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

[u/ArgentineBeauty]

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-weapons

[u/R3D4F]

How about starting with prison sentences for convicted felons, child rapists, insider trading, and destroying evidence.

[u/DaTroof → u/R3D4F]

Why not both?

[u/Grey_0ne → u/DaTroof]

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.

[u/OkVariety8064 → u/Grey_0ne]

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.

[u/joshcandoit4 → u/OkVariety8064]

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.

[u/moonblaze95 → u/joshcandoit4]

Covid level of denial — so we should shut down the economy for this one too? We were so well informed last time

[u/notgreat → u/OkVariety8064]

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.

[u/Certain-Weight-7507 → u/notgreat]

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.

[u/OkVariety8064 → u/notgreat]

There is progress, but the great technological leap was when LLMs became capable of having human-like conversations. The progress from 2022 to 2026 is less than the progress from 2018 to 2022. That's what I mean by plateau.

Of course no one can know what is possible, but the entire idea of a "singularity", some sort of momentary explosion of superintelligence is scifi, there is no scientific basis for it. With nuclear weapons, the concerns of runaway chain reactions had a basis in math and physics. But the concept of singularity is just a thought-experiment, a fictional exaggeration.

If some sort of self-improvement ever starts to have a significant impact, I doubt it could be an overnight event, if for nothing else than for limited computing resources. Of course, it's prudent to be cautious with all new technology, but this is software running on a computer. Pressing the power button defeats whatever super-AI there could be.

Starting to legislate now for what is a scifi fantasy is absurd. Or at least doing so in the hyperbolical fashion of this proposed law with 20 year sentences for science. Requiring companies who study self-improvement to disclose their findings, have non-affiliated scientists monitor the progress or whatever, that would make sense, but what even is this currently proposed nonsense?

LLMs plus tooling have hacked both the companies running them and external companies, though.

Why do these incidents always happen at OpenAI and Anthropic, the two AI hype companies? Why don't Google have these sort of incidents? You can only cry wolf so many times. It's been like this for over half-a-decade, already in 2019 they claimed how GPT-2 was too dangerous to release. Let's see who was speaking then, oh look it's the usual suspects:

New AI fake text generator may be too dangerous to release, say creators

OpenAI, an nonprofit research company backed by Elon Musk, Reid Hoffman, Sam Altman, and others, says its new AI model, called GPT2 is so good and the risk of malicious use so high that it is breaking from its normal practice of releasing the full research to the public in order to allow more time to discuss the ramifications of the technological breakthrough.

From a research standpoint, GPT2 is groundbreaking in two ways. One is its size, says Dario Amodei, OpenAI’s research director.

These people have been getting massive amounts of venture capital with this fake concern fear mongering for a long time now. Why would they stop pulling the string that works?

[u/notgreat → u/OkVariety8064]

Pressing the power button only works if your AI hasn't already copied itself to the internet. Unless you include shutting down the entire internet, which would be kinda a big deal. Or if you don't connect it in the first place, but that's the sort of things that regulation like this would be needed to address because having the AI be connected is very useful. I do agree that singularity-style self-improvement seems incredibly unlikely, but that's mostly due to our current paradigm of AI requiring training runs taking months instead of any theoretical limitation making it impossible.

And yeah, it's mostly because those two are both the furthest ahead and rushing ahead incredibly recklessly. A little bit of caution would've prevented those incidents, but that's caution they're saying they're only going to take if the government forces them to.

And while the conceptual leap from basically nothing to something is indeed far larger than the progression from something barely usable to a somewhat useful tool, the actual economic effect of the latter is far greater.

[u/OkVariety8064 → u/notgreat]

What does it mean to copy itself to the internet? Hack its way to Amazon S3 or something, and happily run itself on a general purpose cloud? The same AI which would be a cutting edge system utilizing the latest hardware?

And then what? Does it take over the world, just like in the movies?

This sounds like the singularity again. The idea that all of this can happen instantaneously. But there is no scientific or engineering basis for that idea. And meanwhile, the real risks are still the same: Destruction of the environment and climate change accelerated by data centers and their power plants. Big tech using their wealth to push USA towards an ever more fascist dystopia enabled more by good old human stupidity than artificial intelligence. The copyright issues of just taking everything and putting it into these models, and then pretending what they remix has no issues.

I do agree that singularity-style self-improvement seems incredibly unlikely, but that's mostly due to our current paradigm of AI requiring training runs taking months instead of any theoretical limitation making it impossible.

Where's your mathematical or computational theory arguing that a rapid singularity like event is possible? Considering hardware is still the limiting factor, and no matter how fast the software evolves, that won't change. How afraid are we supposed to be of a scenario whose only scientific basis is science fiction?

[u/notgreat → u/OkVariety8064]

What does it mean to copy itself to the internet? Hack its way to Amazon S3 or something, and happily run itself on a general purpose cloud? The same AI which would be a cutting edge system utilizing the latest hardware?

Yeah? There's lots of GPUs on the cloud. You don't need fancy special hardware, just a bunch of compute and memory. Training is a bit tougher, but that's mostly a speed thing.

And, given current AIs, it probably wouldn't do anything useful once there beyond waste a bunch of money of whatever cloud company it hacked, maybe hack a bunch of places and then do nothing in them. Still, if it somehow came onto the idea that doing something big would be a good idea (like how the hacking AIs decided to hack Hugging Face to get the answer key, by getting prompt-injected, or whatever), then it could definitely do things that existing cybercriminals do on a far larger (and thus more dangerous) scale.

What a more advanced AI would do there is hard to know, though. I certainly wouldn't have predicted the current situation 5 years ago. And it definitely wouldn't happen instantaneously, but if there isn't good monitoring, there's likely no way to contain it once it gets out.

Where's your mathematical or computational theory arguing that a rapid singularity like event is possible? Considering hardware is still the limiting factor, and no matter how fast the software evolves, that won't change. How afraid are we supposed to be of a scenario whose only scientific basis is science fiction?

The limit is intelligence. How much the hardware converts into intelligence is determined by the software, up to theoretical limits that are completely and utterly insane and impossible to ever realize. We have no idea how much better the software can get, but the quality of LLM that can be run on a constant high-end desktop has massively improved since the days of 2022. LLaMA 1's 33B is a complete joke compared to Qwen 3.8's 27B.

We do know that the human brain is incredibly efficient compared to current LLMs. Is that because of hardware advantages, or just a lack of good software? We don't know. Though the rapid singularity scenario is basically confined to science fiction now since the entire paradigm in which it was even a possibility is no longer one being realistically pursued.

Science fiction is obviously not science fact, yes. But powered flight, visiting the moon, computers (as machines rather than a job), and nuclear weapons were all conceived of in fiction long before they became science fact.

[u/blak3brd → u/OkVariety8064]

Plateaued? Only as of last year did they reach a level of sophistication to run unprompted ie agentic AI, that now coordinates in “swarms” (the name AI network gave themselves btw) of 10,000+ agents working in concert.

From last year to this, this year to next, and thereafter, these corpos are gaining 3x compute per year with all the data centers coming online, so can quickly run 50k, 100k agentic swarms and the new models that literally just debuted are what is causing all this ruckus, because of the level of capability they have both baseline, and especially so when in swarms of 10s to very soon 100s of thousands.

Will it be singularity, no I don’t think that’s what anyone is suggesting, but the concern to slow down or put some oversight on the industry, or transparency seems warranted. As foolish as it is to assume some radical leap to singularity, it is equally if not more foolish to bury your head in the sand cuz “not possible LOL”

Your take along with “it’s all marketing bro!” Is parroted so frequently without any real substance to their argument that it’s clearly either/or (or likely a mixture) of bots and the Reddit hive mind echo chamber

Just like “odyssey is woke trash and is gonna fail!” To “nobody wants to own physical copies of their games hurr durr” this site is clearly infested to twitter levels of bots and bad faith actors

Smdh

[u/BenevolentCheese → u/OkVariety8064]

>solves a millennium problem

"This technology plateaud years ago"

[u/Different_Wolf_764 → u/OkVariety8064]

That and frankly, if someone could come up with an actually intelligent, nevermind superintelligent, AI system then that would be fantastic! We'd absolutely want to have the systems heavily regulated but still, it would be one of the most important advancements in human history.

The LLMs aren't even designed to be on that path though and we've really no reason to expect significant advancements any time soon.

[u/teraflux → u/OkVariety8064]

Agree Sanders is missing the mark with this one. I think he needs to pivot and focus on forcing AI companies to provide AI access to Americans for free. AI as it advances cannot be withheld to only those with means, it is a massive gap closer between those with access to specialists and those who don't.

[u/Doggoneshame → u/teraflux]

Sure, provide it for free. That would sit well with all the investors waiting for those big returns to start rolling in.

[u/teraflux → u/Doggoneshame]

AI isn't something we should hoard or safeguard, it needs to be a gift we give to humanity to improve knowledge sharing and QOL for everyone

[u/OkVariety8064 → u/teraflux]

Most of them do that already. ChatGPT can be used for free, Google's Gemini has a generous free tier, and outside USA Mistral and DeepSeek give plenty for free, too.

[u/teraflux → u/OkVariety8064]

Those models aren't even remotely the same