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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   7846 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 31, 2026

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Yes. There's a lot of money around. Getting a billion dollars, or 10 billion dollars, is much easier than getting past a regulator controlled by the firms you want to compete with.

So the dastardly plan here is that the frontier labs destroy their own leads on the theory that they'll be able to control the regulatory state so thoroughly as to choke out all other competition and avoid becoming a commodity. Except when the frontier is paused they'll instantly become a commodity with several other players in the same tier already. This just doesn't make any sense. If progress stalls then the margins on current models get competed down to the marginal inference cost with or without other market entrants. Half or more of the nation hates these companies, the idea that a regulatory state is going to be particularly sweet to them is hard to imagine and you're making a general argument against all regulation. I'm sorry but one way or the other we're going to be regulating the production of models with nationstate level hacking ability. The public and state will not stand for any random with a bone to pick having the ability to shut down the power grid.

the idea that a regulatory state is going to be particularly sweet to them is hard to imagine

They don't need to be explicitely sweet to them, but the regulation when it gets written up, will be written with the realities of the current market in mind, which is to say it will be written in a way that won't strangle the entirety of the profits out of the the current incumbants to comply with, very little thought will be given to future competitors because the shape of these competitors, and any way their technology or organisational structure might be different and not fit well with the regulation, is currently unknown.

you're making a general argument against all regulation

Yes, he is, and? This is a valid general argument against all regulation (with perhaps the exception of anti-trust regulations). That doesn't mean that the tradeoff is never worth it, but regulation in general has that flaw.

That doesn't mean that the tradeoff is never worth it,

Agreed. To be clear, I am not arguing that there should or shouldn't be AI regulation. My position in this discussion is simply that it's reasonable to hypothesize that leaders in the AI field support regulation, in whole or in part, for selfish reasons, namely that it will hinder potential competition.

So the dastardly plan here is that the frontier labs destroy their own leads on the theory that they'll be able to control the regulatory state so thoroughly as to choke out all other competition and avoid becoming a commodity.

That's kind of how regulatory capture works, yes.

But it clearly cannot work in this case for the reasons I've listed. So the idea that they're going to try to do that instead of continuing to the trajectory that has them rising faster in value than any other companies in history is hard to justify on grounds other than the belief that going forward without regulation is legitimately dangerous. These are at the very least dual use technologies, the idea that we're not going to regulate them is crazy.

The "reasons you have listed" are just you assuming your own conclusion.

The entirety of your case is assuming a boat load of contradictory incentives. You've not bothered to actually make a case for how this regulatory capture could work or why it would be preferable to just continuing the status quo.

Because winning pretty big for all time is much better and more legible for IPO than a small chance of winning very big before being beaten out by a competitor who doesn't have to service your massive and entitled customer base or deal with your office politics and legal woes.

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