To expound, this just seems like a power grab to me, to "lock in" the lead and keep AI controlled by a small number of corporations that can afford to license and operate the technologies. Obviously, this will create a critical nexus of control for a small number of well connected and well heeled investors and is to be avoided at all costs.
It's also deeply troubling that regulatory capture is such an issue these days as well, so putting a government entity in front of the use and existence of this technology is a double whammy — it's not simply about innovation.
The current generation of AIs are "scary" to the uninitiated because they are uncanny valley material, but beyond impersonation they don't show the novel intelligence of a GPI... yet. It seems like OpenAI/Microsoft is doing a LOT of theater to try to build a regulatory lock in on their short term technology advantage. It's a smart strategy, and I think Congress will fall for it.
But goodness gracious we need to be going in the EXACT OPPOSITE direction — open source "core inspectable" AIs that millions of people can examine and tear apart, including and ESPECIALLY the training data and processes that create them.
And if you think this isn't an issue, I wrote this post an hour or two before I managed to take it live because Comcast went out at my house, and we have no viable alternative competitors in my area. We're about to do the same thing with AI, but instead of Internet access it's future digital brains that can control all aspects of a society.
Although I assume if he’s speaking on AI they actually intend on considering his thoughts more seriously than I suggest.
If this is so, and given the concrete examples of cheap derived models learning from the first movers and rapidly (and did I mention cheaply) closing the gap to this peak, the optimal self-serving corporate play is to invite regulation.
After the legislative moats go up, it is once again about who has the biggest legal team ...
Relevantish: https://arxiv.org/abs/2301.00774
The fact that we can reach those levels of sparseness with pruning also indicates that we're not doing a very good job of generating the initial network conditions.
Being able to come up with trainable initial settings for sparse networks across different topologies is hard, but given that we've had a degree of success with pre-trained networks, pre-training and pre-pruning might also allow for sparse networks with minimally compromised learning capabilities.
If it's possible to pre-train composable network modules, it might also be feasible to define trainable sparse networks with significantly relaxed topological constraints.
We have all kinds of advancements to make training cheaper, models computationally cheaper, smaller, etc.
Once that happens/happened, it benefits OAI to throw up walls via legislation.
Big tech advances, like the models of the last year or so, don't happen without a long tail of significant improvements based on fine tuning, at a minimum.
The number of advances being announced by disparate groups, even individuals, also indicates improvements are going to continue at a fast pace.