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ZorbaTHut  2yr ago (text post)   45549 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 5, 2022

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I don't think those two things are at all alike in relevant aspects, though. If people in China invent an alternative internet or kiwifarms, I can't just run it on my own machine.

A sufficiently general interpretation of the argument ("people were calling X resistant to regulation but it turned out to not be, so if people call Y resistant to regulation, it will also turn out to not be") proves way too much though; the exercise of finding historical patterns that were broken is trivial.

A sufficiently general interpretation of the argument ("people were calling X resistant to regulation but it turned out to not be, so if people call Y resistant to regulation, it will also turn out to not be") proves way too much though; the exercise of finding historical patterns that were broken is trivial.

I think this is a very good point. This is a fully general argument about regulation being capable of adapting to whatever technology it wants to regulate. The logistics of some forum website running versus being taken down is sufficiently different from the logistics of a piece of software being run on an individual PC (sans any online requirements) that we can't generalize the experience of one to the other.

Still, I must admit that I personally can't help but feel that we will see history repeat here. Much like, say, KF, AI image-generation software seems likely to piss off a sufficiently sympathetic and loud group of people such that people will find a way to clamp down on it. Maybe it will be death by a thousand cuts by censoring the research that goes into and the distribution of and the results of such software. Maybe it will be more overt political action of just men with guns preventing people from producing independent personal computers and/or using them. Maybe it will be some new creative way of regulation that will have been invented by some AI software that no human could have come up with today. It just seems that when it comes to this stuff, where there's a will there's a way, and there seems to be a lot of will to prevent people from generating arrangements of pixels that one finds objectionable.

This only works because cryptocurrency mining has minimal margins (so top-of-the-line mining hardware is barely profitable, and slightly gimped top-of-the-line hardware is not profitable at all). ML computations are ultimately similar enough to general-purpose computing that you couldn't intentionally cripple them by more than some small constant factor without also crippling games (I've written an ML paper myself where we accelerated the training using graphics-only stone age shader operations, because the deadline was near and we couldn't get our hands on modern GPUs fast enough), but universities and tech giants with 10x faster hardware don't categorically win against a horde of tech-savvy internet users with the 1x version.

The crux of machine learning is matrix multiplication, which is a very fundamental operation. It would be damn hard to make a GPU that can do anything useful, without being able to multiply matrices. "Only have access to the good stuff" is probably best accomplished by limiting access to GPUs at all.

"Only have access to the good stuff" is probably best accomplished by limiting access to GPUs at all.

This is already happening. The US government has already banned Nvidia from selling high-end chipsets to customers in China. One important point about the bans is that this not only bans the current top-end chips but also anything they develop in the future with similar capabilities - so in a few years it will cover high-end gaming cards too, and gradually extend lower down the range as time goes on.

That's currently in the geopolitics sphere, but it's easy to see it being rolled out to other customers that the people in charge don't want to have unfiltered access to modern AI tools. If the masses want powerful GPUs they can use an online service like GeForce Now or Dall-E that restricts any sort of dangerous/undesirable behavior.

I’m not sure if you can prove too much here. There is nothing that floats totally free of all regulation (understood in a sufficiently broad sense). You can’t say “well, it’s technology, and technology is above such petty concerns”. Technology gets regulated all the time: nukes, guns, etc.

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