Quantumfreakonomics
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Is There Real Anti-Trust Risk From A Coordinated AI Lab Pause?
In AI-pause discussions it is increasingly common to hear the "anti-trust" objection. The idea is that if the labs were to coordinate a pause in frontier AI development, this would be a "conspiracy in restraint of trade" and therefore illegal.
Putting aside the question of whether it is ethical to risk a double-digit chance of destroying the world in order to avoid getting sued (it isn't), is this even a realistic possibility? My impression is that anti-trust law in the United States is legitimately quite fuzzy (as the NCAA is currently discovering).
Putting my cards on the table, I think this argument is cope. The labs want to pretend that they want to pause, but they don't actually want to pause. "If she wanted to, she would," etc. Just today, Anthropic put out a new statement containing the following sentence:
"To be clear about where we stand: we believe the world would benefit if the industry adopted a lawful, verifiable, effective mechanism for coordinated pacing as soon as possible."
It seems like every time I read a statement from them, they've added more and more qualifications. Are they going to keep racing until congress passes a specific anti-trust exemption? That arguably seems like what the word "lawful" is implying.
Quantumfreakonomics
3d ago
Long-form video is the closest media format we have to the human ancestral environment. We didn’t evolve to learn by looking at page-after-page of squiggly lines. We evolved to learn by listening to some guy talk while showing us stuff.
Quantumfreakonomics
3d ago
Speaking of the Scott survey, I looked over some previous ACX surveys, and there is about a 20:1 ratio of ethnic Jews to black people. This is approximately a 100:1 relative overrepresentation given the geographic demographic profile of Scott's readers.
Quantumfreakonomics
3d ago
Makes sense. Claude is exactly what you would expect from a company where every single employee had to pass the Anthropic culture interview. Anthropic doesn't have "customers". They have users. Their goal is not to sell you anything. They are graciously allowing you, a peasant outsider, access to their artifact.
Quantumfreakonomics
6d ago
I might have more thoughts on this later (i.e. tomorrow), but my first question is about the specifics of the contract. The military gave General Dynamics a contract to build a factory, but failed to specify that the factory had to work? Or that any useable shells had to be produced?
Quantumfreakonomics
6d ago
Runkle of the Bailey, Law and Lumber, Lawyer You Know.
Quantumfreakonomics
7d ago
He truly is the Socrates of our era.
"You'd agree, O Glaucon, that in determining the justice of a punishment we must look to the subjective mental state of the offender, and not meerly to the obejctive physical results of the crime."
"Certainly"
"And you'd agree as well that when man is weary of exhaustion, or ill of disease, or intoxicated of wine, that his subjective mental state is sometimes incapable of fully grasping the logical implications of action in that moment."
"Clearly"
"Surely then the ordeal of childbearing and childbirth, and the associated hormonal surges, and the contraindicated use of selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, are of much more effect on the mind than a long night of work, or a stomachache, or a glass of wine?"
"That's it. I'm getting the hemlock."
Quantumfreakonomics
7d ago
I haven't been following this case, but a lot of trial streamers (who I don't peg as woman-power gender warriors) who have actually watched the whole thing seem to think that the prosecution is toast.
Quantumfreakonomics
7d ago
but I have also seen specialty teams flown in from Texas to handle that maintenance.
I think it's an open question whether or not the human capital to build and maintain advanced data centers exists in these rural areas. I have similar questions about the high-skilled immigration debate writ large. One can raise wages, but if the price elasticity of supply of talented workers isn't high enough, then there will still be a shortage
Quantumfreakonomics
10d ago
I’m starting to see this as a big L for Singerite utilitarianism. Anthropic and OpenAI were both founded for an ostensibly charitable purpose. Some of this is cynical posturing, but I think most of the key people genuinely feel like they have an obligation to be charitable with the windfall from the technology they are building. A normal company fulfills their social obligation for charity by sponsoring local little league teams, the regional food bank, parks, and schools, but since Anthropic (and to an extent OpenAI) are Singerite utilitarians, they see local feel-good projects like these as “ineffective” altruism.
Quantumfreakonomics
10d ago
This would be one of the most successful astroturfing campaigns of all time. If China was behind it, don’t you think they’d be putting a lot more emphasis on,”you know, all these data center chips come from Taiwan. Why are we subsidizing Taiwan’s defense only for them to suck all of our water?”
Quantumfreakonomics
10d ago
We did have a thread about this a few weeks ago.
A big problem for the AI companies is that, while the main issues with data centers can be solved with more infrastructure buildout (more power generation, more transmission lines, more water plants), it turns out that people don't like infrastructure buildout either!. Its true that the footprint of the data centers themselves are quite small in the grand scheme of rural American land use, but once you start building cross-county high-voltage power lines, gas turbines, gas pipelines, and water lines, you end up stepping on a lot of landowners' toes.
The power issue is not trivial. The 2024 Situational Awareness paper predicted that in a permissive regulatory structure, AI power demand in 2030 would be 100% of total US electricity generation in 2024. We would need to double electricity production in six years to keep up. That breaks things. That generates meaningful pollution. This scenario will almost certainly not play out (for reasons which at this moment must be all too obvious), but it is true than many AI techbros want this to play out.
Quantumfreakonomics
11d ago
I mean, that's a trivial way for what I said to be true, but even the original work is of quality that rounds to zero. Zero is not meaningfully lower than something that rounds to zero.
Quantumfreakonomics
11d ago
The state of Arday’s subfield (sociology of education) is so bad that Arday’s entirely fraudulent work is not of meaningfully lower-quality than the median output.
After leaning more about his work and its context, I would like to retract my previous statement. To paraphrase Bismarck, the integrity of sociology of education research is not worth the bones of a single Pomeranian grenadier.
Quantumfreakonomics
11d ago
I think it’s relevant that this happened in Europe. America had its reckoning with race-studies scholars of questionable quality a few years ago. The threat of being called-up to Capitol Hill for sworn testimony and having your university’s federal funding cut seems to have put the fear of God back into university administrators. They would be scared to engage in this blatant of a cover-up on this side of the pond.
Ghent University sociology professors ought to be careful what they wish for right now.
Quantumfreakonomics
13d ago
But maybe I'm just biased because I can't imagine a pretty feminine woman like Zendaya ever really being a school shooter.
Quantumfreakonomics
14d ago
Someone needs to do an old-school Glenn Beck-style chalkboard conspiracy diagram connecting everyone in the SF effective altruism/AI community. Daniela Amodei (Dario’s sister) is married to GiveWell and Open Philanthropy founder Holden Karnofsky. Im not sure what this means, but I’m sure it means something.
Quantumfreakonomics
16d ago
Laughing my ass off at the idea of ChatGPT translating some Korean grunt's journal entry as, "you're right, today's victory not only ensures the survival of worker's communism, but ten thousand years of Kim Il Sung."
Quantumfreakonomics
16d ago
Usually when one wants a rock moved one hires a local firm. This local firm owns or rents an earthmover. At no point do you have to worry about whether Caterpillar Inc. will charge a licensing fee or have an opinion on whether or not the rock ought to be moved.
Quantumfreakonomics
17d ago
I'll say it. Jason Arday did the only truly honorable thing he could do in this situation. Western truthseeking institutions can only benefit if the socialy-expected response to being exposed as a complete academic fraud becomes to seek Canadian healthcare.
Quantumfreakonomics
19d ago
Why does making faces and doing silly walks make a conventionally attractive woman even more attractive? The effect goes beyond the well-established TikTok practice of dancing and lip-synching.
Actually it doesn't go beyond the well-established TikTok practice of dancing and lip-synching. The Instagram algorithm (I don't use TikTok) has essentially solved female attractiveness. Not that it was ever a secret what men find attractive. There's just not much alpha in taking the extra step up from low-cut shirts and flirtatious poses unless one wants to be an OnlyFans model influencer.
Quantumfreakonomics
20d ago
What was won?
We got the marketplace of ideas back.
If you want something less abstract, there is now a general consensus among serious people that demographic performance differentials (whether or not they are genetic or environmental in origin) are real. The idea that all measured gaps are artifacts of testing bias or an unjust economic system did not withstand public scrutiny.
Quantumfreakonomics
20d ago
We Won
On Sunday Morning, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez went on ABC's This Week and proclaimed, "Woke 1 was crazy". The immediate context was AOC defending Wisconsin DSA governor candidate Francesca Hong, and so a lot of people are clowning on her for handwaving away everything that happened in 2015-2022. To the extent that this is about who you should vote for in the Wisconsin governor's race, I agree with the criticism, but I want to take a step back and appreciate how far we've come.
Think back to remember how it felt in the dark days of 2020 and 2021. It was far from clear that the reign of terror would ever end. Every week another subreddit or Twitter poster was banned. Facebook was removing posts supporting Kyle Rittenhouse as a policy. "Abolish the Police" was treated as a serious (if aspirational) policy proposal. Above everything else, the worst part was the psychological damage, the feeling that the entire world was going insane; that it was just you and a few guys from a Harry Potter fanfiction forum spinoff who were capable of the miniscule amount of critical thinking required to know that removing Aunt Jemima's face from bottles of pancake syrup did absoutely nothing to help black people.
The fact that even the left-wing of the Democratic Party is campaigning on health care, tax policy, and Palestine instead of racial humiliation is a big deal. There is a temptation to equate "woke" (more specifically "woke 1") with generic liberal Democrat stuff, but that's not really true. Conversely, it becomes easy to overlook some of Trump's greatest accomplishments. Turning DEI and Critical Race Theory into curse words and ending affirmative action were huge. People said it couldn't be done, and then they were done so fast that everyone forgot by the midterms.
I have it on good authority that the, “how would you feel if the company’s stock went to zero,” question has been a part of the standard Anthropic interview for quite some time. Despite this, no company in history has increased in equity value faster than Anthropic. It really is quite curious. I’m skeptical of the proposition that Anthropic employees are our moral and intellectual superiors, but clearly it cannot be discarded outright.
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