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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.
"They are already big" is exactly what I had in mind and find a sufficient answer. If you have to run a race where the leader is 5 km ahead with training weights on, and you also have to put on training weights once you get within 1 km, it sounds like something that will severely slow down your ability to catch up. Maybe not for ever, but for long enough to count for the mortal leadership. And that's assuming that regulations will be otherwise impartial.
And while "we could all die" would be very unfortunate, the probability is not yet above my personal willing-to-be-Pascal-mugged threshold. Especially given that we will all die in due time unless sufficiently fast progress in medicine makes it otherwise, and frontier labs being mired in regulation sounds like the opposite of fast progress.
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