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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   24423 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 14, 2026

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There is very obviously not a single thing that could ever satisfy you people. You're twisting literally calling their own sole product a risk to kill all humans in a marketing gimmick to secure regulatory capture. If they carved "No really we're serious about the risks" into their chests and then hung themselves you'd claim they were expecting to receive compensation in the afterlife.

No, I am saying they are using it as cover to slow down unsustainable capex.

And there isn't any possible evidence that could exist that could disabuse you of that impression because pausing unavoidably causes less capex spend. You're epistemically sealed against the straightforward explanation for why the people are doing the things obviously motivated by the durably stated beliefs over many years.

pausing unavoidably causes less capex spend

Why would this be the case, in your telling? Why wouldn't AI companies pivot towards customer compute build-out?

Well, actually when you put it like that they are still building the datacenters right? So they aren't even pulling back in capex which makes your narrative even more ridiculous. Thanks for the contribution.

Which narrative is that?

I'm not sure this means chooky is wrong – training and inference are different tasks, and so don't (necessarily) run on the same datacenters/GPUs. So chooky could be correct that they are slowing down on unsustainable capex (training) but that doesn't necessarily mean that pausing unavoidably means less capex spend total, because you could pivot to building inference datacenters to serve customers with existing models, shifting from expensive R&D to increasing revenue via selling inference. Right?

Now, caveat – I don't know of the top of my head what the current datacenter build out looks like – how much of it is inference versus training, what's being financed directly by the primes versus third parties, etc. etc. I gather that you're not familiar with it either (and I'm not sure it's all public knowledge, anyway). So I am just thinking about the logical levers at play here.

Well, yes, it is tough for the companies making AI to be convincing that they have long been opposed to making AI.

What about the people who've left the companies making AI because they've been convinced that this is reckless?

I'm not sure how you can have both the AI companies and angry ex-employees of those AI companies saying "this is dangerous and will likely end the world" without having to conclude that hey, they probably think it's true.

If only they had long records of writing on the topic going through their beliefs and positions in detail that you refuse to recognize.

Personally, I cannot square these writings being genuine with going out and literally being the primary catalyst to create the AI they supposedly believe is dangerous. Truly a real question: how do you do it?

ETA: Keep in mind my root comment is discussing all this in the context of "C-suite concerns"; these have always been the goalpost. I do not at all doubt that there are various people at frontier AI companies who genuinely are and have been concerned about AI safety - probably, some of them even quit before becoming what I would consider rich! But it is also probably the case that the sustainability departments of Exxon or BP probably have lots of true believers even though the C-suite and company's real decisions don't really give a shit about anything except capex and fossil fuel profits.

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