MateoRobbins

PhD, computational social science, environmental policy, communication

[MateoRobbins @MateoRobbins]

@TedLasso31442 @clikengle @JamesSurowiecki @Paul_Brown_Bear @Replica_419 Providing a single example doesn't support your general claim

[Jon Tester @jontester]

Happy Caturday from the farm!

[Jon Tester @jontester]

The truth is, I don’t look a lot like other politicians in DC, and I don’t act a lot like them either. 

That’s because my wife Sharla and I still farm the land my grandparents homesteaded 100 years ago. I am and always will be a dirt farmer.

[Yale Environment 360 @YaleE360]

From our archives: Lithium miners in the High Andes evaporate around half a million gallons of water to produce a single ton of lithium carbonate.

The rush to mine lithium for EV batteries may turn the region’s delicate wetlands and meadows to desert.
https://t.co/xvMC17pnuz

[Jim Robbins @JimRobbins19]

ICYMI: Several tribes in California are restoring an ancient relationship with fire, in part to help the big trees survive a world with more fire. My latest.
https://t.co/ZKlGFK6OGY

[Brendan Nyhan (@BrendanNyhan on 🟦☁️) @BrendanNyhan]

amplify this not unverified reports until we know more

[Frog and Toad Bot @FrogandToadbot]

'After I put on my bathing suit, you must not look at me until I get into the water.'

'Why not?' asked Frog.

'Because I look funny in my bathing suit. That is why,' said Toad.

[Andrew Ng @AndrewYNg]

I continue to be alarmed at the progress of proposed California regulation SB 1047 and the attack it represents on open source and more broadly on AI innovation. As I wrote previously, this proposed law makes a fundamental mistake of regulating AI technology instead of AI applications, and thus would fail to make AI meaningfully safer. I’d like to explain why the specific mechanisms of SB 1047 are so pernicious to open source.

To be clear, there are routes that regulators should pursue to improve safety. For example, I would welcome outlawing nonconsensual deepfake pornography, standardizing watermarking and fingerprinting to identify generated content, and investing more in red teaming and other safety research. Unfortunately, the proposed bill pursues a less beneficial and more harmful path.

SB 1047’s purported goal is to ensure safety of AI models. It puts in place complex reporting requirements for developers who fine-tune models or develop models that cost more than $100 million to train. It is a vague, ambiguous law that imposes significant penalties for violations, creating a huge gray zone in which developers can’t be sure how to avoid breaking the law. This will paralyze many teams.

You can read the latest draft of the law online. I’ve read through it carefully, and I find it ambiguous and very hard to follow.

Developers who try to navigate the law’s complex requirements face what feels like a huge personal risk. It requires that developers submit, under penalty of perjury, a certification of compliance with the requirements of the law. But when the requirements are complex, hard to understand, and can even shift according to the whims of an unelected body (more on this below), how do we ensure we are in compliance?

For example, the certification must include many different sections. One is an analysis of “the nature and magnitude of critical harms … the model might reasonably cause or enable.” But given that even leading AI researchers aren’t sure what harms models might cause or enable, how is a team of developers supposed to figure this out and declare — under penalty of perjury — that they meet this requirement?

Further, some developers will be required to implement “protections to prevent … misuse of, or unsafe post-training modifications of, the covered model and all covered model derivatives … that are appropriate in light of the risks associated with the covered model, including from advanced persistent threats or other sophisticated actors.” Even leading AI researchers don’t agree on how best to “protect” AI models against these supposed risks, or what would be “appropriate.” So how are developers supposed to figure out how to comply with this requirement?

This creates a scary situation for developers. Committing perjury could lead to fines and even jail time. Some developers will have to hire expensive lawyers or consultants to advise them on how to comply with these requirements. (I am not a lawyer and am not giving legal advice, but one way to try to avoid perjury is to show that you are relying on expert advice, to demonstrate that you had no intent to lie.) Others will simply refrain from releasing cutting-edge AI products.

If this law passes, the fear of a trial by a jury — leading to a verdict that can be very unpredictable and with significant penalties in the event of a conviction — will be very real. What if someone releases a model today after taking what they genuinely felt were reasonable safeguards, but a few years later, when views on AI technology might have shifted, some aggressive prosecutor manages to convince a jury that whatever they did was not, in hindsight, “reasonable”?

Reasonableness is ambiguous and its legal interpretation can depend on case law, jury instructions, and common facts, among other things. This makes it very hard to ensure that what a developer does today will be deemed reasonable by a future jury. (For more on this, see Context Fund’s analysis of SB 1047. [URLs in article linked to below.])

One highly placed lawyer in the California government who studied this law carefully told me they found it hard to understand. I invite you to read it and judge for yourself — if you find the requirements clear, you might have a brilliant future as a lawyer!

Adding to the ambiguity, the bill would create a Frontier Model Division (FMD) with a five-person board that has the power to dictate standards to developers. This small board would be a great target for lobbying and regulatory capture. (Bill Gurley has a great video on regulatory capture.) The unelected FMD can levy fees on developers to cover its costs. It can arbitrarily change the computation threshold at which fine-tuning a model becomes subject to its oversight. This can lead to even small teams being required to hire an auditor to check for compliance with an ambiguous safety standard.

These provisions don’t ensure that AI is safe. They create regulatory uncertainty, and more opportunities for vested interests wishing to stifle open-source to lobby for shifts in the requirements that raise the cost of compliance. This would lock out many teams that don’t have a revenue stream — specifically, many open-source contributors — that would let them pay for lobbyists, auditors, and lawyers to help ensure they comply with these ambiguous and unreasonable requirements.

Open source is a wonderful force that is bringing knowledge and tools to many people, and is a key pillar of AI innovation. I am dismayed at the concerted attacks on it. Make no mistake, there is a fight in California right now for the future health of open source. I am committed to doing what I can to preserve open source, but I don’t assume that the pro-open source side will prevail. I hope you will join me in speaking out against SB 1047 and other laws that threaten to stifle open source.

[Original text (with links): https://t.co/whAndl5C2g ]

[nikki mccann ramírez @NikkiMcR]

🙃🙃🙃

[. @GregTSargent]

Remarkable finding in new Marist poll: By 68-32, voters say they're more concerned about a president who doesn't tell the truth than one who is too old to serve.

Maybe we should cover Trump's lying as a sign of his unfitness for the presidency. 1/

(link)
https://t.co/mLlMWX2WFq

[Charlie Warzel @cwarzel]

people mag! it's really broken through! https://t.co/K8wGxwTF09

[Everything Price Sufferer (but especially eggs) @agraybee]

Those of us who have watched our elderly loved ones decay know the heartache of watching their firm-grasp-of-Chinese-trade-policy phase.

[Michael Podhorzer @Mike_Podhorzer]

1/ Let’s try a thought experiment.

Suppose you heard that in another country, a defeated former president who had attempted a coup was granted immunity for that coup by six Supreme Court judges, half of whom he had appointed; that this attempted coup included a widely-televised, deadly assault on the nation’s capitol intended to prevent the certification of his defeat in the last election; and that the Court’s immunity ruling came just months before a next election in which this defeated president is once again a candidate, seeking to recover the powers he previously abused.

What would you expect the focus of news reports about that Supreme Court’s ruling to be?

a) Debating whether the ruling itself aligns with the history and traditions of that nation’s legal system, or

b) Explaining the Court’s role in an ongoing authoritarian coup.

[MateoRobbins @MateoRobbins]

@mattyglesias @HalSinger No name-calling detected here. Not a good look

[Jamie Henn @jamieclimate]

The stuff in Project 2025 on climate and fossil fuels is even worse than you would imagine. As Michael Mann said, this would be “game over for climate progress.” If you care about a livable future, it’s worth understanding what’s in this radical right blueprint. Buckle up.

[Dan Savage @fakedansavage]

Everyone who complains about climate activists throwing tomato soup on art and tells them to go protest the actual bad actors (not Van Gogh, not Stonehenge, etc.) needs to praise this action.

[Captain Pleasure, Andrés Gómez Emilsson @algekalipso]

All models are right. Some of them apply to this reality.

[Richard McElreath 🐈‍⬛ @rlmcelreath]

This is it, what I've trained for