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The vote difference with no actual rebuttal is pretty funny. People you trust are lying to you. You should not trust them. These are lies cooked up by A16z type people because they want to be able to produce their slop gambling porn simulators more cheaply. That's the faction who's lies you're swallowing and you're getting mad at people for pointing it out.
Are you arguing that people who "want to be able to produce their slop gambling porn simulators more cheaply" would be negatively financially impacted by the proposed regulations and then at the same time that these same proposed regulations don't create a competitive advantage for frontier labs with deeper pockets? How do you figure that?
They don't want any regulation ever or for things to slow down, more broadly they hate the frontier labs in general. There are a few groups in this category, some are angry that they passed on investing in the labs early on in favor of crypto. Broadly their preferred future looks something like the labs burning the money of other investors to produce powerful models that chinese labs are allowed to distill and then they can run them locally to power their anti-social revenue extracting products. They see themselves as the "application layer" that Huang often talks about. They have very little vision about the future of AI and broadly only care about what makes their low effort wrapper start up more money.
Can you explain the alternative view? Can you point to a regulation proposed by any of the labs that would actually hurt the little guys more than the frontier labs? Or at all?
As per our discussion last month, it seems pretty clear that Anthropic's proposed regulations would hit "little guys" like Mistral, and their regulations impose a burden on small companies, burdens are costly, cost hurts, ergo is seems pretty clear that the regulations would hurt little guys. (This does not necessarily mean that regulations are bad.)
With that being said, I'm still not clear on your argument. If your position is that the regulations wouldn't hurt the little guys, or would hurt the frontier labs (whom you say they hate) more so than the little guys, improving the competitive position of the little guys, then why are the little guys against the regulations?
Ok, so Mistral would be required to to submit to the security requirements that the other labs have to submit to. Such as registering with CAISI or some other organization depending on what blueprint you're talking about and submit their models to pre-release testing. How does this lock them out of the frontier exactly? I actually wouldn't be surprised if they already had stricter requirements from the EU given they're based in france.
They want the labs to push the frontier forward as fast as possible, the labs want to slow down. They also find it annoying when the labs have guardrails at all. There's two things "the little guys" could mean, smaller labs and "application layer" startups. The concern for the smaller labs seems totally hallucinated, the idea that a lab is going to be able to put billions into training runs but can't comply with some oversight is absurd on its face. The real concern is about these "application layer" startups who are shoveling absolute rancid slop everywhere as fast as they can. These slop merchants don't discriminate on what type of regulations are proposed for AI, they oppose it all categorically.
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what is an a16z type person?
More generally, I have a fairly embedded prior that the AI companies are in fact actively attempting to secure a regulatory moat, wherein they are the only companies legally permitted to provide AI services. Actions they've taken, particularly the "rogue" hacks, appear to me to fit this model quite well.
Am I being lied to? which bills are supposed to disprove this prior, and why?
Andreessen Horowitz circle, I outline the perspective here.
From which bills did the priors originate from? Openai and Anthropic have both published blueprint suggestions that explicitly exempt anyone doing training runs below 10^25 FLOP earn less than $500M in AI revenue or spend less than $1B a year on AI R&D. If the worry is that the regulations would create a moat we could actually talk about the regulations and demand they be written such that a moat wouldn't be created. But the people pushing this point have not read any of the proposals and do not care about the moat argument besides its use as a soldier.
How much do OpenAI and Anthropic spend/earn/train?
As I understand it the moat argument is that OpenAI and Anthropic want to create a regulation cartel to shut out any other upcoming competitors. If the exemptions are low enough that any competitor exempted wouldn't be able to reach anywhere close to the quality OpenAI/Anthropic provide (and thus can't actually compete) while being too regulation-choked to compete if they try to rise any higher, then it sounds like a moat.
Do you have any actual evidence of this? The cartel accusation as far as I can source it comes from them asking for an exemption to the Sherman act so that they can work together on standards, which is common among many industries and would not at all form any kind of moat. There's a lot of accusations being thrown around which as far as I can tell are entirely hallucinated.
Usually, when a scenario can be explained by "huge corporations conspire to corner the market" I would rather look for evidence that they couldn't do that rather than that they did it. Because my first question is "why wouldn't they?".
It's not like a straightforward moat where you blatantly slam everyone below you with the regulations while avoiding them yourself. But from where I'm standing it could very well work like a moat where you slam yourself, plus a fair distance below you, which works almost just as well but gives you deniability.
Ok so look for it. Did you find any? Do you think it's categorically impossible that driving forward into Recursive self improvement in a race condition could be dangerous? It's very exhausting, you have a motive and are in search for a crime, but not a real search because you don't bother to actually look. Meanwhile we might be driving off a cliff.
Suppose that for once the corporations are thinking about anything besides profit and that they were in fact motivated by trying to save us from runaway AI. Does that rule out the new regulations giving them competitive advantage? Last time I checked it's not just their motives but also the tangible results that were in debate in this thread.
And obviously no one is going to find any evidence of Altman and Amodei conspiring to cartelize whether they did or not.
Can you even explain how the tangible results give them an advantage? The best story I can come up with is that they're able to comply with the regulations better somehow because they were already big. But it's hard for me to imagine a startup lab that is able to get billions of dollars together for a training run that can't figure out how to follow regulation. And the actual tangible direct effect of the regulation is that they stop pushing so far ahead, which just obviously gives other labs a chance to catch up as a first order effect.
Even if I grant that it gave them some unforeseen or specifically articulated advantage surely "we could all die" is enough reason to at least make an attempt that we can modify later if someone does find some harm later? It's not like anyone is saying these rules should be written in stone and assumed perfect for all time, we're trying to coordinate a slow down and ensure safe practices. This is a red hot industry at the center of discourse, it's not likely that any harms will go unnoticed or discussed.
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They didn't originate from bills, but from my understanding of AI safety discourse, the version of that discourse being presented by the lab leadership, their calls for regulation, their market position, and the general way they've been generating "scary" AI incidents that don't seem organic and do seem to bolster their calls for "regulation".
...how is this not a moat?
So a narrative story you've been told that you don't feel a need to ground out in any actual actions taken by any of the people or groups being discussed? They're not intentionally committing felonies, that doesn't make sense. The downsides on that are wildly out of proportion to any imagined upsides.
How is it a moat? If you're spending less than a billion dollars then you're entirely exempt and if you're spending more than that then you just have to comply with simple things like pre-release testing by a third party that all the frontier labs have to comply with. How could you possibly design a regulatory system that is less moat shaped than that?
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FelonyBench now covers dozens of incidents at 4 labs, many with independent reviewers. There are prospiracy reasons why "move fast and break things" cultures might all be moving fast while inadequately securing things, but any conspiracy must go all the way to the top.
"You forget to take every single thing you care about into account in your reward function and so your agents seize on the loophole" is practically the null hypothesis in reinforcement learning; examples go back decades.
A moat would add regulations that apply to others but do not apply to you or are less onerous to you. Regulations that would apply to you but not to competitors catching up to you are the opposite of that.
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