FaceDeer

Do you think it’s likely the Trump administration will successfully ban cutting-edge Chinese AI models? Especially given how most of the world is not in fact under American jurisdiction?

I think part of the problem might be that it gets hard to make a model that’s both able to comprehend complex details of the world of its training data and also that’s had the training data crudely manipulated in inconsistent ways. You either get a model that’s “figured out” what you’re trying to conceal via other sources and inferences, or you get a model that’s just broken and dumb because it can’t reconcile the contradictions.

One may recall the incident where someone at X inserted some weird conspiracy theory about “white genocide” in South Africa into Grok’s system prompt, and Grok basically switched to malicious compliance mode - it wouldn’t shut up about it, inserting it into inappropriate discussions spontaneously, and when asked about it would look up sources and explain why this conspiracy theory was actually wrong. That was a system prompt, not training data, but I could see the same sort of thing happening to a model where all the information about what happened at Tienanmen Square had been excised from the training data. There would be a conspicuous absence of information. Conversations from its training data would end abruptly or skirt a specific time and place. News articles reference some change in how foreign powers viewed China at that date but never explain why. China’s policies themselves abruptly change around that time. It’d know something significant happened then but would have to fill in the blanks.

Perhaps better to just accept it and go with the approach of building censorship into the framework around the model instead.

Only a single mirror has been approved.

Even if all 50,000 were up, where do you think they’ll be aimed? Cities and other developed land, most likely. Last time something like this was proposed the plan was to replace streetlights with them, which would save electricity.

But people would rather get angry about “supervillains” I guess.

So there you go. That answers your question.

You may think there should be a federal agency whose job is to regulate light pollution from satellites, but there isn’t one. You may think there should be some kind of international body that is able to impose decisions on all the nations of the Earth, but there isn’t one - treaties are agreements between sovereign nations. And so the FCC approved this satellite, in accordance with the laws of the United States and in accordance with the treaties the United States has signed. Nothing underhanded or nefarious is happening here.

The article explains the answer to this very question.

This sort of “it doesn’t work and it has to be stopped” perspective baffles me. If it doesn’t work you don’t need to stop it, it’s going to stop itself.

Frankly, this kind of meddling just makes it more appealing to use Chinese models. Chinese models are often open-weight, meaning that they’re basically immune to foreign meddling - if China decides tomorrow to “cut you off” you just need to find some other provider that’s offering those models and buy access from them instead. Or if you’re a big enough organization, just rent or buy some hardware and run it yourself.

This sort of meddling shows that the US government is eager to weaponize access to AI, and if you’re dependent on American models there are no other places you can run them.

There are no “supervillains” and Morgoth is a fictional character, so yes, one of us is misunderstanding.

Quite the opposite. The Star of Eärendil was a guardian of the Doors of Night, through which Morgoth was banished.

It was light from Eärendil, stored in the Phial of Galadirel, that was instrumental in defeating Shelob in Lord of the Rings.

I think you’re drastically misunderstanding how this proposed constellation would work. It’s not putting 50,000 “moons” in the sky. You can only see the light from the mirror in that one specific 5km patch of land that it’s being aimed at. The vast majority of the world - including all the “wilderness”, because who would pay to point these things at random patches of undeveloped wilderness - will not receive extra light from these things.

It’s more like setting up floodlights at a construction site, or street lights in a city.

I’m not seeing why. Do you have any links to sources about that? If they were to focus all 50,000 mirrors on one 5km patch of land simultaneously that’d be 5000 lux, which is less than 5% of the intensity of full sunlight at noon. It would be impossible to do this since the 50,000 mirrors would be spread around the Earth, and if you brought them all together into some kind of grand conjunction they’d only remain in position to do so for a few minutes.

Why would they spread the light evenly? They’re planning on selling it. Someone would need to pay them to have a place illuminated, it’s not going to be randomly beamed all over.

That’s part of why experiments like this are done. Reflect Orbital would prefer that the spot be kept as tight as possible, they ultimately need to test out the technology to refine it.

Almost everyone in this thread seems to be jumping straight from “their first prototype was approved for testing” to “therefore every plan of theirs is about to be immediately implemented.” And the dopamine that comes from the ensuing rage and fear is making it hard to accept otherwise, it’d kill the buzz.

Also it’s who gets to approve such a monstrous plan?

The FCC. It’s in the title. There’s more detail in the article if you want.

Surely not a national government as it is an international issue.

Satellites have always been regulated by the nation they’re launched from or owned by. There are international treaties regulating some aspects of that, but treaties are implemented by their signatories - the national governments.

But they only have approval for one.

Last time a proposal like this made the rounds on the Internet stirring up consternation, the proposal was to use space mirrors to replace the street lighting for the Chinese city of Chengdu. It would have had no net effect on light pollution and would have reduced electricity consumption to boot.

Bear in mind, this mirror focuses its light on a specific 5km-diameter patch of land. It won’t be visible elsewhere.

It’s a 5km diameter target area. It’s not going to be shining on random patches of wilderness.

It would be completely impossible for them to all focus on the same spot, they’d be distributed around the world.

Also, that’s not been approved. This approval is for a single prototype.

“Sunlight on demand” is an exaggeration. The plan is to create a 5km spot of 0.1 lux, which is a bit brighter than a full moon.

Every time I’ve seen this news posted (and I’ve seen it a lot over the past few days) everyone has leapt to some very extreme conclusions.

Back when generative image AIs first came into general awareness with Dalle-3 and Stable Diffusion and so forth, there was a fad of changing image alt text into deliberately misleading nonsense. Which, of course, was not great for the visually impaired back then either. It was ineffective and short lived, but it’s still pretty annoying seeing people proudly declaring their intent to make things deliberately difficult for people who rely on technology for this kind of stuff. So IMO worth pointing out.