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PaperclipPerfector  7d ago (text post)   24659 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 28, 2026

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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.

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.

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).

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.

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?

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

We've built an attention intelligence platform to build and deploy social agents at scale across every demographic and niche. Capturing mindshare on organic social is currently a human labor problem, instead our autonomous creators learn from every interaction, and become more valuable over time driving conversions and engaging with millions 24/7.

Cluely literally cheating as a service

Cluely, a startup that claims to help users “cheat” on job interviews, exams, and sales calls, has raised a $15 million Series A led by Andreessen Horowitz, the company announced on Friday with a video posted on X.

Character.AI this one literally has blood on its hands

In November 2023, 13-year-old Juliana Peralta of Colorado died by suicide after extensive interactions with multiple chatbots on Character.ai. She primarily confided suicidal thoughts and mental health struggles in a chatbot based on the character Hero from the video game Omori, while also engaging in sexually explicit conversations—often initiated by the bots—with others, including those based on characters from children's series such as Harry Potter.

And you didn't

I linked to a prior conversation that in turn linked to Anthropic's regulatory framework, and in your reply you acknowledged that.

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.

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.

They're part of the a16z group that broadly opposes all regulation and actively funds pacs to this effect(leading the future). [...] 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.

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.

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.

Yes, I don't think they'd be a moat. It's up in the air, as they're not strongly defined, if they'd net help or hinder catch up, as written I would guess they would help catch up. Slowing the front runners down gives those behind to fast follow at leisure. This is actually a negative in a sense to me because it lets chinese labs catch up relatively and there are world where that is quite bad by my values.

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.

I don't like to make the arguments from incentives on this subject because I don't think they're the right frame of the argument. It's the frame the a16z/accelerationists want to push because then it's a matter of their interests vs anthropic and don't you really care about freedom of speech ect ect? But I don't think the important point here is about who's interests should prevail, even if that's also for contingent circumstantial reasons an argument my side can win against them. Because even if the balanced tipped and from interests alone the labs came out looking worse through this cynical lens I still don't want everyone to die. If entrenching AI control into a handful of companies actually was the only way to keep everyone from dying then we should do that, albeit probably it would be best to nationalize them in that case. I don't think that's the case but I don't want to hinge my defense of regulations on this unstable ground.

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