Excellent piece. Your point about people hiding behind classified information is especially salient. More often than not it comes from a good-faith inclination of career national security officials to try to plug every possible hole, address any possible threat. But it is also not infrequently used to discredit an opposing view, especially in any remotely partisan debate. In both instances, there is rarely a dominant consensus. I spent two decades in the intelligence community, and this happened all the time.
That perspective, even when offered in good faith, also relies on a narrow definition of national security. X bad actor uses Y tool, thus Y tool must be banned. What it ignores is the remaining scope of what constitutes national security, including economic competitiveness, innovation, and an overall bias toward growth and development.
This is correct, and stifling access to leading open weight models would harm defenders far more than attackers, especially given the challenges of refusals practitioners run into when trying to use the leading models for cyber-oriented defensive work.
The prosumer/hobbyist ecosystem around open weight models should have a positive affect on general AI safety. More people doing more testing in more ways always results in more findings. I’d feel safer in a world with 100+ models running on 100+ harnesses than 10 models running on 10 APIs owned by 10 people.
Excellent piece. Your point about people hiding behind classified information is especially salient. More often than not it comes from a good-faith inclination of career national security officials to try to plug every possible hole, address any possible threat. But it is also not infrequently used to discredit an opposing view, especially in any remotely partisan debate. In both instances, there is rarely a dominant consensus. I spent two decades in the intelligence community, and this happened all the time.
That perspective, even when offered in good faith, also relies on a narrow definition of national security. X bad actor uses Y tool, thus Y tool must be banned. What it ignores is the remaining scope of what constitutes national security, including economic competitiveness, innovation, and an overall bias toward growth and development.
This is correct, and stifling access to leading open weight models would harm defenders far more than attackers, especially given the challenges of refusals practitioners run into when trying to use the leading models for cyber-oriented defensive work.
Appreciate you chiming in, I feel like the comment section here could get interesting in a few hours...
The prosumer/hobbyist ecosystem around open weight models should have a positive affect on general AI safety. More people doing more testing in more ways always results in more findings. I’d feel safer in a world with 100+ models running on 100+ harnesses than 10 models running on 10 APIs owned by 10 people.