AI less regulated than milk, Microsoft president says in warning over safety

Food in general is regulated for very good reasons. Food borne diseases account for maybe a million death every year in the world, mostly from countries that don't have such regulations. And without going as far as death, even mild food poisoning can be quite disruptive. Milk in particular is critical because we give it to children who are the most vulnerable.

If anything needs to be regulated more than anything else, it is milk!

The article also mentions washing machines, which I think is a more level comparison. But washing machines can electrocute you, cause a fire or a flood. That kind of risk doesn't exist with AI, unless washing machine manufacturers took a page from Microsoft and sloppified their design I guess.

Operating systems are less regulated than milk, which is why they blue screen without consequences. Let's not entirely lose the plot here.

Do they want regulation because they are behind and want the brakes applied to others so they can catch up using their huge pile of money, or are they so ahead they want to stifle the rest? My money, based on copilot is on the former.

Funny how it's always these mega corporations who own a piece of the AI pie who are the loudest about regulating it.

I wonder when someone re-"create" for fun with enough tokens and some kind of neurodivergency, operating system that is (mostly) compatible with modern versions of windows but free and is not linux.

Part of the problem is surely that we know how milk should be produced and consumed safely, but we don't know how AI should be produced and made accessible safely.

Should we be more concerned about malevolent humans using AI to cause harm? Or should we be more worried about misaligned AI agents escaping their sandbox to cause harm? Or should we be more worried about job loss, or the concentration of political power in the hands of a small clique of billionaires?

All of these are real possibilities, but it's hard to put a finger on the actual probabilities. And even if you're identified and quantified these dangers, what should the actual regulatory environment look like?

None of this is to argue that we shouldn't have regulation, just that it's very hard to know ahead of time what the rules should be. It doesn't mean we shouldn't try to regulate, but we need to prepare for a rapidly changing technology landscape.

I tend to favor an open source approach to safety rather than keeping the technology hidden. I'd like to see regulation to mandate that model training and weights be much more open than they are now. But I could be wrong: maybe Dario is right that this should be kept in the dark. The only things I'm fairly certain about is that nobody knows for sure and we're going to need to adjust quickly.

> rogue agents

Press, please can we drop this OpenAI whitewash?

Burglaries aten't due to rogue crowbars.

If I invent a new gun, we don't need new regulation to say that killing someone with it is illegal. The cyberterrorism that the big LLM providers commit is already illegal in current law and nobody does anything about it. New regulation won't change that, it would only protect these criminals from their competition.

It feels like RFK Jr. is likely to take exactly the wrong lesson from such a statement...

Well duh. Milk can kill you, directly. Things you put in your body of course must have much higher regulation and safety concerns than computer programs that generate text and images (which are then, maybe, acted upon by humans without reviewing their truth).

These megacorps are doing their best to make their offerings sound scary, because scary == capable in marketing terms, and scary allows them to set up a regulatory moat preventing anyone from competing with them.

I don’t put AI in my body. Also milk is almost certainly over regulated.

It is an odd thing to say that an AI product use mostly by tech class elites should somehow be more regulated than milk, a product a vast portion of the world consumes into their bodies.

...and self hosted models are raw milk.

Not a bad metaphor: mostly fine, arguably legitimate benefits [when you're lucky], potentially really bad.

The biggest place the metaphor breaks is that when you drink bad milk, the consequences are local.

Note: this is not an argument that oligopolies or the state should control or have sole access to AI. It is a reflection of that fact that we as a society have no good answer nor even any process towards one, about how to balance the competing goods and risks of widespread access to capable AI.

Says the major company who is furthest behind in AI right now…

Alarming how casual you all are about regulating and pacing the most risky technology ever developed.