Ask HN: Is the only way to regulate AI through chip fabs?

3 points by jlei523 3 years ago | 6 comments

This means regulating the most advanced chip fabs, TSMC, Samsung, and Intel on manufacturing ever more powerful AI training chips.

I can't think of another way to prevent a rogue lab from training ever more powerful AI.

Only AI labs that pass stringent audits and regulations can be allowed to buy more powerful AI chips.

If we determine that AI is an existential threat to humanity, like nuclear weapons are, shouldn't we regulate AI training chips like we regulate nuclear weapon making material?

Countries have treaties signed on nuclear weapons. Why not sign treaties on AI chip making/buying?

behnamoh 3 years ago |

How do we make sure no country builds underground chip facilities just for training AGI models? tbh, the genie is out of the bottle. I never thought the path to AGI would be so "simple": basically you take a 2017 paper and give it tons of data and see AGI emerge. It's fascinating.

jlei523 3 years ago | |

How do we make sure no country builds an underground nuclear weapon making facility?

I don't actually know the answer to the above question.

But at least for chip making, you need hundreds of different highly advanced technology suppliers and chemicals to make a chip. I would think that making an advanced chip making facility is actually much harder than nuclear weapons. Many countries have the ability to make nuclear weapons, but no one can compete with TSMC, Samsung, and Intel right now. Even then, all 3 rely on ASML machines.

That said, I suppose countries will slowly see the value in chip manufacturing and invest heavily into it in order to train more powerful AI models.

I'm not suggesting that this solution is perfect, but it does seem to buy us significantly more time.

muzani 3 years ago | |

There are some illegal click farms out there, basically those dodgy places designed to click on ads a lot of times, like pages, follow influencers, write reviews. I wonder if those can be repurposed to train AGI.

The Iron Man movie (2008) had him build a high tech suit in a cave to escape from terrorists. But ironically in reality, the people who were inspired to become engineers from that movie build Ultron in a similar cave.

lisasays 3 years ago |

Not just chip fabs; also data centers. According to Eliezer S. Yudkowsky, if push comes to shove, we can also order airstrikes against the latter:

If intelligence says that a country outside the agreement is building a GPU cluster, be less scared of a shooting conflict between nations than of the moratorium being violated; be willing to destroy a rogue datacenter by airstrike.

https://time.com/6266923/ai-eliezer-yudkowsky-open-letter-no...

jlei523 3 years ago | |

Funny enough, perhaps the AI threat is what will bring China and US back on friendlier terms. If there is a greater threat than both, they'll work together.

I think signing an AI treaty between the two countries will do a lot for the world.

verdverm 3 years ago |

> Countries have treaties signed on nuclear weapons.

Yet we also have nuclear technology for energy, medicine, and more. It's a big jump from weapons to a foundation technology.

How do you predetermine if a multi-use chip is going to be used for AI or something else? These GPU like chips have multiple purposes