Inversely to your sarcastic “understanding” about politicians’ stupidity, I can’t understand how tech people seem incapable or unwilling to actually read the legislation they have such strong opinions about.
Or point out what is actually false?
You rebutted the points that the flop limit will not actually limit anyone by saying that gpt4 is out of reach of startups.
Is OpenAI a startup? Is Anthropic? Is Grok? Is Perplexity? Is SSI?
You ignored the counter points that advanced technology exponentially raises flop limits and changes costs.
You said that the flop limit can be raised over time. So startups shouldn’t worry.
You ignored the counter point that flop limits in export controls are explicitly designed to limit competition from other nations.
Flop limits not being a real limit is a ridiculous argument. The intent of a flop limit is to limit, no matter how you sugar coat it.
Being able to ignore the flop limit makes basically everything else you've said irrelevant. But just to quickly go through: I don't want to argue about what a 'startup' is but they're not 'small guys'. Advanced tech can be compensated for, but also it doesn't change the fact that staying under $100 million keeps you excluded. Export controls have nothing to do with this discussion, and they involve a completely different kind of 'flop limit'.
We periodically raise flop limits in export control law. The intention is still to limit China and Iran.
Would any computer industry accept a government mandated limit on perf?
Should NVIDIA accept a limit on flops?
Should Pure accept a limit on TBs?
Should Samsung accept a limit on HBM bandwidth?
Should Arista accept a limit on link bandwidth?
I don’t think that there is enough awareness that scaling laws tie intelligence to these HW metrics. Enforcing a cap on intelligence is the same thing as a cap on these metrics.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neural_scaling_law
Has this legislation really thought through the implications of capping technology metrics, especially in a state where most of the GDP is driven by these metrics?
Clearly I’m biased because I am working on advancing these metrics. I’m doing it because I believe in the power of computing technology to improve the world (smartphones, self driving, automating data entry, biotech, scientific discovery, space, security, defense, etc, etc) as it has done historically. I also believe in the spirit of inventors and entrepreneurs to contribute and be rewarded for these advancements.
I would like to understand the biases of the supporters of this bill beyond a power grab by early movers.
Export control flop limits are designed to limit the access of technology to US allies.
I think it would be informative if the group of people trying to limit access of AI technology to themselves was brought into the light.
Who are they? Why do they think the people of the US and of CA should grant that power to them?
Your delusions and lack of nuance shown in this very thread are exactly why people want to regulate this field.
If developers of nuclear technology were making similar arguments, I bet they’d have attracted even more aggressive regulatory attention. Justifiably, too, since people who speak this way can't possibly be trusted to de-risk their own behavior effectively.
How do people on a computer technology forum ignore the 10,000x improvement in computers over 30 years due to advances in computer technology?
I could understand why politicians don’t get it.
I should think that computer systems companies would be up in arms over SB 1047 in the same way they would be if the government was thinking of putting a cap on hard drives bigger than 1 TB.
It puts a cap on flops. Isn’t the biggest company in the world in the business of selling flops?