This has been my speculation about the people pushing for regulation in this space: it’s an attempt at regulatory capture because there really is little moat with this tech.
I can already run GPT-3 comparable models on a MacBook Pro. GPT-4 level models that can run on at least higher end commodity hardware seem close.
Models trained on data scraped from the net may not be defensible via copyright and they certainly are not patentable. It also seems possible to “pirate” models by training a model on another model. Defending against this or even detecting it would be as hard as preventing web scraping.
Lastly the adaptive nature of the tech makes it hard to achieve lock in via API compatibility. Just tell the model to talk a different way. The rigidity of classical von Neumann computing that facilitates lock in just isn’t there.
So that leaves the old fashioned way: frighten and bribe the government into creating onerous regulations that you can comply with but upstarts cannot. Or worse make the tech require a permit that is expensive and difficult to obtain.
I can already run GPT-3 comparable models on a MacBook Pro. GPT-4 level models that can run on at least higher end commodity hardware seem close.
Models trained on data scraped from the net may not be defensible via copyright and they certainly are not patentable. It also seems possible to “pirate” models by training a model on another model. Defending against this or even detecting it would be as hard as preventing web scraping.
Lastly the adaptive nature of the tech makes it hard to achieve lock in via API compatibility. Just tell the model to talk a different way. The rigidity of classical von Neumann computing that facilitates lock in just isn’t there.
So that leaves the old fashioned way: frighten and bribe the government into creating onerous regulations that you can comply with but upstarts cannot. Or worse make the tech require a permit that is expensive and difficult to obtain.