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Notes -
Is There Real Anti-Trust Risk From A Coordinated AI Lab Pause?
In AI-pause discussions it is increasingly common to hear the "anti-trust" objection. The idea is that if the labs were to coordinate a pause in frontier AI development, this would be a "conspiracy in restraint of trade" and therefore illegal.
Putting aside the question of whether it is ethical to risk a double-digit chance of destroying the world in order to avoid getting sued (it isn't), is this even a realistic possibility? My impression is that anti-trust law in the United States is legitimately quite fuzzy (as the NCAA is currently discovering).
Putting my cards on the table, I think this argument is cope. The labs want to pretend that they want to pause, but they don't actually want to pause. "If she wanted to, she would," etc. Just today, Anthropic put out a new statement containing the following sentence:
It seems like every time I read a statement from them, they've added more and more qualifications. Are they going to keep racing until congress passes a specific anti-trust exemption? That arguably seems like what the word "lawful" is implying.
Anthropic is increasingly incoherent. The people who work there are true believers in AI risk and safety. Even Dario seems to be: apparently, seeing the risk of people being more motivated by money than the cause, there's now a directive coming down from on-high to ask questions during the interview process like "what would you do if Dario made a decision to send Anthropic's value to $0?" (I'm not sure what kind of signal Anthropic is hoping to get from questions like that; insert quip about scheming or misspecified rewards here).
But the actual actions taken by Anthropic don't seem to support it. It's now a two-man game, and Dario could call up Sam and come to some arrangement. And now's the ideal time: Sam himself seems spooked by the HF hack (as he should be). Maybe it's all driven by some petty personal feud between them?
I have no legal expertise in anti-trust law here, but regardless it shouldn't play any role in the decision process here, if the stakes are as high as the principals claim to believe. Worst case scenario, you get slapped with a fine; whatever. If you believe the fate of the world is at risk, that's a burden you can bear.
Having never seen this before and pretending I'm on the spot in an interview: say you want to make AGI and think modern LLM research will at least inform such important work if not maybe directly make it. Stay mission-focused and at least role play as a kool-aid drinker who is there for the AI. The compensation is just a very comfortable side benefit.
Act like a Google interviewer asked "but what if they took away the Google cafeterias". I like the cafeterias. I rather hope they stay about the same. But if somehow they go away forever, too bad. I'm here to work. I'll somehow figure out lunch as a small side distraction from the reason I'm here.
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