alt Hacker NewsBecause the downsides that exist for other companies simply do not exist for this tier of rich companies. Examples:
- product liability
- negligence (civil or criminal)
- Computer Fraud & Abuse Act (requires intent, which after N "accidents" seems like a jury should at least evaluate whether intent is present as understood in a courtroom. Hard to blame "surprise" after the Nth "accidental" breakout.)
The bottom line is that if you or I trained a local model and it did any of this stuff, we would experience Consequences. ("Don't try this at home!") But an artifact of our unequal legal regime is that big rich companies generally do not and thus brazenly touting their immunity is part of their business strategy.
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There are modern legal frameworks around pet liability (dog bites, "vicious" breeds); premises liability (e.g., swimming pools) and known hazards (e.g., a rotting staircase) that stem from ancient legal concepts of whether an ox was a "known gorer" or merely involved in its first goring incident.
Some of these LLMs are known gorers.
I think it's really instructive that only closed-model companies are doing these kind of "my AI could kill the world" demonstrations. All while telling us how dangerous open models are.