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

How do you know when an artificial intelligence system is so powerful that it poses a security risk and should not be deployed without careful oversight?

For regulators trying to constrain AI, it's mostly about the math. Specifically, an AI model trained on 10 to the 26th of floating-point operations per second must now be reported to the U.S. government, and could soon trigger even stricter requirements in California.

Say what? Well, if you count the zeros, that's 100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, or 100 septillion, calculations per second, using a measure known as flops.

To some lawmakers and AI safety advocates, this means ...