[HN Gopher] U.S. government limits exports of artificial intelli...
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U.S. government limits exports of artificial intelligence software
Author : ckcheng
Score : 476 points
Date : 2020-01-04 08:02 UTC (14 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.reuters.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.reuters.com)
| withinrafael wrote:
| Additional details are present in the unpublished rule (document
| 2019-27649 [1][2]).
|
| -- cut --
|
| Geospatial imagery "software" "specially designed" for training a
| Deep Convolutional Neural Network to automate the analysis of
| geospatial imagery and point clouds, and having all of the
| following:
|
| 1. Provides a graphical user interface that enables the user to
| identify objects (e.g., vehicles, houses, etc.) from within
| geospatial imagery and point clouds in order to extract positive
| and negative samples of an object of interest;
|
| 2. Reduces pixel variation by performing scale, color, and
| rotational normalization on the positive samples;
|
| 3. Trains a Deep Convolutional Neural Network to detect the
| object of interest from the positive and negative samples; and
|
| 4. Identifies objects in geospatial imagery using the trained
| Deep Convolutional Neural Network by matching the rotational
| pattern from the positive samples with the rotational pattern of
| objects in the geospatial imagery.
|
| Technical Note: A point cloud is a collection of data points
| defined by a given coordinate system. A point cloud is also known
| as a digital surface model.
|
| -- cut --
|
| [1]
| https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2020/01/06/2019-27...
|
| [2] https://s3.amazonaws.com/public-
| inspection.federalregister.g...
| ynniv wrote:
| This overly specific intersection of requirements is how you
| target a single product in legislation.
| tbihl wrote:
| I saw a great example of this when I was looking at VA gun
| laws today. They have an exception structured as follows:
| Virginia law exempts from these requirements any firearms
| shows held in any town with a population of not less than
| 1,995 and not more than 2,010, according to the 1990 United
| States census [1]
|
| [1] https://lawcenter.giffords.org/gun-shows-in-virginia/
| bluepickles wrote:
| "The provisions of this section shall not apply to firearms
| shows held in any town with a population of not less than
| 1,995 and not more than 2,010, according to the 1990 United
| States census."
|
| https://law.lis.virginia.gov/vacode/title54.1/chapter42/sec
| t...
| marcosdumay wrote:
| Looks to me like it fits all those "model training on a GUI"
| packages people are selling today.
|
| That will place the US in a large economical disadvantage for
| those.
| im3w1l wrote:
| Ah, I was scratching my head reading through it thinking
| about how unlikely it must be for something to have all of
| those properties. But if they were tailor made for a single
| product that makes sense.
| TuringNYC wrote:
| Can anyone comment on who the specific vendor or what
| specific product might be? The AND-criteria makes this
| restriction pretty narrow, and the GUI requirement alone
| rules out practically everything I can think of.
| DerSaidin wrote:
| Looks like a nice concise list of key features for someone to
| reimplement.
| lopmotr wrote:
| It seems strangely ambiguous:
|
| "(geospatial imagery) and (point clouds)" or "geospatial
| (imagery and point clouds)"?
|
| Point 4 requires the use of geospatial imagery, so any point-
| cloud-only product would be exempt, it seems?
|
| The document doesn't define "geospatial imagery", but that
| could surely include hobby and commercial drone footage of the
| ground. Perhaps even ordinary photography from security cameras
| that have user-define object identification features? That
| would make it really quite broad.
|
| But all we need to do is not normalize color, and then
| everything's exempt!
| Frost1x wrote:
| Was doing similar work on a project using sonar imaging for
| the bottom of water bodies to much of what they're excluding.
| Not sure how concerned they'd be with identify freshwater
| creatures and riverbed structures...
| jahewson wrote:
| You're forgetting that how the word "and" works in English is
| often not the same as logical AND, e.g. in "give me a list of
| people who live in New York and Los Angeles" the "and" means
| OR.
| lopmotr wrote:
| Good point. Though I think "and" in those other cases
| really means something like "additionally" or "plus" rather
| than OR. You sentence could be written "... list of people
| who live in NY and people who live in LA.".
|
| But it's still confusing here. If they mean it applies to
| both imagery software and point cloud software, then point
| cloud software would be excluded in point 2 because it
| doesn't have pixels or color (if lidar/etc). So it must be
| software that uses both. That makes more sense if it's
| aimed at a specific existing product.
| salty_biscuits wrote:
| So is Esri worried?
| vajrabum wrote:
| That would have been my guess at who this is aimed at too.
| Lots of applications outside the military and spook shops but
| that's always been the primary customer.
| incompatible wrote:
| The "graphical user interface" bit is weird. I suppose you are
| fine if the software is driven entirely by keyboard shortcuts.
| SilasX wrote:
| I thought input method is orthogonal to whether it's a GUI. I
| think GUI is meant as opposed to text console or eg audio
| (like a phone dial-in service); it doesn't necessarily mean a
| touch screen like I think you're implying.
| sanguy wrote:
| The GUI is specifically mentioned for training (tagging) of
| positive/false-positives that the ML then incorporates.
|
| If you think about tagging it is something you need a GUI for
| unless you are lucky enough to have pre-tagged samples.
|
| Eg: the famous Silicon Valley hotdog AI. You either need to
| have a GUI to allow users to select hot dogs and not hot dogs
| in a bunch of images, or you need a bunch of images already
| tagged.
| extropy wrote:
| IMO that's an indication that this was made for a specific
| piece of software and trying to limit the collateral damage.
| atmosx wrote:
| Same here. They are framing a specific software, possibly a
| very specific business deal from happening.
| peter303 wrote:
| Maxar
| incompatible wrote:
| Yes, it seems very specific.
| floatingatoll wrote:
| Not so weird. Palantir put a GUI on Hadoop/whatever and that
| was enough to sell it to every government for citizen
| inspection. It's the GUI that gets the contracts, not the
| technology alone.
| oefrha wrote:
| If a government
|
| 1) wants to acquire a geospatial imagery recognition
| program;
|
| 2) does not have the tech themselves;
|
| 3) can import the underlying tech without interface;
|
| I highly doubt a restriction on GUI export will stop them.
| floatingatoll wrote:
| 3) will stop them from buying an off the shelf
| commercially-ready product. Yes, they can develop one
| from scratch, but only at enormous cost and difficulty
| relative to simple dollars.
| Aperocky wrote:
| But in the mind of the geniuses that make up the US
| Congress, it does.
|
| How will anyone operate a computer without GUI? That's
| impossible! /s
| cstross wrote:
| Correct.
|
| You can't get a contract without marketing/sales
| interaction with the customers.
|
| Customers at a high enough level to sign off on a payment
| with 7-9 zeroes following the number are not generally
| programmers (or, if they were, they haven't been working at
| the coal face for decades): they're senior managers or
| civil servants.
|
| A GUI front end is a _really amazing_ marketing tool for
| any piece of software insofar as GUIs are designed to
| expose all the internal configuration variables and
| controls in a visually appealing, or even intuitive, manner
| that is _accessible to non-programmers_. Like the folks
| signing the big checks.
|
| (Here's a second possibility: we know it's possible to use
| CAPTCHAs to crowdsource recognition of objects. Maybe
| they're trying to prevent export of a NN training system
| that uses unwitting mechanical turks for quality control?)
| mark_l_watson wrote:
| Absolutely correct! I used to sell expensive software for
| Lisp Machines and what sold it was the UI that was dual
| purpose: for development and for demos to management that
| they could understand.
|
| BTW, off topic, but I love your books!
| floatingatoll wrote:
| "Please select the images that show US military bases to
| proceed"
| oefrha wrote:
| So image recognition APIs like ones provided by AWS and GCP
| should be affected by this due to #2 and #3, no? Or the
| "provides a graphical user interface" part applies to all
| points?
|
| Edit: I overlooked "have all of the following".
| incompatible wrote:
| Well, it says "having all of the following", so I think an
| API is fine.
| oefrha wrote:
| Oh, sorry, didn't see that. Seems kinda pointless then.
| tgsovlerkhgsel wrote:
| The main restriction is ""specially designed" for training a
| Deep Convolutional Neural Network to automate the analysis of
| geospatial imagery and point clouds".
| oefrha wrote:
| And having a GUI. It appears you can simply export a binary
| framework (with or without source) and let the buyer build
| an interface on top of it. Building an interface is not
| terribly advanced work and can be done by fresh bootcamp
| grads even...
| IanCal wrote:
| Strangely given that it has to meet all requirements,
| doesn't that mean multiple people could release two or
| three different projects that work together?
|
| Although saying "well technically" as you get dragged off
| for waterboarding may not make you feel better.
| sytelus wrote:
| Gosh! There are like thousand github repos that do these stuff.
| This could become a tool to prosecute a lot of unwanted people
| like DeCSS.
| ehnto wrote:
| Lots of interesting precedent to come out of it as well. By
| putting code on Github, an American website, as a developer
| are you actually exporting it? Or are the people cloning the
| repo reaching into America and extracting it?
|
| If it is considered exporting, is github the exporter, or is
| the developer. Just like a company might produce a metal
| widget but another company procures and exports it, the
| original company that made the widget isn't the exporter.
| fyfy18 wrote:
| I would not be suprised if we get something along the lines
| of "Unfortunately, this repository is currently unavailable
| in your country" sometime soon. Many websites still
| completely block EU users post GDPR, e.g. Chicago Tribune.
| kaybe wrote:
| So that would mean I, as a foreigner, will have to do a
| little work to import it instead. That won't stop a lot
| of technically literate people.
| crankylinuxuser wrote:
| Remember how it was done the last time the idiotic US
| government did the same stunt with crypto.... Zimmerman
| (PGP) physically printed and bound books containing the
| full OCR-happy font of the source code.
|
| Evidently to the dinosaurs in Congress, a physical book
| is something _COMPLETELY DIFFERENT_ than a file online.
| joana035 wrote:
| us and non-us mirrors, bxa notices, oh my!
| ehnto wrote:
| Imagine a world where your project dependencies can be
| deprecated by import/export law.
| [deleted]
| semi-extrinsic wrote:
| Actually, when we buy lab equipment from the US we have to
| fill out paperwork saying that it will not be used to
| produce weapons, and that it will not be resold to "bad"
| countries.
|
| Probably there is some precedent by considering e.g. if
| Lockheed or FedEx is the exporting company if there have
| been cases where weapons got exported to unwanted actors.
| Probably github is like FedEx in these cases.
| taneq wrote:
| Governments don't make laws to fight other countries. They
| have armies for that. They make laws to control their
| citizens.
| [deleted]
| spectramax wrote:
| Could you please provide a few github links?
| sytelus wrote:
| Object detection in aerial images is a rather booming field
| with 100s of papers published on the topic and contests
| going on in top conferences. I wouldn't be surprised if OSM
| is also doing some of this.
|
| In about 5 minutes I could find these:
|
| https://github.com/search?q=geospatial+deep+learning
|
| https://github.com/search?q=satellite+images+deep+learning
|
| https://github.com/search?q=aerial++deep+learning
|
| https://github.com/search?q=aerial+object+detection
| jefftk wrote:
| It looks like these don't meet (1) because they don't
| have "a graphical user interface that enables the user to
| identify objects"
| kortilla wrote:
| With a GUI and everything? I find it hard to believe there
| are a thousand projects doing that.
| ArtWomb wrote:
| The export ban is on the software? Not the algorithm itself?
| And would it be broad enough that all AI and QI frameworks like
| PyTorch, Tensorflow and Qiskit would fall under its purview.
|
| These restrictions seem to flow from a mental model that still
| views software as a product purchased in a shrink-wrapped box.
| Rather than the services based model currently extant.
| grepfru_it wrote:
| That is the point, to delay the adversary from gaining access
| to completed technology. An example is foreign adversaries
| purchasing PS3s with Linux to quickly access cheap computing
| power.
|
| Whether frameworks are at risk is limited to the wording of
| the ban and then the final determination comes from a judge
| hearing the case. The chilling effects are real and its
| possible framework development may very well be hampered due
| to the unknowns you have pointed out in your post
| Aperocky wrote:
| With a GUI lol, phew.
|
| Yeah almost nothing will fall under that. Build your own GUI
| (if you ever need one).
| Buttons840 wrote:
| I used to put on my tinfoil hat and imagine that cryptography was
| the field to study if you wanted secret government agents to
| visit you. Maybe next time I will instead imagine that computer
| vision is what summons the secret agents.
|
| More seriously, computer vision is going to be important and it
| appears to be far less known than machine learning and has higher
| barriers to entry. I'd exchange a few introductory machine
| learning books for more good computer vision introductions.
|
| Any suggestions on how to get started with computer vision?
| alkonaut wrote:
| What the threat (of an ability the US doesn't want other nations
| to have) here and how does geospatial imagery and point clouds
| fit in?
|
| This seems to target one or a few products so they dislike that
| someone uses the software for that purpose
| sedachv wrote:
| Most likely autonomous drone navigation (particularly very low
| altitude terrain following) and targeting. That is how cruise
| missiles work:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TERCOM
|
| There was a big drone attack on a Saudi Arabian oil processing
| facility last year:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_Abqaiq%E2%80%93Khurais_at...
| blackrock wrote:
| Didn't the most advanced AI research come straight out of China?
|
| The ResNet Project [1] of 2015. It was used as the core algorithm
| behind Google's AlphaGo in 2017.
|
| The 4 computer scientists behind the paper were Chinese
| nationals. They were all educated by the Chinese educational
| system, and got their PhD there (one guy was from Hong Kong).
| They worked at Microsoft at the time, so Microsoft paid them a
| salary for their work, but I think Microsoft benefited more from
| their research, as did the other Silicon Valley and American
| companies.
|
| Three of them went to start or lead other Chinese unicorn
| companies, and one guy went to Facebook in Silicon Valley, so
| Facebook benefited here.
|
| [1] https://macropolo.org/china-ai-research-resnet/
| tu7001 wrote:
| This wrong, we are going to lose on that.
| StuffedParrot wrote:
| Why not ban heuristics altogether?
| __s wrote:
| A protectionist response to the US losing power, & trying to
| stave off brain drain. They should be considering any person who
| knows how to program with Tensorflow a munition. Mitigating brain
| drain is a hopeless endeavor. US should make their immigration
| more liberal to try encourage US as a destination for brain
| drain, as opposed to a source. Drain or be drained
| michannne wrote:
| Are there any studies or reports that point to the US falling
| behind technologically in regards to software research?
| netcan wrote:
| Can anyone illustrate this with current examples?
|
| What financially or technologically significant exports are going
| to stop? How military or nonmilitary are they?
| astatine wrote:
| Unlike the space race, where Russia and the US were significantly
| ahead of everyone else, the field is far more level in AI.
| Arguably there will be areas where the US could even be behind in
| some areas.
|
| Wonder what the real world impact of this will be. Not much, I
| expect.
| antpls wrote:
| USA is probably still ahead of the rest of the world regarding
| IA, thanks to Google. Google sits on a massive amount of text,
| video and speech data. Google is one of the biggest coordinated
| entity (regarding business, data, hardware and software) on
| Earth aimed at advancing AI. The only rival in term of budget
| and data is probably China with a few state-sponsored companies
| together (Huawei + Alibaba + Tencent).
|
| All other countries probably have smart researchers and
| engineers, but no one has the data machine that Google has...
| _iyig wrote:
| >Wonder what the real world impact of this will be. Not much, I
| expect.
|
| Here's a thought experiment I use to imagine the impact of AI:
|
| Imagine you've got a million people at your disposal. At zero
| cost and with no downtime, these people can remotely operate
| robots, understand text, interact using natural language, or
| classify objects in images, all with human-level intelligence
| and accuracy. Now what?
|
| Obviously there are areas where AI can outperform humans, like
| mechanical accuracy and mathematical computation. But in
| general, I find this experiment works pretty well.
| tomp wrote:
| Now imagine doing crowd control. 10 frames per second, 100k
| people, if you need just 1 second to recognize a face, you've
| just saturated your 1m human-AI. The point of digital AI is
| that it can scale, almost indefinitely.
| jefftk wrote:
| You don't need to recognize every face on every frame.
| People move slowly compared to 10hz, so tracking "this is a
| person moving around" is way easier than identifying faces
| anew every frame.
| _iyig wrote:
| OK, then imagine 100 billion people. Scale isn't the point
| of the experiment - the point is bounding expectations
| based on probable (maximal?) capabilities.
|
| Perhaps a post-Singularity AI will have wild capabilities
| beyond our comprehension, but that is outside the scope of
| this experiment.
| olivierduval wrote:
| It's funny: it reminds me of "strong cryptography export ban" in
| the 2000's (btw, Oracle java still have it: you must download
| strong crypto package separatly)...
|
| Obviously, it failed! You can stop a single vendor with unique
| technology to provide hardware components with bans, but you
| can't stop a whole field spreading knowledge!!! People come and
| go, meet, talk, write, exchange knowledges... so sooner or later
| (and more soon now as long as the internet is not limited to US)
| the software will implement these ideas.
|
| The only one that will be challenged will be "big corps" relying
| on IP protection. But if i remember correctly, Google has a
| research center in China... so knowledge will aleady be in China
| and won't even need to be "exported"
| ransom1538 wrote:
| I don't think the government actually wanted to stop math [1]
| from leaving the border. It was just a tool to use against
| people they suspected being involved espionage. Just another
| reason to put you in a cell.
|
| https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSA_algorithm
| dmix wrote:
| The intentions of laws vs the real world implications are so
| often disconnected. There's been a million cases where the
| mere side effects of laws have caused more trouble for the
| intended target of the good intentions than it actually
| helped itself (see rent control laws in NYC and Toronto
| ultimately significantly _reducing_ low income housing for
| over a decade in the 70s and 80s because no developer would
| build there, significantly increasing average rents by
| reducing supply).
|
| Thomas Sowell wrote a quite a few good books about this.
|
| I have no doubt it applies equally to export laws.
| baby wrote:
| No it makes it a pain to export any products abroad. In
| today's world where your market is probably not just the US
| anymore it is insane to have such rules in place.
| krzyk wrote:
| > Oracle java still have it: you must download strong crypto
| package separatly
|
| Not true since java 8u161, and similarly for 7 and 6. And not
| true for every java > 8.
|
| https://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javase/downloads/jce...
|
| http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javase/8u161-relnotes...
| jahewson wrote:
| True, though this update occurred only relatively recently,
| in 2016.
| jjoonathan wrote:
| As gross as the government-meddled Java crypto libraries made
| me feel, the fact that the meddling-free workaround library was
| called "bouncycastle" really made my day.
|
| http://bouncycastle.org/
|
| > Here at the Bouncy Castle, we believe in encryption. That's
| something that's near and dear to our hearts. We believe so
| strongly in encryption, that we've gone to the effort to
| provide some for everybody, and we've now been doing it for
| almost 20 years!
| qrbLPHiKpiux wrote:
| Remember what he did? Software was specifically listed under
| export controls.
|
| So, he printed the code in a book to be OCR'd and further
| compiled into the software.
|
| No export controls on a book.
| jetti wrote:
| Cryptography devices (including software) were on the US
| Munitions List, which meant that it was on par with exporting
| guided missiles. There was an interesting episode of Darknet
| Diaries on this topic that covers some of the crazy
| restrictions, such as professors not being able to teach
| cryptography classes to foreign students.
| sitkack wrote:
| https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCILl8ozWuxnFYXIe2svjHhg
|
| Feedback and control systems can be described in a couple
| pages of text and a handful of simple equations.
| Suppressing knowledge is never an effective strategy. We
| shouldn't hoard the Krabby Patty Secret Formula.
| hyustan wrote:
| Sounds like something straight out of Terminator movies. I think
| they are afraid this technology will get out of hand in the near
| future and I can't really blame them. I remember that video with
| the Google Assistant making a hair dresser appointment. Pretty
| scary stuff
| quicon wrote:
| I guess these guys will be affected: https://www.planet.com/
| mark_l_watson wrote:
| I sold AI software (for building expert systems) for Xerox Lisp
| Machines from 1982 to 1985 and the lawyers at my company
| complained that the $5K license price did not make up for the
| hassle for foreign sales (I sold to customers in Japan, Norway,
| and Germany). So, export controls are not such a new things.
| [deleted]
| nl wrote:
| This is pretty bad. Or good depending on your perspective.
|
| I'm based in Australia, and we started playing today with
| analysis of geospatial imagery for bush fire imagery (because the
| country is on fire).
|
| ECCN0D521No.1 from https://s3.amazonaws.com/public-
| inspection.federalregister.g... covers pretty much everything I'm
| doing.
|
| I guess if I want to look at the positive side, it means I don't
| have to compete with any US vendors if I want to sell my work.
| skissane wrote:
| > I guess if I want to look at the positive side, it means I
| don't have to compete with any US vendors if I want to sell my
| work.
|
| Until the Australian government gets the same idea
| vajrabum wrote:
| My guess is that this is like the export controls on munitions
| or encryption. You can't export to China but you can fairly
| easily get a license to sell it in Australia or any other US
| allied country.
| zerr wrote:
| Is it time to label current AI stuff by its real name -
| statistics?
| smt1 wrote:
| I think as opposed to classical statistics, except for the
| important subfield of statistical learning theory, machine
| learning relates much more to functional analysis, differential
| geometry/optimization over manifolds, and measure/probability
| theory. "AI" is whatever marketing people want to define it as.
| stuqqq wrote:
| I have open source deep learning projects on GitHub. Should I be
| worried?
| csense wrote:
| How could they possibly enforce legal limits on software
| distribution in the age of the Internet?
|
| Anyone can slap their code onto a private Gitlab installation in
| an hour. Hosting a tarball on an HTTPS server is even more
| trivial.
| lopmotr wrote:
| Threat of punishment. Same as how any other law is enforced.
| Animats wrote:
| This assumes the US is ahead of China in image recognition. Is
| there any justification for that?
| bpanon wrote:
| They use it for flight check-ins, entering the park, giving you
| a fine instantly for jaywalking, buying a soda from a vending
| machine, any many more use cases. I assume they are ahead.
| filoleg wrote:
| I think this speaks more about the government and the
| acceptance of such things by the population rather than the
| state of research. Even in a hypothetical scenario of US
| being far ahead of China in the field at the moment, i do not
| see this kind of things going over well at all with the
| public in the US.
| mewpmewp2 wrote:
| It gives opportunities to practice with the tech in ways US
| can't which might make them gain a lead.
| filoleg wrote:
| More opportunities != being ahead.
|
| Given two research labs, with one having a bit better
| equipment, while the other having a more proven history
| of publishing innovative research, it would be
| disingenuous to say that the better equipped lab is ahead
| until they have actually produced some research that puts
| them ahead. It might help them gain lead, but it also
| might result in nothing. Better equipment is just one of
| many components that affect the chances of success. Until
| that lead is acquired, I don't really think it would be
| appropriate to say that they had done so.
|
| Note: the lab with a history of published innovative
| research in my analogy isn't supposed to represent the US
| or any country in specific. This was just an example to
| better illustrate the point I was making. The only thing
| that should matter for whether someone is ahead or not in
| this situation is the actual proof of being ahead, not
| "the opportunities that could lead to them being ahead".
| Otherwise, we should also start immediately trusting all
| those articles that pop up once every few months about
| how some random city is "about to become the next Silicon
| Valley, here are the reasons why".
| sanxiyn wrote:
| No there isn't. ImageNet 2017 was won by a Chinese startup, for
| example.
| rasz wrote:
| Considering even Chinese kids are building drones with AI
| driven aimbots for fun in their spare time, I highly doubt it.
| https://www.robomaster.com
| naniwaduni wrote:
| It is meaningful if the US is ahead of any cooperating bloc of
| powers in any covered area of image recognition. This is much
| broader than being ahead of specifically China on the whole.
| For it to not be true would essentially imply that no new
| research is happening in the US.
| tomc1985 wrote:
| I doubt the US is ahead in this area. China gains heaps upon
| heaps or practical experience in CV by sheer virtue of the
| breadth of its surveillance networks. Not to say we aren't
| doing the same here in the US, but efforts seem to be much
| more scattered
| Tempest1981 wrote:
| I can see the surveillance network providing vastly more
| training data. But isn't that orthogonal with developing
| the algorithms?
|
| Or is it that training data provides experience, which
| improves the algorithms? Or the application of the
| algorithms?
| whoevercares wrote:
| It's a positive loop. More effective surveillance network
| -> Larger investment (from government or government
| contract) -> more application/startup/new programs ->
| more research funding/aggressive hiring -> higher
| recognition for CV/ML researchers/Engineers -> More and
| more people doing CV/ML -> More data, algorithms and
| applications-> more effective surveillance network. Btw
| it got deployed at scale in real world which is a huge
| advantage for progressing any CVML research
|
| Not to mention nowadays Deep learning is pretty much a
| big data game.
| tomc1985 wrote:
| It's not just availability of data for training networks;
| I was mainly referring to practical engineering know-how
| built by field experience
| sangnoir wrote:
| > But isn't that orthogonal with developing the
| algorithms?
|
| Assuming it is - China is also competitive on developing
| algorithms. A few months ago there was a post on
| explosion of AI papers submitted by authors at Chinese
| research institutions, with no signs of slowing down.
| kragen wrote:
| Bernstein's case established that he had a First Amendment right
| to publish source code under the law in effect at the time; he
| argued, successfully, that this was the form in which his
| research was communicated to other researchers. He won his case,
| but it took many years, and of course court cases are political
| processes; they may be decided differently when different judges
| have been appointed to the bench. It seems that machine-vision
| researchers may now need to make the same argument. It's probably
| worthwhile to save the neural network parameter vectors you
| currently have access to somewhere outside the US while that is
| still legal.
| joe_the_user wrote:
| Yeah, the thing about this stuff is the "law is so vague as to
| be meaningless" and "encryption/AI/whatever is just executing
| operations on a computer, what do you mean really?" are much
| harder defenses than one would think.
| tlb wrote:
| The ethical argument for why everyone should have access to
| cryptography is a lot stronger than why everyone should have
| access to satellite imagery recognition algorithms.
|
| Also, cryptography requires both sides to use the same
| algorithm, while companies don't need to use the same
| recognition algorithms.
|
| It also helped, in the crypto case, that you could print some
| version of it on a T-shirt or mail it on a postcard. It looked
| like speech, while neural net parameters don't.
|
| So the free speech case seems much weaker.
| mihaaly wrote:
| I believe the emphasis here was on the generic right of
| disseminating research not on judging the necessity of a
| specific technology for particular audience.
| Fnoord wrote:
| Can one exfiltrate these neural net parameters via the
| Internet or via Tor?
| kragen wrote:
| Lawyers have made strong cases on both sides of the
| cryptography argument; probably they can on both sides of the
| satellite-imagery argument as well. Maps are the primary
| result of satellite imagery recognition and are a public
| good. Most covert activity visible on satellite imagery is
| environmental damage, which is often illegal and generally
| harms the public. Satellite image processing can be very
| useful for increasing agricultural production; restricting
| that to one country, or granting one country's companies an
| effective worldwide monopoly on increasing agricultural
| production, would be ethically unconscionable -- in times of
| drought, it amounts to letting people starve instead of
| telling them how to raise adequate food.
|
| But Bernstein's case didn't hinge on the likely consequences
| of strong cryptography being widely available; rather, he
| argued that he had a First Amendment right to publish his
| research.
| akersten wrote:
| > The ethical argument for why everyone should have access to
| [math] is a lot stronger than why everyone should have access
| to [math].
|
| Sorry, I don't understand your argument.
| baby wrote:
| > court cases are political processes; they may be decided
| differently when different judges have been appointed to the
| bench
|
| This should not be true though, that's the point of having the
| law being a separate power.
| myndpage wrote:
| They say it doesn't apply to Canada. What prevents a Chinese
| company to open a business in Canada and get access to US A.I
| software without the license?
| endorphone wrote:
| "What prevents a Chinese company to open a business in Canada
| and get access to US A"
|
| What prevents a Chinese company from opening a business in the
| US to get access to US technology? I mean...nothing...that's
| exactly what they do.
| hawkice wrote:
| Canada counts as the US for several national security purposes.
| There's a lot of cooperation to prevent this type of loophole.
| cdmckay wrote:
| When they had the cryptography restriction, I'm pretty sure
| it was still ok in Canada to export it. That's why OpenBSD is
| based in Calgary.
| panpanna wrote:
| OpenBSD is based in Calgary because Theo lives there.
| La1n wrote:
| Can you point to some of that cooperation or legislation
| regarding it, that sounds quite interesting.
| fierarul wrote:
| My guess it's related to
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Eyes
| elfexec wrote:
| It more likely has to do with NORAD.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_Aerospace_De
| fen...
| Rebelgecko wrote:
| https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/22/126.5
| cced wrote:
| Is there anything that people outside of the US should download
| now in order to get access to software?
| bitminer wrote:
| The rule refers to products, not freely available source code.
|
| Companies don't sell stuff from GitHub, they sell proprietary
| stuff. It may well be based on open source code, but they own
| it to sell (license) it.
|
| There's lots of examples of products in the geospatial domain
| that are not "AI" yet are restricted or even classified.
|
| For example, ship detection from space-based radar. There are
| numerous public papers on the topic yet any software that
| purports to do this is subject to ITAR rules in the US and CGP
| rules in Canada.
|
| Just because you may know how to do something doesn't prevent a
| government from restricting you from selling it, or talking
| about it. Even if it is "public". Machine guns are an old tech
| and yet are restricted. As they should be.
| Fragoel2 wrote:
| Seems way more narrow than the title implies
|
| "The rule will likely be welcomed by industry, Lewis said,
| because it had feared a much broader crackdown on exports of most
| artificial intelligence hardware and software"
| colejohnson66 wrote:
| That doesn't make it ok. It's just the Overton Window[0]. Say
| something ridiculous so what you really want is deemed "not as
| bad."
|
| [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window
| haecceity wrote:
| Considering that AI is whatever marketing folks want it to be,
| it'd be interesting see their legal definition AI. Anyone have a
| link to the actual document?
| Rebelgecko wrote:
| I think it's this: https://s3.amazonaws.com/public-
| inspection.federalregister.g...
|
| Page 4 and 9 have the technical definitions.
|
| My off the cuff interpretation is that the rule would only
| cover convolutional neural nets that are trained to identify
| _and_ determine the orientation of specific objects in
| geospatial imagery. If the neural net 's input/output aren't
| wrapped in a GUI it sounds like they still might be OK to
| export without a license
| haecceity wrote:
| Looks like it's very specific and targeted to military
| applications. Although the GUI requirement seems to make it a
| little too specific to be applicable.
| TJSomething wrote:
| My reading is that it's the GUI used to train a neural
| network to identify any objects in geospatial imagery. I'm
| definitely less okay with that. Although, I feel like the GUI
| is not the hard part to make, so it's a weird part to
| restrict.
| nitrogen wrote:
| _1. Provides a graphical user interface that enables the user
| to identify objects (e.g., vehicles, houses, etc.) from
| within geospatial imagery and point clouds in order to
| extract positive and negative samplesof an object of
| interest;
|
| 2.Reduces pixel variation by performing scale, color, and
| rotational normalization on the positive samples;
|
| 3. Trains a Deep Convolutional Neural Network to detect the
| object of interest from the positive and negative samples;
| and
|
| 4. Identifies objects in geospatial imagery using the trained
| Deep Convolutional Neural Network by matching the rotational
| pattern from the positive samples with the rotational pattern
| of objects in the geospatial imagery._
|
| What counts as "geospatial imagery"? Could this apply to any
| training UI for self-driving cars, maps, street view, etc.?
| Rebelgecko wrote:
| Probably anything taken from a satellite or aircraft
| kick wrote:
| Because this is so incredibly broad, there's a good chance that
| >20% of people here will be working on something that falls under
| this at some point in the next decade.
|
| While we patiently await for a HN user (or, let's be honest, one
| of the ancient cryptologist-lawyers who come out of the woodwork
| every time something like this happens and sue the government) to
| fix this by suing the government on free speech grounds, don't
| forget that git, mercurial, fossil, bazaar and more are all
| decentralized, can't actually be censored at scale, and can be
| effectively hosted and mirrored trivially.
|
| I actually think it's a well-intentioned law, and it's not like
| it'll harm most people, but it's still something that should be
| stood against on principle.
| 9nGQluzmnq3M wrote:
| It actually sounds far more narrow than the title implies?
|
| > _Under a new rule which goes into effect on Monday, companies
| that export certain types of geospatial imagery software from
| the United States must apply for a license to send it overseas
| except when it is being shipped to Canada._
| kick wrote:
| _The measure covers software that could be used by sensors,
| drones, and satellites to automate the process of identifying
| targets for both military and civilian ends, Lewis said,
| noting it was a boon for industry, which feared a much
| broader crackdown on exports of AI hardware and software._
|
| "sensors, drones, and satellites" used to target _anything_
| means that you can 't even send a Ring camera to Europe.
| m4r35n357 wrote:
| There is no such thing.
| akerro wrote:
| Google, Amazon, Microsoft are in military and oil business now
| because of AI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v3n8txX3144
| NHQ wrote:
| China doesn't need American AI technology.
| andrei_says_ wrote:
| Seems like China is way ahead in the AI game, including by
| applying it for mass surveillance and oppression.
|
| I highly recommend the Frontline documentary on AI in China.
|
| https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/film/in-the-age-of-ai/
|
| They see AI as the next industrial revolution and have decided to
| make sure they are at its forefront. And likely they will, which
| means that we'll be the ones trying to import their tech.
| aspectmin wrote:
| Hmm. Doesn't the point cloud and deep conv section cover a good
| percentage take of self driving car tech?
| paganel wrote:
| Not related to AI but instead related to geo-spatial imagery, I'm
| pretty sure I saw YT videos of ISIS commanders coordinating
| suicidal VBIED attacks in Syria using Google Maps aerial imagery.
| That was happening back in 2014-2015, when such videos were not
| instantly banned on /r/combatfootage and /r/SyrianCivilWar .
| kresten wrote:
| Other countries/companies will thank for the economic
| opportunity.
| K0SM0S wrote:
| My initial instinct exactly, because major corps are global
| now, which means they can easily set up shop anywhere on Earth:
| subsidiaries, but also quasi-independent structures which might
| only be related through distant funding or meta-agreements.
|
| So you can be an American company with tons of "friends" in the
| EU, Asia, Latin American and now Africa, doing stuff (research,
| product) and you would just happen to buy/sell from/through
| these independent actors. _Fiction-Google: "Oh but that 's not
| us! It's Oogleg, a Swiss company! It's true 95% of our private
| shareholders also have shares in Oogleg, but that's only
| circumstancial, these are large funds you know... they actually
| have shares in 95% of businesses altogether through ETFs and
| mutual funds dilution. + some legalese blabla."_
|
| There goes your protectionism, State governments! You'll get
| your import taxes for physical goods and on-prems services but
| overall, it certainly won't impede or even touch the thriving
| heads, the global leaders of the business world. Not anymore.
| That was in another time, before global networks.
|
| And actually, we might think Fortune 100, perhaps 1,000; but in
| truth it's probably much more (cue 80% of GDP in the form of
| SMBs) because how do you enforce a restriction on remoting to
| contribute to some repo somewhere?
|
| Note that this is true as of 2020, factually from a technical
| standpoint, but given a few decades and some generalized
| country-based firewalls (it's coming, in all likelihood) +
| convenient surveillance and you get all the means necessary to
| enforce such policies anew.
| Buttons840 wrote:
| Prior to this "rule", was it possible to break the law and get in
| trouble for doing nothing more than publishing source code to the
| world?
|
| Has that now changed?
|
| Is publishing personal code on GitHub "exporting"?
| reubenmorais wrote:
| In the US, at some point cryptography code was considered
| "munitions" and you needed permission to export it. See
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Export_of_cryptography_from_th...
| and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernstein_v._United_States
| Buttons840 wrote:
| Definitely worth mentioning, thank you. However, I was aware
| of that and believe there are currently no cryptography
| related restrictions (right?), so I'm still wondering if this
| is a zero-to-one situation. Has the software export
| restriction been switched from off to on?
| astura wrote:
| An Intel subsidiary was fined for exporting encryption
| between 2008 and 2011 without permission.
|
| https://www.bis.doc.gov/index.php/all-articles/107-about-
| bis...
| m0zg wrote:
| Seems pretty narrowly targeted, probably similar to things like
| ITAR, quantum, and crypto - which already require regulatory
| disclosure. Probably just to make sure that US companies aren't
| doing Project Maven (or the like) for China. Currently, best I
| can tell, there's nothing in place to prevent such a
| "collaboration".
| LifeLiverTransp wrote:
| Stirring paranoia as a buisness model for 2nd tier softwar
| development regions.
| mlthoughts2018 wrote:
| The reason for this has to be economics / lobbyist driven. It
| makes no sense technologically (because it could not be
| effective) and there are far more dangerous examples of American
| companies developing technology that assists the Chinese
| military, such as private search engines and social credit
| systems that leave the general populace unable to make democratic
| influence on military actions or government policy.
| pandaman wrote:
| The main impact of these regulations is not going to be on the
| software availability overseas but on the _software jobs_
| availability for foreign nationals, IMO.
|
| I work on ITAR-regulated software and, even though, the software
| itself is exported all over the world, I would not be able to
| write it if I had been a national of a restricted country,
| working in the US on a temporary visa.
| roenxi wrote:
| We're in an early and explosive growth stage of AI where well-
| established statistical knowledge is having an unreasonable
| effect when combined with computing power. I've yet to see any AI
| platform that is mindbending vs doing basic math with a
| multivariate normal distribution. The eyewatering stuff is the
| number of Hz of computing power being thrown into simulating Go
| games, etc, etc.
|
| Assuming that among 1.4 billion people there are a few good
| coder/statistician people and using supercomputers [0] as a rough
| proxy for available computing power, it isn't obvious the US is
| even going to inconvenience the Chinese military. Presumably they
| are going to have a parallel AI effort anyway given that they
| have been investing in the area.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TOP500#Top_countries
| Maro wrote:
| "I've yet to see any AI platform that is mindbending"
|
| 1. Siri / Alexa and similar for voice recognition and doing
| basic tasks.
|
| 2. Face recognition for uploaded pictures on Facebook.
|
| 3. Lots of people use FaceID on iPhones.
|
| 4. Tesla and other SDC systems: yes, it's not good enough for
| general use, but the fact that it mostly works in California is
| pretty cool..
|
| "Mindbending" is subjective, but these all use DNNs, and are
| used by millions to billions of people every day. So it's
| incorrect to suggest that all DNN use-cases could be replaced
| with "doing basic math with a multivariate normal
| distribution".
| arpa wrote:
| 1, 2 and 3 are absolutely mundane. One could argue that if
| anything, they are disappointing: i remember passable speech
| recognition running on pentium 2 with 32 megs of ram (dragon
| naturally speaking was first released in 1997). "Natural"
| language parsers were around starting with the first text
| adventures (80s as far as I remember). Considering the
| computing resources big G and big A have, the performance of
| this "AI" is mediocre at best. Facial feature extraction is
| not rocket science either, it dates back to at least 1993, so
| 386/486 with 4-8 megs of RAM.
|
| You want mindbending and scary? Mindbending: deepfakes.
| Scary: automated ai-based law enforcement.
| useful wrote:
| imo, working memory at scale via improvements to more
| obscure methods like a DNC is what will be the next leap
| and make todays 'AI' seem mundane. Most AI today like
| deepfakes involve giving the model all memories available
| via input.
| arpa wrote:
| Scaling SHRDLU in a similar manner would also rock,
| though.
| pp34 wrote:
| They are Dumb and they are just Reacting out of some "fuck we
| have to do something" instinct driven by jobless fucks like
| Peter Thiel/Graham Allison/Kai-Fu Lee constant rhetoric about
| AI and falling behind and how its going to effect everyone.
|
| This is Fear based Decision Making 101. All it leads to is more
| absurd outcomes such as Endless Wars, Huge Monopolies, More
| consolidation of power and resources in the hand of few
| therefore more inequality.
|
| These people and this thinking style would have more
| credibility if they had stopped Wars, reduced inequality,
| disrupted monopoly and oligopolies. They have not done that.
|
| The can't imagine a Chinese AI team and American AI team
| working together to solve problems in humane way. They can't
| imagine constructing orgs that push that through. They can't
| imagine punishing their own who cross lines out of fear that
| the other side wont.
|
| When we allow Fear based thinking to dominate decision making
| Imagination dies. Outcomes are consistently shit. And way below
| the potential of what people collaborating and communicating
| across artificial bullshit boundaries are capable off.
|
| Pick a side and don't back Fear based Decsion makers in your
| org. These guys hold back progress, are the reason climate
| change research is hidden, endless Wars keep getting funded and
| monopolies cling to power way past their expiry date.
|
| How can it be the age of information and knowledge when fear
| wins?
| hanniabu wrote:
| > All it leads to is more absurd outcomes such as Endless
| Wars, Huge Monopolies, More consolidation of power and
| resources in the hand of few therefore more inequality
|
| This is going to persist regardless of this decision
| DataWorker wrote:
| The thing you fear most is fear itself. But you shouldn't.
| Fear is human and probably not going to stop being a thing
| any time soon, despite your demands.
| toxik wrote:
| None of the convnets are Gaussian. It was one of the big
| reasons convnets came to be at all, to model highly kurtotic
| distributions like natural images.
|
| Chinese convnet research is absolutely state of the art
| already, indeed.
| yorwba wrote:
| You can do basic math to a multivariate normal distribution
| to approximate other distributions. In classic feedforward
| networks, that's achieved by using nonlinear activation
| functions. Very wide networks turn into Gaussian processes in
| the limit [0]. There are also approaches explicitly embracing
| the "basic math on multivariate normal distributions"
| framework using normalizing flows [1].
|
| [0] https://arxiv.org/abs/1711.00165
|
| [1] https://arxiv.org/abs/1505.05770
| jahewson wrote:
| I feel like this is kinda cheating though - "Gaussian in
| the limit" is not the same as "Gaussian".
| sgt101 wrote:
| I'd be interested in how you would do NLP tasks such as those
| now done with transformers like gtp2 and Bert by working with
| multi variate normal distributions.
| roenxi wrote:
| Maybe I didn't make myself clear enough.
|
| There was a time when a software engineer didn't get basic
| stuff. A time when languages like C were developed where
| there wasn't an associative data structure baked in for
| example.
|
| It wasn't because associative data structures are a secret
| tech that requires great insight to uncover. It is because
| the field was new and people hadn't cottoned on to how basic
| and important having access to hash-maps is. Times moved on.
| Now basically all modern languages have hash-maps as a basic
| data type.
|
| 'AI' is in that early phase where the engineering world is
| still getting excited over stuff that will basic practice
| eventually. BERT and GTP2 are signs of how much computer
| power Google/etc's researchers have access to, not signs that
| the architectures are fundamentally complicated or somehow
| hard to work out if you live in China. AlphaGo for instance
| was breathtaking as a standalone project, but not hard to
| implement.
| sgt101 wrote:
| I spent at least five years trying to use statistical ml
| and mlps to do NLP on social media comments from about
| 2003. Nothing like a transformer (or an rnn even) occurred
| to me.
|
| I have a belief that someone in the USSR worked out a way
| of doing fluid dynamics that has enabled the Russians to
| develop hypersonics and super cavitation. This is probably
| rather straightforward - in the style of NS - of you know
| the principles. No one in the West ( or China) knows those
| principles, so Western torpedos and reentry vehicles are
| rather poor Vs Russian ones. Once you grasp how something
| works the fact that it's rather easy to apply in comparison
| to the process of getting the insight shouldn't detract
| from the value of the insight .
| roenxi wrote:
| The wiki page on RNN says the early groundwork was done
| in 1986 and the LSTM was a 1997 innovation. If they
| didn't occur to you in 2003 that doesn't imply much, they
| are not suprising concepts.
|
| The surprise was that in the mid-2000s suddenly GPU
| became so powerful that LSTM could be used to achieve
| interesting results. The story here isn't the models, it
| is the computers running the models.
| sedachv wrote:
| > There was a time when a software engineer didn't get
| basic stuff. A time when languages like C were developed
| where there wasn't an associative data structure baked in
| for example. It wasn't because associative data structures
| are a secret tech that requires great insight to uncover.
| It is because the field was new and people hadn't cottoned
| on to how basic and important having access to hash-maps
| is. Times moved on. Now basically all modern languages have
| hash-maps as a basic data type.
|
| That is a really weird historical fantasy. If you pull out
| your copy of volume 3 of Knuth and look at chapter 6, it is
| obvious that associative data structures were some of the
| first ones to be developed in the field.
|
| The reason why hash tables became so popular is the
| explosion in main memory size starting in the late 1990s.
| The trade-offs between the possible associative data
| structures became less important for a lot of applications,
| especially when you consider how much needed to be done on
| secondary storage and specifically on tapes in the 1960s
| through the 1980s.
| mihaaly wrote:
| I sense that they will hurt themselves more with the imposed
| additional bureaucracy, hindering business and collaboration -
| the latter being a key aspect in efficient research, not to
| mention multinational companies already living on the area.
|
| Also, how effective could this regulation be with so much
| knowledge and open source code already disseminated in the
| field?
| steve19 wrote:
| Does this mean Nvidia can't export GPUs to China?
| perl4ever wrote:
| Is that snark?
|
| Google suggests Nvidia GPUs are probably made in Guangdong by
| PCPartner.
|
| The actual chips, I don't know, but TSMC does have fabs in
| China.
| imhoguy wrote:
| I bet it is yet another law to bring back knowledge and
| manufacturing to US.
| steve19 wrote:
| It was not snark. The article says they are banning hardware
| and software.
| Abishek_Muthian wrote:
| Progress in AI tech has been due to open sharing of knowledge, so
| much so that even companies such as Apple which tend to keep its
| research under closed doors started publishing open Machine
| Learning journals to attract talent.
|
| AI tech is too powerful to be monopolised, if not democratised it
| might become another 'semiconductor' industry.
| solarengineer wrote:
| Naieve question: Are there any repositories (e.g. Hosted at
| github) that one should mirror?
| hanniabu wrote:
| Good question, bumping for visibility
| colejohnson66 wrote:
| This isn't reddit. Replies don't "bump" posts.
| Gudin wrote:
| I doubt this applies to open-source software.
| peter303 wrote:
| I recall similar happening during Bush admin during 2000s. Many
| of our software customers were international. To obtain an export
| license we were required to scan our source code with an approved
| Dept of Commerce scan software vendor to look for all kinds of
| inappropriate code like a too strong cryptography algorithm in
| the licensing portion and plagarism of copyrighted code. The
| first couple of releases this was done were brutal. Many of the
| developers not far our of the university were used to taking
| anything from the internet/open source if it saved effort. There
| was not a clear company policy about this until the export
| restrictions. Sometimes there would be a half dozen chain of
| borrowing before a culprit turned up. We muddled through and
| fixed hundreds of flags. If I was the program manager, I'd
| schedule and export code scan every week to avoid late problems.
|
| AI code is just another layer in this odorous process.
| Aperocky wrote:
| lmao this is hilarious. Imagine dealing with such stupidity
| while other countries don't have to, instant competitive
| disadvantage
| [deleted]
| asveikau wrote:
| Makes me think that the big tech companies which absorb a large
| amount of new college grads each year have a bunch of copyright
| violations but won't be audited.
|
| These companies have "strict" code review policies but often
| the reviewers are just a recent previous year's new college
| grad, now overconfident by a small amount of work experience.
| FpUser wrote:
| "... boost oversight of exports of sensitive technology to
| adversaries like China, for _economic_ and security reasons... "
|
| I think _economic_ is the keyword here. From what I gather this
| is not the first time the US is doing something like this. I am
| pretty sure other countries have done the same in their
| particular areas of concern. They 're just not as mighty and
| famous as the US so nobody pays attention. So much for free
| market.
|
| Anyways I think it is a little too late and all it will
| accomplish is - opening a window of opportunity for other
| players.
|
| Also because it formulated way too broad and has an escape clause
| (apply for a license) then it might offer an unfair advantage
| right inside the US. Big companies will get it and for smaller it
| nay be more difficult. Same as patent system. Company like Apple
| can patent my cat with little troubles. Me: not so much and I
| speak from experience.
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