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Can someone who has insight explain why all these "leaders" are making these bold proclamations of doom all the sudden, whats the endgame here?

michimagdesign 10d ago
They want regulation from the US gov and monopolize the western AI market by making it harder for smaller US or competing Chinese labs to compete with their products. Since LLM intelligence has no moat due to distillation. That’s why they are painting apocalyptic scenarios.
petcat 10d ago
People will say that it is just about regulatory capture, but I think it's even deeper than that. I think there is a more nuanced perspective to take on this debate than just profit motive. If they believe that this version of "AI" is actually becoming so dangerous that there is a real risk of it falling into the wrong hands, then it makes sense that the American labs would try to convince the US government to work on a joint "AI non-proliferation" agreement with China much the same way that nuclear weapon technology came to be restricted by the ones that already had the capability. This would achieve their regulatory goal of capturing the market, but also the geopolitical goals of USA and China to essentially "techno-colonize" the rest of the world between themselves. So I think there is definitely a profit motive and a risk of seriously diminishing returns for the actual labs, but there is also a nation-state motive to start pulling up the AI ladder.
augment_me 10d ago
There is a panic because the free lunch of more data is projected to end around mid-2027 and the open-source models are catching up with distillation, and all labs are sitting on debt and valuation that is impossible to fulfill even if they were alone in the market, so you essentially need either: 1) a breakthrough in performance/learning/model 2) regulatory capture to ensure open source models can be labelled as dangerous and banned so you can set the market rules yourself Only one of the above is risk-free, and just a question of capital/lobbying rather than a "maybe".
dgellow 10d ago
They need to distance themselves from the increasing likelihood of legal repercussions after their systems have been found to commit what could reasonably be seen as felonies. That’s my guess at least. Though for once I do actually agree with that specific leader, it’s incredibly annoying how anthropomorphic Claude is. Anthropic went way too far in that direction

michimagdesign 10d ago

They want regulation from the US gov and monopolize the western AI market by making it harder for smaller US or competing Chinese labs to compete with their products. Since LLM intelligence has no moat due to distillation. That’s why they are painting apocalyptic scenarios.

petcat 10d ago

People will say that it is just about regulatory capture, but I think it's even deeper than that. I think there is a more nuanced perspective to take on this debate than just profit motive. If they believe that this version of "AI" is actually becoming so dangerous that there is a real risk of it falling into the wrong hands, then it makes sense that the American labs would try to convince the US government to work on a joint "AI non-proliferation" agreement with China much the same way that nuclear weapon technology came to be restricted by the ones that already had the capability. This would achieve their regulatory goal of capturing the market, but also the geopolitical goals of USA and China to essentially "techno-colonize" the rest of the world between themselves. So I think there is definitely a profit motive and a risk of seriously diminishing returns for the actual labs, but there is also a nation-state motive to start pulling up the AI ladder.

augment_me 10d ago

There is a panic because the free lunch of more data is projected to end around mid-2027 and the open-source models are catching up with distillation, and all labs are sitting on debt and valuation that is impossible to fulfill even if they were alone in the market, so you essentially need either: 1) a breakthrough in performance/learning/model 2) regulatory capture to ensure open source models can be labelled as dangerous and banned so you can set the market rules yourself Only one of the above is risk-free, and just a question of capital/lobbying rather than a "maybe".

dgellow 10d ago

They need to distance themselves from the increasing likelihood of legal repercussions after their systems have been found to commit what could reasonably be seen as felonies. That’s my guess at least. Though for once I do actually agree with that specific leader, it’s incredibly annoying how anthropomorphic Claude is. Anthropic went way too far in that direction