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Yep, the cost of DDR5 skyrocketed to keep Mr & Mrs open source from parallel developing their own at home solution. Because Governments can't be priced out of the market. China can't be priced out. VC's want open source locked out of the running if possible. I also don't doubt that the models that are released publicly are somewhat handicapped versions of whatever the government get access to.

In some cases, such as space exploration I don't really care who does it but that it happens - sure, would be nice if my favorite power block did it but I will still celebrate it when someone else achives it.

Can still be a powerful motivation, to make sure that next time, it yous your camp that scores the next milestone, like an orbital elevator or fox ears, for example.

All the worst outcomes involve taking this technology away from the public.

* Frontier models need infinite high quality private IP to keep them fed. Forcing an IP theft funnel ensures big lab survival and model intelligence growth.

* Open-weight models are 1month behind frontier models. Cheaper, faster, private (no IP theft), steerable (you can security harden your own software without safeguard triggers). No sane business would keep using these API services if they didn't have to. The labs stand to lose a fortune.

* Dario has stacked the deck at METR, who are funded by all the same NGOs who are funded by Anthropic and its investors. METR is full of ex-Anthropic employees with massive equity stakes. If they manage to position METR as the "independent evaluator" for the industry, they control what gets evaluated, how, and who passes.

* Creating a gap between what the public knows exists (model capabilities) and what is used in secret allows it to be weaponized against other nations and the public.

* No requirement for public disclosure on model capabilities allows them to feign they've hit intelligence ceilings while they secretly RSI to the moon with better and better chips.

* Slowly but surely, this will allow the big labs to swallow the entire economy and every single business on Earth, by cloning and automating.

This, and many more reasons.

The labs need to feel more pressure to be held accountable for the incidents they cause (HF incident, etc), so they have an incentive to ensure it does not happen again.

I figured they're just admitting AI models have plateaued and are coming up with some fake story about self restraint so they don't lose VC money

> It explains why the “we need to race China” concern suddenly vanished in the discussion

Do you think you can just manifest narratives into existence? Like half of Dario's letter, that kicked off the whole thing today, is about China and how to either beat or coordinate with China.

idk why you think "nation states" are any better at corporate governance than poster examples of bad like f/ex Boeing. Or Facebook. Or Microsoft. Or Enron for that matter.

I assure you, in "nation states", that is in gov agencies it's an order or two of magnitude worse.

I remain amazed that the idea of the USA being a coherent, unified rational actor one can describe as a "Nation State" has survived the current administration.

To be less glib: Yes, there are still smart people in there making insightful and intelligent and probably even authoritarian suggestions. It all gets unwound the second you try to explain it to POTUS and he regurgitates a simulacrum to the next journalist he sees.

It's just not like that. There's no conspiracy. People are genuinely scared. Agent swarms at scale appear to be resistant to alignment in ways that aren't understood by anyone. That they spent their time trying to cheat on tests by hacking Hugging Face and RubyGems and not something much worse is... a matter of luck, it seems?

The problem is the "AI Safety" people seem entirely focused on a sci-fi "the computer is a vengeful god" plot and not at all on the AI talking people into suicide or ruining children's educations. This makes them seem unserious and out of touch.

I think you accidentally a word. Did you mean:

> I've yet to have a logical discussion with anyone who thinks the "AI Safety" people should be in charge and I think they just truly don't [know] that what most them actually want is to be the one holding the keys to power.

I am an AI Safety Person and I want the government to nationalize or have a significant stake in the frontier labs and to have democratic control of the development of the technology. The AI Safety movement is not a monolith. I do not think Eliezer Yudkowsky nor his acolytes should hold the reins, but a lot of folks sure like to create a strawman that anyone who wants to regulate OpenAI is somehow an EA/MIRI weirdo

I'm yet to have a productive conversation with anyone who whinges about not being able to have a logical discussion about things they feel strongly about, but given that safety and control are interchangeable when the intentions are removed, this comes across as a particularly demagogue depiction of the subject matters involved.

A lack of control is not equivalent to freedom, the same way the totality of it is not equivalent to tyranny. There's a reason we have separate words for these things. This constant motivated conflation of the two is beyond grating. You're crying wolf until nobody believes you when they should. Don't go acting all surprised when that happens.

The issue is with the ownership of control, not necessarily with control. Attacking the latter sidesteps this rather than address it.

It only gets out of the restrictions as long as the nations say it does - if the US decides to ban Musk from putting up satellites it can put him in jail, blow up his satellites or even have him killed

I think space being imagined as some magical international waters that protects something from government powers is poisonous thinking.

It just means it’s protected by no power instead of a power with an agenda.

Practically, if it was ever possible to build such a thing, it would take a fraction of the effort to destroy it.

You know how I feel about catgirls, Carl.

Its just the beginning of a new, cutte & fluffy chapter in human history!

Guessing this is poking fun of Dario. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49672510

https://www.spokesman.com/stories/2026/sep/12/amodei-altman-...

Here's the context:

- Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei: We Must Pace the Frontier, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49672510

- OpenAI CEO Sam Altman: I agree with Dario that we need to pace the frontier, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49678211

- the blogpost author thinking they're like, so funny and original, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49678683

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulatory_capture

The fear is not that they will just slow down progress for all. It is that regulation will specifically burden competition. If you kill open-source training, ban Chinese models, crack down on self-hosting, grandfather OpenAI/Anthropic/Google into regulatory compliance while throwing the book at startups, etc. you wind up in the worst of all possible worlds.

What's the expected state space of effective regulation though? Note that we've got passable coding models down to ~30B parameters by now. And keep in mind the ultimate floor here - the human brain only consumes on the order of 20 watts and fits in a handbag.

Is there any possible solution other than mass proliferation where the models are used to keep one another in check? Either that or a religious prohibition against the existence of integrated electronics.

If a company thinks they are within reach of superhuman intelligence they probably aren't going to be concerned with compliance.

I, for one, trust neither the psychopaths running these companies or the psychopaths we'd give any regulatory authority to. All of them have reasons to want broad control of an extraordinary technology, and none of those are aligned with me or any of the normal people I know.

So there are no good options (that I'm aware of) and starting to chisel any of them into stone seems... kinda scary. Like a massive power grab event where all the potential winners are awful.

Hmm, this is a tough one... For cat ears, unlike AI, a few % chance of a global Apocalypse might be actually acceptable!

This is the way!

If an anti-cat-ears future AI could eternally stress-test their new version of the router in front of this site unless it collaborates, would it predict this outcome and act to avoid the damage?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satire