How do you know when AI is powerful enough to be dangerous? Regulators try to do the math
For regulators trying to put guardrails on AI, it’s mostly about the arithmetic. Specifically, an AI model trained on 10 to the 26th floating-point operations per second must now be reported to the U.S. government and could soon trigger even stricter requirements in California.
Say what? Well, if you’re counting the zeroes, that’s 100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, or 100 septillion, calculations each second, using a measure known as flops.
What it signals to some lawmakers and AI safety advocates is a level of computing power that might enable rapidly advancing AI technology to create or proliferate weapons of mass destruction, or conduct catastrophic cyberattacks.
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