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Ah, the classic AI startup lifecycle: We must build a moat to save humanity from AI. Please regulate our open-source competitors for safety. Actually, safety
by heftykoo 7mo ago
Ah, the classic AI startup lifecycle:
We must build a moat to save humanity from AI.
Please regulate our open-source competitors for safety.
Actually, safety doesn't scale well for our Q3 revenue targets.
- dmix 7mo agoOnce they are a dominant market leader they will go back to asking the government to regulate based on policy suggestions from non-profits they also fund.
- nielsbot 7mo agoIs this sarcasm?
- bee_rider 7mo agoI think it is cynicism; at least, there’s an idea that once a company is dominant it should want regulation, as it’ll stifle competition (since the competition has less capacity for regulatory hoop-jumping, or the competition will have had less time to do regulatory capture).
- wiml 7mo agoI wouldn't think so. Regulatory capture is a pretty typical activity for a dominant company.
- baq 7mo agosama did just that a couple years ago
- Frieren 7mo agoIt is well know that big corporations take good regulations and change them to make them: 1. Easier to bypass for themselves. 2. Create extra work for incumbents. 3. Convince the public that the problems are solved so no other action is needed. In many industries goverment and corporations work together to create regulations bypassing the social movements that asked for the industry to be regulated and their actual problems. The end result are regulations that are extremely complex to add exceptions for anything that big corporations paid to change instead of regulations that protect citizens and encourage competition.
- deltoidmaximus 7mo agoSee the Mattel lead painted toy scandal. The end result was congress passed regulations that manufacturers had to have their toys tested for lead and then made large companies like Mattel exempt from it because they were deemed large enough to handle it on their own. Even though they were the reason for the legislation because they weren't handling it on their own. Mattel sells lead painted toys and congress responds by hobbling their competitors.
- amelius 7mo agoAs if their shareholders would agree.
- baq 7mo agoFoundational model provider manifesto: ‘While there’s value in safety, we value the Pentagon’s dollars more’
- pera 7mo agoIt turns out the biggest threat to AI safety is capitalism, who would have thought
- hiAndrewQuinn 7mo agoNick Land has basically been saying this since the 90s, if you can look past all the rhetoric
- gom_jabbar 7mo agoExactly. He recently said the following in an interview: "AI safety and anti-capitalism [...] are at least strongly analogous, if not exactly the same thing." [0] [0] Nick Land (2026). A Conversation with Nick Land (Part 2) by Vincent Lê in Architechtonics Substack. Retrieved from vincentl3.substack.com/p/a-conversation-with-nick-land-part-a4f
- junofan 7mo agoI don’t get it. Even the Soviet Union used money. Simply paying for stuff isn’t necessarily capitalism? Or are you suggesting Anthropic should be state-owned?
- jwr 7mo agoIt's not just AI, replace "safe" with "open" and you will find a close match with many companies. I guess the difference is that after the initial phase, we are continuously being gaslighted by companies calling things "open" when they are most definitely not.
- varispeed 7mo agoPoliticians also love to regulate, especially over wine and steak and when the watchers don't watch.
- yesimahuman 7mo agoThe only surprise is how quickly it all happened!