Tech leaders have been vocal proponents of the need to regulate artificial intelligence, but they’re also lobbying hard to make sure the new rules work in their favor.
That's not to say they all want the same thing.
Facebook parent Meta and
These two diverging camps — the open and the closed — disagree about whether to build AI in a way that makes the underlying technology widely accessible. Safety is at the heart of the debate, but so is who gets to profit from AI's advances.
Open advocates favor an approach that is “not proprietary and closed,” said
WHAT'S OPEN-SOURCE AI?
The term “open-source” comes from a decades-old practice of building software in which the code is free or widely accessible for anyone to examine, modify and build upon.
Open-source AI involves more than just code and computer scientists differ on how to define it depending on which components of the technology are publicly available and if there are restrictions limiting its use. Some use open science to describe the broader philosophy.
Part of the confusion around open-source AI is that despite its name, OpenAI — the company behind ChatGPT and the image-generator DALL-E — builds AI systems that are decidedly closed.
“To state the obvious, there are near-term and commercial incentives against open source," said
To make his case for open-source dangers, Sutskever posited an AI system that had learned how to start its own biological laboratory.
IS IT DANGEROUS?
Even current AI models pose risks and could be used, for instance, to ramp up disinformation campaigns to disrupt democratic elections, said
“Open source is really great in so many dimensions of technology,” but AI is different, Harris said.
“Anyone who watched the movie ‘Oppenheimer’ knows this, that when big scientific discoveries are being made, there are lots of reasons to think twice about how broadly to share the details of all of that information in ways that could get into the wrong hands,” he said.
“As long as there are no guardrails in place right now, it’s just completely irresponsible to be deploying these models to the public,” said the group's
IS IT FEAR-MONGERING?
An increasingly public debate has emerged over the benefits or dangers of adopting an open-source approach to AI development.
Meta’s chief AI scientist,
LeCun said on X, formerly Twitter, that he worried that fearmongering from fellow scientists about AI “doomsday scenarios” was giving ammunition to those who want to ban open-source research and development.
“In a future where AI systems are poised to constitute the repository of all human knowledge and culture, we need the platforms to be open source and freely available so that everyone can contribute to them,” LeCun wrote. “Openness is the only way to make AI platforms reflect the entirety of human knowledge and culture.”
For
“It’s sort of a classic regulatory capture approach of trying to raise fears about open-source innovation," said
WHAT ARE GOVERNMENTS DOING?
It was easy to miss the “open-source” debate in the discussion around
Biden's order described open models with the technical name of “dual-use foundation models with widely available weights” and said they needed further study. Weights are numerical parameters that influence how an AI model performs.
When those weights are publicly posted on the internet, "there can be substantial benefits to innovation, but also substantial security risks, such as the removal of safeguards within the model,” Biden's order said. He gave
The
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