More than 1,200 industry staff sign petition seeking international guardrails for automated research:
More than 1,200 employees of frontier AI companies have signed a petition calling for US government support to develop ways of slowing automated AI development if necessary.
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, OpenAI chief scientist Jakub Pachocki, Google DeepMind chief strategy officer Jasjeet Sekhon, and Meta AI chief scientist Shengjia Zhao are among the signatories to the petition, which calls for tools to "deliberately pace frontier-wide progress."
"The world's leading AI companies believe they could be close to automating AI research," the document states. They nevertheless have obvious commercial incentives to keep advancing the tech and marketing its perceived power.
The proposed answer is a combination of technical and governance tools that could apply the brakes if development begins outpacing industry's ability to understand or control the resulting systems.
"Each company – and country – is under intense competitive pressure not to unilaterally slow that acceleration," the petition says.
The signatories ask: "We request that the US government support an international effort to develop the technical and governance tools needed to deliberately pace the frontier of automated AI development."
The appeal closely follows the attack on Hugging Face by autonomous OpenAI agents, which offered a timely demonstration of why stronger controls might be needed.
Earlier in July, Google DeepMind boss Demis Hassabis called for a US-led, industry-funded standards body modeled on the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA), with the aim of encouraging international coordination.
OpenAI head honcho Sam Altman described it as "a thoughtful proposal." This is a warmer reception than OpenAI gave Brussels' own attempt at guardrails via the AI Act.
Regulating AI companies is difficult, and any workable framework risks being overtaken by the technology before it can be agreed and implemented.
The EU's AI Act has struggled in the face of industry pressure. Compliance deadlines now extend to December 2027 for standalone high-risk systems and August 2028 for those embedded in regulated products, which makes the protestations of the petition ring somewhat hollow, particularly from companies that spent real effort softening the one binding framework already on the table, only to now ask Washington for a voluntary one they'd help design themselves.
Considering the vast amounts of money sloshing around the industry, and the need to keep investment rolling in, calls for tools and a framework to pace development smack more of performative convenience and marketing than anything else.
Arguably, it is already long past the time when an effective framework could have been applied – no country wants to risk strangling a potential golden goose now.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Friday July 31, @11:36AM (3 children)
> governance tools that could apply the brakes
Right, and we'll just bomb foreign data centers into compliance?
🌻🌻🌻🌻✌️ [google.com]
(Score: 2) by Username on Friday July 31, @03:00PM
'Murica, fuck yeah!
Though, I think it's them begging for fed grants.
(Score: 2) by Bentonite on Sunday August 02, @10:42AM (1 child)
A hyperscale datacentre is one of the vanishingly rare targets you can bomb to make the world a better place - bombs away USA please - you're welcome.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Sunday August 02, @01:19PM
As an American taxpayer I am not in favor of paying reparations for the destruction of data centers by military force.
Thank you for your attention to this matter.
🌻🌻🌻🌻✌️ [google.com]
(Score: 5, Interesting) by gringer on Friday July 31, @11:44AM (2 children)
Basically the only company that's making money off this is Nvidia. If existing laws (e.g. copyright, pollution) were properly enforced, then there would be no feasible product.
Ask me about Sequencing DNA [youtube.com]
(Score: 4, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Friday July 31, @12:34PM
>the only company that's making money off this is...
Oh, follow the money. Who makes money off of the chaos and insider trading of recent government market manipulations? The parasites in the financial industry: traders, gamblers with inside information, bankers, brokers...
Who's going to have huge windfalls when the bubble pops (if it ever does)?
The money doesn't vanish, the resources consumed do - but money is indestructible, it always ends up in somebody's pockets.
🌻🌻🌻🌻✌️ [google.com]
(Score: 2) by Username on Friday July 31, @03:06PM
Day traders have been making bank off LLMs before it was cool.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Thexalon on Friday July 31, @11:52AM (3 children)
Now that the AI executives have machines they can credibly claim are capable of replacing human intelligence and creativity, their primary concern is to ensure that nobody else has them, and everybody is as dependent on them as possible. That will enable them to start jacking up the price to use it, so they might be able to eventually make a profit.
"Think of how stupid the average person is. Then realize half of 'em are stupider than that." - George Carlin
(Score: 3, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Friday July 31, @01:41PM (1 child)
> their primary concern is to ensure that nobody else has them
You would think that, but that's a very old world (pre-internet) perspective.
Open hardware, open models, open weights - the closed frontier models may be in the hands of the best resourced individual companies, but their "lead" will evaporate in months if they stop development while the rest of the world continues forward. The open world (and other closed development that's not so public about what progress they are making) are collectively at least as capable as these shining stars of capital fusion, probably more capable once they organize into a more effective cooperative development model like the FOSS world.
https://www.fredgao.com/p/deepseeks-liang-wenfeng-breaks-his [fredgao.com]
🌻🌻🌻🌻✌️ [google.com]
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Saturday August 01, @01:36AM
They have a plan for that too: "Hey Congress, you really should give us a giant pile of taxpayer money to ensure that our LLMs are better than China's. Oh, and here's a bunch of campaign cash."
"Think of how stupid the average person is. Then realize half of 'em are stupider than that." - George Carlin
(Score: 2) by Kilo110 on Friday July 31, @03:03PM
the term is regulatory capture. and yup, that's what went across my mind too.
(Score: 3, Informative) by cmdrklarg on Friday July 31, @09:13PM (1 child)
The human race is doomed. The time to slap guardrails up were years ago when this all started. Pandora's Box has been opened, and there's no closing it.
Maybe the sun will hit us with another Carrington Event; that will solve the issue, though it will not be good for us either.
The world is full of kings and queens who blind your eyes and steal your dreams.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by mcgrew on Sunday August 02, @06:10PM
They were calling computers "electronic brains" in 1952 when the incredibly primitive ENIAC beat the experts at calling the presidential election, and Walter Cronkite didn't admit it until the last vote was counted.
The Stupid-Ass Voter Evisceration act: SAVE Trump and his family from prison
(Score: 0, Disagree) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 01, @02:48AM (1 child)
It has been 4 years and nothing has blown up. These guys just want censorship and exclusivity.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 01, @05:59AM
OpenAI Says the Rogue Agent That Hacked Hugging Face Also Breached Other Services [soylentnews.org]
They have not 'blown up' - but they have been out of control.