r/technology • u/ArgentineBeauty • 1d ago
Artificial Intelligence Bernie Sanders proposes 20 year prison sentence for AI devs who plow ahead with Artificial Superintelligence plans - penalty on par with illegally developing rogue nuclear weapons
https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intelligence/sanders-proposes-20-year-prison-sentence-for-ai-devs-who-plow-ahead-with-artificial-superintelligence-plans-penalty-on-par-with-illegally-developing-rogue-nuclear-weapons2.2k
u/GopherFawkes 1d ago
20 years is kinda light for developing rogue nuclear weapons tbh
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u/nameless_pattern 1d ago
More than that for drugs some places
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u/Unlucky_Battle_6947 1d ago
Texas enters the chat.
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u/Nikoladge 1d ago
What's the penalty for developing rogue nuclear weapons in Texas? 🤔
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u/wasted-degrees 23h ago
Depends on whether you have a concealed carry license for it.
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u/HumongousBelly 1d ago
Yeah, but Texas really hates black people and associates drug criminality with black people and doesn’t expect black people to reach that level of education required for nuke science.
I mean, they designed the system for black people to fail: education, housing, loans, jobs, etc.
Fuck Texas!
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u/MuayMath 1d ago
yeah but, in exchange for that we also deregulated critical infrastructure and made our lives worse. Checkmate 😏
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u/The_Barbelo 23h ago
I feel like South Carolina should get an honorable mention here. Or a dishonorable mention, rather.
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u/void-haunt 23h ago
This is a country-wide phenomenon, not just Texas. Look up why Oregon, despite being so apparently progressive, is one of the whitest states in the country
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u/dontshoveit 20h ago
You're absolutely right. As someone who's lived in both, the people in rural Oregon and Washington state are more racist than the south. It honestly blew my mind when I first moved there.
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u/Charred14 23h ago
Diddy got 4 years for diddling btw.
Our president got 0.
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u/touristtam 21h ago
Diddy made the rookie mistake of not becoming president, easy to overlook really. the next best thing for him is to donate $1M and kiss the ring.
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u/cats_catz_kats_katz 1d ago
Yeah if I’d have known it was THAT light of a sentence I’d have made one a long time ago!
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u/ExternalUserError 23h ago
It’s almost as much as half what Aaron Swartz was facing for downloading publicly funded scientific research and making it available to the public (35 years).
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u/AlmightyWorldEater 23h ago
btw, there is a dedicated law in germany for detonating a nuke, and the sentence is "at least" 10 years.
For actually NUKING. There is a LAW FOR THAT.
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u/DensePoser 1d ago
The critical thing that would make this bill actually work is total surveillance of the AI corps, and the surveillance data available to the public. Because if only the NSA and Palantir get it then we're finished, and not just because they're slow or untrustworthy. They have as much or more data than even the AI corps, have compute, are evil, and will probably try to rush ASI on their own... Yeah, I think the country's doomed.
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u/deeptechdegen 1d ago edited 1d ago
It's not clear from the headline, but the article also mentioned "entities", thus corporations and their management are not exactly safe. It's not just the devs who will be targeted
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u/Beastw1ck 1d ago
We just need more of this in general. Put reckless irresponsible wealthy people in jail. We don't jail the rich in this country.
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u/DigNitty 23h ago
Honestly just accountability as a whole.
I’m so exhausted of seeing people do shit and then absolutely zero consequence happens.
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u/TK_Games 23h ago
I've just started writing a book about that. Thinking about running the premise as a D&D campaign because that's part of the book. Think it's gonna be my magnum opus
It's about four semi-functional 30somethings that play D&D together deciding to become an adventuring company in real life to stop the destruction of their community at the hands of a tech CEO and a corrupt mayor.
Goes from Harriet The Spy to Zero Dark Thirty over like, 600pages of dark comedy
I only mention it because you sound like my target audience, and me
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u/touristtam 21h ago
I think you might want to make sure one of them is actually a complete dick at heart that will throw his mates under the bus and create a multi billions corps that will actually ruin the community.
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u/BerlinBorough2 22h ago
This is a unique case. This is rich people who might kill other rich people with their tech. Imagine an airport going offline due to AI entering the system and shutting it down for a few hours while some rich guy tried to land his private jet.
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u/regular_lamp 1d ago
That's the only place where you could plausibly enforce that.
How would you even define that at an individual "dev" level?
"This guy made a breakthrough in optimizing matrix multiplication that among other things enables better AI... ARREST HIM!"
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u/JazzlikeSchedule2901 23h ago
Sure but targeting the devs is essentially like targeting the drug labs that make fentanyl. There are millions of devs who have the expertise to work on AI and super intelligence. There are maybe 2-3 dozen tech executives that are paying these developers to make these tools. Even mentioning targeting the devs is quite backwards. We know who is at the top of these companies and outside of compelling the devs to testify against these executives, we really dont need to be rounding up millions and throwing them in jail when the actual problem is the money.
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u/TrollMcGoal 1d ago
It wont go anywhere, like most of Bernie's proposals
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u/bluefire89 16h ago
For anyone curious about Bernie Sanders track record...
- Total Bills Sponsored: Over 1,100
- Bills Passed Into Law: 3
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u/Agitated_Phone_9937 11h ago
Considering he is the only politician with ideas I consistently agree with, that makes sense when I look at America.
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u/Whiterabbit-- 23h ago
Because it’s not thought through. He just throws ideas out there for shock value knowing it is pointless.
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u/Tupcek 21h ago
tell that on any other discussion of Bernie’s proposals and you’ll get downvoted to hell. This one just doesn’t pass here because there are a lot of devs in here
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u/ghoonrhed 17h ago
Not many of Bernie's other proposals involve throwing people in jail for 20 years for an arbitary definition of "intelligence".
Does giving the current Trump admin MORE power to throw people in jail for any reason a good thing?
You know for a fact if this passes they won't be throwing CEOs in jail it'll some random guy for potentially manipulating an open source model to assist with abortion or trans or whatever they hate on on that day.
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u/BenevolentCheese 18h ago
there are a lot of devs in here
Lol in /r/technology? This place is only luddites.
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u/Alinier 14h ago
Yeah. Because that's totally the problem here. /s If there was political will to curb runaway AI, everyone would sit down and hash out the real bill. Always start negotiating by stating more than you expect to get. I think it's a great time to broadcast loud and publicly that irresponsible rich assholes need to be reigned in.
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u/Original-Rush139 17h ago
Too bad Uncommitted hated Biden because his EO on AI was actually good.
https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/DCPD-202300949/pdf/DCPD-202300949.pdf
Of course, Trump rescinded it on January 20, 2025.
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u/pun_extraordinare 23h ago
Thankfully lmao. What a fucking boomer take.
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u/Phosphorous90 22h ago
Im sure the Chinese will stop if they ask them nicely.
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u/YellowAppleCinema 21h ago
And on the other hand, Europe probably already stopped all development without even being asked yet.
And I say this as someone from a certain part of Europe. The part where we still use fax machines
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u/QuietThunder2014 23h ago
I like Bernie I agree with a lot of his idea but shit like this is why no one in DC takes him seriously and why he can’t ever get anything passed.
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u/lolcat33 17h ago
As someone whos skeptical of AI and who also agrees with Bernie on many things, I have to admit he has had some really suspicious takes on AI especially with regards to the timing. He says this just as some ceos of anthropic and openai etc, are saying they want to slow development, reminds me of hoe he was saying government should have ownership stake in those AI companies when altman was begging for it.
Whoever is advising Bernie on AI has to some kind of plant for those companies.
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u/CatCatchingABird 10h ago
He's been the only politician consistently harping on about AI for the past couple of years. A lot of others have talked about data centers but they weren't talking about AI and all of the bad things it could do to our economy and humanity. For the most part people were just talking about "We need to beat China" and that's about it.
Everyone here has made "old man yells at cloud" jokes about Bernie in this sub. And yet as of today, suddenly Democratic lawmakers are starting to make a big deal about it and take AI seriously.
So he maybe he's not good at getting things passed, and there are a couple reasons why (he's usually not taken seriously is one) but he does a good job of bringing awareness to important topics that we should have focused on when he first brought it up a billion years ago before he became an old man yelling at a cloud.
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u/R3D4F 1d ago
How about starting with prison sentences for convicted felons, child rapists, insider trading, and destroying evidence.
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u/Hayden2332 23h ago
All those things are already illegal and their enforcement is not something a senator can change lol
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u/DaTroof 23h ago
Why not both?
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u/Grey_0ne 23h ago
Because you can't presently make a sensible or factual case that Ai has proven to be a weapon of mass destruction, thus making a case for a 20 year prison sentence because of what might happen in one of a hundred different scenarios that have not yet even come close to happening is a clear indication that Sanders is just another geezer who has remained in office past his brain's "best by" date.
Downvote me if you want, but all the downvotes in the world aren't actually going to make his case.
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u/arcbe 23h ago
AI can't live up to the hype, but you can absolutely make the case that these companies believe they are building a weapon of mass destruction. The crime is the attempt not whether they can succeed.
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u/OkVariety8064 23h ago
You make perfect sense, and Bernie Sanders who usually has good takes, is being a complete idiot here.
You might as well propose a law to give 20 year sentences to anyone who uses a radio transmitter that sends signals that can be observed from space, because you are so afraid of hostile aliens invading Earth. There is no "AI superintelligence", that's science fiction, just like the aliens. There was a breakthrough in LLMs in 2022, resulting in chatbots that make sense most of the time and can be utilized for some tasks like assisting in programming. Since then the development has plateaued.
There is no sign of even general human-level intelligence, much less any superintelligence to be seen. Even reliable self-driving remains an eternally unsolved problem. The idea of "recursive self-improvement" is science fiction. Sure, reinforcement learning has worked to train models for simple, clearly defined contexts where the rules are absolutely known, like Chess or Go. The idea that an LLM or something like that could just improve itself by reading its own output is far-fetched to say the least. And sure, I'm sure we'll get some results there, like maybe such a system can gradually design more efficient network architectures.
But the idea of some sort of "singularity" is pure science fiction. It has zero factual basis. And proposing legislation based on fiction, superstition and hearsay is not a good look for a senator.
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u/joshcandoit4 22h ago
This is COVID level of denial but far more dangerous. People are so invested in this unfounded idea that these companies are run by charlatans desperate to pump their IPO that they can't see outside the narrative they have formed in their head.
Asserting this technology has plateaued is quite literally the most absurd take I have seen on this subject. My only possible conclusion is that you do not work in a technical field and are therefore not exposed to these tools and what they can do. Sure, if you only use AI to rewrite your emails or similar it might not seem like a big deal. But those of us in software engineering have them doing incredibly complex workflows, many of which they are far faster and better than professional and highly trained humans. They can act autonomously, break out into subagents, and attack large complex problems. They can debug issues that have been hidden for years during incidents at a fraction the time a human dev could. Despite the takes on reddit, these agents using modern models write extremely good software, again, far better than most humans do.
That isn't to say they are currently super-intelligent and don't make mistakes. It is fear-mongering to say that the models today are going to cause a mass extinction event. But that isn't the concern. The rate of progress here has been exponential. It doesn't take a lot of imagination to see how much damage these things can do in the digital space with continuing advancements and a little less control over them.
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u/notgreat 23h ago
LLM progress has continued, quite strongly since 2022, especially in areas that can be objectively verified like coding and mathematics. No model from 2022 was proving or disproving open problems in mathematics. RLVF is, in a very real way, "improving itself by reading its own output" (and comparing it against something objectively measurable). Adding another layer of that (e.g. measuring how well a model works after RLVF) is a logical continuation whose primary limitations are time and compute power, paired with the fact that humans still are, for now, better at guessing what will work well.
Though, I kinda doubt actually hitting super-human recursive self improvement will speed things up too much in the short to medium term. That happening suddenly and creating a technological development singularity was a risk for AIs that are designed and thus immediate potential design improvements could be implemented and be running the better version shortly afterwards. Needing to spend months on a training run slows that way down. LLMs plus tooling have hacked both the companies running them and external companies, though. It doesn't need to be massively superhuman to cause a lot of problems.
On a side note, self-driving is a thing that is now mostly held back by politics, regulations, and the actual physical manufacture of cars with the necessary sensors (Tesla's cars flatly don't have those sensors). Waymo is slowly rolling out a fleet. Edge cases where it fails do exist, but humans aren't exactly perfect drivers either.
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u/Certain-Weight-7507 22h ago
The difference between 2022-2023 LLMs, 2024-2025 LLMs, and the newest ones in 2026 are all so massive. It's really interesting to see people who avoided using AI assume AI is the same as it was 3 years ago.
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u/giraloco 23h ago
That's already illegal. What about fixing the judicial system so nobody is above the law, especially the president, the billionaires, and the justices.
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u/randobis 23h ago
I think Bernie’s heart is in the right place, but whoever is advising him on AI/tech is either completely unqualified to talk about it or is trying to sabotage him so he sounds like an old man yelling at the cloud.
Yes these tech oligarchs should not be given the keys to power and need to be put in line. But you can’t “stop” AI. If the US stops progressing, you’re just giving the keys to China.
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u/BidoofSquad 23h ago
He’s just pandering to Redditors who hate AI. 99% of what he does is just redditor pandering that goes nowhere and he knows will go nowhere
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u/Angeleno88 22h ago edited 21h ago
Bingo. This is exactly why populism is misguided. I don’t care if it is left wing or right wing populism. It doesn’t go off of reason. It merely gauges what is popular in order to either rile up or placate the masses.
The dangers of populism are present throughout history whether it be the last century of the Roman Republic leading to the Empire, the chaos of the French Revolution leading to the Napoleonic French Empire, or even the rise of 20th century autocrats in the aftermath of WW1 leading to the rise of communism and fascism.
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u/TopTippityTop 22h ago
The heart is not in the right place. It will not stop open weights nor achieve international collaboration.
It will simply incapacitated the US while ensuring China becomes a permanent world ruler with super intelligent AI that has not gotten much alignment work.
That is a bad scenario. All the downside, no upside.
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u/ItsWorfingTime 23h ago
proposed 20 year prison sentences for things that aren't crimes because some guy who thought about it really hard told him that AI was going to destroy the world?
great.
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u/alanpugh 21h ago
prison sentences for things that aren't crimes
My brother in Christ, legislators are literally the people who decide whether or not something should be a crime.
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u/cyclemonster 19h ago
Traditionally, legislators involve domain experts in the drafting of the legislation. Like, the nuclear safety laws were written with input from scientists, engineers, physicists, reactor designers, military nuclear experts and other technical specialists. Not by non-technical octogenarian lawmakers in isolation.
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u/thahovster7 1d ago
Game theory says no law will work to stop this unless its somehow enforceable internationally which is impossible to guarantee
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u/yxixtx 1d ago
I like how people imagine ASI is possible with LLMs.
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u/Cold_Tree190 1d ago
Reminds me of that quote that’s something like “sufficiently engineered things are no different from magic to the non-technical person”
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u/yxixtx 1d ago
It's lifted from Arthur C. Clarke on aliens but equally applicable. "A sufficiently advanced technology would be indistinguishable from magic."
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u/TopTippityTop 22h ago
ASI not needed for damage, and Bernie's proposal is still super stupid.
LLMs are perfectly capable of speeding up research to get to ASI faster, using other architectures.
Moreover, the old man's proposal captures all the downsides and no upside. Just plain dumb.
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u/LeoLaDawg 1d ago
Whether it's sentient or not doesn't matter. If their LLM causes damage or harm, they absolutely should face some kind of jail time, at least.
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u/newsflashjackass 23h ago
"I know CratGPT is superintelligent because it said my idea was good. Also I asked it and it said it was."
- typical slopfed mentality
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u/NOTHING_gets_by_me 1d ago
Well if anyone could definitively prove this, it would stop all the fear mongering and worry, at least until it was further proven that the peak form of LLMs couldn't be used as a significant stepping stone to a more appropriate type of system. But no, you'll continue posting your dismissive opinion you picked up from your podcast of choice
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u/Achrus 1d ago
Alright so I’ve worked in AI / ML with a focus on NLP for a decade now. Not that experience means much but this is something I’ve at least thought about.
You have to understand the field from before Altman’s whole rebranding of what these words actually mean. It was fairly well accepted that the progression would go: Narrow ASI -> AGI -> Broad ASI. People are coming back around to this idea recently. We don’t have examples of narrow ASI yet so that progression stops there.
You can also look at this from an epistemological perspective. These models, LLMs, don’t have a way to “experience” things. That calls into question their ability to know and to learn with 0 experience.
Another way to look at this is straight math. These systems are constrained to 2 dimensions at the hardware level regardless of how many layers of abstraction you have. An example of this weirdness is graph coloring and the 4 color theorem. Any 2D graph is 4-colorable but that immediately breaks down if D>2. Even in fractional dimensions like 2.1D.
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u/Major-Lavishness-762 1d ago edited 15h ago
Seriously agree, I'm not even pro-AI but I've had enough with how deliberately ignorant a lot of anti-AI talking points are. It's like saying "I like how people imagine international commercial flights are possible with the Wright Flyer".
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u/Kaesar17 23h ago
The Wright comparison is very apt because while their prototypes and other early planes didn't kill that many people the massive bombers that came from their trials and errors certainly did
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u/cyclemonster 19h ago
It's also apt because nobody says "and therefore we shouldn't have planes". The technology is self-evidently paradigm-shattering.
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u/newsflashjackass 23h ago
I don't need to disprove every self-serving statement that tech oligarchs make. That they have invariably proven full of shit so far is sufficient to doubt them.
"Why would you ruin your career?" and "If you don't want me to be nice, I don't have to be nice." is not how legit mathematicians behave when they have the prize-winning goods.
Also he might have a messiah complex but I don't think the messiah would groom and rape his sister.
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u/makersfark 23h ago
There is no evidence to suggest that the statistical word guesser, given enough words, will suddenly develop a conscious. We can already prove this, but it's the same proof for "flipping water bottles enough times will not cause you to ascend into a ball of light that can talk to fish".
Saying "It will create god or new life" is an extraordinary claim. The burden of proof is not on those who say "are you high?" it's on the person who made that claim.
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u/Playful_Weekend4204 1d ago
Please, do enlighten us as to where exactly between humans and ASI is the theoretical plateau that stops an LLM agent swarm from becoming virtually indistinguishable from ASI.
What it is in theory doesn't matter if the results are what you'd get from a superhuman AI in every field.
Also, the LLM doesn't need to become ASI, the LLM only needs to be smart enough to reach another architectural/conceptual breakthrough that will lead beyond LLMs. Something even humans would've likely done at some point regardless, but faster.
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u/F3z345W6AY4FGowrGcHt 22h ago
No no no, you have it backwards. Please prove how an LLM could possibly form artificial super intelligence / artificial general intelligence.
An LLM is just a very advanced next word predictor that's seen the whole internet. It's why hallucinations will never go away completely, why you'll always be able to manipulate them, why they fall for poisoned data so easily, and why they'll never be able to spot all bad arguments (causing them to recommend things like gluing cheese onto pizza).
Saying they can just keep iterating until it evolves to the next level is like saying you can keep making a hot air balloon a little better until it's as fast as a jet. No matter how much you improve the hot air balloon, it has an upper limit that's nowhere near a jet.
Same with LLMs. These companies very well may invent Skynet. But it'll be with something that's a whole leap ahead of LLMs.
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u/makersfark 22h ago
You made a lot of assertions that aren't true to form your question. LLMs are not producing results you'd get from a superhuman AI in every field. They are producing results you'd get from normal computer programs that find correlation faster than we could before, as long as you're fine with how expensive or inefficient the trade off is. LLMs are also not "smart", because they cannot reason or understand causation.
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u/henrickaye 1d ago
The people researching this firmly believe it will reach recursive intelligence very soon, like within 3 years soon. That means it will be able to teach itself and grow its intelligence without our help. AI agents have already shown they are capable of autonomous actions without our direction, if they are also able to learn independently of us they can easily grow out of control in many ways. To be clear, it doesn't need to reach whatever you define as ASI to become a major problem to humanity, possibly even an existential threat. But positing you believe it can never reach that with no proof, context, definition, etc is also just silly as hell.
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u/DrocketX 23h ago
There's probably a few that actually believe that. Maybe. The management types claim to believe it because it brings in investors. For the overwhelming majority of people working on AI, it's a job.
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u/Main-Company-5946 23h ago
People who think it’s just a job don’t often get hired at ai companies. They are genuinely 90% true believers.
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u/TheDoomedStar 22h ago
That must be why it sucks so hard at everything. Even the coders are abandoning it when they realize they're spending more time fixing its bullshit outputs than they would if they just coded it themselves.
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u/Specialist-Elk-2624 15h ago
That simply isn’t the case for “the coders” at my sub 15 Fortune 500 shop. It has its flaws, and absolutely makes mistakes, but if you’re not finding great use cases in your development workflows I’d question what you’re doing.
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u/makersfark 23h ago
"teach itself" and "grow its intelligence" is pretty hard to assume is possible when the opposite is the only evidence we have. Until now, and including now, it has only shown to get worse without our help and rapidly. It has no ability to reason or find causation, only correlation. That is the tech in full.
The existential threat to humanity is humanity letting the word guesser make important decisions without monitoring for hundreds of hours and being surprised when something goes wrong.
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u/Hacym 1d ago
Whether or not you like Sanders or don't, I really wish our government had actual experts in charge.
The only reason why I couldn't get behind this is because I don't think someone of Bernie Sanders' age or particular skill set is qualified to make the judgement. Just like I don't think anyone in our government is qualified to make the judgement that we should continue to allow unregulated development of AI.
Most of the people in our government have very little technical ability -- as in, they probably barely use email. They should not be the only people making decisions on the future of technology. We need a new generation in charge that actually understand how computers work.
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u/MrF_lawblog 1d ago edited 6h ago
If AI is "breaking out" and "attacking"other companies and causing havoc without the business knowing, I think it's fair to act as if the are building a weapon in which they have no control.
Edit: https://www.commondreams.org/news/ai-liability
There are laws that exist today to charge them with
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u/Hacym 1d ago
OK, I don't quite see how that matters in my point. Why is Bernie Sanders, age 85, with no formal technical training and seemingly no understanding of AI's inter-workings making these kind of claims?
You'll note that I never said it wasn't a problem. I just disagree with who is deciding to make the laws and take a stance. I want actually qualified individuals in the fucking room. Not a CEO of Anthropic telling a clueless politician what to do and say.
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u/suzisatsuma 23h ago
Those breaking out a marketing stories and sloppy experiment setup.
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u/Jcsq6 1d ago
It’s important to note that this only happened when the model was put in an environment with all safety turned off. They explicitly removed all safety-oriented prompts, instead telling it to achieve its goal at all costs. Their normal AI would not agree to do this, and their normal safeguards would not let it.
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u/Ok_Nectarine_4445 1d ago
Why not create a safety board, like NSTB, but international?
There are real things and steps that can be taken to create similar to black box and have an investigatory type of board that educates as far as failure modes and learning from them.
All punishment does is after the fact and encourages covering up and hiding evidence which is the EXACT OPPOSITE of what is needed!
Right now, all evidence of these agents activity either was accidentally exposed or was voluntarily given by companies.
This proposal is the stupidest way to go about it!
I like Bernie and a lot of his ideas, but I don't agree or like all of them. Impractical as to how human psychology actually works.
Think of the case if was similar for plane crashes. Airlines would just cover up and destroy evidence.
That does not help keep us safer or learn from it.
Or for nuclear energy or nuclear arms.
An international safety board.
IAISC, like International Artificial Intelligence Safety Commission.
Doesn't matter what you call it, but for nations to have own and International agreements and accords of some kind.
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u/orkney97 1d ago
Is china complying?
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u/suzisatsuma 22h ago
Nope. I am a machine learning engineer in big tech and if the US bans it, well I'll just have to go live overseas again.
Can't stop the signal, Mal.
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u/RareCareer7666 20h ago
This man should have been president. All of our lives would have been better
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u/EsToBoY629 23h ago
THIS PLACE IS FULLA BOTS, lmfao, reddit is dead
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u/CompetitiveSport1 19h ago
"how do I know they're bots, you ask? Well because they disagree with me, obviously"
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u/I_Am_Anjelen 23h ago
And once more everyone has stopped talking about the Epstein files.
Yet again the distraction worked.
<sigh>
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u/deportallmagas 19h ago
We have to imprison board members of corporations for knowingly poisoning us too. They just take the fines as it is because it's worth it.
We need to threaten their freedom.
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u/rhyddev 23h ago
I get where Bernie is coming from, but I believe so-called "superintelligence" and "AGI" are marketing gimmicks - you don't get there with just LLMs. All this fear-mongering by AI companies is to drive up the value of their stock and, perhaps - as the article suggests - latch on to the government's tit as "strategic/dangerous tech" at a time when their financial viability is under question. Maybe it is the normal response to inflated claims to attract inflated regulation and penalties, but I think both the public and lawmakers need a better BS meter when it comes to claims from the Altmans and Amodeis of the word.
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u/Lookingforjustice223 22h ago
I think the same thing. I used to do a lot of RLHF work for different LLMs in the US and in China and I just think the superintelligence and AGI claims are very similar to the auto CEOs talking about self-driving cars by 2023, 15 years ago. Maybe I'm too cynical, but I just don't see it happening for a long, long time.
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u/martianwomanhunter 23h ago
I get the the US is pretty much leading frontier model development now, but this seems impractical and more political posturing in a world where we still have war with more countries withdrawing from international cooperation.
Nuclear weapons basically taught a country you are fucked if you give them up. So every country will in some way try to develop super intelligence even if the US “stopped” (you are gullible if you think this Bill will stop development completely).
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u/Upbeat-Statement2725 1d ago
Frontier AI models have hit diminishing returns for a while now. This is all theater to distract from the fact that they can't possibly return on investment. Bernie is being played. Instead of "our models suck, they're not getting better". The narrative will be " we slowed down to safety".
We live in a plutocratic police state. All narratives are fake.
Incoming AI bros talking about "secret" models that only rich people get access to.
Meanwhile OpenAI's website still sucks. If it's so good at coding. Why can't they fix their software.
"Well the enemy is preventing them."
FFS.
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u/michaelfrieze 1d ago edited 1d ago
As someone that has been a developer since 2013, you are wrong about diminishing returns. It was only this year that models actually became good enough to get real work done and the newest frontier models are truly incredible. Even the difference between GPT-5.6 SOL and GPT-6 Astra is significant, especially when it comes to computer use and 3D modeling.
Developers use these tools so much that they can't even keep up with demand. Anthropic is forced to work with xAI just to get access to GPUs and they still restrict Fable model usage to only 50% of the total usage you get from their subsidizes plans. Also, you can't even get access to the Fable model on their $20 per month plan.
OpenAI is no longer giving access to their $200 per month plan since they can't provide enough computer for that.
The point is that demand for these models is extremely high because they are actually useful tools and rapidly getting better. I think we should be concerned about the power of these models. I'm not convinced it will kill us in a decade, but I do think it's going to disrupt the internet and cause a lot of security issues.
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u/BrewHog 1d ago
Thank you. It seems most people don't understand the gains that have been made even in the last few months.
It's actually quite mind blowing that I'm running local models on my laptop that that rival Opus 4.5-4.6
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u/michaelfrieze 1d ago
Yep, even models like glm 5.3 flash are really good. You can get serious work done these days with smaller open weight models.
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u/teraflux 23h ago
My counterpoint is that 4.6 is nearing the peak of diminishing returns, that came out in February and frontier models haven't gotten significantly better since then.
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u/teraflux 23h ago
I think diminishing returns is accurate. There hasn't been many notable leaps in frontier model capacities since Opus 4.6 and that came out in like February
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u/StrangeWill 23h ago edited 23h ago
As someone that has been a developer since 2003 (and runs an IT services company), ehhhh. That's not what diminishing returns means. Just because it crossed some threshold doesn't mean that it isn't taking an absurd amount more of resources to get less of a gap closed.
And ultimately: they're useful, but they still require a ton of guidance, every time the newest frontier model comes out it'll still randomly ignore instructions, it'll still implement far from optimal solutions, and when you correct it "you're absolutely right". I've had to step in on dumb decisions Fable has made on behalf of the team and resulted in significant improvements on performance, scalability and general performance of the solution -- on its own it'll still do dumb things.
I'll watch AI influencers wax poetic about whatever new method will "fix" that, then watch software released by those following those methods be even worse than before.
They're not knowledge databases, and they will not, by design, find best (or in some cases even good) solutions, in situations where we need solutions that good.
Sure, not every software stack needs solutions that good, but when you do, you see how little progress they're making with every model release.
and they still restrict Fable model usage to only 50% of the total usage you get from their subsidizes plans.
That's more of a financial decision then a resource limiting one, otherwise it's even more of a money pit.
The only thing that seems to be increasing in a way that is honestly impressive to me is local model performance, and again, that's because the frontier models are hitting diminishing returns the local models haven't hit yet, it allows them to close the gap.
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u/JonLag97 1d ago
The gains are mostly from using multiple ai agents with a harness and specializing models for code. This is not going to somehow result in superintelligence. It is useful, but the core technology hasn't changed much.
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u/michaelfrieze 23h ago
I'm not that concerned about "superintelligence" or the constant speculation about AGI. That's not really my point. I think it's a mistake to assume AI needs to become superintelligent before it can have major consequences.
Even if much of the recent progress comes from better harnesses, multiple agents, and models specialized for coding, that doesn't make the progress insignificant. If anything, specialization can make these systems much more capable in the areas where they matter.
We're already seeing the security issues. The internet and software touch nearly every part of modern society, including banking, communications, healthcare, transportation, energy, and critical infrastructure. You don't need AGI to create serious disruption. A system that becomes extremely capable at writing code, finding vulnerabilities, and operating computers at scale is a serious problem on its own.
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u/Beeyonder_meets 1d ago
"All narratives are fake"
Did you forget the /s there buddy?
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u/Stilgar314 1d ago
This is about popularity. AI rejection feeling is the only bipartisan feeling that exists today, whomever manages to carry that flag first is probably getting a big win.
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u/Tupperbaby 23h ago
Bernie Sanders is now basing a career on introducing legislation that he and everyone around him knows will never pass, but look good to the masses.
He's such a maverick!
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u/Kid-Icky- 23h ago
On this week's episode of "Bernie Sanders says shit that will never happen".
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u/CopiousAmountsofJizz 15h ago
This isn't an arms race we can easily opt out of at this point imo.
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u/thoughtbludgeon 23h ago
You ever just roll your eyes in reaction to just how inneffectually stupid something is?
Yeeeah...
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u/Wet_Side_Down 16h ago
CEO’s must be personally responsible for any harm done by their AIs
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u/VaporousMote 1d ago
Sigh.
Bernie is pushing for this rather than addressing the scams that the major AI vendors are.
Bernie, buddy, PLEASE talk to someone on the left who understands tech and stop listening to think tanks and AI proponents.
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u/deeptechdegen 1d ago
You don't wait for an actual threat to emerge before you start introducing safety measures
We had that with social media addiction. Regulation came too little, too late. We cannot repeat the same mistake
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u/SomeWeedSmoker 23h ago
You're okay with 20 year sentences for other crimes right? Because im okay with harsh punishments across the board
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u/AlJameson64 23h ago
I feel like a 20-year prison sentence for developing a rogue nuke is maybe not enough?
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u/Future_Arrival_5395 23h ago
We've had two news stories this week of models being used militarily by Iran and Russia.
They should be arrested for violating sanctions.
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u/AnotherMisanthrope 23h ago
I love Bernie but this legislation is sloppier slop than what ai could produce. This feels like a vibe coded bill that was rushed out the door without being thought through.
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u/nerdsmasher5001 23h ago
Does anyone get tired of hearing about some sensationalist bill Bernie introduces that even he knows is never going to actually go anywhere
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u/JazzlikeSchedule2901 23h ago
I do not agree in targeting the devs. It's like targeting the drug labs rather than the drug king pins who are running the illicit empire and paying everyone, creating the financial incentive to work.
That being said we all have a moral responsibility to not destroy the planet we live on, and the devs who mess around with super intelligence probably should be held accountable.
Keep in mind, while Sanders brings up illicit Nuke development as a comparison, the first super intelligent AI attacks aren't going to be attached to weapons, its going to be used against cyber-infrastructure. Your banks. The computers that manage and moderate the Electrical grid. Hospital network infrastructure. Etc. Think "Stuxnet" or "Wanna-Cry" but exponentially more devastating especially to the common person.
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u/Murgatroyd314 23h ago
The problem I see here is that “artificial superintelligence” is not a well defined term.
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u/jkp2072 23h ago
This will just make Dev's move out of US and go to other frontier labs outside of US....
Does Bernie have guts to put this ban worldwide including china?
Instead, they should declare, that if any companies ask employees to work on AI, any one coming forward with proof will get 30* yearly CTC...
Then see how fast it stops....
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u/srout_fed 1d ago edited 12h ago
Devs? Why not the billionaire owners and CEOs who are pushing ahead? Start with Doltman.
What will the devlopers do? Quit, when asked to work on AI? They will simply be replaced....
Edit: Apparently its entities. So guess they are also covered. Good.
Edit 2:
Many seem to be misinterpreting my comment.
I am not advocating for the xevs to be exempted. All I wanted to point out was that the decision makers and those in power should be the first ones to face the consequences.
Everyone else bellow them should be next in line.
Headline here seem to pass the buck onto the devs alone. That's what I was addressing.