DAIS: A New Attempt to Make AI Play Nicely with Humans
September 20, 2024
This essay is the work of a dumb dinobaby. No smart software required.
How about a decentralized artificial intelligence “association”? One has been set up by Michael Casey, the former chief content officer at Coindesk. (Coindesk reports about the bright, sunny world of crypto currency and related topics.) I learned about this society in — you guessed it — Coindesk’s online information service called Coindesk. The article “Decentralized AI Society Launched to Fight Tech Giants Who ‘Own the Regulators’” is interesting. I like the idea that “tech giants” own the regulators. This is an observation which Apple and Google might not agree. Both “tech giants” have been facing some unfavorable regulatory decisions. If these regulators are “owned,” I think the “tech giants” need to exercise their leadership skills to make the annoying regulators go away. One resigned in the EU this week, but as Shakespeare said of lawyers, let’s drown them. So far the “tech giants” have been bumbling along, growing bigger as a result of feasting on data and amplifying allegedly monopolistic behaviors which just seem to pop up, rules or no rules.
Two experts look at what emerged from a Petri dish of technological goodies. Quite a surprise I assume. Thanks, MSFT Copilot. Good enough.
The write up reports:
Industry leaders have launched a non-profit organization called the Decentralized AI Society (DAIS), dedicated to tackling the probability of the monopolization of the artificial intelligence (AI) industry.
What is the DAIS outfit setting out to do? Here’s what Coindesk reports and this is a quote of the bullets from the write up:
Bringing capital to the decentralized AI world in what has already become an arms race for resources like graphical processing units (GPUs) and the data centers that compute together.
Shaping policy to craft AI regulations.
Education and promotion of decentralized AI.
Engineering to create new algorithms for learning models in a distributed way.
These are interesting targets. I want to point out that “decentralization” is the opposite of what the “tech giants” have already put in place; that is, concentration of money, talent, and infrastructure. Even old dogs like Oracle are now hopping on the centralized bandwagon. Even newcomers want to get as many cattle into the killing chute before the glamor of AI begins to lose some sparkles.
Several observations:
- DAIS has some crypto roots. These may become positive or negative. Right now regulators are interested in crypto as are other enforcement entities
- One of the Arnold Laws of Online is that centralization, consolidation, and concentration are emergent behaviors for online products and services. Countering this “law” and its “emergent” functionality is going to take more than conferences, a Web site, and some “logical” ideas which any “rational” person would heartily endorse. But emergent is tough to stop based on my experience.
- Singapore has become a hot spot for certain financial and technical activities. The problem is that nation-states may not want to be inhibited in their AI ambitions. Some may find the notion of “education” a problem as well because curricula must conform to pre-defined frameworks. Distributed is not a pre-defined anything; it is the opposite of controlled and, therefore, likely to be a bit of a problem.
Net net: Interesting idea. But Amazon, Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and some other outfits may want to talk about “distributed” but really mean the technological notion is okay, but we want as much of the money as we can get.
Stephen E Arnold, September 20, 2024
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