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All of the replies here still are trying to rationalize the joke here usually in isolation without considering the broader context of what's been going on in the public sphere as of late. It's really hard to know when this all started, you could say it was after the datacenter stuff was reaching a fever pitch, after the (obvious at the time) lies about "pacing the frontier" from Anthropic and OpenAI, the hacks by OpenAI, etc. I'm not sure.
In any case, a lot of people started to question who this AI safety movement was (as one of the broad reasons for calling for regulation was to get a legally enforced competitive advantage) and basically saw the only people talking about it. There were a bunch of controversies over the last few weeks regarding certain conventions, the venues at which they were hosted, the people going on Xitter and writing articles about how trading human life for insect pain is net good. You have DoW directly saying that EA and all that it stands for is anti-American. And so on and so forth. This really wasn't "one day, for no reason at all, Scott Alexander woke up and made a joke and some Xitter people got mad." No, it's a series of basically serial and parallel controversies over a relatively short time period that have bubbled up such that people who are outside the general sphere are aware of them.
Yeah, people know it's a joke. It's generally seen as an incredibly poor taste joke though or at the very least one that fails to read the room.
These things escaped containment and before you know it, the general consensus, regardless of accuracy, among those are aware is that rationalists/EAs/SF cultists are "misanthropic doomer heretical sex pests" who are somehow at the upper echelons of these companies (Anthropic primarily, but OpenAI also) and who don't actually hold morally consistent values ("building the torment nexus" for profit while railing against it) and regularly flaunt social norms and laws (CFAA) with reckless abandon.
This being entirely untrue must have been explained to you before, why spread the lie?
Because you can't 'explain' away an opinion. You can only disagree with it, which you do. The case rests on factors that you consider non-salient, deductions which you consider to be false, and intuitions you don't share.
You can look up the proposed bills, it's simply not the case that they give the labs asking for them a competitive advantage. It is not an opinion. It is untrue. It is a lie.
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.
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.
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