What I do know is lawyers and policymakers likely understand damage caused by models a hell of a lot better than they understand model weights, pretraining, post-training, recursive self-improvement (RSI), or anything else in the technical weeds of models. They may understand none of that, but they will know the scale of economic damage if, for their next trick/minor benchmark misconfiguration, OpenAI takes down a major US power grid.

Additionally, I trust model labs to have a far better grasp of their models’ dangers and how they can go wrong than policymakers and regulators. They are the ones who know about all of the technical minutiae that can add up to a major problem.

Liability is good specifically because it allows each side that has more information on their specific area to make decisions on it. Again, don’t just take my (especially non-policymaker) word for it.

— “When AI Models Hurt People, the Labs Should Pay,” Weighty Thoughts