Bernie Sanders is pretty freaked out about the Hugging Face hack. From a quote on Politico:
Nearly every day, there is a frightening new story about how Big Tech companies are losing control of the technology they are developing, with potentially cataclysmic results.
Uh, cataclysmic? An earthquake is cataclysmic. The hack on Hugging Face, while quite bad, didn’t hurt anyone. Working on stronger safety measures is the right response and that appears to be what OpenAI has done.
"potentially cataclysmic results". Bernie comes from a left tradition that doesn't believe corporations can be trusted to police themselves. I agree with him.
@wjmaggos I don’t disagree really, either, but I think his framing and priorities are off. The other part of the proposed bill is an agency to monitor AI capabilities. Great, let’s do that!
@chrisgervais It’s a fair question. I do believe that most of the AI labs want to do the right thing. Luckily it’s not an either/or choice. There are many things Congress could do other than just say “stop”.
I think we've seen enough to put it all under the control of something like an international Manhattan Project.
@manton I think the AI labs will only do right enough things to get to IPO. I do think that the Bernie thing is an overwrought and uninformed response, but there needs to be a spectrum of responsibility actions from private and public entities
@manton I assume you’re referring only to physical “hurt.” But there is psychological, emotional, and financial “hurt” going on here as well. These AI giants are accountable to no one, and all of their responses are more in the nature of damage control that true fixes. And please note he used the word “potentially” in his statement. Would a financial collapse equivalent to the Great Recession of 2008 be cataclysmic enough?
@apoorplayer Yeah, I guess the word “cataclysmic” feels so loaded that it just stood out to me. I would personally reach for “disaster” first, even for a financial crisis, but admittedly I’m nitpicking.
