have fought a conventional WWIII without the bomb. Can you imagine the casualty rates for that...

Meanwhile, a single nuclear bomb hitting a major city could cause more casualties' than all American deaths in ww2 (400k).

It is hard for me to imagine a statement more out of touch with history than this. All geopolitical history from WWII forward is profoundly affected by the development of the bomb.

I don't even know where to begin to argue against this. Off the top of my head:

1. What would have happened between Japan and the US in WWII without Hiroshima and Nagasaki?

2. Would the USSR have fallen without the financial drain of the nuclear arms race?

3. Would Isreal still exist if it didn't have nuclear weapons?

4. If neither the US nor Russia had nuclear weapons, how many proxy wars would have been avoided in favor of direct conflict?

The whole trajectory of history would be different if we'd never split the atom.

The bomb had effects, but it didn't change anything. We still go to war, eat, sleep and get afraid about things we can't control.

For a moment, stop thinking about whether bombs, AI or the printing press do or do not affect history. Ask yourself what the motivations are for thinking that they do?

If that is your criteria, then nothing has ever changed anything.

After religion: We still go to war, eat, sleep and get afraid about things we can't control.

So, no change.

You can be cynical about corporate motives and still worried. I personally am worried about AI partly because I am very cynical about how corporations will use it, and I don't really want my atoms to be ground up to add storage bits for the number that once represented Microsoft's market cap or whatever.

But even cynicism doesn't seem to me to give much reason to worry about regulation of "next to no cost" open source models, though. There's only any chance of regulation being practical if models stay very expensive to make, requiring specialized hardware with a supply chain chokepoint. If personal devices do catch up to the state of the art, then for better or worse regulation is not going to prevent people from using them.

Serious question, who funds their research? And do any of them ever plan to work or consult in industry?

My econ professor was an “academic” and drew a modest salary while he made millions at the same time providing expert testimony for giant monopolies in antitrust disputes

Many of the academics at the top of this list are quite wealthy from direct employment, investing and consulting for big tech and venture-funded startups.

This is a really good point. I wonder if some of the antipathy to the joint statement is coming from people who are worried about open source models or small startups being interfered with by the regulations the statement calls for.

I agree with you that this cat is out of the bag and regulation of the tech we're seeing now is super unlikely.

We might see regulations for startups and individuals on explicitly exploring some class of self-improving approach that experts widely agree are dangerous, but there's no way we'll see broad bans on messing with open source AI/ML tools in the US at least. That fight is very winnable.

One who won a Turing award for somebody else's ML work and refused to give credit for it.

My understanding is that the AI needs iron from our blood to make paperclips. So you don't have to worry about this one.

This is the more realistic danger: I don't know if corporations are intentionally "controlling the narrative" by spewing unreasonable fears to distract from the actual dangers: AI + Capitalism + big tech/MNC + current tax regime = fewer white- & blue-collar jobs + increased concentration of wealth and a lower tax base for governments.

Having a few companies as AI gatekeepers will be terrible for society.

You mean scare the public so they can do business with the lawmakers without people asking too many questions

We can base our arguments on the unprovable, some specific person's secret intentions, or we engage the their ideas. One is lazy and meaningless, the other actually takes effort.

Then there is this lazy and false equivalency between corporations being interested in market capture and AI risks being exaggerated.

This is what they’re terrified of. They’ve invested near a billion dollars and need billions in revenue to enrich their shareholders.

But if the data leaks? They can’t stop random companies or moneyed individuals running the models on their own kit.

My prediction is that there will be copyright enforcement mandated by law in all GPUs. If you upload weights from the big AI companies then the driver will block it and phone home. Or report you to the authorities for violations of corporate profits… err… “AI Safety”.

I guarantee something like this will happen within months because the clock is ticking.

It takes just one employee to deliberately or accidentally leak the weights…

Sorry I don’t understand what would be the impact? Aren’t the results not deterministic

What are the weights here

Oh this is a nifty idea. Hadn't thought of regulation in this manner. Seems like it would be pretty effective too.