This (purported) leak is incredibly scary if you're worried about AI risk due to AI capabilities developing too fast.
Firstly, it suggests that open-source models are improving rapidly because people are able to iterate on top of each other's improvements and try out a much larger number of experiments than a small team at a single company possibly could.
Secondly, it suggests that data size is less important than you might think from recent scaling laws, as you can achieve high performance with "small, highly curated datasets". This suggests a world where dangerous capabilities are much further distributed.
Thirdly, it proposes that Google should open-source its AI technology. Obviously, this is only the opinion of one researcher and it currently seems unlikely to occur, but if Google was to pursue this path, this would lead to a significant shortening of timelines.
I'm worried that up until now, this community has been too focused on the threat of big companies pushing capabilities ahead and not focused enough on the threat posed by open-source AI. I would love to see more discussions of regulations in order to mitigate this risk. I suspect it would be possible to significantly hamper these projects by making the developers of these projects potentially liable for any resulting misuse.
Widely, does this come as a surprise? I recall back to the GPT2 days where the 4chan and Twitter users of AIDungeon discovered various prompting techniques we use today. More access means more people trying more things, and this should already be our base case because of how open participation in open source has advanced and improved OSS projects.
I have no idea how you think this would work.
First, any attempt at weakening liability waivers will cause immediate opposition by the entire software industry. (I don't even know under what legal theory of liability this would even operate.) Remember under American law, code is free speech. So...second, in the case you're somehow (somehow!) able to pass something (while there's a politicized and deadlocked legislature) where a coalition that includes the entire tech industry is lobbying against it and there isn't an immediate prior restraint to speech challenge...what do you think you're going to do? Go after the mostly anonymous model trainers? A lot of these people are random Joe Schmoes with no assets. Some of the SD model trainers which aren't anonymous already have shell corporations set up, both to shield their real identities and to preemptively tank liability in case of artist nuisance lawsuits.