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Notes -
Statement on the US government directive to suspend access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5.
A few immediate thoughts:
For one strain of doomer, this is a good thing: the USG showing willingness to directly intervene and cut down the addressable market for capability-pushing models reduces economic incentives to push the frontier at all costs and slows down the race dynamic. Correspondingly, it's going to be a nightmare for the markets: the AI boom is driven by the idea that frontier models are going to be replacing a significant chunk of global labor, and obviously now this is significantly less likely now that frontier models are going to be stuck in Uncle Sam's basement.
For another strain of doomer, this is a horrible thing: really this was fairly clear even with the DOD conflict, but now control of AI is now very firmly a direct White House concern - the fate of the planet and/or the universe is in the end going to be decided by DC bureaucrats and not SF tech nerds.
Companies, especially non-US companies, are going to be rushing to the doors to move their AI workflows off closed-source and onto self-hosted models, another blow for the AI market thesis - the business continuity risks of Anthropic's demonstrated willingness to silently cripple models and USG's demonstrated willingness to now arbitrarily cut off access are simply going to be too much.
I’m not saying that I have faith in the government here, but it is shocking that anyone might find “self regulating” private SF company of weird tech elitists to be a superior path.
I recall once Rush on a monologue saying that global warming can’t possibly be real the way the left says because if it was true, it would require government intervention in a way that undermined capitalism and he couldn’t accept that.
I remember being just shocked at the backwards reasoning. Obviously there’s a true point about backwards incentives reducing trust in the claim. But Rush himself was just openly engaging in the reverse mindset.
Here we have the same people saying that this threat exists also not wanting to have to overturn their grip on power over it.
There's also a slight utility maximizing thing here, similar to what I usually use to dismiss claims of us being simulations. Information only matters in-so-far as it can increase your expected utility.
Suppose we might live in two possible world: with probability p we live in world A which is normal and you have agency. With probability q we live in world B which temporarily looks like world A but in a couple years will collapse and nothing you do matters. Either everyone dies, or AI takes over and does whatever it wants good or bad in a way that you personally can't control, or it's a simulation and the matrix lords do whatever they want.
For any strategy you employ now before knowing which world you live in, the probably q does not matter. If your utility in world B is approximately constant with respect to your strategy, then you might as well act as if you're in world A and maximize your utility within that world. If there's a 40% chance we're all going to die in a few years and it either happens or doesn't outside your control, then might as well live for that 60%. I think this is a steelmanned version of the backwards reasoning. If you believe in capitalism so strongly that you think communism is equivalent to the end of civilization, or would kill you personally, or just be so bad that life is not worth living anymore, or would be equally incapable of solving global warming, then you might as well act as if you live in the world where it's not too bad for capitalism to solve.
Note that epistemically this is different from it actually affecting the probabilities p and q. It doesn't actually change how bad global warming is or how bad you ought to literally expect it to be. Just how bad it would be rational to treat it. If you are not a hero with a very high locus of control and are not going to step up and save the world from existential threats, then you might as well go about your life as if they don't exist and not worry too much about them.
Different Bad Things are different not only in their probability but also in how actionable they are. Your approach applies to things which are not actionable. The probability that the sun blows up tomorrow is not worth worrying about, because there is nothing humans could do which would make a difference. By contrast, a lot of problems humans worry about -- from ASI and global warming to cancer or getting attacked by a bear in the woods -- are actually Bad Things where humans can make decisions which will affect the badness of the outcomes.
The US is not the land of fully unregulated capitalism, nor has is ever been. To a true believer in the free market, if would seem almost as oppressive as Soviet Russia. The list of goods and services whose sale is either forbidden or severely regulated is long. Humans. Human meat. Fentanyl. Sex. Fissile material. Fragmentation grenades. Leaded gasoline. Handguns. Dental services. Loans. Food. Animals. CFCs. Ebola samples. Parts of protected animal species. "If the government makes us pay for the privilege of burning fossil fuels, that is the end of capitalism in America" is a sentiment excusable from a guy living in 1850. For someone living today, it seems strange to claim that all the regulations amassed since WW2 are fine but CO2 emission certificates would be the end of the world.
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