Foaming the runways
Firmly closing the door after the horse has already escaped and is kicking everybody.
Normal person Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, has called for Pacing the Frontier.
I don’t pay much attention to the market-manipulating psyops of the big AI companies anymore, but this hit different since SpaceX, Google and OpenAI swung in behind him to agree. When a cabal of billionaires align on something in public, I am immediately suspicious, and it seems like I’m not the only one.
Former US FTC comissioner Alvero Boyeda said:
AI will not eradicate humanity. Humans survived an ice age, the Black Death, two world wars, and (so far) the advent of nuclear weapons. Anyone who is loudly warning of AI-caused human extinction should not be taken seriously.
Antitrust law does absolutely prevent AI companies from organizing to prevent the entry of cheaper, upstart rivals because the bigger companies are burning cash and failing to achieve sufficient profitability. The panic of individual employees may be sincere if misguided, but the moves by their CEOs to achieve some kind of broad “antitrust waiver” or “exemption” should be meet with deep skepticism in light of the economics of the industry and the threat they face from open models.
It hadn’t occurred to me that they would be trying to form a cartel - I think because like many others I’m still not convinced of the world-shattering ability of statistical inference models with zero world knowledge to reshape society:
Far more impactful than the tech itself - which has many valid uses - is the scale of unprecedented capital resources being deployed behind it:
Data centers destroying the environment, or breaking the electrical grid. AI automation, even if it sucks and doesn’t really work, replacing human labor, even in the short term. Mindless AI agents bricking dinner reservation sites, online ticket queues, marketplaces, or even taking down whole chunks of the internet. Visual slop filling up our feeds. A massive recession when the AI bubble finally pops. They’re all real, already happening, and do not require an eschatologic belief in artificial general intelligence to address.
My gut-check was that this was about avoiding the guillotines that will come with the truly astonishing collapse over the horizon.
A post from Hacker News I’ve seen going around nails this:
Translation: We see this technology not being any more useful than what it is now, no AGI is coming, and the first one to accept this and slow down the dollar burn rate will incur the wrath of the market. So let’s say this big boogey man technology will end all life on earth and we all slow down together