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Your position upstream was "it's simply not the case that they give the labs asking for them a competitive advantage" and then you asked me to "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?" Seems like you can create a competitive advantage without locking down the entire space for yourself.
As we discussed previously, you can hit the FLOPs requirement to trigger oversight without spending billions; Mistral did it. Now, it is true that Anthropic's proposed rules would also not apply to anyone who made less than $500 million in annual AI-derived revenue or spend more than $1 billion on R&D annually, which doesn't seem to have anything to do with the frontier at all - if someone decided to make an Evil AI in their basement/supervillain lair based on an existing open-sourced design, it wouldn't need to comply with Anthropic's model regulations, even if it exceeded the FLOPs requirement (which some open-source models do).
Which of these application layer startups need to worry about this right now? Perplexity is the biggest one I can think of, and they just now hit $500 million AAR, right? And most of those application layer startups don't really develop their own models, do they? So (to your point) these sorts of regulations might not even hit them.
If I am getting your argument right, then, application layer startups are against regulations less because it might affect them directly (in terms of oversight) and more that it will slow down the progress of the frontier models that they interface with to make their "absolute rancid slop," thus slowing their revenue gain. Is that a good summary?
And you didn't, you refused to do any work so for the conversation to continue I cited the proposed legislation myself which does not hurt the little guys more than the big guys.
the openai FLOPs requirement is 10^26 which cuts a bit higher, but if your argument was "actually it should be 10^27" then we can have a conversation. But you don't seem at all interested in engaging with regulation as if it's a valid end at all. You make arguments that generalize to all regulation in all cases is bad because you can make up a story for how this somehow helps incumbent companies.
They're part of the a16z group that broadly opposes all regulation and actively funds pacs to this effect(leading the future). Their opposition to this regulation in particular is over determined. They want the frontier to advance quickly and be distilled by open weight models because it's their belief that every other layer will be a commodity layer and they're the real enduring layer. They have a love hate relationship with the frontier labs. They also oppose all regulation in general because they fear if some AI regulatory organization got some teeth they might come after their slop, which the public widely hates. for fun here are a few examples of a16z funded projects:
Doublespeed Slop social media spammatron 5000
Cluely literally cheating as a service
Character.AI this one literally has blood on its hands
I linked to a prior conversation that in turn linked to Anthropic's regulatory framework, and in your reply you acknowledged that.
As I said, "This does not necessarily mean that regulations are bad." I've been trying to figure out your position, which seems to be that regulation wouldn't hurt the little guys but would cost them money but it's not a regulatory moat. It seems quite possible that regulations can be good and be a regulatory moat, there's no contradiction there. But you've been arguing that they wouldn't serve as a moat, not that they are good or bad.
Okay, see this makes sense to me! Thank you! (Sincerely!) I don't think you would have gotten so many downvotes if you had said "a16z thinks regulation of the frontier is a camel's nose under the tent to ban their shady services that have been implicated in suicide and cheating.* I appreciate you taking the time to lay that out for me.
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