More Tales From Nvidia: Just Who Can Access AI Technology? (Issue #249!)
One argument left out in the latest self-regulatory frenzy is it is not just what the technology can do, the bigger issue may be the who can access the technology.
Right now, the who is everyone, including adversarial parties.
The modern AI datacenter has over 200-times the compute power as the fastest supercomputer, Fugaku, did, in 2020 (this is how fast things move so just extrapolate). Fugaku was a supercomputer at a Japanese research facility. Fugaku could only be used by the scientists there. The No. 2 supercomputer at the time was three times less powerful than Fugaku, and was an IBM-built system located at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee. That supercomputer was also only used by U.S. government scientists.
These types of technologies were only accessible to a select group of people, who were well vetted, along with the work they were doing on them.
Now, 200-times to 600-times the compute power of the most powerful supercomputers from 2020 is available to virtually anyone, with only very limited controls, at best. It is also running software, especially the agents, that can be quite unpredictable with their behaviors.
The technology for nuclear bombs and other state secrets was always closely held.
This amount of computing power cannot be made available to the masses that include malicious actors of all kinds. Drones become available to everyone, next thing you know people are putting bombs on them and blowing everything up. Making this amount of compute available to the world at large is multiples more dangerous.
It is clear the bad guys are already trying. This article is interesting. This stuff is happening. Anthropic to its credit seemingly tried to cut some of it off, but I highly doubt all of it is being cut off by them, Open AI, and everyone else. It is kind of Nvidia ($NVDA) saying its highest end parts were not going to China, yet somehow the Chinese still had and have access to all of it.
This amount of compute cannot be a mass market product. Just like kinetic weapons cannot be a mass market product, and nuclear weapons especially cannot be a mass market product.
We have made public stuff that belongs in government and university research laboratories, along with all the other things that are not public domain. These types of technologies never were public domain. Never, ever, ever.
Greed is not always good.
Positions: None
