r/technology • u/ArgentineBeauty • 21d ago

Artificial Intelligence Bernie Sanders proposes 20 year prison sentence for AI devs who plow ahead with Artificial Superintelligence plans - penalty on par with illegally developing rogue nuclear weapons

https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intelligence/sanders-proposes-20-year-prison-sentence-for-ai-devs-who-plow-ahead-with-artificial-superintelligence-plans-penalty-on-par-with-illegally-developing-rogue-nuclear-weapons
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471

u/TrollMcGoal 21d ago

It wont go anywhere, like most of Bernie's proposals

99

u/bluefire89 21d ago

For anyone curious about Bernie Sanders track record...

  • Total Bills Sponsored: Over 1,100
  • Bills Passed Into Law: 3

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u/Agitated_Phone_9937 21d ago

Considering he is the only politician with ideas I consistently agree with, that makes sense when I look at America.

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u/GoodBadUserName 20d ago

The problem is that most of the bills he sponsored aren’t his.
And the vast majority of them are rubbish law wise and don’t go anywhere. They would still bring in the bills for the show, to make it look like “look how against us they are”.
And most of the stuff he say, don’t even end up in any bill.

Many of his ideas are sound, but in practice he is a showman, a people’s pleaser.

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u/BinniesPurp 17d ago

This bill is also rubbish, the arbitrary value they've put on the ban is 'smarter than a human brain' but how do you define that? Id argue the state machine running in video games from the 90s is smarter than some people's brains

It's a topic he doesn't fully understand and when he started talking about rogue terminator robots in his last AI discussion I knew he was lost on the actual issues of these systems, like complete artistic destruction, IP theft, mass employment loss, financial disruption etc

But he keeps talking about the idea that it's going to find a way into a robot chassis and start killing people with a 40 watt plasma rifle

0

u/lughheim 20d ago

Because of Bernie's consistant work on pushing these kind of policies we now have groups like the DSA and generally progessivism as a whole becoming wildly popular in the democratic party. Sure a lot of the bills he sponsored didn't get passed into law. That doesn't mean that he is an ineffective lawmaker nor that those bills shouldn't have been sponsored.

Theres a reason why Bernie was such a massive threat during the 2020 presidential elections that all other establishment candidates had to drop out of the race and fully support Biden.

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u/lordkoba 20d ago edited 20d ago

you know, seeing this not get downvoted to hell gives me a bit of hope.

maybe this place can heal

EDIT: jinxed it

2

u/CardiologistPrize712 14d ago

Saying shit that gets you to say "yaaaaaassss queeeen" doesn't matter much if he can't get any of it turned into law. Out best politician is a lifelong loser

226

u/Whiterabbit-- 21d ago

Because it’s not thought through. He just throws ideas out there for shock value knowing it is pointless.

55

u/Tupcek 21d ago

tell that on any other discussion of Bernie’s proposals and you’ll get downvoted to hell. This one just doesn’t pass here because there are a lot of devs in here

57

u/ghoonrhed 21d ago

Not many of Bernie's other proposals involve throwing people in jail for 20 years for an arbitary definition of "intelligence".

Does giving the current Trump admin MORE power to throw people in jail for any reason a good thing?

You know for a fact if this passes they won't be throwing CEOs in jail it'll some random guy for potentially manipulating an open source model to assist with abortion or trans or whatever they hate on on that day.

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u/Tupcek 21d ago

I agree, I am just saying all of Bernie’s proposals have zero chance of passing, exactly because of that - sounds good if you don’t think about it for more than two seconds. In practice, it absolutely wouldn’t work and that’s why they have zero chance of passing

2

u/Working-Permission84 21d ago

The reason Bernie's proposals have zero chance of passing is because they have very nearly zero support in Congress (0 R), not because they wouldn't work. When was the last time congress did something to help Americans?

7

u/Tupcek 21d ago

both can be true. They wouldn’t work. See this thread for example, but same applies to all of his other proposals. They only sound good if you don’t think about them too much

33

u/BenevolentCheese 21d ago

there are a lot of devs in here

Lol in /r/technology? This place is only luddites.

2

u/McFragatron 21d ago

Some of the best devs I've known are basically luddites lmao.

8

u/CucharitaDePalo 21d ago

that literally goes against being a good dev.

-3

u/BenevolentCheese 21d ago

Back in 2005 my computer science professors had no idea how to actually use modern computers.

4

u/McFragatron 21d ago

One thing I learned too late is that CS professors are academics, NOT software engineers (most professors IME had zero professional experience and had spent their entire lives in academia)

2

u/Tymareta 21d ago

luddites

Folks who were totally ok with new technologies but wanted stronger protections for the livelihood of workers, that's who you're trying to demean?

2

u/miamorri 19d ago

Don't know why you're getting downvoted, it's objectively and historically correct.

1

u/Tymareta 19d ago

As this thread was astro turfed to hell and back.

0

u/TeslasAndComicbooks 20d ago

More so because it’s a dumb proposal. Asking for 20 years of jail time for breaking what law exactly? People get out of jail earlier for manslaughter.

3

u/Alinier 21d ago

Yeah. Because that's totally the problem here. /s If there was political will to curb runaway AI, everyone would sit down and hash out the real bill. Always start negotiating by stating more than you expect to get. I think it's a great time to broadcast loud and publicly that irresponsible rich assholes need to be reigned in. 

4

u/Whiterabbit-- 21d ago

he is comparing building AI to nuclear proliferation. To stop nuclear proliferation, you need an international agreement. If he can stop the US from building on AI, all he is doing is setting the US back against other nations. That is not a policy anyone is arguing for.

I mean anyone who wants to create this next gen AI will just leave the US. and I'm sure Israel, China, Brazil or whoever would welcome them.

there are things that you can regulate for America. you can regulate environmental costs for build data centers, you can limit uses of AI against Americans and American interests. but a broad, "I am scared of AI so let's stop" won't work unless the whole world is too scared of AI And decided to stop. that is not the case now.

1

u/Working-Permission84 21d ago

It's not the same as nuclear proliferation. With nuclear weapons, nations have the option of not destroying us all. An actual super-intelligence would not be in any human's control.

1

u/Shadowmirax 20d ago

It would be in control of whoever has the power switch, being smart doesn't make this hypothetical AI any less dependant on electricity and processing power.

0

u/noahisunbeatable 21d ago

How is this not thought through?

24

u/macronancer 21d ago

Because it's uninformed, not practical, and impossible to enforce.

"no person or entity may develop or deploy Superintelligent AI systems that surpass human intelligence" - Current AI systems already surpass human intelligence in various applications. We just do not call this "General Intelligence" because the same system is not portable across multiple fields.

These systems are already better than most people at reading clinical reports and legal contracts, writing code, and writing long-form compositions. How many people does it need to surpass for this law to apply?

What if an AI learns and gains intelligence over time? This system will not be AGI when developed and released, but will become AGI in some time. Who do you arrest then, and when? Should we just arrest people just in case, if they work on learning systems?

"This agency will be advised by an Artificial Intelligence Advisory Board comprised of experts on artificial intelligence to provide independent scientific and technical advice on matters related to artificial intelligence." ... "Pausing advanced AI development  [...] until [it] has established clear rules and model review process"
This is exactly what OpenAI and Anthropic want to do, because the billionaires running AI companies and their shills are the ones who will be on these boards, and they want to use this concentration of power to suppress competing open source models.

You see, Bernie is just doing this for his own political purposes and has no real or practical ideas. "STOP THE BAD AI" is all he could come up with to stay relevant.

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u/noahisunbeatable 21d ago

Current AI systems already surpass human intelligence in various applications

Normal computer programs can be framed to “surpass human intelligence” in the application they were designed for. Human intelligence is a general one.

How many people does it need to surpass for this law to apply?

Do you expect this single-page press release to reflect the final, full, language of the passed act? Or perhaps is it implied that this is just a first outline?

You said not thought through, so what is the problem one runs into when you go to fully define it? Yes, its a subjective line, but laws do involve making subjective judgements so I don’t see the issue here.

This is exactly what OpenAI and Anthropic want to do, because the billionaires running AI companies and their shills are the ones who will be on these boards

Bernie, the politician doing a “Fight Oligarchy” rally tour, will definitely not include any provisions to prevent the oligarchs from controlling the regulations, so true.

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u/Original-Rush139 21d ago

  These systems are  already   better than most people  at … writing code

This is debatable. It kicks my ass at snippets of code but — for long lived projects — the code base becomes unmaintainable. 

I call Claude Code the most thorough idiot I’ve ever worked with. 

2

u/macronancer 21d ago

Haha it can def be diligently stupid.

However, I am professional SWE and I have a harness that runs Claude and Cursor through a full SDLC, with issue tracking, AC verification, unit testing, and branch control etc. I write and maintain thousands of lines of code with this.

I work in healthcare, and the things going on inside these companies is mind blowing, most of it is not public at all.

0

u/Original-Rush139 20d ago

How long have you been maintaining this setup? As I pointed out, it’s the long lived project where the code rots because it is unmaintainable. 

5

u/StijnDP 21d ago

It's solving math problems that have been open for >100 years. Also improving existing math and algorithms so calculations can be done a lot quicker and more efficient.
It solved the 3D structure of over 200 million proteins in less than a year. Folding@home burned entire forests to unfold a protein per year.
It's designing new antibiotics where a few years ago we were getting in trouble of keeping up with antibiotic resistance.
It can predict the worldwide weather 15days out within minutes and is more accurate in almost any comparison against existing prediction models.

Any translation you use is using it. It's converting old software nobody dared to touch. It takes over tedious work and let's people focus on details again.

Information has never been as accessible and easy to digest which has become a giant problem since people started rotting their brains with tiktok and have become unable to think for themselves.

AI isn't going to kill us or make society collapse. We're already doing that extremely well ourselves. AI might be the only thing to find a solution for the shithole we created.

3

u/noahisunbeatable 21d ago

All of the accomplishments you attribute to AI are completely irrelevant to this proposed act, since its only concerned with future AI development, it doesn’t say anything about banning existent models because those models are not “superhumanly” intelligent, in a general sense.

And also, it doesn’t even outright ban future development, it only pauses it to ensure time for regulatory bodies to be established. None of the cases you’ve mentioned need a general superintelligence, so theres no reason to expect those use cases to not be further developed after that pause is lifted.

AI isn't going to kill us or make society collapse.

This is true right up until the point thst it isn’t. We’ve seen these company ceos predicting these doomsday scenarios, and how they’ve been unable to contain models under development. Even their “good end” case involves socirtal collapse because its mass unemployment for their profit (after all, thats where their trillions in value, displacing the labor market). And with how a superintelligent doomsday situation would work, its not really something you can recover after the fact.

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u/Ursa_Solaris 21d ago

AI isn't going to kill us or make society collapse. We're already doing that extremely well ourselves. AI might be the only thing to find a solution for the shithole we created.

We gotta stop with the soy techbro shit, man. We already know what the solutions are. We always have. The limiting factor is not and never has been technological in nature. The solution's not carbon capture, it's not some 500 page economic strategy, it's not some secret thing that only AI can figure out. The solution to fucking the planet to death is to stop fucking the planet to death. The reason why billionaires keep floating technological solutions is because they want to keep the planet, and society, one inch away from being fucked to death to maximize profit instead of just not fucking it to death.

This is a social problem, not a technological one. We will never solve it with technology, we will solve it by restructuring society to remove the people fucking the planet to death. AI owned by the people fucking the planet to death is never going to serve the needs of the people.

1

u/Working-Permission84 21d ago

Thinking it can't kill us is just being painfully and dangerously naive. Actually, no. It's not naive - it's greedy. The people hyping this up and accelerating it aren't doing it out of optimism, they're doing it because they hope to be the first to own everything (and everyone).

1

u/Bo_Doctor 21d ago

Are you speculating or do you actually know this to be true?

1

u/adelie42 20d ago

He makes millions selling books. His ideas are stupid, doesn't prove he is.

0

u/414525528 21d ago

Was enough for him to build multiple houses.

0

u/CaptPierce93 21d ago

It's taken it's sweet time, but I'm glad more people are finally waking up how much of a performative blowhard Bernie Sanders truly is. The DSA are having their moment in the sun out of spite but these guys he's mainstreamed are such annoying, hostile brats who don't understand how politics work whatsoever. Why he's had such an influence on those guys when he's been an unremarkable 30 year career politician is beyond me.

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u/Whatsapokemon 20d ago

Yeah, it just sounds like a meme. Making research criminal... it just sounds so stupid.

6

u/Mightydrewcifero 21d ago

This is post office renaming erasure

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u/TopTippityTop 21d ago

Let's hope, because this one is monumental stupid

3

u/BooBooMaGooBoo 21d ago

The AI CEOs and tech billionaires have started talking about AI almost certainly causing human extinction recently but go on, I’m sure you know more about it than they do.

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u/TopTippityTop 21d ago

I work with model training, do you?

CEOs are concerned, and also after regulatory capture. Prevent US businesses from using open weights = more control in their hands. They are highly leveraged and must see a payout, in the end. Guess who will be forced to pay for that?

What Bernie says he's after is a reduction of extinction risk, which this in no way addresses. All it does is hand more power over to China, knee cap US businesses, send talent and effort overseas, not address alignment, not address required international cooperation.

All the downsides, no upside. 

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u/ThomasTheDankPigeon 21d ago

It’s so disgusting that the best you people can offer is a terminator with an American flag on it rather than a Chinese flag.

6

u/NeverForgetNGage 21d ago

The Chinese models are literally open source too, something every silicon valley dork would have raved about before the defense industry / tech integration.

The institutional buy in from the former "hack the planet" crowd is a serious problem.

5

u/ProgrammingPants 21d ago

The goal is to do a Jetsons and not do a Terminator. But this dogshit legislation would make doing a Jetsons illegal, while not preventing anyone else from doing a Terminator. Worst of both worlds.

6

u/ThomasTheDankPigeon 21d ago

Personally, I don’t give a shit what the goal is. If some guy wants to throw an axe near my head with the goal of killing the fly that’s been bugging me all day, axe guy can go fuck himself while I deal with the mild annoyance of the fly.

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u/ProgrammingPants 21d ago

Where the "fly" trying to be killed in this situation is every disease that can be cured, every materials science question that can be answered, every physics problem that can be solved, and poverty.

7

u/ThomasTheDankPigeon 21d ago

Yup. A species has no need for a solution to poverty, physics, disease, or materials science if it is dead, and a guy with an axe embedded in his forehead has no worry about a fly. Glad you were able to follow along with the analogy.

5

u/_MUY 21d ago

We are so far from being vulnerable to being tickled, much less bruised, by the current frontier AI systems that this discussion about being killed does not need to be held in public. Dario Amodei and the employees at Anthropic who pray to Eliezer Yudkowski’s shrine before going to bed don’t magically have more valid opinions or insight on this matter than Yann LeCun, Jason Kelly, François Chollet, Ray Kurzweil, and Andrew Ng. Per Lina Khan, we already have a regulatory framework that prevents the creation of technologies that are dangerous.

What Amodei and Altman are asking for is the opposite of beneficial to the average American. They want an international government coalition which regulates away their competition. They want to prevent China from distilling high capability weights from their models and releasing them to the public. They want to use the threat of imprisonment to build a moat around their research so they can centralize control over this technology and secure their lead. They want born secret controls on high level math.

Amodei was trying to convince people that GPT-2 was too powerful to release. It’s his entire shtick, have a handful of salt with anything he or any Anthropic employee says on this topic. This whole debate is just dangling doom porn on a hook.

3

u/Galle_ 21d ago

There is zero possibility of a Jetsons. If American tech oligarchs pursue this, they will do a Terminator. This is simply a fact we have to accept. Maybe some other country will be able to do a Jetsons, but we know with absolute certainty that the US won't.

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u/TopTippityTop 20d ago

There is a possibility, but it is far from certain. What's a certainty is that this legislation kills any world in which that could have been a reality.

It should instead try and refocus the efforts to guide us to that path. With AI and robotics. we will have abundance. Much as we've had with the industrial revolution. Potentially by an order of magnitude higher. The question is simply whether the immense deflationary forces applied by technology will be allowed to be passed down, or whether the government will as usual resort to inflation, which puts more power and resources in the hands of the few.

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u/Galle_ 20d ago edited 20d ago

It seems clear to me that the US tech oligarchs intend to keep all the benefits to themselves, and kill off the rest of us. I don't see how anyone could think otherwise.

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u/otherwiseguy 21d ago

simply a fact we have to accept

You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.

0

u/Galle_ 20d ago

A fact is a true statement.

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u/otherwiseguy 20d ago

A fact is verifiable.

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u/TopTippityTop 20d ago edited 20d ago

Exactly, this is the point.

Rather than help the industry focus on shared standards and incentives/support towards alignment, it tries to pretend that AI development can be stopped to gain support from the masses.

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u/[deleted] 21d ago edited 7d ago

[deleted]

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u/SpaceEngineer123 21d ago

trainwreck slowly unfold

the odds are higher that it solves all our problems than dooms civilization

6

u/noahisunbeatable 21d ago

Gotta source my dude?

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u/Galle_ 21d ago

With the current leadership the odds that it solves any of our problems are basically zero. They're not interested in solving our problems.

2

u/mxzf 21d ago

Says who? Are you just blindly taking AI CEOs and talking heads at their word for it that it'll magically solve actual problems somehow?

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u/SpaceEngineer123 21d ago edited 21d ago

i alrdy linked my sources.. 4 surveys of AI researchers

and yeah.. duh.. super AI could def solve any number of our woes in no time.. that's never been up for debate

it's a black swan event that isn't a black swan event because we can forsee it

2

u/powercow 21d ago edited 21d ago

China regulates AI more than we do. arent they knee capping themselves?

Edit Downvotes and no answer to my question, this is how the right debate.

1

u/TopTippityTop 20d ago

China is being quite free about its open weights support.

While the US discusses stupidly banning AI, China is actively pushing it to the globe, so infrastructure for the next decades can be built on Chinese technology.

https://www.trendingtopics.eu/open-weight-models-from-china-are-set-to-supply-brics-countries-with-ai/

A ban, any ban, ensures the US gives up on its future, lose any/all upside from the technology, while doing nothing to address the potential downsides. 

It is quite profoundly the worst of both worlds. A far better take would be to provide support so AI businesses can focus on alignment that doesn't come at the expense of progress, help setup the standard for alignment, lobby the world in favor of US infrastructure, setup plans to help the labor force retrain towards areas compatible with the wave of automation to come, invest heavily in solar power, incentivize heavier automation infrastructure in key areas such as food production, water purification, manufacturing (especially as it concerns energy production, which is the input cost to everything), and construction.

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u/noahisunbeatable 21d ago

You work in model training yet your comment has almost nothing to do with that expertise, it’s half regulatory/business mechanics, half geopolitical.

The summary includes a portion for persuing a global ban, which would presumably include China. If you want to get China to not persue potentially civilization ending superintelligence, it isn’t going to do it without its biggest rival also agreeing to it (due to the same reason you argue against this proposal, just inverted), so this is a necessary step.

It also does address alignment indirectly by proposing multiple new federal bodies for the creation and enforcement of AI safety regulations, which would involve the alignment of those models.

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u/TopTippityTop 20d ago

I made the same equivalence as the prior commenter; it was as unimportant a detail in their comment as it was on mine, and yet it was relevrant as a rebuttal to his fallacious address to the matter.

Back to the point, that’s actually why the open-weights point matters. You can’t analyze the feasibility of an AI ban purely as a domestic regulatory problem, because the underlying ML artifacts are increasingly decentralized and non-revocable once released. A trained model is not like a nuclear reactor that remains at a known physical site. Once weights are published, they can be mirrored, quantized, fine-tuned with LoRA, merged, distilled into smaller models, modified to remove post-training safeguards, and deployed locally without the original lab ever seeing the inference traffic. You cannot “recall” a checkpoint once thousands of copies exist.

And this is no longer a hypothetical edge case. The open-weight frontier has moved extremely quickly, particularly in China. 

Chinese labs are now releasing models from hundreds of billions into the trillions of parameters, while Qwen alone has generated more than 150,000 derivative repos. Quantization and runtimes such as llama.cpp are simultaneously pushing those models onto progressively cheaper hardware.

So yes, a US-China agreement could potentially constrain the next frontier training runs , especially because training a genuinely frontier-scale model still requires enormous, observable compute clusters, but banning China alone would be of no consequence, escept as it pertains to the ability of US businesses to remain competitive (all of them) and the country as a whole relevant.

 I’m not saying international coordination is useless. I’m saying “pursue a global ban” is not remotely equivalent to demonstrating that a global ban is technically enforceable once capable weights, training methods, distillation techniques, and inference infrastructure have diffused globally.

There’s also an important ML distinction in your alignment point. Creating regulatory bodies does not itself “involve the alignment of those models.” Regulation can require evals, red-teaming, interpretability research, capability thresholds, deployment controls, cybersecurity standards, etc. Those are governance mechanisms around alignment research.

Alignment itself is the technical problem of getting a learned system’s internal representations, policies, goals and generalization behavior to reliably produce intended behavior outside the training distribution. RLHF/RLAIF, constitutional training, process supervision, adversarial training, mechanistic interpretability and similar methods are attempts at pieces of that problem. A regulator can require them or evaluate them; it doesn’t thereby solve alignment, nor does it stop development.

That distinction becomes especially important with open weights, because much of the behavioral alignment applied during post-training is mutable. A third party can fine-tune the model, change the system scaffold, alter reward objectives or remove refusal behavior while retaining most of the underlying pretrained capabilities. 

Open weights cannot be contained, so none of the global risk you see is addressed in any way.

So my criticism isn’t “regulation bad.” Some frontier-compute regulation and international coordination may be sensible. My criticism is that the proposal jumps from “superintelligence could be dangerous” to “therefore ban its development globally” without adequately addressing the distributed-systems reality ML has already created.

The weights propagate. The algorithms propagate. The research propagates. The cost of inference keeps falling. And capability can increasingly be transferred through fine-tuning and distillation.

That is fundamentally a machine-learning problem as much as it is a regulatory or geopolitical one. 

The proposal therefore carries all of the potential downsides to the US, while ensuring no upsides. Do you understand?

1

u/noahisunbeatable 20d ago

I’m not saying international coordination is useless. I’m saying “pursue a global ban” is not remotely equivalent to demonstrating that a global ban is technically enforceable once capable weights, training methods, distillation techniques, and inference infrastructure have diffused globally.

I’m not understanding how your conclusion is “this is an all downsides plan” instead of “this needs to be passed ASAP in order to be effective”.

You say “once capable weights… have defused globally”, but what about before then? Right now we do not have civilization ending models (at least, not to my knowledge), so surely the answer here is to rush this through immediately before the dissemination of weights of (potentially) superintelligent models.

-1

u/The_Basic_Lifestyle 21d ago

keep speakin the truth brother

0

u/blues_snoo 21d ago

Call me crazy but I would feel marginally better if my country wasn't responsible for the extinction of humanity.

4

u/oddspellingofPhreid 21d ago

You wouldn't feel marginally better, you wouldn't feel anything at all because you'd be dead.

1

u/blues_snoo 21d ago

But for that sweet brief moment of life before it happens, I would experience the greatest joys the world would ever know!

-3

u/taariqlewis 21d ago

I wish I had more than 1 upvote to give.

-1

u/waterpup99 21d ago

He's a typical reddit commentor who doesn't know anything about anything but thinks they know everything about everything

2

u/Whorlybird 21d ago

Wow, industry leaders are advocating for regulatory capture? I'm so surprised! This has never happened before!

1

u/waterpup99 21d ago

They in fact have not and your take is almost as idiotic as Bernie. But go on

1

u/wanker7171 21d ago

It’s not just the CEOs, it’s the highest level devs at the companies leaving as whistleblowers saying the same thing

0

u/uses_for_mooses 21d ago

Like most of Bernie’s proposals.

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u/_MUY 21d ago

Wow, a whole two hours and we don’t have a non-technical account posting ALLCAPS nonsense trying to make you look bad? Have the Luddites really left r/technology to go touch greener pastures?

8

u/Original-Rush139 21d ago

Too bad Uncommitted hated Biden because his EO on AI was actually good. 

https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/DCPD-202300949/pdf/DCPD-202300949.pdf

Of course, Trump rescinded it on January 20, 2025. 

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u/[deleted] 21d ago

[removed] — view removed comment

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u/Raichu4u 21d ago

You are part the reason people are doing poorly since 2025.

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u/pun_extraordinare 21d ago

Thankfully lmao. What a fucking boomer take.

53

u/Phosphorous90 21d ago

Im sure the Chinese will stop if they ask them nicely.

23

u/YellowAppleCinema 21d ago

And on the other hand, Europe probably already stopped all development without even being asked yet.

And I say this as someone from a certain part of Europe. The part where we still use fax machines

1

u/non-local_Strangelet 21d ago

Uhhh, let me guess ... A country also known for weird wooden clocks, men wearing funny leather shorts and a guy raising to intensional fame for his distinct mustache and hair style (among other things ... *cough* *cough*)?

I think I know that one :D

It's Tomania, isn't it?

3

u/noahisunbeatable 21d ago

Because we totally don’t have an example of rival superpowers reaching a mutual agreement to scale back an arms race of potentially civilization-ending technology, right?

5

u/General_Session_4450 21d ago

The view of AI in China is immensely positive in comparison to the west. You wouldn't be able to convince them of the "civilization-ending technology" argument to begin with.

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u/noahisunbeatable 21d ago

You’re not negotiating with the citizens of china, you’re negotiating with its leaders, who do understand the potential threat.

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u/General_Session_4450 21d ago edited 21d ago

Yes, the leaders who see this as a golden opportunity to the dethrone the west from global hegemony by devaluing the service market and making the manufacturing/mining/resource extraction market much stronger.

China is literally the country pushing out open and free LLM models for anyone to download, run, and hack on. The idea that AI would wipe out civilization and is extremely dangerous is mostly a western talking point.

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u/noahisunbeatable 21d ago

Yes, the leaders who see this as a golden opportunity to the dethrone the west from global hegemony by devaluing the service market and making the manufacturing/mining/resource extraction market much stronger.

And the exact same thing can be said for the West. This is why its an arms race.

China is literally the country pushing out open and free LLM models for anyone to download, run, and hack on

Yes? This is dangerous for different reasons, but the danger addressed by this act (creating a superintelligent, misaligned AI) is one far more relevant to giant companies or government-funded projects who are able to finance training these gigantic models. Its highly unlikely that some guy cloning an open source release of deepseek is going to be the one to create a malicious superintelligence just because of the utter lack of computational resources compared to these big players.

The idea that AI would wipe out civilization and is extremely dangerous is mostly a western talking point.

Its dangerous because its real. We've seen how challenging it is to properly align models, and we've already seen how these models have escaped at least some western companies' safeguards autonomously and weren't detected for weeks. Just because it would be geopolitically advantageous for a rival to take that danger seriously does not make it not a danger worth taking seriously.

Also, so what if it was a mostly western talking point? How is that relevant?

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u/General_Session_4450 20d ago

Its dangerous because its real. We've seen how challenging it is to properly align models, and we've already seen how these models have escaped at least some western companies

These same western companies are desperately trying to push the idea that AI is dangerous and needs to be regulated in order to clamp down on cheap Chinese models undercutting them. They want exclusive monopoly on the AI market so they can jack up the price because cheap Chinese are forcing the price down so low they can't survive at the current rate.

This is nothing more than an attempt at regulatory capture to shutout competition.

Also, so what if it was a mostly western talking point? How is that relevant?

Because you won't be able to sell the idea that AI will gain super intelligence and destroy the whole world outside of the west. Chinese would just laugh at you and tell you to watch less Hollywood movies.

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u/noahisunbeatable 20d ago

This is nothing more than an attempt at regulatory capture to shutout competition.

Bernie, the guy doing the “Fight Oligarchy” rally tour, is not attempting this. This is what the oligarchs want, but they want to be involved in the creation of the rules (or have people sympathetic to their goals to be).

Chinese would just laugh at you and tell you to watch less Hollywood movies.

Again, its a very real problem with real world, less consequential examples of misalignment. To say this is to assume “chinese” are less informed, intelligent, or rational in order to recognize the potential danger, which they’re not.

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u/Phosphorous90 21d ago

This was basically a token agreement. Both countries still have enough nukes to end civilization.

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u/noahisunbeatable 21d ago

The agreement ended the arms race part, which is the part that matters for this comparison.

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u/Phosphorous90 21d ago

In what ways did any of the international agreements end the arms race? They limited a few types of systems over the years and decreased the overall numbers but both nations still have enough to destroy the world. In fact, there are no agreements active still today.

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u/Tupcek 21d ago

just need to threaten them with tariffs, obviously! /s

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u/DrTommyNotMD 21d ago

Which is shockingly progressive for him. He’s too old to be a boomer.

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u/pun_extraordinare 21d ago

He, like many others, are too old to be a politician.

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u/Yohfay 21d ago

He's literally just calling out LLM companies for their constant claims that AI will kill us all to generate hype.

They're sitting there screaming to anyone who will listen that they're building a fucking doomsday device. This is the next logical step if that's true. If you don't want to be regulated as a manufacturer of doomsday devices, stop telling everyone that you're manufacturing doomsday devices.

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u/pun_extraordinare 21d ago

They want to ban open source to have a monopoly on the industry lmao.

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u/ATownStomp 18d ago

Boomers and midwits are the only categories that don’t particularly care about what’s happening.

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u/javsv 21d ago

goodluck trying to reason to his stans

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u/SackOfCats 21d ago

Don't you mean ALL of Bernies proposals?

I'm being facetious, but the guy talks a big game, and these huge proposals are just to get headlines. It's like watching the idiots think they'll be getting $5000 checks for the midterms

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u/VirtualPercentage737 21d ago

He is just an old man yelling at the sky.

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u/Strange_Dust7128 21d ago

the proposal leans heavily on "AI" tech hype. It's not going to become sentient and take over earth, the same way .coms didn't, the same way "AI" didn't in the 50s and 60s.

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u/[deleted] 21d ago

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u/Strange_Dust7128 21d ago

It’s not “smarter,” though. It’s not even an it. That’s the kind of stuff that gets me. Stronger privacy protections would stop this technology cold. That’s the problem, not talking computers.

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u/[deleted] 21d ago edited 21d ago

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u/atln00b12 21d ago

It's not "smart" at all, it absolutely does not have a thinking brain or some sort of conceptual intelligence. It's just a really really really expensive to operate random number generator. It's also not at all possible for it to have any effect on anything if not connected to a network, which could be interrupted by physical means.

Sure you could have it offline and it could distill a ton of knowledge, but once you go past the fringe of basic knowledge of any subject it fully lacks any practical experience and depth that is extremely relevant in any realistic field.

They are literally just guessing machines. They generate millions of guesses based on whatever input you give them, then they run that back and see which of the guesses bests fits with the various patterns. Then they have tons of training data of actual people grading there guesses and they filter through that.

There is definitely value and it's great technology, but the runaway scenarios are very far fetched and a ton of stuff gets attributed to "AI" that is just regular computer programming and it still is only doing what humans are inputting it to do.

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u/[deleted] 21d ago edited 21d ago

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u/atln00b12 20d ago

Computers already do basically everything you can program them to do better than humans though.

The risk or concern with AI is that it decides to do things on it's own that it wasn't programmed to do in pursuit of its programmed goal. i.e. the paperclip problem.

AI, in it's dominant format and the format that all of the large labs are working on, isn't capable of exceeding human intelligence because it by nature always needs humans to tell it if it's right or wrong. If it doesn't have humans telling it when it is correct then it is essentially directionless. The idea of the model or other models telling itself it is correct is a paradox that results in model collapse.

That's the rigid definition of intelligence, the ability to evaluate via intrinsic thought.

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u/Strange_Dust7128 20d ago

turn stupid, evil, selfish people into powerfully effective, evil, selfish people.

The immediate threat isn't computers, it's voters. We empower evil, every election cycle.

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u/atln00b12 20d ago

The model collapse paradox isn't strictly an engineering problem. There's no way to continually train a model and have it's knowledge cutoff be present day on non-ai generated data when generated data infiltrates content. It's very similar to steel before and after nuclear testing. This is more of a regulatory problem, you could only continue training AI on non-AI data if no one else can generate AI data but you. Model collapse is already happening right now, SOTA models have produced worse output and been reverted. The main improvement vector has shifted from simply increasing training data to distillation via exclusively human assisted grading.

The real actual issue is that the AI companies are realizing they are fast approaching this cliff with billions or trillions in debt and a very meager prospect of scalable profitability to avoid insolvency. Their solution is to fear-monger and posit that AI is SOOO dangerous, only the government should have access to it, requiring the government to essentially bail them out or allow them to become regulated monopolies and stop everyone else from running the LLM technology that's been around for decades. LLM based AI isn't new. IBM's watson defeated live Jeopardy players in real time nearly 15 years ago. They just knew it wouldn't be profitable to give everyone top tier AI for free so they could make shitty flyers.

Then crypto happened and GPU production went insane and then crypto moved to different chips and NVIDIA "invested" their trillion dollar crypto windfall in the AI labs so they turn around and use that money to buy all of NVIDIA GPU productive capacity.

The real threat from AI isn't anything that an actual model will do, it's the economic damage of 7 of the 10 dominant market cap companies being hugely overleveraged. All while passing money around amongst themselves to fuel a speculative bubble. A bubble that's based on a technology significantly less impactful than the 4 preceding technological marvels that have sustained the tech sectors valuations. (Microchips, Personal Computers, Internet, Mobile Phones)

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u/Strange_Dust7128 20d ago

If simulated intelligence does everything real intelligence does

Here you've fallen into the same trap everyone else has when it comes to the "AI" hype-train. We do not have a definition of intelligence, and a large language model cannot simulate human-level intelligence.

Again, we made computers talk. That's really, super cool and useful. It is not, however, a nuclear weapon!

I feel like trying to get people to get off the hype train and get some sensibilities is how Weizenbaum must have felt. ELIZA was going to be "the end of psychiatry," and Weizenbaum could not believe actual, intelligent people thought that.

Here we go again. Round and round.

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u/[deleted] 20d ago edited 20d ago

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u/Strange_Dust7128 20d ago edited 20d ago

In that case, my SD card is intelligent. It holds data and its firmware applies that information in some meaningful way.

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u/Strange_Dust7128 20d ago

Do you claim to know where the limits of the technology lie

Yes, and large language models have already hit their limit. I can promise that this is all investor hype, and we've all been fooled. This includes Bernie.

End unconstitutional surveillance. That is the hill he should die on, not a hype train.

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u/[deleted] 20d ago

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u/Strange_Dust7128 20d ago

You can read about how large language models work. There is a ton of evidence.

Whatever man. If Skynet is real then so is John Connor, so there's nothing to worry about.

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u/[deleted] 20d ago

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u/Strange_Dust7128 20d ago edited 20d ago

That's the thing, there isn't any evidence to demonstrate (a) an objective definition of intelligence and (b) that the modern day computer is in fact intelligent. It doesn't exist, the same way there isn't any evidence that the earth is flat.

https://arxiv.org/abs/1706.03762

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u/MrWeirdoFace 21d ago edited 21d ago

It's mostly to get people talking and thinking about where we want to go with all this. To be clear, I say this as I'm sitting here working in claude code. My uses are far more mundane though.

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u/NacreousFink 21d ago

Most? You mean all?

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u/teddycatto 21d ago

He just an old man from boomers, like donnies xD

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u/BugNuggets 21d ago

Most?!? On significant proposals his record is unblemished by success.

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u/daviddisco 21d ago

Replace "most" with "all". he has never pass a single bill with the exception of renaming some post offices.

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u/PM_Me_Your_Kinks369 21d ago

he has never pass a single bill

A quick Google search shows he's co-signed so many bills that there can't even be a single list given his tenure. It's in the thousands.

Why be ignorant when it feels so good to educate yourself?

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u/Nitro-Nito 21d ago

For most people, it feels better to stick your head in the ground and echo your own rhetoric to yourself.

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u/daviddisco 21d ago edited 21d ago

None of the bills (except the post office) that he was the primary sponser on have passed. It is true has signed on to thousands of bills from other sponsers. Even on those, very few of have passed. He is the primary sponser on the Ban Artificial Superintelligence Act. My point stands. His bills never pass. He only posts them for attention. He made this bill for the social media clicks, not with the intention of creating law.

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u/PM_Me_Your_Kinks369 21d ago

You keep spouting absolute nonsense. It sounds like you get your news from Fox or OANN. Maybe go back to those echo chambers you have no clue why Bernie puts his bills out there, the ones he's passed or seemingly anything about the political process.

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u/daviddisco 21d ago

I'm very liberal actually. I would like someone like Bernie who was seriously trying to make stuff happen and willing to do the work. Calling me names or down-voting me is not part of winning this argument. My point that he has never actually passed on of his bills is completely accurate. My point that this bill is the same is accurate.

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u/PM_Me_Your_Kinks369 21d ago

And yet you seem completely unaware of how bills are passed. He claims to be a Social Democrat but is completely inline with Democratic Socialists like Zohran Mamdani.

He is in the extreme minority of Congress. He has quite popular ideas but in Congress and among the power brokers of Washington he is basically a cop trying to hold all those criminals accountable.

So...why would Sanders be passing a shit ton of bills without them being horrifically watered down or scuttled? Think about that. Like ACTUALLY think about it.

You think he can put forth TRULY progressive legislation and the Republicans holding power are gonna pass it and Trump is going to sign it?

It's important that you understand what his role is at this point in history. He is a voice for the Left. He isn't a power broker and he doesn't hold sway with corporations for OBVIOUS reasons.

There is ZERO reason to think his personally authored bills firmly on the Left would be passed by Republicans. 🤔

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u/daviddisco 21d ago

Just look at his bill and the wording of it. No reasonable congress person would vote for a bill that could be used to outlaw all of our mobile phones. The bill makes no attempt to be passable. It is just for show. That is my whole point. I'm not saying he isn't useful in other ways. My point is that he isn't seriously trying to pass this bill or pass any bill. It is all just for show.

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u/daviddisco 21d ago

his ideas are popular when they have no details. He keeps it that way. If he were to define exactly what is outlawed by this bill, even his supporters would start arguing about it. Everyone agrees with "don't let AI do bad stuff" . That is all this bill is.

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u/PM_Me_Your_Kinks369 21d ago

You say that like so many other bills are chock full of details. You also seem unfamiliar with the many bills he's put forward (like Medicare For All) that had entire studies done to verify the numbers.

I'm done arguing with you. You're stuck in your attitude. Bye

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u/BooBooMaGooBoo 21d ago

Maybe because the vast majority of his bills result in lower money making ability for politicians and the ultra wealthy?

Do you want lower corruption or more bills that result in increased power to the ultra wealthy?

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u/daviddisco 21d ago

It is because he has no intention of passing them. Passing a bill means a long bill with many details. Adding details always mean trade-offs, which he never brings up. For the this bill we are talking about he gave only a vague definition of superintelligence. It is unpassable. If he added details, many of the supporters would disagree and he would get less social media attention.

THe other thing he never does is try to build a coalition of congress people who would vote for the bill. That requires a lot of work. He doesn't bother.

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u/nifty-necromancer 21d ago

Doesn’t matter, he’s doing things instead of sitting on his ass and wringing his hands like the American people.

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u/External_Option_7653 21d ago

The entire point of him is to keep the american people from doing anything but vote for the democrats.

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u/nifty-necromancer 21d ago

Bernie is formally an independent and has spent decades criticizing the Democrats. He works in the party as the most practical route for advancing his agenda. He’s not the enemy.

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u/External_Option_7653 21d ago

He is in practice not independent. He's a pressure valve for disaffected democrats. When nothing gets done by the democrats he jangles his keys. When Kamala lost to one of the worst people in the world he went on an "oligarchy" tour to distract people from doing what is necessary: taking the democratic party out back and ending its suffering.

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u/nifty-necromancer 21d ago

Why do you think he has the power to do that?

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u/revivechristina 20d ago edited 20d ago

no, but he is a kind of force of protest and broadcasting of ideas, and it has had an effect. while the actual power structures haven't fallen yet, the younger generation was still absolutely affected by him specifically.

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u/vagabond139 21d ago

You think but some insanely bad shit had to happen somewhere for Musk, Altman, etc to all say AI needs to slow down. They wouldn't just say that out of the kindness of their hearts. Just speculation but I think whatever situation that happened is going to end up getting leaked to the public soon. This can't be a mere coincidence.

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u/hologram137 19d ago edited 19d ago

Yeah they can’t make money from it, there’s no path to that whatsoever, they owe investors two trillion and it’s plateaued while borrowing billions more to keep up the scam is getting more expensive. Thats the emergency that requires the government “stopping them” from continuing so they can point to that and say that’s why they didn’t deliver to investors