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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 28, 2026

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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.

  • -11

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.

Are you arguing that people who "want to be able to produce their slop gambling porn simulators more cheaply" would be negatively financially impacted by the proposed regulations and then at the same time that these same proposed regulations don't create a competitive advantage for frontier labs with deeper pockets? How do you figure that?

They don't want any regulation ever or for things to slow down, more broadly they hate the frontier labs in general. There are a few groups in this category, some are angry that they passed on investing in the labs early on in favor of crypto. Broadly their preferred future looks something like the labs burning the money of other investors to produce powerful models that chinese labs are allowed to distill and then they can run them locally to power their anti-social revenue extracting products. They see themselves as the "application layer" that Huang often talks about. They have very little vision about the future of AI and broadly only care about what makes their low effort wrapper start up more money.

Can you explain the alternative view? Can you 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?

Can you 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?

As per our discussion last month, it seems pretty clear that Anthropic's proposed regulations would hit "little guys" like Mistral, and their regulations impose a burden on small companies, burdens are costly, cost hurts, ergo is seems pretty clear that the regulations would hurt little guys. (This does not necessarily mean that regulations are bad.)

With that being said, I'm still not clear on your argument. If your position is that the regulations wouldn't hurt the little guys, or would hurt the frontier labs (whom you say they hate) more so than the little guys, improving the competitive position of the little guys, then why are the little guys against the regulations?

As per our discussion last month, it seems pretty clear that Anthropic's proposed regulations would hit "little guys" like Mistral, and their regulations impose a burden on small companies, burdens are costly, cost hurts, ergo is seems pretty clear that the regulations would hurt little guys. (This does not necessarily mean that regulations are bad.)

Ok, so Mistral would be required to to submit to the security requirements that the other labs have to submit to. Such as registering with CAISI or some other organization depending on what blueprint you're talking about and submit their models to pre-release testing. How does this lock them out of the frontier exactly? I actually wouldn't be surprised if they already had stricter requirements from the EU given they're based in france.

With that being said, I'm still not clear on your argument. If your position is that the regulations wouldn't hurt the little guys, or would hurt the frontier labs (whom you say they hate) more so than the little guys, improving the competitive position of the little guys, then why are the little guys against the regulations?

They want the labs to push the frontier forward as fast as possible, the labs want to slow down. They also find it annoying when the labs have guardrails at all. There's two things "the little guys" could mean, smaller labs and "application layer" startups. The concern for the smaller labs seems totally hallucinated, the idea that a lab is going to be able to put billions into training runs but can't comply with some oversight is absurd on its face. The real concern is about these "application layer" startups who are shoveling absolute rancid slop everywhere as fast as they can. These slop merchants don't discriminate on what type of regulations are proposed for AI, they oppose it all categorically.

How does this lock them out of the frontier exactly?

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.

the idea that a lab is going to be able to put billions into training runs but can't comply with some oversight is absurd on its face.

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 real concern is about these "application layer" startups who are shoveling absolute rancid slop everywhere as fast as they can. These slop merchants don't discriminate on what type of regulations are proposed for AI, they oppose it all categorically.

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?

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.

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