Californians, tell your reps to vote yes on SB 1047!

Unfortunately, due to misinformation and lobbying by big tech companies, SB 1047 is currently stalled in the Assembly Appropriations Committee.

This is extremely misleading. Any bill that would have non-negligible fiscal impact (the threshold is only $150,000 https://apro.assembly.ca.gov/welcome-committee-appropriations/appropriations-committee-rules) must be put in the Appropriation Committee “Suspense File” until after the budget is prepared. That is the status of SB 1047 and many many other bills. It has nothing to do with misinformation or lobbying, it is a part of the standard process. I believe all the bills that make it out of the Suspense File will be announced at the hearing this Thursday.

More on this: https://calmatters.org/newsletter/california-bills-suspense-file/

I've previously messaged Buffy Wicks asking to make sure a few specific bits got preserved. (I unfortunately didn't save a copy of it before sending into their letter-form-submission). I plan to do more calling/writing Wicks/Weiner and later the governor.

I'm hoping to say more things about it soon. It seems pretty important. I've talked to some people with concerns about various aspects of it, which seem reasonable to be concerned about  (I agreed with most of the takes in RobertM's post about it [LW · GW]). But it still seems like the right overall call to me to support the bill. I'd argue more about the specifics of it, but I expect to see a new version of the bill soon and it seems probably better to argue about it then.

Here's the comment I sent using the contact form on my representative's website.

Dear Assemblymember Grayson:

I am writing to urge you to consider voting Yes on SB 1047, the Safe and Secure Innovation for Frontier Artificial Intelligence Models Act. How our civilization handles machine intelligence is of critical importance to the future of humanity (or lack thereof), and from what I've heard from sources I've trust, this bill seems like a good first step: experts such as Turing Award winners Yoshua Bengio and Stuart Russell support the bill (https://time.com/7008947/california-ai-bill-letter/), and Eric Neyman of the Alignment Research Center described it as "narrowly tailored to address the most pressing AI risks without inhibiting innovation" (https://x.com/ericneyman/status/1823749878641779006). Thank you for your consideration. I am,

Your faithful constituent,
Zack M. Davis

I've been thinking about calling to support this bill, but haven't because I'm worried that as a resident who can't vote, they don't want to hear from me. My understanding is that if you tell the Californian rep you don't have the right to vote (e.g. because you're on a visa), they will ignore you. And that you can probably mislead without lying, but it will be necessary to mislead.

Anyone know better?

The Bill has passed the appropriations committee and will now move onto the Assembly floor.  There were some changes made to the Bill. From the press release: 

Removing perjury – Replace criminal penalties for perjury with civil penalties. There are now no criminal penalties in the bill. Opponents had misrepresented this provision, and a civil penalty serves well as a deterrent against lying to the government.

Eliminating the FMD – Remove the proposed new state regulatory body (formerly the Frontier Model Division, or FMD). SB 1047’s enforcement was always done through the AG’s office, and this amendment streamlines the regulatory structure without significantly impacting the ability to hold bad actors accountable. Some of the FMD’s functions have been moved to the existing Government Operations Agency.

Adjusting legal standards - The legal standard under which developers must attest they have fulfilled their commitments under the bill has changed from “reasonable assurance” standard to a standard of “reasonable care,” which is defined under centuries of common law as the care a reasonable person would have taken. We lay out a few elements of reasonable care in AI development, including whether they consulted NIST standards in establishing their safety plans, and how their safety plan compares to other companies in the industry.

New threshold to protect startups’ ability to fine-tune open sourced models – Established a threshold to determine which fine-tuned models are covered under SB 1047. Only models that were fine-tuned at a cost of at least $10 million are now covered. If a model is fine-tuned at a cost of less than $10 million dollars, the model is not covered and the developer doing the fine tuning has no obligations under the bill. The overwhelming majority of developers fine-tuning open sourced models will not be covered and therefore will have no obligations under the bill.

Narrowing, but not eliminating, pre-harm enforcement – Cutting the AG’s ability to seek civil penalties unless a harm has occurred or there is an imminent threat to public safety.

I just did my calls for today. (Seemed like today is the last day before the next assembly voting and particularly worthwhile to call during?)

A thing I am wondering about: My understanding is it's not very useful to call with a nuanced statement. Basically they just keep a ticker-tally of people supporting the bill. 

But, it seems to me that if like 300 people called asking for a particular change, or supporting a particular clause not-getting-removed, this might be helpful? If so, I think it might be a failure of the x-risk community to not have gotten consensus on things-important-to-keep.