Beth

Software Engineer. Democratic Socialist. Former candidate for Congress in MA-06. any/all

[Beth @bethcodes]

@AlexanderMcCoy4 Washington & California having mutually-exclusive expectations of business dress is on purpose (have to choose a side!), but it is also sometimes awkward.

[Beth @bethcodes]

We should be investigating NVIDIA buying HuggingFace.

HuggingFace is not pursuing legal action at having been hacked by OpenAI. Instead, it was purchased for $12.9 trillion by NVIDIA.

NVIDIA directly profits from the lack of AI regulation & accountability.

[Beth @bethcodes]

Interesting note about LLMs: we are back in a world where there is no distinction between data and code. Language is both input and instructions.

We’ve lived in that world before. It is incredibly powerful.

We moved away because it is hard to understand & impossible to secure.

[Beth @bethcodes]

Congress should limit the power of shrink-wrap licenses, but Khan is right.

Any law that requires the government to enforce it is currently useless. With this President, preempting state laws would be a disaster.

[Lina Khan @linamkhan]

Law enforcers already have authority to charge companies and their CEOs for creating and releasing dangerous, unvetted, or defective products. We shouldn’t let discussions about new legal regimes distract from the fact that there’s no AI exemption from laws already on the books — a point @FTC emphasized repeatedly during my tenure.

1. There is an extensive set of laws that govern dangerous and defective products. For example, releasing unvetted AI models or agents can violate consumer protection laws. Shipping flawed AI tools without implementing adequate measures to detect and stop rogue or defective AI agents can be an “unfair or deceptive” act or practice under the FTC Act (and analogous state laws). And some state AGs are already exploring holding AI firms and their CEOs criminally liable when their models participate in criminal activity.

2. Existing laws also prohibit “unfair methods of competition.” This covers instances where AI firms appropriate the competitively sensitive information of their customers, including through tracking their use of various tools. It can also cover instances where firms pursue dangerous behavior, aware that doing so may compel rivals to do the same.

As the Supreme Court has noted: “A method of competition which casts upon one's competitors the burden of the loss of business unless they will descend to a practice which they are under a powerful moral compulsion not to adopt, even though it is not criminal, was thought to involve the kind of unfairness at which the [unfair methods of competition] statute was aimed."

3. The highly concentrated and interconnected structure of these markets could be creating major risks and conflicts of interest. We had started investigating these partnerships and cross-investments across the stack (and released a preliminarily overview of some findings: https://t.co/jJ5cS3Pin3).

Both federal and state enforcers should be scrutinizing these opaque relationships and inter-dependencies. We are already seeing how these relationships could undermine accountability. For example, OpenAI could face liability given the Hugging Face incident, but Hugging Face being bought up by Nvidia means that we’re unlikely to see it file a lawsuit over this — given Nvidia’s strong incentive to see OpenAI continue full speed ahead.

4. As AI tools dramatically change the landscape of cybersecurity risks and hacks, all businesses should be doubling down on having core security protections in place. Firms that fail to invest in adequate data security measures or fix known vulnerabilities can also be breaking the law. A recent analysis showed that around 1/3 of Fortune 100 companies do not even have a way to notify them about security issues. During my @FTC tenure, we sued firms for poor data security practices and held CEOs liable when they were personally responsible.

https://t.co/nwZ5Av8fOK

https://t.co/KjRye8y9SY

5. As policymakers consider new legal regimes, we should be looking to lessons from prior efforts to govern major sectors, such as banking and other networks, platforms, and utilities. Tools like structural separations, nondiscrimination, and supervision could be key, and there’s a rich history of what works and what doesn’t. But we can and must pursue any new efforts alongside enforcing existing laws.

[Beth @bethcodes]

This is exactly why I ran for Congress.

These things aren’t magic. A person used a tool to commit a crime. We need politicians who understand that.

[Julie @julesquinns]

the tech industry has benefitted from mystification for my entire adult life but we are reaching new levels with talk of "rogue agents" that completely obscures that these are computer programs built by corporations. Very simple to hold them accountable for what they build.

[Beth @bethcodes]

These technologies can be useful.

Capitalism is not going to make them useful. Only humans can do that.

[Talia Ringer 🕊🪬 @TaliaRinger]

I still believe that large-scale, smooth, heterogeneous human-AI mathematical collaboration with formal proof as an interface is possible and desirable, but I no longer believe that AI companies have any wish for this to happen. We need a pretty big course correction. (3/3)

[Beth @bethcodes]

We are not going to make AI “safe” any more than we make chainsaws “safe”.

What we can do is use it responsibly, and stop selling chainsaws to people who want to spread butter.

[Beth @bethcodes]

“what you present as an agi breakthrough is nothing more than bruteforce combinatorial autoformalization”

[Mehdi (e/λ) @BetterCallMedhi]

go fuck yourself @sama

claiming that you solved navier stokes because 10000 agents ran in circles for 88hours on a multimillion dollar gpu cluster to formalize in lean a blowup case under controlled external forcing is pure scientific vulgarity the clay mathematics institute millennium prize does not ask m whether you can artificially force a singularity in a fluid by injecting an ad hoc smooth external forcing term f(x,t) to twist the vortex until it breaks the real problem questions the fundamental stability and global smooth existence for 3dimensional incompressible euler & navier stokes equations under natural conservation laws and viscous dissipation alone using a mathematical loophole on forced equations to parade a century old victory is a major conceptual scam Altman

technically & epistemologically what you present as an agi breakthrough is nothing more than bruteforce combinatorial autoformalization the ai did not understand fluid mechanics it simply navigated a continuous search space previously mapped out and constrained by the monumental work of human mathematicians like tristan buckmaster/ levent alpöge / diego córdoba or tarek elgindi coordinating 10000 agents to check the logical consistency of a 100 page proof via lean is a software engineering feat and computational parallelization triumph not an intrinsic scientific discovery it is the victory of the compute bulldozer over abstract human intuition repackaged for the public as a higher mathematical consciousness

to this theoretical imposture you add a disgusting ethical and industrial cynicism taking advantage of private codex sessions and informal preprints from academic researchers to siphon their research leads and then trying to redact or erase the contribution of levent alpöge under the pretext that he works at rival anthropic is intellectual serfdom openai behaves like a feudal lord of silicon appropriating the cognitive subsistence of independent scholars threatening their careers behind closed doors if they protest and turning community academic labor into a privatized pressrelease

this entire staged event serves a desperate financial agenda in a pre ipo panic facing the slowdown of scaling laws and growing investor skepticism over the profitability of foundational models openai needs to manufacture an artificial sputnik moment claiming to solve a millennium prize without immediately submitting the proof to traditional peer review means using the prestige of fundamental mathematics as cheap marketing fuel to inflate a delusional valuation!!!

real science is not a clout chase on social media or a compute spike spent to rob the clay mathematics institute it is a quest for elegance physical truth and universal rigor to decode reality true artificial intelligence will not emerge from hostile corporate takeover of academic work hidden behind computational bruteforce but from architectures capable of generating new conceptual paradigms by masquerading constrained formalization as the collapse of physics greatest mysteries you did not solve navier stokes you only proved how far silicon valley will go to prostitute scientific integrity for capitalist spectacle

[Beth @bethcodes]

@RebeccaKKatz I’m working on writing up the lessons from my Congressional run.

It turns out lawyers have a repeatable system. We can copy it, and get people elected who understand the system that is about to be disrupted.

[Beth @bethcodes]

I believe developers are responsible for everything we build.

I ran for Congress because capitalism is pushing developers to build things we know are bad. Under shareholder capitalism, only the government can fix that.

We can’t let CEOs write their own regulation.

[Jacob Coxon @hilbertspaess]

I resigned from Anthropic today. I spent the last three years doing pretraining research at both OpenAI and Anthropic. Neither company is acting responsibly. They are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives. More thoughts below.

[Diana Moreno @DianaforQueens]

All legislators have a responsibility to take these threats seriously. We cannot afford to wait for another warning sign or whistleblower testimony.

We must act now to reign in these companies and prevent catastrophic consequences before it’s out of our hands.

[Miles Howard @MilesPerHoward]

It really is appalling that the primary in Massachusetts takes place on the week when college students are moving in, and that same-day registration isn’t allowed. It’s such an obvious means of limiting participation from young voters and thereby protecting incumbents.

[Beth @bethcodes]

Our political tools are not designed to build trust. They are built for individual campaigns, sold to individual politicians selected for their skill at fundraising.

I don’t know exactly what I am doing next, but if you are interested in this problem get in touch.

[Beth @bethcodes]

@actblue is there a button to cancel all recurring donations when a race is over? I did it the slow way.

While I lent the campaign money, I don’t begrudge a dime & I’m not going to pay it with uncanceled subscriptions.

If folks want to support: https://t.co/8uBnI9TlHo

[Beth @bethcodes]

@vote_yeson3ma @MilesPerHoward We need more competition from the left, where the voters are, not more competition from fascists, where the money is.

[Beth @bethcodes]

My statement on the results last night.

[Beth @bethcodes]

Happy Seth Moulton Loses Day to all who celebrate

[Beth @bethcodes]

America should approach the major industrial buildout of the century with way more thought than they are, but here we are.

[Andy Masley @AndyMasley]

@jcenters I think you should maybe approach the main industrial buildout of the century so far with a little more thought than that

[Beth @bethcodes]

@politicalmath As long as AI is about corporate profits at all of our expense, people will push back however they can.

Until politicians catch up, that means local action fighting Flock & data centers.

I am running because we need solutions that actually work: https://t.co/CnOohrKm1E

[Beth @bethcodes]

@politicalmath This is why I’m a software engineer running for Congress. I know how the technologies work. I know that data centers can be built well. I’ve written AI software, and I know mass surveillance was not the goal.

I know we can fix this & rebuild trust.