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ZorbaTHut  1yr ago (text post)   44913 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 5, 2022

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First volley in the AI culture war? The EU’s attempt to regulate open-source AI is counterproductive

The regulation of general-purpose AI (GPAI) is currently being debated by the European Union’s legislative bodies as they work on the Artificial Intelligence Act (AIA). One proposed change from the Council of the EU (the Council) would take the unusual, and harmful, step of regulating open-source GPAI. While intended to enable the safer use of these tools, the proposal would create legal liability for open-source GPAI models, undermining their development. This could further concentrate power over the future of AI in large technology companies and prevent research that is critical to the public’s understanding of AI.

The definition of "GPAI" is vague and unclear, but it may possibly differ from the commonly-understood usage of "AGI" and may include systems like GPT-3 and SD.

I will be very curious to see how much mainstream political traction these issues get in the coming years and what the left/right divide on the issue will look like.

As @arjin_ferman observes, this is in line with my more pessimistic scenarios. What is AGI, people ask? Why don't they just click the link? But to be fair, it took me a little while to discover the actual definition, here («WITH PRAGMATISM AGAINST POPULISM & STAGNATION», lmao):

'general purpose AI system' means an AI system that - irrespective of the modality in which it is placed on the market or put into service, including as open source software - is intended by the provider to perform generally applicable functions such as image and speech recognition, audio and video generation, pattern detection, question answering, translation and others; a general purpose AI system may be used in a plurality of contexts and be integrated in a plurality of other AI systems;

It's trivial to realize how this applies to large language models like the GPT series, to say nothing of multimodal systems. We don't have to get even to GATO sorts of multitask training. If anyone thought the cooling effect will only start close to what we intuitively recognize as human performance: think again.

I advise people to notice how synchronized the push against individual agency enhancement is, and it's not, contra the insistence of quokka-economists, explained by innocuous market reasons like economies of scale and data moats. In the US, you have the EA movement with their longtermism, fearmongering, advocacy for «compute governance» and «pivotal acts», and independently from that – politicized corporate AI safety/fairness divisions that'll probably be used to distinguish «responsible actors» and delegitimize smaller ones on the next legislation cycle (like with Oscars: not everyone can afford the demanded diversity package). In the EU, you have this regulation circus building on pop of earlier anti-American big tech rackets masquerading as customer protection. Of course Bostrom's hand is traceable to both sides of the pond, via WEF in the Old World and LW cluster in the New. In Russia... well, if we'll have Russia still on the map in two years, they'll do good if they don't start burning their remaining ML talent for witchcraft; they're also shut out of international markets and can't acquire new compute. Japan is «LOL», as @gwern (not with us I assume) puts it – they don't do any AI R&D worth mentioning, aren't sovereign, and will meekly follow Western lead. In China, as gwern again points out, the newest American export regulations will increase the relative (although not absolute) capacity of central government and big tech, which are already paranoid and illiberal to the highest degree:

The second-order effects here would seem to confirm Chinese autarky and trends towards secrecy, and further, to shift power from Chinese academia/small businesses/hobbyists/general-public to Chinese bigtech and thus, the Chinese government. If you've been following along, the big megacorps, especially in the wake of the attempted US execution of Huawei, have been developing their own DL ASICs for a while with an eye towards exactly this sort of scenario. [...]

If you are rich and well-connected and can finance the lobbying and guanxi and paperwork, you'll be able to get access to compute, one way or another, while the small guys can no longer click 'buy' on nvidia.com or just negotiate their usual datacenter orders and will pay higher costs or go without. It's the same reason why things like GDPR always wind up hurting FANG less than the activists expect (and hurt small actors like NGOs or startups much more), why 'regulatory capture' exists and why big actors often actively lobby for more regulation. It's going to be much harder and more expensive to get Nvidia GPUs or to get proprietary hardware (can you buy a TPU from Google? no, you cannot), therefore, small actors like hobbyists will be systematically disadvantaged and many priced out.

The rest of the world (sorry fellow rest-of-worlders) is comprised of some shades of shithole and Western cryptocolony, wracked by climate disasters, brain drain and, crucially, global economic crisis triggered in no small part by the EU/American/Chinese COVID policies and now the war, extremely vulnerable even to half-hearted sanctions, and won't have the wherewithal to do ML research at scale.

Well, there are exceptions of course, hilariously two exceptions validating priors of Russian conspiracy nuts.

One is a dystopian surveillance state with legendary intelligence services and diplomatic acumen, a history of attempting and partially pulling off ludicrously illiberal tech regulations, but not (yet) any de facto obstruction on advanced AI research for smaller actors; the island where core DeepMind staff is physically located, and Stability.AI incorporated.

The other is a militarized ethnostate with infamously capable intelligence agencies, world-class lithography fabs, world-leading STEM&software talent, brazenly self-interested and defiant of international regulations, not beholden to NATO or really any other alliance, with a good track record in clandestine WMD development and non-signing of non-proliferation treaties and their equivalents.

So: USA, UK, Israel, maaaybe China if (and that's a big if) it doesn't immolate itself with its own bureaucracy and Special Military Operation in a few years. These three and a half – more like one and a half – actors will split the future of the light cone, the way it's going.

That's to be expected of course. Individual agency is a threat to big structures, always has been. Even allowing escape is a threat, an infinitely big threat when multiplied by longtermist numbers and existential anxiety. There used to be a great Motte-adjacent blog, 451somethingsomething, a few years ago, with a good article of the alienation the author felt when he noticed the vibe of eusociality and hivemindedness in the society around him, his own obsolescence as a stubborn independent cell. Not edgy, just desperate. That's kind of how I feel now.

You're quite right about restrictions closing in.

I just spent 20 minutes trying and failing to install stable diffusion (due to poor technical skills). It's amazing how much sanctimonious nonsense they can put in their license. They go on about being biased towards White/Western prompt language and announce that it probably cost about 11 tonnes of CO2 to produce the model, as though anyone cares. I don't understand why you would release software for free, on a very open license and then put in this stuff. Wouldn't releasing your model like that mean you're libertarian-leaning?

The model should not be used to intentionally create or disseminate images that create hostile or alienating environments for people. This includes generating images that people would foreseeably find disturbing, distressing, or offensive; or content that propagates historical or current stereotypes.

Of course, there's already a general in 4chan's /h/ about it. h stands for precisely what you would expect a novel art-creation AI tool to be used for.

I wouldn't read much into it: they have to cover their asses (it doesn't work all that well). And yes, people care about CO2; 11 tons isn't a lot, some models can burn the equivalent of a small city's energy budget, and we need to encourage energy-efficient approaches (hopefully, there's also the added benefit of slowing down major corporate players with near-infinite compute budget, who can just keep scaling).

Emad personally, at least, has a pretty mature (IMO) understanding of ethics around personal freedom, in fact philosophy is one of his specializations. But he clearly doesn't like White supremacy a great deal, being a Bangladeshi, and might really appreciate debiasing of the dataset towards a statistically accurate representation of human phenotypes across the globe. Just under 10% of the global population are white, after all (you'd never tell that from a random English-annotated image content sample).

I think it's time to come to grips with the fact that some of the other 90+% are enabling technical breakthroughs with their own people in mind.

Try some retard-proof guide or prebaked SD-based executable, I'm sure there was one linked on /r/StableDiffusion.

And don't give up after 20 minutes. Come on man, doing something for the first time can take orders of magnitude longer.

Yeah I found an exe shortly after. The technical skill I lacked was the wisdom to look for an easier path. It's good fun to play around with.

But to put the C02 into comparison, some friends of mine put 17 tonnes of C02 into the atmosphere just today with international flights. Your average climate summit probably has a carbon footprint similar to the larger models. Slowing down the big players is nice but the silliness of it irritates me.

And do these people think a primary use-case isn't nuding celebrities or making 'stereotypical' content? Credit where credit's due, the version I got didn't have blockers on it. But it's like making a set of monkey bars and forbidding children to climb on top of them since they might fall. One, it goes against the point and two, it won't be obeyed. A rule made to be despised.

Is it so clear that this is one of those domains where present trends can be meaningfully extrapolated? Theoretically, bringing any modern country up to the cutting edge of AI amounts to transferring a few TB of data and one container-load of GPUs; if you also want people who can understand and iterate on it, perhaps add a classload of people and at most 8 years of training. The people behind the likes of DeepMind do not strike me as actual +4\sigma-on-the-g-distribution individuals that are in genuine short supply globally to anyone that is not the Cathedral as much as moderately smart people who were at the right place at the right time with the right motivations. As I see it, it's not clear that it wouldn't take just one Chinese drone swarm flying too close to the wrong rock for Japan remember the last few times they surprised powers that wanted a slice of their sleepy islands by sudden and very prolific technological copypasta.

Also, I wanted to thank you for linking the Complex Numbers songs in that previous post of yours you linked. Pretty neat, and colours in my mental image of the direction the Russian offshoot of the rationalist community must have moved in. Did you have anything to do with the people behind it?

There used to be a great Motte-adjacent blog, 451somethingsomething, a few years ago, with a good article of the alienation the author felt when he noticed the vibe of eusociality and hivemindedness in the society around him, his own obsolescence as a stubborn independent cell.

Status451? That guy who wrote the book review on Days of Rage?

Right, Ghosts in Every Machine

Last month was strange and horrifying. A guy with an interesting and novel project wanted to talk about it at a conference. A conference run by a solid, upstanding tech leader. And then everyone lost their shit. Suddenly, out of nowhere, everything was crazy. All I wanted to do was protect a conference I’ve enjoyed in the past, to do a nice thing for a guy who made a mistake in the eyes of the public. The next thing I know, I’m surrounded by zombies. News reporters made up lies about us. Communists on the internet joked (haha-no-but-really) about sending us to gulags. Coworkers of mine, not knowing who I am, told me to my face about this “crazy blog defending a horrible bigot,” and how they’re glad there aren’t any terrible people like that in our office. I’ll be laughing for a long time about how I’m officially certified “not supremacist” by the SPLC.

This is insanity. Why did these people do these strange things? Why did people I knew and trusted, interacted with daily, turn into horrible people yelling for my head? The most confusing part was their general ignorance of the details of the situation. Very few of them knew why they should be upset. None of them had ever read the speaker’s offending blog, and few of them had so much as seen the offending quotation. All they knew was that we’re the bad guys, and need to be punished.

Our critics are a part of something bigger than themselves. They’re keyed in to the Waze app, being the human serpents, while my Motorola flip-phone struggles to run the snake game. And why wouldn’t they? At every step along the way, it makes sense. Who cares why the narrative seems a little too perfect, they’re happy. It works for them. Their needs are met. By playing their part, responding to the signals in the memetwork, they enjoy health and happiness, wealth and social status. It would be stupid not to go along.

We here at Status451 have never really fit in. The signals are mangled by the mountains here in Zomia. We’re the single cells. The behaviours of everyone else made no sense to us, and the results were frightening. We can’t see the complex internal signals.

When the mass of cells is bearing down on you, just like in Simon-spore, you do have an option. You have mobility. Freedom. Our critics, keyed into the signal of their culture war narrative, gain a lot of benefits. They get their social needs provided for, in exchange for being the lifeblood of their egregore. But that is the cost: they must be the egregore. They lose the freedom to go their own way. We here have chosen the other path. Maybe “chosen” isn’t quite the right word; I’ve tried my whole life to fit in, be normal, and it just doesn’t work. But our other path, chosen or not, gives us the freedom to see things differently. We can be the masters of our own fate, hold a deeper, fuller agency over our lives. As long as we don’t wake the deep faceless things.

Everyone loves weaponization narrative. Sure, every action, performed by a rational actor (even more so by coalition of actors) is calculated to secure their cozy status quo or disrupt rival one. But know what? Absence of any EU legislation would signify the same weaponization, successfully carried out by other actors like AI-powered businesses. They would have lobbied their way toward just right degree of individual agency, basically any degree you wish to pay for. Monthly agency subscription, pretty interface, but they would also hoard some details of your precious agency in the background, for its safety and for better recommendations, and maybe some other things.

Every disruptive technology would be weaponized, rest assured. And not only technology itself – that’s the bread and butter of technocrats – folks of more modest means weaponize the mere threat of technology. Even your natural claim for agency is already part of a standard sjw toolset you would sneer at in other circumstances.

Instead of pamphleteering away regulatory motion, I’d first explore the strategies they devise, and where exactly this tide is moving. Or do you already have a good strategy of decentralized resistance?

One is a dystopian surveillance state with legendary intelligence services and diplomatic acumen, a history of attempting and partially pulling off ludicrously illiberal tech regulations, but not (yet) any de facto obstruction on advanced AI research for smaller actors; the island where core DeepMind staff is physically located, and Stability.AI incorporated.

Would be hilarious if it actually turns out that Brexit was the singular event that allowed UK to remain sovereign. It would vindicate the deplorables as nothing else.

History is full of these weird little accidents and ironies, like Mussolini getting ousted in the end by the symbolic grand council of fascism he created.

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