How do you know when AI is powerful enough to be dangerous? Regulators try to do the math

For free real time breaking news alerts sent straight to your inbox sign up to our breaking news emails Sign up to our free breaking news emails Sign up to our free breaking news emails SIGN UP I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. Following Biden's footsteps, the European Union’s sweeping AI Act also measures floating-point operations per second, or flops, but sets the bar 10 times lower at 10 to the 25th power. Floating point arithmetic might sound fancy “but it’s really just numbers that are being added or multiplied together,” making it one of the simplest ways to assess an AI model's capability and risk, Aguirre said. For Horowitz, putting limits on “how much math you’re allowed to do” reflects a mistaken belief there will only be a handful of big companies making the most capable models and you can put “flaming hoops in front of them and they’ll jump through them and it’s fine.” In response to the criticism, the sponsor of California's legislation sent a letter to Andreessen Horowitz this summer defending the bill, including its regulatory thresholds. Yacine Jernite, who leads policy research at the AI company Hugging Face, said the flops metric emerged in “good faith” ahead of last year's Biden order but is already starting to grow obsolete.