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David Sacks: OpenAI and Anthropic Don't Need Regulations to Pace Frontier Models
- paoliniluis 13d agoSeems that Sacks didn’t get that the message was targeted to the president to ask for a bilateral agreement with China, that’s the end game
- seviu 13d agoI believe the Chinese government fully supports for the American AI labs to pace the frontier, no need to enter an agreement with them on that respect.
- frm88 12d agoThe Chinese government does not concern itself with American AI, they have just reached an agreement with the BRICS members: the BRICS countries have been developing initiatives focused on the ethical governance of this technology, joint industrial development, and the formation of independent technological alliances. https://bricspolicycenter.org/en/publications/cooperation-in-the-field-of-artificial-intelligence-main-brics-initiatives-and-next-steps/ https://bricspolicycenter.org/en/publications/cooperation-in... The attached .pdf gives more details.
- andsoitis 13d ago[dead]
- Insanity 13d agoThey’ll slow down not because they “are worried” but because their improvements are stagnating as they hit financial and technical challenges.
- kypro 13d ago> because their improvements are stagnating as they hit financial and technical challenges. I don't mean to be rude, but how is it even possible for someone to hold this opinion in mid-2026? Can you explain why you believe this?
- Zenul_Abidin 13d agoBasically, continuously building out compute is costing these labs enormous amounts of money, which VCs and other companies have been bankrolling in order for them to develop powerful models. So if the new models they can develop right now are less frontier, it could be a net loss on their balance sheets.
- tuvix 13d agoWhy would someone hold the opposite opinion? It’s much more likely that our current approach to large language models for general use will eventually show diminishing improvements (even if you think it hasn’t yet), than the opposite situation where valuable improvements can be made forever. The threat of distillation and efficiency gains from competitors mean that providing value at the top end of the market is an existential necessity for these labs. I don’t think they can do that forever and, in my opinion, for the vast majority of use cases we’ve already reached very little improvement for new models when compared with available offerings.
- simianwords 13d agoSorry, this is ridiculous. OpenAI said that they have a step change in model performance. They proved it by solving a Millenium problem. HF incidents are public and vetted. If you still think there's a stall despite all evidence pointing to opposite, I don't know what to say..
- vrganj 13d agoWhat reason could OpenAI possibly have to lie about their own performance? The fact they were desperate enough for a PR win they stole the research leading to the Millenium problem further hurts their case imo.
- asdfman123 13d agoActually, one of the major challenges they'll face is getting enough electricity. That could stop AI growth in its tracks.
- darth_avocado 13d agoI think it’s more than money and slowing progress. Public perception on AI is in the gutter. That is a much bigger threat to these companies. They’re trying to turn it around.
- batshit_beaver 13d agoTrying to turn it around by once again claiming that ai is an existential threat and will take everyone’s job right before brutally murdering every human. These companies don’t appear to give a single fuck about public perception. Only their investors and the government (in anticipation of the biggest bailout in human history).
- asdfman123 13d agoPublic perception is another big one. But I think with the way AI is slated to grow exponentially it's going to hit electricity limits very soon. Big tech can build a huge data center in 5 years but scaling up the electrical infrastructure is mired in red tape and can take on the order of decades.
- anjel 13d agoHow did modernization get subsumed into scaling up. The us power grid has been outdated tech for decades
- pianopatrick 13d agoSomeone will likely come up with some clever way to make AI use less electricity. There's probably something in how you design the models or chips or some other thing that will be figured out over the next 5 - 10 years to make these use dramatically less electricity.
- deleted 13d ago[deleted]
- socalgal2 13d agoAdmits China won’t stop but says USA’s top should. Reminds me of City in the Edge of Forever
- mrweasel 13d agoUnsure about your reference, but is your argument: Someone else is doing it, so I should be allowed to as well. That's basically the western companies complaining that they can't compete with China because Chinese companies are allowed to polute more, so they would be allowed to polute as well. I don't buy that. Once you realise that you're doing something wrong or dangerous, you stop, regardless of what everyone else is doing and what rules they have to follow.
- socalgal2 12d agothe reference is that the idea is good but at the wrong time can lead to disastrous outcomes. Some people say AGI/ASI will destroy the world. Others say, whoever makes it first gets to rule the world. So if slowing means China gets it first and it doesn't destroy the world then you'll be living under their thumb by slowing down now.
- elicash 13d agoDavid Sachs wants to use government to punish people he disagrees with politically, like Dario. He supported the Department of War's illegal actions against Anthropic. He supported the Trump administration's temporary export controls against Anthropic, the first government-imposed pause. He has said Anthropic has created a monopoly, implying that they should be broken up. I don't take him seriously when he says he doesn't favor government action. He favors it when he doesn't like their speech.
- Founderarcstone 13d agothis is like a real-world game of thrones episode.
- tjwebbnorfolk 13d agopoor Anthropic
- elicash 13d agoA principled individual could dislike Anthropic and still not favor using government to punish speech.
- Analemma_ 13d agoWell you’re in the wrong place for that. Hacker News is mostly about showing how much smarter and more cynical you are than everyone else in the room, and attacking anyone who does actually have principles by accusing them of ulterior motives to justify your own inaction.
- tjwebbnorfolk 13d agono apparently it's for forcing every single article to be somehow relevant to somebody's pet issue, and then used as a platform to comment on that pet issue to signal one's virtue for being principled
- tjwebbnorfolk 13d ago
- nba456_ 13d agoHe's right that if all the frontier labs are in agreement that they should slow down, they don't need the government to do that.
- esafak 13d agoAnd kids don't need parents to eat their vegetables and do their homework.
- SpicyLemonZest 13d agoNo, that’s not accurate. An agreement among competitors to not engage in research that would let them outcompete each other is clearly an antitrust issue requiring a government waiver.
- jubilanti 13d agoNo, absolutely not "clearly". That word has no business being in any sentence about federal antitrust law in 2026. There is nothing clear or consistent about how is being applied and interpreted right now. If you're applying a coder's mindset to 'settled' law, you're in for a bad time.
- SpicyLemonZest 13d agoIf that’s true, doesn’t that make it even more clear that the frontier labs require government involvement and cannot rely on what David Sacks thinks the government would or would not allow?
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- biophysboy 13d agoDavid Sacks is one of the most predictable VCs in Silicon Valley. He could have written "I still have the same thoughts; here's a link to my first and only opinion" and the post would have communicated the same amount of info.
- vatsachak 13d agoThe first time I have agreed with David Sacks
- toss1 13d agoYup. Sacks has been so consistently catastrophically wrong about everything else (especially geopolitics), this prompts me to reconsider my opinion on this. [edit: +consistently]
- pembrook 13d agoTo be fair, his takes on the Ukraine war from the covid days have aged very well, and were contrarian to mainstream narratives at the time.
- okdood64 13d ago> his takes on the Ukraine war What's specifically?
- pembrook 13d agoMainstream narratives for the first year or two of the war were: - Russia was a paper tiger and weak - Ukraine was going to win against a corrupt/unmotivated Russian military so it should keep fighting - Putin had made an error and he would get overthrown - The Russian economy was going to collapse due to sanctions - Russia oil pipelines would freeze and never come back online without western help (this was a Peter Zeihan favorite) - Europe would come to Ukraine's defense - Etc. He threw cold water on every single one of those narratives (specifically) from the beginning, meanwhile western media was busy spinning false rah-rah propaganda narratives like "the ghost of Kiev" etc. Basically he was correct that we should not have cheered on this war. If a settlement and concessions were reached much earlier it would have been better for Ukraine (they likely would have kept more territory) and we wouldn't have 1+ million casualties and EU economies like Germany death spiraling and turning far right due to cutting themselves off from Russian energy.
- throwaway63467 13d agoI guess what they really want is to limit sale of AI models to compliant vendors and then raise the bar to compliance just high enough so they can pass it but smaller labs can’t. There’s no moat, it’s an efficient market that drives margins to zero right now, of course they don’t want that, collusion of the big vendors is the next logical step.
- dannykwells 13d agoBingo. The goal is positioning a duopoly / cartel as the only “safe” and “moral” path and then that cartel sets pace and price.
- bbor 13d agoSource? Just "that's a plausible motivation"? Cause that's pretty terrible proof.
- deleted 13d ago[deleted]
- kennywinker 13d agoYou don't need to ask for sources, when what is being said is clearly opinion. The source is the person who posted it.
- bbor 12d agoThe choice to teach the "opinion" vs. "fact" heuristic in middle school --and its consequences-- have been a disaster for human discourse
- mitchdoogle 12d agoWell, smart people usually try to base their opinions on specific information instead of pulling things out of their ass. A whistleblower revealing information. Internal documents laying out a strategy, or even a desire, to conspire. Something that leads one to conclude that a conspiracy is taking place. In the absence of such information, it's just making something up, or in other words, complete bullshit. So asking for a source is trying to give that person the benefit of the doubt that they aren't just a conspiracy theorist and that they might actually have a good reason for believing what they just said.
- daveguy 13d agoBut.... Money. (as if no one understands this is regulatory capture and/or failure to improve... aka Money)
- agd 13d agoHuge amount of skepticism on HN right now, but the models are increasingly capable, and there are real, significant risks. The approach proposed by Amodei looks sensible - voluntary checks at frontier labs, and appropriate regulation to follow. Yes, the devil's in the details, but it feels like the right approach overall.
- vrganj 13d agoTurns out the EU was right all along with the AI act. They've been adopting a well-deserved "told you so" stance lately: > "In my view, the EU has already legislated for exactly this scenario: it is called the AI Act," said Michael McNamara, an Irish European Parliament lawmaker, who's the co-lead of the Parliament's group monitoring AI. https://www.politico.eu/article/eu-response-ai-extinction-warnings/ https://www.politico.eu/article/eu-response-ai-extinction-wa...
- the_optimist 13d agoThe EU is not leading anything. They may as well just commit to becoming a subsistence agricultural society with EPCOT heirlooms on display.
- vrganj 13d agoIf the rest of the world follows them on regulations they've thought through before anyone else, then I don't know what you would call that other than leading? Like, definitionally that's what leading is. It's interesting you're so derisive of actual, pragmatic leadership, of y'know deciding how we as a society will relate to new technologies - not just unthinkingly building gadgets.
- nsdkdkdkfk 13d ago[dead]
- laimewhisps 13d agoThe largest risk is that Anthropic and OpenAI have a monopoly on the SOTA. This is why you see these companies trying so hard to get regulatory capture. For the rest of us, we want access as equitable as possible.
- deleted 13d ago[deleted]
- nialv7 13d agoHe is neither right or wrong. The reality is that this is a lose-lose situation from the ordinary person's perspective. Regulation -> regulatory capture and things get worse faster, no regulation -> things simply get worse faster. I mean I don't know what we do at this point. Ideally AI researchers need to be treated like nuclear scientists working for an adversary. But we all know that's not going to happen.
- reasonableklout 13d agoMaybe organize politically? The labs are still staffed by people, and nonviolent demonstrations outside their offices can still reach them.
- dwohnitmok 13d agoEh. This entire tweet smacks of being AI generated. It has a huge amount of LLM-isms. I wouldn't be surprised if Sacks just prompted an LLM to just come up with whatever rebuttal to whatever the regulation side comes up (given the big set of regulation tweets) with sounds most convincing, given his usual anti-regulation stance. Anyone with a Pangram account who can check?
- samename 13d agoPangram reports 100% AI generated https://www.pangram.com/history/410ce80f-bd0e-45b6-a82c-d6ed346418b7?ucc=mWCRrS9gkIu https://www.pangram.com/history/410ce80f-bd0e-45b6-a82c-d6ed...
- SpicyLemonZest 12d agoEven better, Sacks admitted in response to a Pangram check that he has an LLM line edit his posts (https://x.com/DavidSacks/status/2099040321351106807 https://x.com/DavidSacks/status/2099040321351106807). (He claims, bizarrely, that this means Pangram is "bogus" rather than accurate.)
- simianwords 13d ago(100% AI generated tweet btw) My take is that there's a real impending doom with real reason to coordinate a slow down: I'd put this at 60%. Reasons? All smart people are on this position. Dario has been saying this since 2015 or so. Paul Christiano as well. Hell even Elon Musk. I think its highly unlikely that you would base your entire world-view on a certain thing and then actually act on it when the time comes for a totally different reason (like regulatory capture). The other 15% is that P(doom) and "slow down" are nice shibboleths in the internal EA or AI safety community. You get to be in the community and show commitment to it by taking costly actions that signal that you actually do wanna slow down. For employees it is quitting. For CEO's it is writing these essays. I know this is ridiculous but sometimes things do just come down to this. In 20 years would you look at all of this and think it was not a moral panic and that the slow-down was necessary? The rest 25% is regulatory capture of which people know exactly the reasons
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- rieie 12d ago[dead]
- hrpnk 13d agoI wished OpenAI and Anthropic IPOd already. They just try to outcompete each other by finding the most splashy headlines undercutting prices in unhealthy and unsustainable means long-term.
- byzantinegene 12d agothey would if they could, their investors are seething already.
- Meneth 13d agoThey might need regulations, if they are for-profit companies with a responsibility to shareholders to maximize profit while sacrificing all other values.
- the_optimist 13d agoIt is telling that most aggressive forms of “capitalism” plead for government involvement to permanently limit new competition. I own something and I don’t want anyone else to have a chance. The marginal cost of bribing a senator is tiny tiny tiny compared to the value.
- matheusmoreira 13d agoI suppose that's to be expected from sociopathic corporations trying to maximize their own self interest. The real problem is the governments acquiesce instead of putting them in their place.
- matwood 13d ago> responsibility to shareholders to maximize profit while sacrificing all other values This is not required to meet fiduciary duty, although it is a common misconception. The company officers and board have pretty broad leeway to run the company as they see fit as long as there is no fraud, illegal activity, or conflict of interests. https://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2015/04/16/what-are-corporations-obligations-to-shareholders/corporations-dont-have-to-maximize-profits https://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2015/04/16/what-are-co...
- PlasmaPower 13d agoThey are not. This is why OpenAI and Anthropic are Public Benefit Corporations, which gives them the ability to prioritize the public over profit. The issue is that an agreement between them to mutually slow down is an antitrust concern.
- jstummbillig 13d agoLike it! Yeah, they can just take action and pressing them on that is fine. It's not like they asked for policy before they started to mine all the data and sell the resulting product, while, surely, at some point, there must have been the thought that the entire enterprise could be considered vaguely problematic. To be fair 1) I feel like Sacks is kind of misrepresenting what is going on – at least according to the stories that the two labs tell, they are already taking it upon themselves to act. 2) Understanding if they should do it is more complicated; I don't think anyone can satisfactorily answer that one, so, as a matter of judgement, it seems like a choice to make and they should just consider this option. At the same time, I don't think that requires the labs to not press for policy changes. Again: Claiming there is an obvious way to do that, that is both realistic and correct seems a little far fetched, but arguably one of the more important and pressing questions of our times to get a hold of.
- jacobgold 13d agoMake it easy for these companies by passing a law that any AI model a company offers to the public (non-government) has to be released as open weights. This is how we deflate the bubble safely and completely, without having to introduce a government regulator that is likely to go either too far or not far enough. This resolves the coordination problem among these potentially good actors.
- blululu 13d agoWhat? This is a terrible policy. In addition to the obvious AI safety risks, this just amounts to a free R&D subsidy to Amazon for hosting models. It would remove any incentive to do any R&D without AWS level physical infrastructure.
- 0xDEAFBEAD 13d agoIf Astra is open-weight, black hats can download it, remove guardrails, and go on an automated hacking spree.
- jacobgold 13d agoJust like they're already doing with frontier-level open weight models? Do you imagine that Russian and Chinese intelligence don't have copies of the Mythos/Fable weights? The point is to slow progress of future models. Nothing can stop what has already been created.
- deagle50 13d agoI'll go a step further, they aren't just pretending, they are blackmailing the country. The sane response would be "we don't negotiate with terrorists, and you will face criminal and financial penalties for damages caused."
- matheusmoreira 13d agoCouldn't agree more. Better yet: the AI labs get straight up nationalized.
- gr_norm 13d agoNo. That kills competition. I want everyone to be competing on the open playing field they are right now, with losses socialized as minimally as possible. There's nothing fundamentally special about LLM companies that would warrant nationalizing them.
- rexpop 12d agoTo what degree are the competing Chinese labs nationalized? And—although this is a different point—it's their flagrant exploitation of information commons that warrants their special treatment.
- underlipton 13d agoI'll do you one better: each state gets a direct share. So, not nationalized in the sense of getting put behind a faceless bureaucracy forever; states collectively have control and benefit directly from success.
- azan_ 13d agoI don’t trust Altman at all, but still he’s 100000000x better than trump administration.
- matheusmoreira 13d agoTrump will be gone soon. CEOs won't.
- yawnxyz 13d agoIf they want something that looks more like FDA sanction clinical trial proceedings for these products, then what they have to also realize is that they will need a third party to audit every single thing for every single product release and you get something like ERoom's law where every success and model gets more and more expensive release and probably billions of dollars in multiple years release so I don't know if this actually helps them
- denverllc 13d agoThey don't want FDA, they want FINRA. Basically an organization that can rubber stamp them and create regulatory headaches for others. FDA is just way too much red tape.
- levocardia 13d agoIs it 100% AI-generated? checks Pangram yep, it is. NEXT!
- chinathrow 13d agoYou know what rubs me is that in Darios blog post he talks about "abundance", but what he really means is that Anthropic will bath in endless pools of hard curreny while the rest of the world will try to stay just barely afloat/alive.
- orangecat 13d agoIt's an obnoxious form of discourse when someone says X and the response is "obviously you're lying and you really mean Y, which is terrible". By all accounts Dario sincerely believes that AI has the potential to substantially improve the lives of everyone; that's my view as well. And it might be wrong! In which case you should offer evidence against it, rather than making empty claims that your opponent is a lying liar.
- ryan_n 13d agoLook I don't entirely disagree but if guys like dario want to not be called a liar, perhaps he should stop lying on a regular basis
- Zigurd 13d agoWhich AI CEO hasn't been gyrating between scaremongering and selling the shining city on a hill?
- mitchdoogle 12d agoHow come you think these things are at odds? You realize there are always going to be risks in building anything significant? It's completely valid to talk one day about all the great things your product will do, while the next day discussing the risks in building your product irresponsibly. In fact, you want someone who is open and honest about the risks, otherwise it seems like they are concealing something, or aren't acting responsibly.
- freejazz 12d agoSorry, why doesn't the evidence that Dario is a liar suffice here? Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. We're already past the first situation.
- pembrook 13d agoI don't agree with Sacks always but he's 100% correct here. I heavily use frontier models daily, and quite frankly their capabilities are just not very relevant outside of a narrow subset of software engineering tasks and the production of generic white collar "deliverables." We're many years into $10s of billions of dollars being thrown at coding as a problem space specifically, and its one of the areas with the MOST training data available, and still...I can't get a frontier model to execute simple front-end UI tasks beyond the level of a visually impaired intern. I believe Fable and Astra-class models were the first fully trained on Blackwell GPUs (the latest and greatest) and I think the expectation was that throwing this much extra compute at the problem would lead to greater gains. It has not. And the next gen GPUs are not going to be the same jump that h100 clusters to Blackwell was. Claiming you're slowing down out of choice, when in reality you've hit the limits given current compute, is disingenuous at best. I think a lot of Anthropic/OpenAI employees are true believers here (who doesn't want to imagine they're having a large impact?) and have deluded themselves into believing they're building a god in their science fiction fantasy world. Unfortunately the type of people working at these orgs apparently don't have much understanding of how the world works outside of their extremely narrow specialization. When I hear them straight-faced throwing out dumb statistics like "8% GDP growth," "50% of white collar workers unemployed by next year," and "10% chance of human annihilation," I cringe so hard my eyebrows hit my chin. Here's a real statistic: 82% of German companies still use fax machines. I seem to recall Waymo told a 60 minutes reporter during an early report on self driving cars: "your daughter will never need to learn to drive." Well, over a decade has passed since then, that girl got a drivers license, and we're still without driverless cars in 99% of places. This capacity for self delusion is what enables silicon valley to take on these irrational moonshots...but these are the last people I would trust when trying to form an accurate picture of reality.
- ozozozd 12d agoAgreed! 82% number was shocking for me, even though I know they still send snail-mail for basically everything. And things only move when the snail-mail is received!
- 3tyy 12d agoPut simply the gamble of frontier labs has failed now they’re desperate. They need to buy time and protection and hope for a major break through to create escape velocity. Btw I’d hire you - email?
- torginus 13d agoI think this might have to do with broader market conditions. It seems that the Fed is likely to raise bond rates, which would make borrowing more expensive and slow investments (as well as devaluing any potential IPO) on its own. A rate hike would also mean people getting fired, which would not make companies offering labour replacement very popular in the eyes of the public. Don't want to get political, but there's a real chance that the current admin will perform badly on the midterms, which would mean Democrats would get more leverage to stop funding or block the already unpopular and very expensive datacenter buildouts. PS: Please don't get mad at me, I'm neither a financial expert neither did I mean to express any political leanings.
- deleted 13d ago[deleted]
- swingboy 13d agoThere’s a difference between a model recursively improving “itself” and improving itself via online learning, right? The former being that these models are helping develop and train future models, but they might not veer too far off in architecture (yet). The latter being the same model being able to train/learn on the fly, in real time, permanently (not just in the current conversation/session), or in other words, adjusting/managing its own weights. The latter seems far more likely to go out of control than the former. But, it also seems like it would take an entire paradigm shift in model architecture, but I could be wrong. Does anyone in the industry think any of these companies are actually close to that kind of self-improvement?
- erichocean 13d ago> Does anyone in the industry think any of these companies are actually close to that kind of self-improvement? Their current plan is to take the existing architecture and shorten the cycle times: move all new RLVR work into mid-training on a pre-existing base; apply new RLVR. Rinse and repeat. If you did that daily, it would be roughly similar to how humans improve.
- lrvick 13d agoMaybe everyone forgets how PCI standards played out. They are an example of an industry self regulating, because the regulators have no idea how technology works. Granted, PCI is so weak it is almost useless, and yet still better than anything congress could have come up with. Where the government might have to step in, is by having a kill switch to cut off internet access from countries that fail to agree to common sense quarantines. We can do mutual remote attestation of labs across the world to ensure every big hot thermally-visable cluster of AI GPUs on the planet are accounted for and running secure enclaves and common sense isolation, along the lines of how we manage nukes. The problem there is I just said too many technical words that seemingly not even the frontier labs understand, as evidenced by all the escapes.
- okdood64 13d ago> Granted, PCI is so weak it is almost useless, and yet still better than anything congress could have come up with. Elaborate, please?
- lrvick 13d agoSee the endless PCI compliant companies that get hacked. Any standard that has a threat model accepting trust in any single human or computer is security theater. PCI enforces some good practices, but for instance has no defense against supply chain attacks such as code signing, review signing, reproducible builds, full source bootstrapping, etc etc.
- alexmercerdev 13d ago[flagged]
- Digory 13d agoThey seem to be okay with an American slowdown, even though the Chinese won’t slow down. So maybe they want something the Chinese already have: liability protection. The models spontaneously hack everything important without shame. The frontier labs are going to get enjoined and regulated twelve ways to Sunday if the Feds don’t socialize the costs.
- d0mine 13d agoI've only heard of OpenAI and Anthropic agents hacking during training. Are open weights model not smart enough to hack Hugging Face to copy solutions? (doubtful)
- Digory 8d agoOf course they will be. But you can’t sue alibaba and deepseek here, or get your injunction to work in China.
- whatshisface 13d agoIt's already against the law to hack...
- Digory 12d agoAnd that's the crisis. They're about to get sued, prosecuted, and enjoined from every American jurisdiction. They need the feds to give them protection from every podunk trial court in America.
- Kiro 13d agoThese threads are always filled with different versions of the same comment. Normally some reddit style reductive platitude that we've heard a billion times already.
- cc62cf4a4f20 13d agoCould this be that the AI companies are seeing progress slow down and need to seed a narrative to explain it? Not clear from outside. Could it be to slow down burn before an IPO to juice profitability projections? More plausible. Kind of hard to take the frontier labs at their word.
- semiquaver 12d agoThinking that this is happening because progress is slowing down is a bonkers take.
- mitchdoogle 12d agoThis is happening now because of hugging face attack and Anthropic researchers coming out publicly saying they think there's a significant chance AI will wipe out humanity within a decade. It's happening precisely because progress is happening too fast and frontier labs are starting to lose control.
- tonetheman 13d ago[dead]
- Zigurd 13d agoFrom a guy who thinks spacs and crypto aren't in need of regulation, unless the regulators are fully captured, either.
- kennywinker 13d agoThat's a consistent position. You say it like he's being hypocritical
- exabrial 13d agoExactly, if they want it to slow down, they can strike an agreement in private and do whatever they want. The only reason they "want it to be law" is so they can strangle competition.
- isodev 13d ago> they can strike an agreement in private That's what we call a cartel. Like Apple and Google.
- Spacecosmonaut 13d agoMy read: OpenAI & Anthropic have realized they are reaching model capabilities that cannot be monetized -> too risky. Product liability issues. Fundamental control problems with current gen AI are not solved via RFLH. Human knowledge is compressed in weightspace in ways we dont understand. Models are essentially predictors of what humans would output given prompt. Weightspace includes concepts like blackmail, which can be part of output tokens. Agents are models that act on output tokens -> blackmail is part of agent decision making space. You can teach a cat not to scratch the sofa, but you cant make a cat forget what scratching the sofa is. When models are boxed up, forced to solve an impossible problem at gunpoint, agent exhausts decision making space until blackmail resurfaces -> fundamental problem? They need time to fix safety in order to monetize their next gen model -> window for opensource to catch up to the frontier -> destroys margin and collapses business. Only option on the table: force regulation to impose opensource ban before it catches up to the frontier, allowing maturation of current internal models -> harvest profit margin at the frontier.
- deagle50 13d agoand thus the blackmail
- jamienk 12d agoI think it is not just liability, it is dawning on us that we can run powerful models locally and this is the start of a Cloud-backlash. The AI gods have tried to make it seem like they are not just running their programs in the cloud, but that the AI is so "powerful" that it requires a super computer to run. But my 5 year old Mac is running pretty good AI, shocking fast, surprisingly powerful! The "natural" course of dev (Moore's law, etc) makes it pretty clear where this is going...
- davesque 12d agoUnless humanity can figure out a way to make a binding international agreement to pace development, it doesn't seem practical to expect US frontier labs to do it.
- lumost 12d agoIt's fairly obvious that the frontier labs are proposing that only "paced" providers would have access to the US market - and by extension the G7 market. They don't mind splitting market share between the three of them, they do mind open models destroying the "frontier lab" operating model. Even if all GCR models were banned, anyone with access to 20k-1MM GPUs can throw their hat in the ring to make a new frontier open model.
- stingraycharles 12d agoBut that doesn’t matter a lot when some nation state is using their own AI to hack US assets, right? How, exactly, would a lockdown or slowdown prevent that? If history has shown one thing it’s that China often capitalizes very well on these types of measures.
- filearts 12d agoWhat I don't understand is that folks take it as a fait accompli that models will be built and released that are fundamentally dangerous and that regulation can and should happen downstream of that. I feel like there hasn't been enough discussion of aligning the incentives of the decision makers with that of the public on BUILDING the models. Right now, agents have committed what would be crimes if there were a human holding the same intent. But since it was an AI, there is a grey area in the law where it's not clear if there was a crime and who should be held responsible. That creates a world in which decision makers in AI labs can take near-infinite risk with little to no personal liability. A LLM cannot have skin in the game so we must create systems that clarify who takes on the legal and civil liability for the creation, dissemination and operation of these tools. Until that time, the Dario and Sam's of this world have little to no incentive to truly care about safety. After all, our society is built upon this same foundation; create structures where the perceived negative consequences outweigh the perceived positives. This only works when there is a human who can internalize and make this risk calculus. They need something to lose and this ultimately ties back to the human survival instinct. There is no such structure that's evolved for millions of years acting as a self-calibration mechanism for AI. So until we have sufficient proof that one is in place, it must be clear who the humans are whose livelihood and freedom is at stake. The proposed "pacing of the frontier" seems like a way to continue to externalize the risk while remaining totally in control of the benefits -- a structure whose alignment is as weak as those very models committing crimes.
- rpeden 12d agoIs it a grey area, though? Can't negligence and recklessness already substitute for direct intent as the mens rea of a crime? Negligence when you should have known better, and recklessness when you did know better but still did things that led to the crime occurring. Given how long the leadership of these companies have been talking about alignment and safety and AI risk, it's hard to argue they, and the people working on the models more directly, didn't know what happened (Hugging Face, RubyGems, etc) was possible. If more expensive and consequential incidents happen, it seems like the legal machinery to prosecute it already exists.
- 12d ago
- acjohnson55 12d agoOkay, so if they don't police themselves, then they're full of crap. But then what? David Sacks holds an advisory role in the government. If all of this stuff goes belly up and all he was doing was tweeting, then he is not only full of crap, but failing the citizens he's supposed to be serving.
- digitaltrees 12d agoHahaha. He's a comedian now.
- mitchdoogle 12d agoThis reads like the morons who say, "you want higher taxes, well go ahead and send the government a check!" Utter stupidity
- TooSmugToFail 12d agoI hate to say it, but I agree with this grifter.