Yesterday we wrote about this study by R Street's Haiman Wong on open source AI, a topic of particular interest to your correspondent. Some conservatives whose main fear relating to AI is censorship think of open source as a cure-all, but the reality is, of course, more complicated. Open source has plusses as well as minuses.

They point out that while open source AI can be more innovative, it creates challenges when it comes to governance, including issues like cybersecurity and quality control. Open source systems are thought to be better since anyone can audit the code for vulnerabilities but there is no central authority in charge of patching problems. The study emphasizes that "there is often no singular entity responsible for overseeing the security or ethical use of such systems." This means that when problems occur, it's unclear who bears responsibility for fixes or mitigation, response times to critical issues can be inconsistent, there's no formal enforcement mechanism for addressing misuse, and maintaining long-term security becomes dependent on sustained community interest.

The report also has some policy recommendations, of course. The more interesting ones, if you're into AI "safety" involve a set of non-mandatory guidelines that would essentially stratify AI systems by risk level. The White House would direct NIST, CISA, and NTIA to collaboratively develop these guidelines, and different categories of AI applications would be ranked depending on their risk level. The guidelines would include specific security checklists and pre-release testing protocols to help developers identify and address vulnerabilities before deployment. Since they wouldn't be mandatory, they wouldn't slow innovation but would act as industry best practices.

Policy News You Need To Know

#Natalism #BabyBonus — There's a lot of talk about the White House potentially supporting a baby bonus in the reconciliation bill. Good timing: Leah Libresco at the Niskanen Center has come out with her version of the proposal. She points out that families have pressing financial needs at the time of birth, since that's when expenses go up and income goes down, and the CTC arrives later. She also points out that it is a pro-life measure since financial pressure is the most-often cited reason for pursuing abortion. "A $2k benefit for every new baby would cost between $5.3-$7.7 billion a year," cheap these days.

#Tax — Nerdfest alert! Jack Salmon at Mercatus has reviewed two decades of empirical literature on the tax multiplier, in other words, how much economic activity is destroyed by every incremental dollar of taxes raised. It's all very interesting, but the bottomline? "Economic output falls by about 75 cents for every $1 increase in tax, while the full economic impact is likely to be around $2 for every $1 in additional taxation." If you believe in economics, that is.

#DOGE — Well, this seems really dumb: DOGE is set to shut down Ed's "ERIC", or Education Resources Information Center, which is a massive online library catalog and database of 2.1 million educational documents. This is obviously a very valuable resource for researchers and scholars and maintaining it accessible and open to the public is a valuable use of taxpayer dollars.

#AI #Chyna — Important warning from Keegan McBride and Adam Thierer at R Street: "America can still lose the AI race."

#Reg — April has been a slow month on the regulatory front, a welcome reprieve from the Biden Administration. However, this week, trusty Dan Goldbeck of American Action Forum tells us, this has changed recently due to new HHS rules.

#LGBT — Important article from Prisha Mosley at Daily Wire, a detransitioner. "My desire to transition was largely due to being sexually assaulted when I was 14. I believed I could escape myself and my sex through medicalization. I know now that, in truth, I never changed sex. And undergoing hormones and surgery did not help my mental health or heal my torment. That required facing the trauma in therapy and doing the real work of recovery." Though severely beaten back, the trans ideology is by no means defeated, and defeating it thoroughly means looking squarely at what happens to vulnerable children who are taken in by this ideology.

#Healthcare #Politics — Interesting: Arnold Ventures has run a survey and found that "in 18 of the Cook Political Report's 'swing districts' in Congress, more than three quarters of voters say it is very important for Congress to take action to reduce the price of prescription drugs." Let he who has ears to hear…

#SinglePayer — There's been a surge of material on single payer systems recently. We're not sure why. But we're still happy people are banging this drum. Socialized health care is bad! And it's important to keep pointing it out, since so many Americans seem to have brainwashed themselves into believing otherwise. Anyway, today it's American Action Forum's Michael Baker who's pointing out that "breakthrough therapies for rare diseases often face long delays in coverage by single-payer systems due to strict cost-effectiveness evaluations" and that "the disparity in treatment of rare diseases between single-payer systems and the United States is pronounced." All true! His short item on this crucial issue is worth reading in full.