So there’s an interesting Reddit post which leads to an article on VentureBeat and a letter from a Senator to Mark Zuckerberg, all attached below.

There’s a fairly straightforward point which needs to be made:

1. Like it or not, Code and Data are forms of speech; yes they can be made to “do things” or they can “describe things” but that doesn’t make them any less “speech”, instead it makes them more-something-else-too.
2. LLM data, is data like everything else. Just as Firefox will not function without configuration files, so goes LLaMa.
3. If the Government is encouraged to suppress general access to code, it will attempt to do so; and then the suppressions will fail several years, perhaps a few decades, later. This is what happened with Cryptographic Export Controls, too.
4. In the face of suppression, open-source developers will hoard the extant code, and build upon it, thereby sedimenting all the bias and other undesirable attributes which the extant code holds.
5. So if you want a kinder, gentler AI in deployment, you need to encourage open development and collaboration so that hoarding is undesirable, and so that developers can freely track all the developments which make AI better.
6. In short: involving the Government will be counterproductive.

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> The open dissemination of LLaMA represents a significant increase in the sophistication of <code> available to the general public, and raises serious questions about the potential for misuse or abuse.

God forbid the general public get access to "code."https://t.co/T163cZa1mC pic.twitter.com/9dzEt9tS7U

— Alec Muffett (@AlecMuffett) June 8, 2023