And I don't mean the doomerism nonsense. From rogue AI, doomerism, AGI.
I mean real regulation:
1) Fair accounting of input/output tokens. Where is the weights and measures department to enforce fair counting of usage? If I pay for a gallon of gas, that is what I expect. When I pay for a dollar of LLM compute, is it going to play games with the input (or especially the output) tokens to devalue my dollar? 2) Quality. When I request a higher effort of a frontier model, and then I get downgraded to a lower tier model or with different effort levels (and I may not even know if I was downgraded!), they are effectively selling you a service you didn't ask for. "But the terms of service", great, if they feel it is such a risk to downgrade, and they get it wrong a lot, then they should discount the cost of the downgraded response. 3) Adulterating outputs. LLMs are now routinely adulterating output for tracking and accountability purposes, but is there anyone to validate these efforts are not lowering the quality of the response? There needs to be more discussion around companies adulterating their product, and holding them to account. I have several times noticed words were swapped: sometimes the word pick made no sense, when it previously didn't do this. And I wasn't looking for it or cherry picking. It stood out that badly. 4) Furthering point 3, are the responses themselves going to be seeded such that the author of that response can be identified? Has anyone asked themselves if they could deanonymize LLM responses online like yellow printer dots? 5) Quotas. Related to points 1 and 2, when I am on a metered service, what happens to requests that fail mid-response, or the response is cut midway? Why should I pay for a failed response? Maybe that is fine, but who is validating they aren't doing this at scale to save money?
I feel every time we earnestly or "good faith" engage in the nonsense regulations that the major LLMaaS (LLMs as a Service) duopolists, we fail to engage in real discussions about regulating the product we are paying for.
I don't see why we should believe these companies to operate in good faith post-IPO. Where is the incentive once they shut down all competition to ensure only OpenAI/Anthropic are the LLMs you can purchase from?
Look to what Uber/Lyft have become over the years. Massively degrading their service and increasing nickel and dime costs. They skirted regulation then demanded the world bend and write regulations that fit their revenue goals everywhere they could (or threatened to pull out where they couldn't).
And if the danger really is as bad as they say, then how can we trust them to "regulate" that threat if they would refuse regulations around basic delivery of service?
Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49871747
Points: 4
# Comments: 1
