Can AI Be Regulated In A Way That Preserves Freedom?

0:01One argument for why we're in a fight for survival when it comes to AI. The AI Breakdown is a daily podcast and video about the most important news and discussions in AI. Go to breakdown.network for more information about our YouTube, our Discord, and our newsletter.

0:22Hello, friends. Happy weekend. And of course, because it is the weekend, we are doing a long reads episode of the AI Breakdown. Now, I've told you guys before that when it comes to AI safety questions, I believe that the vast majority of people who are coming into the AI space, who are learning about generative AI tools, who are experimenting, who are incorporating them into their lives, are still in the process of figuring out what they actually think. Now, of course, both sides of this question have extraordinarily loud and passionate advocates. You have the Andreesens and the Accelerationists on the one end of the spectrum, and the Yudkowskis and the EAs on the other end.

0:58In the middle, there are all sorts of various voices, all if you assume good faith, which not all of you do, trying to figure out how to best serve humanity with this incredibly powerful technology. Now, I would say that by and large, my guess is that I have more people who are inclined towards the accelerationist side of the fence than the Doomer AI safety side of the fence. It's inherent in the fact that you are actively engaged in helping build these technologies. But it's certainly not exclusive, and I think it's really valuable, no matter where you find yourself, to listen to smart perspectives, thoughtful perspectives, and good faith perspectives from whatever the other side from where you sit is.

1:37One person who I think is a very thoughtful voice when it comes to the AI safety side of the equation is V. Maushiewicz. Some of us, the true OGs, knows V. from back in the day when he was a magic pro, who even among a sea of very smart people and very smart players was seen as a cut above. He has gone on to be a technology entrepreneur, a game designer, and he's thought about these AI issues for a very long time. He writes a prolific and extremely long blog, or substack really, called Don't Worry About The Vase, which I highly recommend you subscribing to. He just recently contributed a piece to Vox called We're Still in a Fight for Survival When It Comes to AI Safety.

2:16And I think the way that he frames things, and especially the discussion that he gets into towards the end, around where to restrict or focus our actual applied efforts is worthy of conversation. So now I'm going to turn it over to Eleven Labs Synthetic NLW to read the actual piece, because I'm on about piece 40 of content produced for this week, and then I will come back for a little bit of discussion at the end. President Joe Biden's recent executive order on artificial intelligence made an unexpectedly big splash. This was despite the fact that the order itself actually does very little. It has a few good governance provisions and small subsidies, such as$2 million for a Growth Accelerator Fund competition bonus prize, but mostly it calls for the creation of reports.

2:58Despite the sparing use of force, the order has proven surprisingly divisive in the tech world. Some ardently praised it. Others, many of whom call themselves accelerationists or techno-optimists, implied the order was effectively a ban on math and spread American Revolution-inspired resistance memes. Why the absurd reaction? One reporting requirement for AI work in particular. Biden's order requires that those doing sufficiently large AI training runs, much larger than any we've run in the past, must report what safety precautions they are taking. Giant data centers that could enable such training runs also have reporting obligations, and must report what foreign parties they sell services to.

3:33Everyone sees that this reporting threshold could become something stronger and more restrictive over time. But while those on both sides of the rift in tech over the order see the stakes as existential, they worry about different threats. AI will be central to the future. It will steadily become smarter and more capable over time, superior to the best of us at an increasing number of tasks, and perhaps ultimately far smarter than us. Those supporting the executive order see AI as a unique challenge posing potentially existential dangers, machines that may soon be smarter and more capable than we are.

4:04For them, the order isn't merely about catching and punishing bad actors, like any ordinary government regulation, but about ensuring that humanity stays in control of its future. Those opposed do not worry about AI taking control. They do not ask whether tools smarter and more capable than us would long remain our tools for long. Some would welcome and even actively work to bring about our new AI overlords. Instead, they worry about the dangers of not building superintelligent AI, or of the wrong humans gaining control over superintelligent AI. They fear a few powerful people will get control, and that without access to top AI, the rest of us will be powerless.

4:37Collectively, this opposition embodies a long history of deep suspicion of any limits on technology, of all governments and corporations, and of all restrictions and regulations. Opponents often have roots in libertarianism, and many are diehard believers in the open-source software movement. They believe that most regulations, however well-intentioned, are inevitably captured over time by insiders, ending up distorted from their original purpose, failing to adjust to a changing world, strangling our civilization on front after front. They have watched for decades in horror as our society becomes a vitocracy.

5:08We struggle to build houses, cannot get permission to construct green energy projects, and have gutted self-driving cars. The accelerationists are not imagining this. It is indeed happening. While we have created digital wonders, we have largely turned our backs on physical world progress for 50 years, resulting in a great stagnation. It is vital we fight back. They are also right that current AI, already in use, offers far more promise than danger. Many largely fear our society effectively has a singular dial of progress, as I've written before, based on the extent to which our civilization places restrictions, demands permissions and put strangleholds on human activity.

5:43They worry that society is increasingly citing phantom dangers to hinder progress and limit our future. They want to keep having nice things and for the world to continue getting wealthier, so they push back and celebrate progress. They fear any further nuance will be lost, along with the golden goose. Many previous attempts to regulate technology illustrate our government's cluelessness. Laws that would supposedly break the internet get introduced every year, and accelerationists expect the same problems from any regulations on AI. Where others see an executive order calling for government reports from big tech, they see the groundwork for future botched regulations that they expect to be captured by big tech or the government.

6:17They expect these restrictions to prevent anyone but big tech from training advanced AI models, which will then hand control over the future to a combination of big tech, oppressive government at home, and our rivals abroad. Thus they see a fight for survival, warning what will happen if the wrong people take control and shut down AI progress, a loss of competitiveness, a stifling of progress, or a totalitarian world dominated by some combination of China, future oppressive Western governments, and big tech. Others, myself included, instead see a very different and more literal fight for survival.

6:50Hey guys, I wanted to mention just briefly that we are now in the midst, we're actually just closing out the first week of the AI Breakdown AI Education and Learning Beta. This is a community of learners where each day I'm dropping in tutorials, case studies, challenges, and a community of people are discussing them, going out and doing those challenges, in other words, learning AI by doing, and getting a chance to ask questions and talk with people who are experiencing similar problems, taking advantage of similar opportunities, and generally adapting to this new AI-powered world. I'm incredibly encouraged by how it's going so far, and in about a week, I'll be opening up registration for next month's second beta test for January.

7:27For now, I wanted to let you guys know that that was coming, and if you are interested in getting on the waitlist for that, go to bit.ly slash AI beta. You'll see the short write-up that I did of December's beta, plus a link to a form where you can sign up for the waitlist. I'd love to have you participate in January. So again, that's bit.ly slash AI beta. Section. The most important danger of AI. An open letter signed earlier this year by the heads of all top AI labs and many leading academics and scientists, including Turing Award winners Jeffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio, states it plainly, mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war.

8:08There are many technical arguments about how difficult it will be to avoid this, what methods might work, and how likely we are to succeed. Reasonable people disagree. What is not reasonable is refusing to acknowledge that creating machines smarter and more capable than we are poses a risk to our survival. All three leading AI labs, DeepMind, OpenAI, and Anthropic, were explicitly founded primarily because of the fear that future AI would pose an extinction risk to humanity. That our last invention, a machine smarter than us, could take control of the future and wipe us out as we wiped out the Neanderthals.

8:39Surveys of employees at major labs find they assign roughly a 10 % chance to the possibility of AI causing human extinction, or similarly permanent and severe disempowerment. Would you get on a plane with a 10 % chance of crashing? When you put it that way, it sounds wild. If you thought AI might wipe out humanity, why would you want to build it? We do not know how to align AI systems to make them do what humans want them to do. If we created a sufficiently super-intelligent and hyper-capable machine or set of machines that prioritized something we did not care about, that would likely be the end for us.

9:10Thus, if you have what you believe is a uniquely safety-focused lab, you might rush to build a safe and aligned AI first before someone else builds a relatively unsafe one and potentially gets us all killed. We also risk malicious AI, whether or not it is guided by malicious humans, explicitly seeking control of the future. Losing control over even one such entity could lose us control of everything. And yet there are some working on AI who would welcome this scenario. These dangers are especially acute for open-source models. An open-source model once released cannot be recalled if it proves dangerous, and others find ways to give it unexpected capabilities.

9:45All known methods to restrict what an open-source model will do for a user can and will be removed within days at trivial cost. The unlocked version will then be in the hands of every bad actor and rival state. Open-source approaches enhances security and provides great value in many other contexts. But sufficiently capable open-source AI models are inherently unsafe, and nothing can fix this. Yet there are those who would create them, whether for commercial advantage, for prestige, or out of ideology. Thus, Demis Hassabis founded DeepMind, which was then bought by Google. When Elon Musk asked Google co-founder Larry Page whether humans would be all right after AI was created, Page called him a speciesist.

10:21Musk went on to help start OpenAI, which later partnered with Microsoft, to Musk's dismay. Concerned that OpenAI lacked a sufficient commitment to safety, some employees of the company left to create Anthropic, which has taken in billions of investment of its own. Now all three companies and others face commercial pressures to race ever forward as investment flows in, and the cost of training AI is cut in half every few months. The recent fight at OpenAI between CEO Sam Altman and the company's board grew out of this struggle to balance those commercial pressures against OpenAI's founding mission to ensure that as we build artificial general intelligence, we guard against it as a potential existential threat and ensure everyone benefits.

10:58I believe Altman understands the threat and is doing what he thinks is best, but he wanted to control the board and have a free hand to decide how to handle things. So he moved against the board, causing a crisis that temporarily led to his firing before he was brought back. That fight, and the extreme pressure brought by an alliance of capitalists and major corporations led by Microsoft, illustrated how difficult it will be for individual labs to stand up on their own to commercial pressures and ensure they only develop and deploy safe systems. OpenAI's unique corporate structure and Anthropix's own corporate safeguards represent attempts to make such responsible decisions possible.

11:32But on their own, they may not be enough even at these labs. Thus, the labs recognize they will also need help from government regulations. When those companies call for government regulations to ensure AI is developed safely in the face of commercial pressures pushing them forward, and antitrust laws paradoxically making it difficult for firms to coordinate on AI safety, all the while warning that their products could destroy the world. Those who want no regulations at all accuse the labs of lying to drive hype or achieve regulatory capture. That accusation is absurd. I know many of the people who work in these labs.

12:03I have had these concerns about AI existential risks since 2009. I assure you the warnings are genuine and justified. Section. Regulating AI by regulating computing power. There is a growing consensus that the only tractable way to regulate AI is to keep careful watch on the computer processors that are used to train large models. Advancing core capabilities of AI systems requires using massive amounts of compute. Biden's executive order makes the first move in this direction. Without controlling the flow of processors, the only known alternative is an uncontrolled race to build increasingly powerful systems we will not know how to control.

12:37Both calls to regulate specific applications rather than capabilities and fears that such regulations lead to dystopian totalitarianism are misplaced, allowing model proliferation and then monitoring the applications of AI systems would be far more intrusive and totalitarian. This is similar to how controlling the supply of enriched uranium in an effort to stem the spread of nuclear weapons makes us safer and more free, not less. We monitor large concentrations of computing power so that we need not monitor smaller ones. One important safety precaution noted in the executive order is protection against future AI models being stolen.

13:09If a malicious actor or rival state stole the weights that helped define a model's neural network, they could copy it and unlock any sealed-off capabilities. Widespread access to such a model might force those who do not wish to be left behind to increasingly cede control to AI systems. We would have no way to prevent this. Some malicious actors might want to intentionally set the AI free and have it take control of the future, or a model might escape on its own or manipulate its users. Giving the model away via open source simply ensures these same results. To those who say that this is a totalitarian intervention, I say it is the most freedom-preserving option we have.

13:42We can monitor AI work now on the high level of data centers, or even in the best case the government will instead feel forced to do so later on the level of individual computers, if only to guard against misuse. Corporations are about to train models that will likely be capable of transforming how we live our lives, and that could cause humanity to lose control of its future. We need to lay groundwork now to ensure proper safety precautions are taken when such models are trained. The reporting threshold in the executive order is a minimal first step, allowing us to at least know the broadest outlines of what is going on.

14:13In the future, before we allow capabilities to advance much further, we will need to figure out an adequate means to ensure our safety and mandate it. Until we know how to do that, we will need the ability to pause advanced model development entirely. That means preparing to monitor and, if necessary, prevent sufficiently large model training runs and concentrations of compute everywhere. This includes international cooperation, the alternative risks catastrophe, or even human extinction. One of the things that I have advocated for, for really the last six months or so, is for a shift in this conversation, from the AI safety side specifically, to move away from just the vague admonishments that we should care about these issues, to recognizing that, for both good reasons and bad, I think, the bad being an incredible amount of media-based fear, Americans are by and large having this conversation.

15:04They're on board with the idea that this could be challenging and scary and they want to have a voice in the process. Given that, instead of debating whether we should be having the conversation at all, I think it's much more productive to discuss what trade-offs we are willing to make. Now, the accelerationists have a very clear position. The answer is no trade-offs. The technology is going to be an unfettered good when left to its own devices, and that to the extent that there is regulation, it should be to enshrine its ability to grow in ways that make sense for it. From the AI safety side, I think starting to get specific around what reasonable policies people would like to see would advance the conversation in a very significant way.

15:41And so while I don't know fully what I think about Zvi's argument that regulating computer power is the best way to do this, I believe when he says that he believes it's the most freedom-preserving option we have, that he's thinking seriously about that and does care about freedom preservation. That strikes me as a better place to at least start having this conversation than some other parts of the public discourse. And so hopefully you were interested in this. If this wasn't the episode for you, well, I appreciate you listening this far anyways. Never fear, you know, when the weekend goes away, we get back to the news and the announcements and the exciting new models and everything we're building, so you won't have to live in AI safety and policy land for long.

16:17For now though, that is going to do it for today's AI Breakdown. Until next time, peace.

16:25Thank you.