This is a terrible tech policy document. The noise made by some closed AI companies around simple word calculators taking over the world has now led to a regulatory regime which functionally makes it tougher for newer entrants, in both closed and open source AI worlds. This is the textbook definition of regulatory capture playing out (cc @bgurley). Some red flags: 🚩 Zooming out, what struck to me at the beginning is that this is not just an "AI" executive order, it is infact a retroactive governance regime being imposed on the entire web, while also limiting the future. The term AI is defined so broadly, that it could impact everything from Google search results, to Amazon recommendations, to Yelp restaurant suggestions, to anything else which recommends anything to you. This is the start of the "AI-industrial-complex", which will now lead to a world of billions of dollars being spent in regulations, compliance and lobbying over the time ahead. 🚩 This EO is essentially banning fully open source models over 10B parameters, as it requires reporting requirements and "..physical and cybersecurity measures taken to protect those model weights". 🚩 Beyond the datacenter clouds, this would also extend to even decentralized networks providing compute, where even the location and total compute has to be reported. To Floyd in Florida running a SETI @ home node searching for extraterrestrial life signals - the government wants to know the precise location of your computer in your basement now... 🚩 Compliance regime for any model which was trained with more than 10^26 floating-point operations (or 0.1 exaflops) 🚩 Training requests from non-US persons to be submitted. This is like opening a bank account now! 🚩 This is a remarkable regulatory capture exercise, as now the cost of compliance for anyone running a physically co-located datacenter with compute above a threshold now increases 🚩 Models in this regime are basically guilty until provent innocent if they require compute > 0.1 exaflops 🤦‍♂️ "..(b)  The term “artificial intelligence” or “AI” has the meaning set forth in 15 U.S.C. 9401(3):  a machine-based system that can, for a given set of human-defined objectives, make predictions, recommendations, or decisions influencing real or virtual environments." "..(k)  The term “dual-use foundation model” means an AI model that is trained on broad data; generally uses self-supervision; contains at least tens of billions of parameters;" "..(i)   any model that was trained using a quantity of computing power greater than 1026 integer or floating-point operations.." "..(ii)  any computing cluster that has a set of machines physically co-located in a single datacenter, transitively connected by data center networking of over 100 Gbit/s, and having a theoretical maximum computing capacity of 1020 integer or floating-point operations per second for training AI" "..submit a report to the Secretary of Commerce when a foreign person transacts with that United States IaaS Provider to train a large AI model" "..a model shall be considered to have potential capabilities that could be used in malicious cyber-enabled activity if it requires a quantity of computing power greater than 1026 integer or floating-point operations and is trained on a computing cluster that has a set of machines physically co-located in a single datacenter, transitively connected by data center networking of over 100 Gbit/s, and having a theoretical maximum compute capacity of 1020 integer or floating-point operations per second for training AI." whitehouse.gov/briefing-room…