r/technology • u/Malor777 • 16h ago
Artificial Intelligence AI is less regulated than milk, says Microsoft president
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c6rmy7zmvx3lo45
u/forestshrub 16h ago
it’s like they’re bragging about how much freedom they have.
always bringing it up on social media , doing press conferences and interviews about it but never actually implement any safeguards or regulations…
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u/throwawaygaydude69 14h ago
Have you considered that they may want regulation to squash competition?
I have my reservations with AI, but I do think that the means of compute should be largely free.
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u/forestshrub 12h ago
i agree this is their strategy, but asking the government to regulate your product instead of doing it yourself is laughable, especially when congress isn’t even qualified to handle ai.
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u/PatchyWhiskers 15h ago
The only safeguards they want are against sci-fi potential problems like it gaining consciousness and killing us all, they don’t care about real, current problems.
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u/MandyWarHal 15h ago
I don't think they even care about the end of humanity, because they figure they'll just Rich their way out of it .. wish I'd be around for the last laugh but unfortunately I'm pretty sure this shit will take me out any day now.
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u/Panda_hat 6h ago
It's exactly what its like - it's what it is.
This is advertising to potential investors how unregulated and how much of a wild west the entire AI market is.
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u/GeneralDumbtomics 8h ago
To be fair, raw milk is a bigger danger.
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u/West-Abalone-171 5h ago
Letting techbro nazis run botfarms is how you wind up with raw milk. So "ai" is the danger in both cases, just not in their scifi fantasy version.
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u/Quentin-Code 16h ago
Please let’s regulate more so that we can ban the competition by saying that they don’t respect the regulation 🥹 (can you please do it before people move to much cheaper open weight, European and Chinese model 🙏)
(Heard that some big tech companies are going to be using these cheaper models, please hurry passing regulations!! Don’t you see how dAnGerouS AI is? It definitely wants to kill us! We have AGI now! I mean, super intelligence!!)
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u/linerva 15h ago
I'm for regulating them all...and then heavily penalising them all for their breaches. Including the ones that have already happened.
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u/Quentin-Code 14h ago
I’m for penalizing them all for their breaches. Heavily. But the regulation part, nope, or not on their terms for sure.
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u/HashtagDadWatts 12h ago
If you’re not going to regulate them what are you planning to penalize them for breaching?
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u/Catullus13 15h ago
AI is like a year away from creating its own OS and probably the entire Microsoft office suite
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u/Embarrassed_Quit_450 12h ago
Right, that'll happen the same year we get fully operational fusion power plants.
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u/West-Abalone-171 5h ago
There is currently an ai slop version of office that works but is generally hot garbage and vibe coded slopware is 5 or so years old now.
Fusion is at least 30 years away from making a full sized shitty powerplant worse than what we already have by every metric.
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u/Broadband- 10h ago
This "we need to be regulated" conversation is absolute bullshit.
It would be like me saying we need more laws to make sure I don't lie to people or take advantage of them. Sure punishment can direct action but that same action or inaction can be decided regardless of regulation.
It's shocking but there are private companies and private citizens who hold themselves more accountable than required by law or regulations. For some it hinders their best outcome but for many, surprisingly, it results in a better outcome.
Quick example. A local business that picks up, responds and puts their customer first versus a public company with call trees, dark patterns and questionable ethics.
They aren't mutually exclusive however, why again must line always go up for shareholders and not your employees? Why remove "don't be evil" from a company motto and why offshore or h1b replace instead of investing in those that made the company successful to begin with?
I'm beginning to think they're being careful with their words. Regulation can remove competitors without a sizeable purse while laws can make you somewhat held to your actions.
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u/SlingingTriceps 4h ago
I'm not usually defending these people, and this is not much of a defence anyway, but with companies that are this big this is definitelly not as simple as you deciding personally to stop lying. If you're a normal person, when you lie, you're going out of your way for a second, you don't typically make your whole life about lying. These companies were never "normal people" though. Cheating their way through regulations is what they do since the very beginning, without it they wouldn't exist. If they suddenly just "stop lying" things start unravelling pretty fast. The bottom line is they don't want to stop lying. To them to stop lying is to die, or worse, it's letting a competitor take over. Regulations and laws at their worst (from their perspective) make the playing field even. It also shifts the responsibility to someone else, so when they get caught getting around it they can just say "it's not our fault you damn politicians didn't think this one through".
Another reason you're going to see them saying "we need regulations" is because it's in their best interest to be at the forefront of any regulation talks, specially if they feel regulation is imminent and unavoidable. The consequences could be much more dire for them if they let someone else lead it. So you're right when you say it's bullshit, it's pretty obvious they rather not be regulated at all, but what alternative do we have, not regulating it cause they're saying they want regulations? This is some Looney Tunes logic.
The thing about Google dropping "don't be evil" is a pretty minor thing in your comment, but I also would like to point out that the reason they dropped it is not because they decided to start being evil. Simply having words like that on a wall would never stop anyone from doing evil stuff to begin with it. The reason they dropped it it's because it's just bad PR. Why would you declare you are not going to be evil? It already sounds insincere by itself. You're like "I swear to be not evil", why are you thinking about being evil in the first place? Nobody wakes up and goes "aah, what a beautiful day to not commit murder". It's dumb, it accomplishes nothing, and it makes people raise eyebrows at you for no good reason.
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u/Training-Belt-7318 3h ago
They want regulation because they have the infrastructure to handle it, but can't keep up with the development of smaller companies. They want regulation to push smaller companies to sell to them. This has nothing to do with wantong to hold themselves accountable and everything to do with making it easier for them to compete.
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u/Noble1xCarter 3h ago
Don't forget open source models. They want AI treated like a weapon, that way open source & underdog models can be outlawed. That's why they've been intentionally hacking government systems and other companies - to prove that AI is dangerous and only Microsoft/Google/Apple/Anthropic/Meta/OpenAI/etc. can be trusted with it.
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u/hextanerf 4h ago
so why are they still pushing it?
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u/Training-Belt-7318 3h ago
Companies like Microsoft stand to gain for regulation. This isn't them calling out a problem, it is them pushing a tech industry towards its synergies.
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u/Noble1xCarter 3h ago
Yeah, they don't want regulations that protect consumers, they want regulations that protect their profit.
They want AI to be treated as a weapon that can only be handled by "responsible" parties (Microsoft, Google, Apple, Anthropic, Meta, etc.), so open source and ethical models can get outlawed.
That's why they've been purposely hacking governments and other companies and saying "oopsies, we didn't know our AI could do that, we didn't tell it to." It makes their models sound powerful enough to attract investors & potential buyers (any publicity is good publicity), while also making AI sound dangerous (for all the wrong reasons) so they get total control over it.
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u/MobilePenguins 4h ago edited 4h ago
The United States can say “here’s the legal guardrails that AI companies and users need to abide by, no copying trademarked or copyrighted works, no cloning existing software, no established characters like Mickey Mouse in your video generations, etc. a whole long list”
And the next day China 🇨🇳 releases a new open source model on GitHub, open source, no restrictions, people go do whatever they want anyways and run it offline + clones of all the popular software products from major companies like Microsoft Office, Adobe PhotoShop, light room, etc. and I’m not talking ‘cracked’ copies, I mean literally open source like you can have Claude add new features that you specifically want into the software and add new capabilities that didn’t exist before, port it on platforms it was never supported on (like Linux for example), and use it in ways the publishers never intended such as adding a ‘Grammarly’ clone and putting it natively into your Microsoft Word clone, and there’s two subscriptions you never need again right there. Can even make them 1:1 look and function like carbon copies of the real thing, that work offline indefinitely.
The genie is out of the bottle. You can literally go download offline copies of all you need to run an entire home lab of local AI models that are incredibly powerful if you can afford upper price range gaming PC hardware. There’s even guides on how to remove some of the restrictions and safeguards.
If they banned this stuff today, there’s already millions of offline backups everywhere. It’s absolutely too late. You can buy a cheap $10 USB flash drive and literally load it up with what used to be billions $ USD worth of research and development to make this kind of software, some guy can clone all these things and make his own alterations on very inexpensive hardware. REA (reverse engineer anything) is making huge waves right now, and it’s literally free on GitHub right now.
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u/Vast-Poetry9431 15h ago
That’s because we have entered into a techno feudalism era in which the vast majority of children born today can expect a worse life than the ones their parents had 🥰🥰🥰🥰
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u/Modem_Sound_67 16h ago
Is that a promise or a threat?