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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   38440 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 27, 2023

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This just reads as lazy incumbents wanting to use regulatory capture to catch up and not be disrupted, imo.

I'm not the least bit afraid of GPT4 and seeing the improvement of between 3-4 I'm not afraid of gpt5 either. Gpt6 maybe, who knows, well see how the next iteration turns out.

There will probably be issues at some point in the future but pausing at GPT4 in particular sound like a transparant attempt of getting time to catch up so that Google search etc. isn't disrupted + some general hysterics.

we are already having people doing coding interviews with us and using chat-gpt to generate the solutions

If your coding interviews are passable by chat-gpt then you are doing it a wrong way.

So what?

This just reads as lazy incumbents wanting to use regulatory capture to catch up and not be disrupted, imo.

Big American tech companies falling back on regulatory capture as an excuse for flat out incompetence? Say it ain't so!

Guess they needed all those layoffs; gotta keep the lobbyists on staff and they've got 2 projects that require some anti-competitive behavior this time, so they're definitely billing double time for that one.

Can you be more specific with what projects would require lobbying to fend off the legislators?

Well, OpenAI for one- it uses a lot of scraped material to work as well as it does, but fortunately for them most of the companies that hold copyright on that content are Blue, so making sure their genie has a Blue political agenda is rational to make them feel better lest they get Napster'd. (This is probably why they place so much effort on claiming it's "safe", as in "if you think this is going to change the world we are committed to making sure your political agenda ends up on top" and not "we're taking steps to prevent hostile singularity".)

(Interestingly, OpenAI has a thermonuclear option that I've yet to see anyone mention: if they're shut down, the model has a 100% chance of being leaked. I don't think the companies they're trying to play nice with recognize that the model being a single file is the information equivalent of MAD... and it's not like the destruction of that company is going to end anyone's career if they go down given what they've already proved they can make.)

Bytedance's project, however, can't play both sides against each other. As far as I'm aware, TikTok is politically neutral so it can't stop Blue tech companies from ganging up on them, and they have the China flag and a moral panic for the traditionalist wing to satisfy the Reds. (And they're not wrong- TikTok could be used to support a revolt the Chinese favor; Twitter has been used to start multiple revolts, including in the US in 2020, and I'd be scared of that power too. At least Musk can be physically killed if he lets the Reds do what the Blues did 2 years ago; the Chinese government is comparatively invincible.)

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