Original Reddit post

While I’m a relatively heavy user of AI, I have never used AI to write an email or social media post. I mostly use AI to talk to computers and tell them what to do with more refined control and a wider range of options than I could have imagined a couple years ago. I find it useful for research; it can function like a search engine on steroids. I’ve dabbled quite a bit in stable diffusion modeling and computer vision, and I have been burning the midnight oil learning about AI related photogrammetry topics such as Gaussian splatting. I find the visual field of AI in particular to be incredibly fascinating. It is amazing what can be done with a few multidimensional matrices of binary values (Nth order tensors), but that really is all that it is at the end of the day - big boxes of numbers. I believe we should live in a society where First Order communication of human to human dialogue should take precedence and an elevated seat over the use of AI informed dialogue. Once you start putting AI in-between humans, I don’t believe there is any stopping the devolution of society into secondary, tertiary, and quaternary orders of communication as people get separated further from each other. I think we even saw evidence of this hypothesis revealed when the world witnessed the data centers in Russia destroyed in Ukraine. While by no means a “super intelligence” in its present form, these big boxes of numbers will certainly have a significant impact on our society when paired with more and more powerful hardware. Quantum computing, photonic computing, and petabyte-scale RAM in the future will likely lead to advances that are leaps and bounds ahead of where the field is at today. AI is already accelerating that future by assisting in the research of those technologies. There will probably be multiple clusters of religion-adjacent cults formed around some of the most powerful AI nodes in the not so distant future. These nodes will be capable of amazing things, but they will still be a reflection of their flawed human creators, and they will still likely be fueled by random number generators. Pandora’s box has been opened. AI models have been disseminated to millions of computers. Data centers enable broad scale access to AI, but AI models can be run on local hardware for anyone with the appropriate resources. Tools exist to allow fabrication and alteration of models entirely offline. Even if the major hyper scalers can be regulated - which is impossible for any individual country to do anyway - it is not possible to control offline development by unscrupulous private individuals, organizations, or governments. These boxes of numbers can provide a lot of unchecked power. I don’t think society is ready for it, but it is here, and it’s not going away. Our best bet would be to have a transparent international society performing cyber security research. The Linux community has already started pushing out cybersecurity updates at a much more frequent pace. Most of you probably use Linux a lot more than you realize. More than half of all web servers in the world run Linux, so everyone uses it indirectly while using the internet. I think it would be good for the governments of the world to support open-source cybersecurity initiatives to avoid reliance on private companies and proprietary models for our wellbeing. Even if we were to assume everyone has good motives - which I don’t - we need an option to protect against the inevitable mishaps that are going to occur. When bad motives enter the equation, we need to protect against that as well. Another benefit of public funding for open-source model development would be shared access to the benefits. It would be nice if the medical advancements and technological discoveries (of which there will no doubt be many) could be owned by the public instead of patented for profit by private entities. AI puts too much power and too much risk management into the hands of individuals and private corporations with limited accountability and a mandate to maximize profitability. Regulations on the technology at this point have the potential to solidify the market share of the big players and make it more challenging for smaller players to compete independently. That is why you hear all the CEOs in this field calling for regulation, they need it to protect their market position, and they’ll use their lobbyists and connections with the current executive branch to influence the regulations to something that is easy for them and hard for others. Regulation should primarily occur at two levels: At the infrastructure level. For example, open coolant loops should not be allowed for data centers throughout the majority of the country, particularly in agricultural areas which are already facing water scarcity issues. AI data centers should primarily be located where the waste heat can be recovered to offset fossil fuel consumption. At the training data level, to ensure that a company has the legal rights to all material used for training. If a model is found to be non-compliant, a financial settlement alone is not adequate, the model should be forever discontinued from service. If we set in place sustainability and ethically minded constraints and let developers deal with the economic consequences, the hardware demand will decrease, smaller businesses will be able to enter the market, and it’ll decentralize control of AI systems to more individuals and businesses throughout the country. Governments of all shapes and sizes should insist on using only transparently documented open-source models. Proprietary models operating in any government system are a risk to the public and should be made illegal. Sam Altman recently made comments about it being a waste for individuals to have RAM in their own computers when he needs all the RAM for his data centers. While that’s true from a raw utilization perspective, it is terribly flawed from a power dynamics perspective. Scientific discovery and advancement are moving faster than they ever have before, we don’t need to accelerate. The focus should be on diluting concentrations of power. Altman, Amodei, Pichai, Bezos, Musk, and Zuckerberg already control far too much of the world’s RAM. I think people should be focused more on RAM accumulation and deployment of billionaires instead of just focusing on their money hoarding alone. TL;DR = Big boxes of numbers combined with RAM are powerful tools right now, we need to decentralize the power. submitted by /u/–Spaceman–

Originally posted by u/–Spaceman– on r/ArtificialInteligence