alt Hacker NewsWe should be skeptical of any major player that advocates for regulating their own industry. In practice, this just means increasing barriers to entry and making it harder to compete with them.
In my mind we should be trying to push AI along the Linux trajectory. You have a free and open source product, developed by a decentralized team with a strong code of ethics, running on commodity hardware. There can still be trillion dollar industries built on top of it, but the core technology is democratized and available to everybody. I don't see how we get there if we allow a handful of companies to dictate where development of the technology goes.
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Wouldn’t this align with their financial interests? In theory the thing that’s keeping them from being profitable (or one of the big things) is the periodic capex expenditures of building new frontier models.
The regulation that is being argued for here is against pushing the frontier. Entering the market with say a new speech to text model is not subject to such regulation. What's needed is something qualitatively different from entry barriers, and of the frontier model companies at least Anthropic and deepmind seem to have enough self-awareness to speak about it. They are finding themselves in a race with possibly catastrophic outcome for humanity and would like to stop, but it needs internation cooperation on a level that no single company can provide.