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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.
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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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