Desperately seeking simulation

What the reactions to Senate Bill 1047 can teach us about Tech Overlord belief

Tech Overlord in Action. Stencil Art by Banksy Circa 2002. Image courtesy myartbroker.com

Tech Overlord reaction to Senate Bill 1047 as “stopping progress”

Recently the SB 1047 “The Safe and Secure Innovation for Frontier Artificial Intelligence Models Act” was passed, with amendments, by the California Legislature.

A very simple summary:

1. If an AI model was trained using >$100M or trained using 10²⁶ floating point operations, it is a covered model. If a AI model costing >$10M is derived from a covered model, this model is also a covered model (22602(f)), these model being covered by this proposed amendment to the Business and Professions Code Section 8.
2. If this covered model causes an artificial intelligence safety incident (22602(c)) such as a “sustained sequence of unsafe behaviour other than at the request of a user” or “theft or…escape of the model weights”, this must be reported to the Board of Frontier Models (previously Frontier Model Division) without criminal liability upon failure to do so (previously upon pain of perjury which is a criminal offence).
3. A developer must not produce a covered model with a hazardous capability cf. 22603(b)(4)(A)(i). A hazardous capability is defined as >$500M of cyber or biological damage, or “damage by an artificial intelligence model that autonomously engages in conduct that would violate the Penal Code if undertaken by a human”.

What is most interesting this caused quite a kerfuffle amongst the Tech Overlord, which, thanks to The Verge, Wired and Forbes I was able to follow and excavated these nuggets:

1. A revealing letter from the Jason Kwon (et al), Chief Strategy Officer of Open AI, arguing why the law should be Federally based, not State based;
2. Apart from Jason, other various luminaries also complaining and whining about the law; and
3. A petition like list of arguments against the law by The Progress Chamber;
4. Godmother Pizza Maker Dr. Fei Fei Li objects too; and
5. Eight members of congress objected in a letter to the Governor of California.