Maybe it’s wishful thinking on my behalf, but I am still not convinced that LLMs are on a path to SciFi levels of apocalyptic malicious super intelligence. Rather LLMs at some level are just all of the humanity’s information rendered accessible in an unprecedented way.

In general trying to regulate information access is a losing battle that invites tyranny. So the goal should be minimal restrictions.

At the end of the day, the threats posed by capable AI tools have to be physical. I think the key threats are the following:

- Internet connected infrastructure being crippled

- Creation of WMDs

- Economic collapse (precipitous devaluation of knowledge work and IP).

I personally think the glory days of the wild west, mostly unregulated internet were already over before LLMs; and we need to take a step back to make something structurally secure. This (expensive) change would stop the irresponsible/malicious actor running a tireless hacking agent in a loop threat model. Even a rogue SciFi tier AI would have a much harder time escaping/propagating with a structurally secure internet.

Enabling WMD creation is scaring, but I don’t think it’s really that big of an issue. Anyone with a sophisticated enough supply chain to create AI data centers is leaps and bounds more advanced than what is required to enrich uranium or synthesize bio weapons. The problem is allowing access to untrusted parties. I think it’s fair enough that individual actors shouldn’t have unregulated access to all of human information (private frontier AI companies included).

The last problem is probably the trickiest, but again could probably be solved by regulation. IP protection is already tricky and I don’t think we should try to get more protectionist.

We really need to figure out how to preserve fulfilling careers (if AI does ever get cost effective enough). I don’t think, say accounting, is inherently more fulfilling than building a house. The problem is concentration of wealth and labor dynamics.

Of course all of this gets way harder if it proves that truly dangerous capabilities can be present in models that can be run on consumer hardware.

I don’t think it’s necessarily tyrannical to have a tier of hardware that’s labeled some equivalent of “weapons grade” and requires strict licensing. Restricted computers is a change from the norm. But I can go buy a shotgun with ease and not an F35 jet.

We’d just need to be careful that we can still have lightly to unregulated computing to a certain point and that access to the capable AIs isn’t restricted to just in groups.