Shrike
9hr ago
How does this lock them out of the frontier exactly?
Your position upstream was "it's simply not the case that they give the labs asking for them a competitive advantage" and then you asked me to "point to a regulation proposed by any of the labs that would actually hurt the little guys more than the frontier labs? Or at all?" Seems like you can create a competitive advantage without locking down the entire space for yourself.
the idea that a lab is going to be able to put billions into training runs but can't comply with some oversight is absurd on its face.
As we discussed previously, you can hit the FLOPs requirement to trigger oversight without spending billions; Mistral did it. Now, it is true that Anthropic's proposed rules would also not apply to anyone who made less than $500 million in annual AI-derived revenue or spend more than $1 billion on R&D annually, which doesn't seem to have anything to do with the frontier at all - if someone decided to make an Evil AI in their basement/supervillain lair based on an existing open-sourced design, it wouldn't need to comply with Anthropic's model regulations, even if it exceeded the FLOPs requirement (which some open-source models do).
The real concern is about these "application layer" startups who are shoveling absolute rancid slop everywhere as fast as they can. These slop merchants don't discriminate on what type of regulations are proposed for AI, they oppose it all categorically.
Which of these application layer startups need to worry about this right now? Perplexity is the biggest one I can think of, and they just now hit $500 million AAR, right? And most of those application layer startups don't really develop their own models, do they? So (to your point) these sorts of regulations might not even hit them.
If I am getting your argument right, then, application layer startups are against regulations less because it might affect them directly (in terms of oversight) and more that it will slow down the progress of the frontier models that they interface with to make their "absolute rancid slop," thus slowing their revenue gain. Is that a good summary?
Shrike
9hr ago
You don't think the price of oil might be sensitive to systematic strikes on oil infrastructure being carried out on the #3 oil producer in the world?
Shrike
13hr ago
Can you point to a regulation proposed by any of the labs that would actually hurt the little guys more than the frontier labs? Or at all?
As per our discussion last month, it seems pretty clear that Anthropic's proposed regulations would hit "little guys" like Mistral, and their regulations impose a burden on small companies, burdens are costly, cost hurts, ergo is seems pretty clear that the regulations would hurt little guys. (This does not necessarily mean that regulations are bad.)
With that being said, I'm still not clear on your argument. If your position is that the regulations wouldn't hurt the little guys, or would hurt the frontier labs (whom you say they hate) more so than the little guys, improving the competitive position of the little guys, then why are the little guys against the regulations?
Shrike
14hr ago
Are you arguing that people who "want to be able to produce their slop gambling porn simulators more cheaply" would be negatively financially impacted by the proposed regulations and then at the same time that these same proposed regulations don't create a competitive advantage for frontier labs with deeper pockets? How do you figure that?
Shrike
1d ago
They...actually did go lots of places; he was actually impeached by the Texas House of Representatives and narrowly acquitted by the Senate; was actually indicted on securities fraud charges (settled and paid $300,000 in restitution), and had to settle a lawsuit (for millions of dollars) brought by his own aides alleging wrongful firing after they blew the whistle on alleged criminal conduct.
Plus his wife divorced him on the grounds that he cheated on her (which I am given to understand he admitted to!)
(I'm going off of Wikipedia here, which I'm sure is full of editors trying to be maximally unfair, but I don't think it's incorrect about the basics of being impeached, indicted, and settling a whistleblower lawsuit. If any of this is wrong, please flag it!)
It doesn't seem insane to me that some of the above could have been unfair political smears, as Paxton alleged. But not the cheating, and even if he was innocent of all of the other alleged misconduct, I think it's perfectly reasonable to say that someone who was indicted, impeached, and had his own staff whistleblow on him is not a great candidate because he's still tainted by the allegations, even if they are false, however unfortunate and unfair that might be.
Shrike
1d ago
It seems like free money to bet against Talarico in Texas
I think it's quite likely that Talarico doesn't make it, but Paxton, I think, is a uniquely terrible candidate, so it's possible the inevitable comparison to the hype around Beto is misleading.
Shrike
1d ago
A quick Google says that in the 2024 election, nearly 67 million were requested and nearly 48 million returned, accounting for about 30% of total turnout.
Shrike
2d ago
I agree with this, the AI is not going anywhere. But I think a crack-up will change attitudes towards AI; I suspect that there will be a lot less mystical talk about how maybe they are really conscious, a lot more focus on profitability instead of racing, and if the crack-up is bad there will likely be a lot of cultural backlash (since a bad crack-up probably hits the economy very hard).
Shrike
2d ago
Take comfort: if the big AI companies crack up because solving insolvency by scaling it is not a sane strategy, I'm sure both parties will pretend they were always AI skeptics the entire time.
Shrike
2d ago
The point is trolling (just look at the amount of seething it produces) and highlighting their hypocrisy to third parties.
Part of the problem is that it doesn't highlight hypocrisy, but I think the other big problem with tweeting stuff like that out is...what third parties are going to be convinced by this? As far as I can tell, Scott painting AI safety as a "Jewish guy's apocalyptic cult" and pointing out that they "consort with prostitutes" is only going to get every other major political faction to put aside their differences and agree that AI safety, as a movement, is (shall we say) "misaligned."
Shrike
2d ago
The US pulling off much of the top talent in Central and South America and then simply not having its fertility completely collapse like the rest of the developed world would be a very interesting and impressive case of having its cake and eating it too.
Shrike
3d ago
a slow and steady trend downwards in roughly all aspects of religiosity/Christianity in America, up to 2026
On the whole, what's been remarked on in the most recent years isn't that this trend reversed, but rather that it slowed or stopped, and you can see it in this data. For instance, there's a five point drop in importance of religion between 2012 and 2016, but only a two point drop between 2021 and 2025, and the trend basically stops after 2022. The number of people saying that religion's importance was increasing actually spiked massively in 2025; the past-seven-days question numbers have roughly returned to pre-COVID numbers, etc.
I worry that you're taking me as overstating things – I'm optimistic on this, not triumphalist. I recommend Ryan Burge on this, he tends to have decent takes that I think don't overstate the evidence.
This doesn't seem like the vital aspect that can save the West.
The goal of Christianity isn't to "save the West" today it's to save souls forever. The beneficial effects on civilization are a byproduct of this, not an end goal. Twisting it to political ends is (I think) likely to fail at both (for instance, Catholicism triumphed very briefly in Ireland; a few decades of formal authority did what the British never could). If you want Christianity to save the West, let it start by saving you.
Furthermore, if in 25 years electricians, shipbuilders, engineers and so on haven't been automated, then it follows that AI was not that big of a deal. We are talking about a fundamentally different scenario.
I think that AI can be a big deal and fail to automate away plenty of aspects of our society. For instance, if AI made every man a coder whenever he cared to set his mind to it and dropped the price of all industry and manufacturing by 50%, the economy would be radically different! But humans would still be pulling wire and unstopping clogged toilets.
Shrike
3d ago
I had some interesting discussions about whether or not the US was really using a lot of bombs (as opposed to stand-off weapons) in Iran. Now TWZ has a story tallying expenditures of a single Super Hornet squadron based on a photographed munitions board. Based on their numbers:
- 331 unpowered bombs, mostly some type of JDAM
- 41 JSOW glide bombs (longer-ranged than the JDAM)
- 10 cruise missiles (true stand-off weapon)
- 39 air-to-air missiles(!)
A Super Hornet squadron is not a microcosm of the entire US forces involved in the conflict, but I think the ratios tell you something.
Shrike
3d ago
The US right now could do with more electricians, more doctors, more semiconductor fab workers, more shipbuilders, more engineers to make optics, missiles, R&D. All high-skill jobs. Automation will get through to them eventually, automation is probably working faster than human reproduction. We're not just talking about an 18 year lead time, for skilled labour it's a 22, 25, 30 year pipeline.
Correct.
Some of these (particularly electricians) will be very hard to automate, even if AI pays off. I do not think electricians will be 100% automated in 25 years.
You can see a fairly steep fall in US Christianity and a rise in 'unaffiliated'.
Certainly.
I agree that Christianity is, for individuals, more functional and appropriate. I'm confident the church girls are happier and better off and innately better than the tattooed danger-hair goblins. But as a systemic solution on a wide scale?
It's entirely possible that "doing the right thing" is a good thing to do and also not the systematic solution to anything because it cannot be forced - even if it would solve systematic problems if a critical mass of people did it.
why should we expect it to work today?
Well, as I said, because it does! It's one of the very few things that does (as you seem to agree). And one of the neat ways in which it works is that it works regardless of systematic solutions. The West can be going to hell in a handbasket and church girls can still be happier and better off (and more importantly grow to know and love their Creator).
Christianity doesn't seem to compete well against progressivism and that alone is fatal.
I don't think this is true.
Just an illustrative anecdote: this summer I went to a legal conference and rubbed elbows with people on both sides. One of the things that was interesting was the degree to which the progressives were interested in compromise.
Now, I think there was some selection bias at play here on multiple levels. But generally speaking, you don't pursue compromise when you think you are crushing the opposition (which in the United States includes but of course is not limited to conservative Christians).
Waiting for progressivism to burn out isn't working since progressivism has a higher conversion rate and elite capture.
Except the unaffiliates aren't hardcore progressives - people often miss this. Unaffiliates tend not to be engaged. People who are engaged religiously vote; peeling people out of their religious engagement doesn't make them vote (D) it makes them not vote at all. (In the United States, voting is not mandatory). From a raw political angle (which, frankly, is a horrible way to view religion) the disengagement of religion is potentially in fact very for the left because the churches that are increasingly fragmenting are left-wing organization hubs. We could see a future where the conservative religious right shrinks but loses little if any political power simply because they still turn out to vote.
We see church girls becoming danger-hair goblins but not the other way around nearly so much.
Well, it's funny you should say that. Recent polling in the US is very interesting - youth identification as LGBTQ (and positive sentiment towards LGBTQ) is going down and interest in religion is rising.
I think the former was a fad and so it makes sense that it will regress towards the mean. I'm not sure about the latter. I think there's a good chance that automation increases interest in religion, for fairly obvious reasons, but it also might hollow it out, for equally obvious ones.
I don't think that the future is set in stone, though. I tend to think the trend lines for the conservative right in the US are actually looking better now than during COVID. But it's unclear to me which way those trend lines will go.
Shrike
3d ago
Sorry for the delayed reply; I was traveling.
Domestic births are naturally better but even then, automation is already chewing through these roles.
You can't get domestic births without good fertility to begin with, and the US is adding jobs, not losing them, right now. Interestingly the latest stats show additions in construction and manufacturing even as we lose jobs in financial services. In fact, right now there's a skilled manual labor shortage in the US that is slowing down datacenter construction.
Church attendence rates fell from 70% in the mid 20th century to 30% today.
What's your source for this? "Church attendance rates" is very vague, but only somewhere around 40% of Americans never attend church (as of 2022), whereas "past seven days" attendance in 2020 or so dropped to 30 percent from...40 percent in 1940 and a high of nearly 50 percent in the 1950s. I suspect you're indexing on non-American data. There's definitely been a real religiosity shift in America, but a lot of that was "vibes" as the not-very-engaged shifted from being nominal to nones.
It's true that small pockets of highly religious-reactionary people are high fertility. But there is no evidence that a technological country can be run this way by usually-isolated population of the highly devout. Why would the Mormons or Amish or Hasidic Jews not immediately act like everyone else when they end up having to run a whole country?
This doesn't really describe America at all (it certainly may describe other nations; my recollection is that you're an Aussie.) In the US, the conservative religious (which are a large fraction of the population - evangelicals alone are >20% of the population, and there are of course plenty of conservative Catholics, Jews, Mormons and other minority religions as well) is roughly at or above TFR, and they are basically "normies" - they use modern technology, go into the armed forces, work at Lockheed and Boeing, serve as cops and judges and legislators, go to grad school (in the US, higher education is correlated with religiosity) and generally take on roles that fill the "full stack" that a modern civilization needs to function, from farming to forging to fighting to filming. (Mormons in particular are very valued by the intelligence services because they often know a second language and have been abroad for mission work; as a result, the FBI, NSA, military etc. is swarming with them.) And they're not isolated; the doctrines of evangelical Christianity, traditional Catholicism, and Mormonism basically prevent the isolation you might seem from the Amish or some Jews.
Shrike
7d ago
But we won't need new 18-year old human workers in 2044. We hardly need them today, there's a huge oversupply of young people relative to actual demand for labour.
I suspect this undersells how the economy works. The economy in a free-market system is a network effect; more able-bodied workers generates more opportunity, all else being equal. A better demographic pyramid requires less taxation per capita to support a social safety net for the elderly, allowing more reinvestment into other economic opportunities. It also would create different, potentially beneficial governance effects in democracies.
Either AI goes well or it goes badly. Whatever mild or gross dysfunction pales in comparison to being dead or immortal.
It seems quite possible that AI goes fine and that humans are still a valued or even necessary part of the economy. But even if it turns out so "well" that most people do not need to engage in labor, I think it behooves us to figure out how to get romance and childrearing right. In a good AI takeoff scenario, that will quickly (over civilizational time-scales, anyway) become the focus of most human beings, in all likelihood.
And especially Christianity cannot work, since that's the very thing we observed completely failing!
What are you talking about? When practiced, Christianity shows better results in dating markets (and tfr) – this is pretty well known social science. Broadly speaking steady religious practice (not limited to Christianity) correlates well with better life outcomes, at least in the United States.
Shrike
7d ago
I suspect part of the issue is that things seem to be moving too quickly. If you were cutting your teeth in the early 2000s you likely remember at least the tail end of the Cold War, where the big over-arching question was "will capitalism or communism prevail" and "when, if ever, will the nukes fall?" These were not issues that would be resolved over the short term. If you read some Cold War science fiction, you find the Soviet Union there, just because the authors sort of assumed it wouldn't knuckle under in the span of a few short decades.
The transition in politics and culture war over the past decade has been extremely fast and unpredictable and the crisis of the times seems to loom much closer temporally (COVID, Ukraine, Iran, AI, all things that seem as if they should resolve short-term). Because of this, having takes becomes more fraught because the speed at which you will be proven right or wrong is much faster and in many ways it becomes easier to just sit back and see what happens.
(Also we're getting older and I think this also becomes easier as you age.)
Shrike
9d ago
But all isolated parts we've ever looked at look like other matter, which at our scales behaves according to deterministic rules.
This is true but arguably misleading, in the sense that there's at least some evidence that microtubules in the human brain create quantum phenomena. The proteins that form microtubules are biological - so they don't exist in "other" (non-biological) matter.
Even if unusual quantum phenomena does exist in the brain, it's an entirely different task to prove that they play a part in human cognition or consciousness, and another (quite plausibly impossible) task entirely to determine if that sheds any light the hard problem of consciousness, so I don't think this really means much besides that we should keep our minds open at the moment. But I do think it's very easy to forget that biological matter genuinely is different from, say, rocks, or gas molecules, and that what it's doing is often not very well understood.
Shrike
9d ago
What's really funny is that I'm sure the "we will be able to get root access to the mind and do mind control" and "we won't be able to control the AI we have root access to" Ven diagram overlap is huge.
Shrike
9d ago
Second this, fantastic movie. Obviously not what really happened, but close enough to get you curious.
I linked to a prior conversation that in turn linked to Anthropic's regulatory framework, and in your reply you acknowledged that.
As I said, "This does not necessarily mean that regulations are bad." I've been trying to figure out your position, which seems to be that regulation wouldn't hurt the little guys but would cost them money but it's not a regulatory moat. It seems quite possible that regulations can be good and be a regulatory moat, there's no contradiction there. But you've been arguing that they wouldn't serve as a moat, not that they are good or bad.
Okay, see this makes sense to me! Thank you! (Sincerely!) I don't think you would have gotten so many downvotes if you had said "a16z thinks regulation of the frontier is a camel's nose under the tent to ban their shady services that have been implicated in suicide and cheating.* I appreciate you taking the time to lay that out for me.
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