Brian Chau@psychosort
Apr 28
13 tweets
The California senate bill to crush OpenAI's competitors is fast tracked for a vote. This is the most brazen attempt to hurt startups and open source yet.
This bill covers not just models with 10^26 compute, but those with SIMILAR PERFORMANCE.
This means that if GPT-5 is mildly better than GPT-4 and uses 10^26 FLOPs, any model that is similarly good is covered.
They literally specified that they want to regulate models capable of competing with OpenAI.
They are trying to sneak in a new AI regulatory agency, like the TSA or Nuclear Regulatory Commission. The primary function will be to harm small players in the AI industry.
Or as @Adam Thierer puts it, NEPA for AI
The cruelest part: they want developers to fund their own oppression. The FMD would be funded by blanket fees on the companies it regulates.
The bill would make it a felony to make a paperwork mistake for this agency, opening the door to selective weaponization and harassment.
The derivative model clause is crucial. It de-facto criminalizes open source.
Their definition of derivative model includes unlimited additional training, as long as it is not "independent", and everything up to combination with other software.
Let's be clear about what this means. If your AI writes perfectly legitimate emails, and a malicious actor makes a "derivate model" by attaching it to malware, then the FMD will target you, possibly with a felony.
Close source your models or else.
The full bill is here: leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billText…
@Dean Woodley Ball's summary: hyperdimensional.substack.com/p/californias-…
You can submit a position letter to the bill author, which ensures that your position shows up on all future bill analyses that Senators read.
leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billNavC…
You can also help by leaving a public comment at this doc:
docs.google.com/document/d/1rk…
My response to Senator Wiener's QT:
I stand by the claims that this is a clear attempt to ban open source and that criminal perjury charges are possible
x.com/psychosort/sta…
Brian Chau@psychosort
Apr 29
View on Twitter
I'm thankful to Senator Wiener for engaging on this 'vigorous' debate and implicitly accepting with my points about the similar performance standard.
Let me state in clear and undeniable terms the path to legal action against open source software we would all consider to be reasonable.
Brian Chau
@psychosort
Executive Director @aftfuture.
Emergent Ventures 2022, IOI Gold 2017. e/🇺🇸
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