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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   24460 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 14, 2026

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The discourse didn't make sense to me until I realized that the pro-acceleration+anti-Anthropic faction consists entirely of venture capitalists who want unregulated open weight models so they can use them to found B2B SaaS startups. Just a complete failure to grasp the implications of the situation we are in. If they fully understood what it means for Anthropic (or OpenAI) to solve alignment and build superintelligence then they would be the ones begging the government for a slowdown.

unregulated open weight models so they can use them to found B2B SaaS startups

This would be weird, because open weight models which can do most of what the big three can do exist. I expect that SaaS is not exactly like finding exploits in existing codebases, where the proprietary models made good use of their few months of advance over the open weight models. If my startup model is to write smut on demand for my customers specific combinations of kinks and characters (which is probably not B2B, unless their kinks are really weird), then it does not really matter too much if I run on Mythos or Kimi K3. I would expect that most niche use cases are similar.

The big AI labs probably spend a lot of tokens identifying domains where their model's capability advantage is really decisive (like Navier-Stokes, or exploit-finding) and then a lot more tokens solving problems in these fields to showcase their model.

They're paranoid about the big labs convincing the government to ban open weights (caveat: just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they aren't after you).

I am anti-Anthropic because I think Anthropic is clearly run by and staffed by people who are deranged, and thus couldn't produce an aligned AI under any circumstances (same for open AI of course). Thus anything that leave a possibility of them being supplanted is good, and regulatory capture would stop that possibility, whence it is bad.

"It turns out that this whole faction is actually just motivated by [monolithic sardine-can-compressed explanation of self-interest]" doesn't work for frontier lab Kremlinology and it doesn't work for the /accs either.

In case anyone thinks I'm making this up:

New York Post - OpenAI and Anthropic oversold AI security breaches to pressure feds into protecting turf: insiders

Reading the headline, you might assume that the "insiders" referred to here are anonymous employees of OpenAI and Anthropic. This would be incorrect. All of the "insider" sources are executives of SaaS AI wrapper companies.

“The attack in no way represents some sort of rebellion by the AI models. . . . In fact, they did exactly what they were told to do. They were not given adequate guardrails or containment,” said Akhil Verghese, founder of Krazimo, an AI software company. [...]

“One man’s ‘the model escaped the sandbox’ is another man’s ‘you failed to build the sandbox correctly.’ There was a live route to the internet . . . and nobody was watching what the agents were doing while it ran,” said Abhi Kumar, co-founder of Voice AI. [...]

“It feels exaggerated to say, the leap feels quite large, to go from you know ‘we didn’t build the right sort of box’ to ‘everyone should be extremely alarmed and everyone in government should jump on this topic,'” Taivo Pungas, chief intelligence officer at Pactum AI, told The Post.

The outgroup homogeneity claim is still beneath addressing in detail, but I laughed irl at Kumar clearly using AI to write his quote:

“The thing that set it off. . . was an agent handed a spreadsheet task it couldn’t finish, because the files sat behind links it couldn’t reach. So it went looking for a way out. That’s not a machine waking up. That’s an impossible task in a leaky box, and a system doing exactly what you built it to do.”

I'm more charitable. I think they have started to understand that by default, Anthropic will extinguish all their B2B SaaS nonsense like a hurricane extinguishes a candle flame. In this situation there's just nothing to do but give all your money to Anthropic and maybe the upstream supply chain, until Anthropic buys it out. They'd rather maintain some optionality.
David Sacks is now endorsing voluntary slowdown at the top 2 labs.

This seems awfully bullish on Anthropic considering that OpenAI is at their same level, and other labs are only maybe 6-12 months behind.

This is fair, the logic of capability applies to all frontier labs (or more precisely, companies with frontier LLM research and gigawatts of long-term contracted or owned compute, ie OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Meta, xAI). They all will have RSI sooner or later, the first two and maybe three have it already.
The difference is mostly in Amodei's political posturing plus Anthropic's obvious preference to not let others use their best models unencumbered. OpenAI does not have a model stronger than Astra that's ready for general use (they have that monster that proved Navier-Stokes, but it is math-specialized, and internally they still use Astra); the gap between the end of development and general availability is measured in weeks, at most a couple months. Anthropic considers users to be a bootstrapping phase.

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