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Made me think what Mark Andreeson said in a recent interview. > They said, look, AI is a technology basically, that the government is gonna completely control.
by bko 2y ago
Made me think what Mark Andreeson said in a recent interview.
> They said, look, AI is a technology basically, that the government is gonna completely control. This is not gonna be a startup thing. They, they actually said flat out to us, don't do AI startups like, don't fund AI startups. It's not something that we're gonna allow to happen. They're not gonna be allowed to exist. There's no point.
> They basically said AI is gonna be a game of two or three big companies working closely with the government. And we're gonna basically wrap them in a, you know, they, I'm paraphrasing, but we're gonna basically wrap them in a government cocoon. We're gonna protect them from competition, we're gonna control them, we're gonna dictate what they do.
>And then I said, I don't understand how you're gonna lock this down so much because like the math for you, AI is like out there and it's being taught everywhere. And you know, they literally said, well, you know, during the Cold War we, we classified entire areas of physics and took them out of the research community and like entire branches of physics basically went dark and didn't proceed. And that if we decide we need to, we're gonna do the same thing to to the math underneath ai.
> And I said, I've just learned two very important things. 'cause I wasn't aware of the former and I wasn't aware that you were, you know, even conceiving of doing it to the latter. And so they basically just said, yeah, we're gonna look, we're gonna take total control the entire thing and just don't start startups.
If this is true, makes sense for OpenAI and other to ramp up lobbying to be one of the two or three big companies. In another subsequent interivew Altman denied he was ever in such a meeting.
https://app.podscribe.ai/episode/118114058 https://app.podscribe.ai/episode/118114058
- Dig1t 2y agoThis is exactly the same thought I had. With so much talk about regulation and talk of complete control of the technology by govt, it would be very foolish for them not to be spending a lot of time and money trying to influence policy on it.
- seper8 2y agoAnyone else find him IMPOSSIBLE to listen to? He really needs a speaking coach. You know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know...
- wil421 2y agoIf I had fuck you money I wouldn’t care. Elon sounds many times worse than my ADHD mind but there are many folks who would pay to hear him speak.
- akprasad 2y agoFor context, Andreessen is talking here about the Biden administration, and his revulsion to this approach is why he endorsed Trump: > I, you know, look, and I would say like when we endorse Trump, we, we only did so on the basis of like tech policy. [...] Number two was ai, where I became very scared earlier this year that they were gonna do the same thing to AI that they did to crypto.
- griomnib 2y agoHN audience is essentially pro-Trump as well. 1/3rd of Santa Clara county (heart of Silicon Valley) voted for him, and a lot of tech employees come from authoritarian countries (China) and really see nothing wrong with authoritarian rule.
- Ninjak8051 2y agoFirst of all, that is factually incorrect -- Trump received 28.1% of the vote in Santa Clara county, which is significantly lower than 1/3rd. Source: https://results.enr.clarityelections.com/CA/Santa_Clara/122582/web.345435/#/summary https://results.enr.clarityelections.com/CA/Santa_Clara/1225.... Second of all, your bar for "essentially pro-Trump" being 1/3rd of the vote is ridiculous, by your standard almost every county in America is "essentially pro-Trump".
- griomnib 2y agoGive me a break, that’s fine for rounding and a huge gap between SCC and San Francisco and Santa Cruz. SCC is the outlier in the region, and a good percentage of HN is very pro-Trump because a good percentage of HN is pro-greed. And the point about Chinese being among the most pro-Trump is South Bay stands - I have had several conversations and most people from mainland (RIP HK) see zero problem with authoritarian rule.
- nradov 2y agoLots of voters see many things wrong with authoritarian rule but on the freedom versus authoritarianism spectrum it's not at all clear that Democrats are any better. With the recent national shift towards populism, both major political parties seem roughly equally authoritarian in different policy areas. Besides AI policy there are other major authoritarianism issues around online censorship, public health, gun control, recreational drugs, reproductive healthcare, etc. I'm not trying to start yet another fight over which side is right or wrong on those particular issues but rather using them as examples to show how both parties are authoritarian when it fits the ideology of their core voters and campaign contributors. Overall voters who identify as Asian mainly voted for Harris. So I am skeptical of your claim that Trump got a lot of votes from first-generation immigrants from China. https://navigatorresearch.org/2024-post-election-survey-racial-analysis-of-2024-election-results/ https://navigatorresearch.org/2024-post-election-survey-raci...
- JumpCrisscross 2y ago> makes sense for OpenAI and other to ramp up lobbying to be one of the two or three big companies The fact that Musk hates Altman, has the President's ear and has a competitor to Altman's main wealth engine surely also plays into the calculus.
- baobabKoodaa 2y agoyou can't have an oligarchy without oligarchs (plural - even if some of them hate each other)
- jncfhnb 2y agoI call bullshit. I don’t really believe they’re saying don’t fund startups. I also don’t believe for a second that they think they can stunt progress. We didn’t have the internet in the 60s.
- loganfrederick 2y agoI dunno, I've met enough people first hand who believe in heavily regulating AI researchers to the extent that private companies shouldn't or couldn't do it without being owned by the government. It would surprise me that a handful of staffers in either the intelligence agencies or Biden executive branch also thought this way.
- dole 2y agoInformation wants to be free. If the US doesn't invest, others will.
- kelseyfrog 2y agoI'm not sure. Saying that information wants anything is like saying that an LLM is capable of thought - a category error.
- random3 2y agowhat does that even mean? People want things. Information doesn't want anything. People want property rights for both physical and intellectual property. Likely rules are ill suited for levels of scaling achieved with current technology. A single person can read a ton of stuff and retain only a fraction compared to how much a system can. So information wants to be free is nonsense. People want access to more information, at the same time they don't want others to have accees to the same information. However having access to more information has marginal effects when capacity is limited. Hence it's the information capacity that makes all the difference and this puts a small class in disproportionate advantage.
- ata_aman 2y agoNot putting words in OP’s mouth from the comment you’re replying to. But from my understanding, the default state of information is to spread itself, it’s an inherent characteristic. You have to put effort to suppress it (example making info classified or enforcing secrecy). If you don’t actively put effort into suppressing information, it will spread.
- null0pointer 2y agoInformation wants to be free (as in libre) in the same way water wants to flow downhill.
- JumpCrisscross 2y ago> Information wants to be free (as in libre) in the same way water wants to flow downhill Water flows downhill to maximise entropy. The equivalent for information is dissolution into randomness. If anything, by this analogy, the “freedom” that involves information being copied and transmitted is the equivalent of pumping water uphill. Freedom takes work. You don’t get it for free.
- neilv 2y agoInteresting. How would that work? The US certainly doesn't have a monopoly on the best scientists and engineers. How long can the US control sufficient capacity of hardware? (Without unspeakable atrocities.) Is the US planning to overwhelmingly outspend other countries? Or make AI-control treaties. And we'll have AI states and non-AI states?
- NemoNobody 2y agoThe US is the unparalleled economy and unlike it's only economic contender, the US has future growth projected out as far as the turn of the century - China has a near economic apocalypse projected for its country by the turn of the century. That's really not that far away. What leads you to believe the US wont continue to ourselves everyone whenever it deems want or reason? Historically that has been the case. China's future has drawn attention to the sand upon which the foundation of their economic growth sits. So. Who will outspend the single country that accounts for 25.32% of all global economic activity?? Who is going to do that??
- tokioyoyo 2y agoThere’ve been two new generations of kids that have been born since the “China is doomed” headlines have dominated the news. At some point, maybe, everyone should take them a bit more seriously? If one calls current US administrations methods “course correcting”, the same person should assume that another giant can do the same.
- JumpCrisscross 2y ago[flagged]
- snapcaster 2y agoDeng Xiaoping was a great leader and massively grew china, but he was a dictator too. I can understand thinking Xi isn't great but i don't see how him being a dictator plays into it when looking at China's leaders
- davesque 2y agoNot sure how that would work exactly. The math behind transformer models is really basic. And the world is different now than it was during the cold war. There was no internet, for example. Also, given that this was during an interview in which MA was criticizing the Biden administration, I'm assuming he was telling half truths to make Democrats look like bogeymen as all Trump crazed lunatics tend to do.
- bongodongobob 2y agoIt won't work. Restricting hard to find and process radioactive elements vs math... Yeah good luck.
- loeber 2y agoHow can you expect people to take your comment seriously if you can't even spell his name?
- jjulius 2y agoHow can you expect people to take you seriously as a CEO if you're going to attack someone for a mistake like that? And that's to say nothing of the fact that such an innocuous typo doesn't change the actual crux. A little, "Hey, dunno if you know or not, but it's 'Andreessen'," goes a long way.
- torginus 2y ago> they literally said, well, you know, during the Cold War we, we classified entire areas of physics and took them out of the research community and like entire branches of physics basically went dark and didn't proceed What are the odds that deep within US research labs, we have some crazy breakthrough tech tucked away? Like antigravity drives or force fields or whatever - complete with brand new breakthrough physical theories to support them. I'd guess suppressing such a breakthrough without raising suspicion wouldn't be hard - probably only a few top guys can make the intellectual jumps to derive such theories and the experimental setup to validate them could very well cost billions. The US government could just quietly whisk away the top talent into some secret lab, put out some fake papers showing this avenue of research is not noteworthy and not fund further public research in the area.
- CamperBob2 2y ago(a) Like all great conspiracy theories, it would require too many people to keep their mouths shut; and (b) nobody in China would care about any secrecy rules laid down by the US government, any more than Sakharov's team in Russia cared about the US's intention to monopolize the hydrogen bomb. The closest thing to this type of technology would be EUV hardware of the sort produced by ASML. We have now given China every incentive to put everything they've got into developing similar technology on their own soil. Despite slow progress to date, they will get there. Another analogy might be the math behind encryption, effectively monopolized by NSA for decades... but nobody's trillion-dollar economy was blocked by those secrets.
- throwaway314155 2y ago> What are the odds that deep within US research labs, we have some crazy breakthrough tech tucked away? Like antigravity drives or force fields or whatever - complete with brand new breakthrough physical theories to support them. Effectively zero? Did that sound more convincing when you originally wrote it? Because it's like conspiracy theory 101.
- griomnib 2y agoThis is so clearly a complete lie - in what universe is some top government official in the United States telling corporations to a) fall behind competing nations in advanced technology, b) set back our technological edge in the military, c) degrade the USA ability to spy on and control information access/controls in other countries, or d) do anything other than fish for an insider trading opportunity.
- chrisfosterelli 2y agoAI promises a lot of creative destruction. There are a plethora of historical examples where elites have restricted technological development because they thought it was a threat to the status quo and therefore their ability to extract wealth from that status quo. For example: Queen Elizabeth refusing to grant a patent for the first knitting machine, the Qing dynasty forbidding large-scale ship building, or the Ottoman Empire outlawing the printing press. I'm not sure that this is what is happening here, but it's occurrence is not impossible.
- griomnib 2y agoThe CEOs and investor class are the elites. Politicians answer to them, not the other way around.
- chrisfosterelli 2y agoI think you misunderstood me to be talking about just the politicians. Mark is claiming the gov is going to limit new entrants and give an effective monopoly to the large, established entities with political power. When the US applied arms export restrictions on cryptography mathematics during the cold war, they gave exceptions to companies like IBM.
- kjkjadksj 2y agoYou don’t even need to dip into the historical record. The government set back atomic energy research for decades out of fears of that technology being shared among the people of the world. And what do you know, the fossil fuel industry just happened to reap heavy benefit from that decision.
- miohtama 2y agoTrump revoked Biden's AI executive order as one of the first things in the office https://www.cio.com/article/3806594/trump-repeals-bidens-ai-oversight-order-shifts-focus-to-innovation-driven-policies.html?amp=1 https://www.cio.com/article/3806594/trump-repeals-bidens-ai-...
- kjkjadksj 2y agoWell that is honestly a bit of a relief. If the government wants to stymie innovation like this the product isn’t going to take my job anytime soon.