Do they want regulation because they are behind and want the brakes applied to others so they can catch up using their huge pile of money, or are they so ahead they want to stifle the rest? My money, based on copilot is on the former.
I reckon it's a combination of "They want to pull up the ladder behind them.", "They want a huge hand in creating the relevant laws and regulations", and "If they don't get an unimpeachable excuse that explains why they're never going to be meeting their sky-high promises _very soon_, the coming questions about their slowing pace will end them.".
So according to your logic, there really is no benign reason a company may call for regulation.
true. it's always self interested obviously
If they were benign, why wait till now? Why didn't they say anything when OpenAi first released GPT and Microsoft was the biggest investor? Did something change between then and now?
Yes, the frontier models got vastly more capable, and the compute available to them probably increased by an order of magnitude?
It's not a paradigmatic shift though. It is able to do what it was already doing, but better. You can't really claim there has been a staggering improvement since then and anything that it is doing now is wildly unexpected.
You don't think there's been a paradigm shift or wildly unexpected capabilities since "when OpenAi first released GPT"?
No. Has the underlying technology changed in any way?
Uh, our understanding of it has. Doing automated cyberattacks using novel zero-days, or resolving open math questions, was perhaps one of the many somewhat plausible futures in 2022, but absolutely not an inevitable or even particularly likely one. If you disagree, I’d like to see your analysis and predictions from four years ago, otherwise it’s nothing but hindsight bias.
Ah yes, because white hats aren’t allowed to use AI to find zero days, and solving open math questions is such a horrible thing, why even bother advancing mathematics at all if someone can’t spend ten years and hundreds of thousands of dollars to only get partway there and feel good about themselves? This new understanding definitely makes me want to regulate AI so only the Right People™ can use it, that definitely won’t empower rival nations who lack such regulation and give them an advantage.
Our understanding perhaps. But do you think researchers working on it had a similar understanding?
I'd feel comfortable saying there's no benign reason _Microsoft_ would call for regulation.