Yann LeCun on how lobbying for AI regulation is abused

  • How do you feasibly regulate AI? It's so easy to write a machine learning algorithm and the fundamentals for learning it are all over the place. YouTube tutorials, Udemy, Coursera, or university courses all teach it. Once you know how to write AI algorithms, all you need is a computer.

    The hard part is getting data to train your model, and it becomes a natural monopoly because the service that performs better will see more traffic to collect more data.

    But I don't understand how you can regulate AI in a way that makes any sense. Ban specific algorithms? Limit data collection? Create some confusing wording around generic "algorithms that improve other algorithms" or something like that?

    And even if you passed such a law, it's trivially easy for someone from any other part of the world to set up an API for their ML algo to run.

    Regulation on AI sounds like it would be about as successful as the war on drugs.

  • I'd trust Yann LeCun a lot more if he committed to eternal human supremacy, but he's said some dubious things in the past that amount to being okay with giving over the light cone to some arbitrary AI system. I'm pretty sure he does mean "light cone" more or less, he's a techno optimist.

  • In a surprising turn of events, capitalists are using their money to influence the government decisions, absolutely shocking!!!