AI Regulation

[Zkuq]

sc94597 said:

ConsoleWarVet said:

One thing I’d like to see is some sort of mechanism that throttles access to products/resources whenever something starts gobbling everything up and affecting prices.

I have no idea what this mechanism would look like and how it would work, but it would be nice if RAMageddon could be mitigated by telling the Zuckerbergs of the world that they have enough and some needs to be left that the rest of us can afford.

Zkuq said:

I think that mechanism is called price, and I'm probably at least as annoyed as you are about that. I would definitely love if there was such a mechanism without other notable downsides. One thing that's probably particularly hard is how global the whole thing is: manufacturing is mostly in countries where AI models are developed, and a large chunk of AI users are in entirely other countries too.

The best solution to this problem is to introduce competition. More countries should invest in public enterprises that produce chip infrastructure. Computer chips are becoming critical infrastructure in the same way steel, electricity, roads, public transportation, etc. are. It could be sold under the guise of national independence and security. 

Now that the neo-liberal era is nearly dead, maybe Western Countries can do this again. 

The issue right now is that the two South Korean companies and the single American company are the only consumer ram manufacturers and they have an oligopoly. 

Of course, even this would probably take 4 to 6 years, but if we start now then we won't have this issue ever again after 2030. Even in times when prices and profits are more normal, a public manufacturer of computer chips probably would be profitable. 

The reason why this likely would have to be public, is that private companies are susceptible to overly short time-horizons for planning by investors. 

My first thought was that I'm not sure if that would work out, but after giving it a thought, I don't see why it couldn't. Of course the political will to do it seems to be missing, which is an issue. As far as I know, there's been a bunch of talk about strategic autonomy here in Europe, but at the moment it's not feeling like there will be great results.