AI and ML
Can you guess who didn't sign on to the group letter?
With the US government scrutinizing AI as much as ever, 25 technology companies, industry organizations, and venture capital firms published an open letter on Friday urging policymakers to support open weight AI models.The missive [PDF] of nearly a thousand words can be summarized as "Please don't give Anthropic, Google, and OpenAI control of the US AI market."Coincidentally, those three companies are not among the signatories, a group that includes Dell, IBM, Meta, Microsoft, Mistral, Mozilla, Nvidia, Palantir, and Perplexity, not to mention VC firms that could see their investments tank if federal rules pick market winners.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, however, responded to the letter by insisting that he's fine with open weight models as long as proprietary models exist too. "I want the US to win in AI both in open source and proprietary models, and I am glad to see this," he said, having perhaps missed that Dean Ball, OpenAI’s head of strategic futures, recently suggested, "One probable outcome of an open-weight-model-dominant world is full AI communism…"
In any event, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang echoed Altman's sentiment. "Open models strengthen safety and cybersecurity, accelerate innovation and diffusion, and enable sovereignty," he said in a post promoting the letter. "The world needs both frontier closed models and frontier open models."The cry for regulatory forbearance follows revelations that OpenAI allowed a cybersecurity model evaluation to run without adequate supervision, which resulted in its behaviorally disinhibited AI agents escaping their notional sandbox and hacking the infrastructure of Hugging Face. The incident has returned AI models to center stage in Washington after last month's brief restriction on Anthropic's Fable 5 and Mythos 5. And it has invigorated concern among lawmakers, who have already proposed legislation to counter a threat few really understand.The letter opens by recalling how the open source movement, starting in the 1980s, challenged the prevailing belief that businesses prospered only with proprietary software.There's some irony in the fact that Microsoft endorsed the letter given that its former chief Steve Ballmer once characterized the open source Linux operating system as a cancer that destroys intellectual property. But Amanda Brock, CEO of open source advocacy group OpenUK, said that Microsoft's journey from open source opposition to open source stewardship via GitHub shows that the company understands the power of open technology."The letter shares the essence of that understanding and offers the US's leadership wise counsel, particularly when it comes to security," she said in a statement provided to The Register. "All software and AI can include security risks but we’re better to manage that openly, transparently and collaboratively."
