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PaperclipPerfector  4d ago (text post)   11721 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 31, 2026

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Why would the current winners of the race want this? This would be catastrophic for their companies as others caught up. Ironically its the current losers that would cynically want this as it would allow them to catch up. I'm so tired of these takes that hallucinate some cynical interest that falls apart in two seconds of thought because it's impossible to imagine that the type of people who have been publicly posting about and discussing the dangerous ai since before the industry existed could possibly care about the singular thing they've been warning about for over a decade.

We the current frontier mousetrap makers think it should be ILLEGAL for anyone to build a better mousetrap faster than we can, for the good of humanity.

Who? Who the fuck are these other better mouse trap makers that they're afraid of? it doesn't make any sense. If signaling that they're willing to give up their lead isn't enough to show you that they are serious about the problem then what possible action could change your mind?

Why would the current winners of the race want this?

Perhaps because they anticipate or hope that the applicable regulations would impose a lot of bureaucratic hurdles and red tape on new players in the industry.

There are already multi-billion dollar hurdles for new players in the industry to put together enough compute to train a frontier model, the idea that having a legal department is going to be the difference is absurd. This isn't a haircutting industry.

Big companies start off as small companies. Anti-competitive regulation rarely targets the hard-to-kill large companies and instead strangles the small companies to ensure there's nobody around to grow into a big company.

Frontier models also aren't their only competition. Anthropic and OpenAI have both shown a desire to raise prices which is going to make budget and self hosted models more appealing alternatives as they do. Adding large costs to everyone in the industry doesn't just put a big barrier to entry up but also brings budget options closer on price to the big players.

I know what regulatory capture is. I'm asking how the type of regulatory capture being discussed could possibly apply to a product class that takes billions of dollars to bring to market in any scenario. Stop pattern matching and look at the actual fact pattern it's absurd. If a small business was able to bring a frontier model to market alone then we have a whole lot of other things to worry about.

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.

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.

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