I have been lurking on the aigamedev subreddit to see exactly what sort of games people are coming up with and I can say I have been incredibly disappointing. I've been faithfully trying the games people post and have come to the conclusion that game design is a very difficult art to learn, and something LLMs really can't help with that much. My guess is that these games are "fun" just like toddler paintings are "beautiful." And there are so many quality indie games you could get for the 25+ dollars you'd spend generating the code. Anyways, I guess that's another discussion for another blog post.
Also, thank you for sharing your experience. I recently joined that subreddit just to see what people are creating and I too have been unimpressed.
I think there is a model in a lot of people's minds that AI coding is exclusively handing off the thought processes and ideation processes to the agent, which seems to foreclose on the possibility that it offers the least friction of any other available method to translate the users thoughts into useful artifacts, some of which are the working software that is the primary goal of development. The model says something like "I don't know what it needs to consist of, but make me this thing I'll know when I see.". But there are also plenty of people who have spent the time learning these skills before AI came along, and remain capable of performing those feats without the ai, but realize they are even more capable to do those same things with AI, in volumes that would have been previously prohibitively tedious. And now that they have the tedium wrangled, they are freed from all of these arguments that start: we can't do that because it would take forever.
I'm strongly skeptical of this argument, as there's only a few things you can not build a rough version and get something to ideate upon. Even with 3d games you can do design with blocks and buy models to have something to pinpoint the design.
I can give you a concrete example: this week at work, it occurred to me that the 16 channels of expected and measured binary on or off test data I need to collect could benefit from a visualization because matching expectations will have visual properties that failures will not. So I had my AI agent create a script that encodes 16 channels of expected and measured binary wave forms over time, as a 32 channel 1Hz sampling frequency wav file, which I can view with audacity, which also has the necessary controls to measure time between transitions in the waveformms.
From hindsight, one could argue that since all of that solution consisted of rudiments of perfectly normal software that didnt need AI to be written or integrated, it was equally possible to create without AI. But knowing that could do it with the greatest of ease, for the total price of naming it, converted this from a project that required the motivation to figure out all of the necessary steps to one that just needed a good description.
I have a side project which is an experiment to build an interesting quick UI for local AI. As part of it I want a very very specific, interesting look involving shaders, animations, and so on.
I was trying to just get a prototype in place by prompting and it was going nowhere, just constant yo-yo'ing and never really getting what I wanted. This also was quite de-motivating and I found myself "yelling" at the model.
So I told Codex:
- Make this API first-class in our framework, with easy parameters (it had been sort of a hacked low-level thing)
- Add hot reloading to our system so I can edit it without any state loss or refresh
- Give me more knobs (X, Y, Z) so I can tune everything here as I need
- Add a HUD that lets me also drag sliders to tweak the same things
And I got my desired look within a few seconds.
The principles of good design and products have always been this btw, you need your feedback loop to be as tight as possible. Good design has always come from the ability to iterate incredibly fast, your brush needs to move precisely with your hands, and can't have delay from the time you put it down to the time the stroke shows up.
I’m not sure this can be assumed. Discovery was already one of the biggest hurdles when releases were bottlenecked by human output. Increasing output 10x is only going to make it worse.
Same as with Google, where they’ve lost the SEO war against AI spammers and valuable content has become close to impossible to find.
That has been true even without AI.
Solutions to create games with barely any programming knowledge have existed for a long time. You can create a full featured Unreal Engine game with just using its visual scripting language.
Lots of amazing games have absolute dogshit code. It doesn't matter. You can write super simple, procedural code without any fancy abstraction and just get the job done.
Programming is the easiest part of game dev.
Plus you don't have to be a solo dev. Sure, just being a game designer might be hard but if you bring artistic skills to the table as well then you are golden and can partner up or outsource the programming if needed. Honestly people with an artistic background often do much better than people from a software engineering background who are used to overcomplicate things.
So no, programming was never the hurdle and AI doesn't help here. It just helps people to produce more slop faster.
These communites established a generation of modern animators and game developers. Maybe we'll see the same from the youth of today who use these tools and create communities around it.
There's a lot to getting it right, and like all software, you have to built it for your target market. There's no easy AI solution to getting a fun and engaging core loop. Nor is there one for building the right level of complexity and balancing the learning curve.
I think a lot of people who can't/don't code see themselves as game designers and had thought that AI would let them make games, and are now finding it wasn't really about the code after all. That, and if you can't code, vibe coding alone isn't really good enough for much beyond flash-level games (yet).
I've done a lot of programming on various sub sections of the disciple and it still remains to me the hardest one to crack for AI.
It's undoubtedly am incredible tool for accelerating output but I think it's going to be the hardest for ai to commoditize as a whole.
We have had any number of quite competently programmed absolute flops.
It is always the creative world building part.
The main criticism of the Harry Potter books are not spelling or sentence structure, it is the plot holes and contradictions in the world build.
The same holds for software.
Getting cutesie stylized 3D models is something that’s trivial with an RTX 5090, a ChatGPT pro subscription (unlimited image generation), you run Trellis2 plus a few other open source things in a pipeline that your agents can queue and it’s astonishing how much cool stuff comes out the other side. But the graphics don’t make the game fun at all, they’re just set dressing for the fun.
There’s been a lot of learning going from 0. “Okay, 3D model of a character. Oh, this model is useless since it isn’t in a T Pose I can’t rig it. What’s a rig? Okay, there’s a rigging ML model. Download that. Okay, how do I animate it? Oh, cool there’s a model for that. Oh wait my model has holes in it, that looks weird. Okay there’s an ultra shapes library that helps improve geometry. Whoops, that strips all the textures and shaders. Okay, trellis2 has a mode that takes an existing model and retextures it. Okay wow these look good, the characters are walking around! This goblin is break dancing! Okay uhh, what do you actually do in this game?”
Like it feels like that trap you can get stuck in when one part of something is trivially easy, so I have like 500 random 3D assets that are honestly pretty good looking for a game where the core gameplay loop is not developed at all because I have no idea what would make it feel fun. Because I can prompt and say “oh wouldn’t a Christmas village be cool?” And I wake up the next morning with 50 3D models of Christmas village stuff and characters and I say “wow, neat!” (It takes maybe 8 minutes end to end for the pipeline to generate one 3D model, so I just run it overnight). But then I have to manually place them in the world (if you let the AI do it in unreal engine 5 it places them via coordinates which become impossible to move inside the unreal editor).
The fun part is “wow, this is something I’m making with my kids, and it’s unique to us”. That’s what keeps me at it. I’ve never seen my kid so engrossed and excited to help me with something, she’s the one coming up with ideas and saying “what if we did this and that?” and then seeing those things become real is really neat. The bottleneck is there’s a dozen agents that can work on different parts of the game but it’s a chaotic mess.
Still, I’d imagine this is how people learn is by making something that’s a piece of junk then making something that’s better. I don’t plan on releasing my pieces of junk unless I feel like they’re actually fun.
But those games have already been designed a specific way, based on the developer's ideas and imagination and vision.
If you're the sort of person who always thinks along the lines of "I wish there was a way to upgrade spells" or "it would be great if you could open this door and see what is behind it" or "I hate the way orcs and goblins are friends, they should actually fight each other"
That has always been the issue with games: they capture the imagination... and then stop there. There's no way to expand them the way you want (except for submitting requests/wishes to the devs and hope they listen and add it in a short enough time period) and customization options are always very limited.
AI, on the other hand, empowers everyone to bring their own ideas to life. Sure, those ideas may not be great, or the execution may not be great, but at the end of the day it's a way to express one's imagination that would otherwise take years to do.
But at this time Dario was at OpenAI and was a co-author on the GPT-2 research paper announcing the model.
The "too dangerous to release" approach has been him the whole time, at both companies.
The "danger" was in terms of spam / misinformation proliferation, not the same category of capabilities adjacent risks current discussed.
You can hold your own opinions on spam/misinformation as a problem, but to say there was no credibly anticipated outsized downside to a sudden jump in human-passing text generation feels pretty off to me.
It's the kind of people that want to ban anything because of some theoretical small harm is technically possible. We're lucky it's not more prevalent or we'd still be in the stone age.
(It's also amazing to me that it took mere minutes for this observation, deep in a sub-thread, to get downvoted without any reply, with no obvious reason for it.)
Nobody believed or suggested that GPT2 could do longform or produce novel text that stood up against careful scrutiny as insightful or well informed. But because the capabilities were novel, people would have no strong alternative than to believe some person wrote it.
You current tripping over LLMisms is irrelevant. You have years of antibodies, both personal and herd-immunity (eg, the many, many articles and comments that describe LLMisms).
Google also analyzed for risks earlier in development of "Meena" and "Bard" and chose not to release, instead. And then got caught flatfooted when OpenAI did so anyways. (They also I think didn't really see a compelling business case for public propagation of it, either).
It starts to look very much like what is really happening with Anthropic is a lot of cynical attempts at regulatory capture. Make grand proclamations. Get your stuff out there first. Ask for regulation and then kick the ladder away from underneath you. But they did it clumsily and failed to grease the right palms.
From the original 2019 release:
> We can also imagine the application of these models for malicious purposes , including the following (or other applications we can’t yet anticipate):
Generate misleading news articles
Impersonate others online
Automate the production of abusive or faked content to post on social media
Automate the production of spam/phishing content
These worries are why they stated they were cautious in rolling it out
Ah, yes. You see, it’s not them who are wrong for knowingly releasing something they knew to be harmful, it’s everyone else who needs to change. That seems reasonable. Humanity is famous for being able to rapidly adapt to fast changes as one voice. Oh, wait…
They are no different to the tobacco and oil companies. They know the harm they’re causing but care about personal profit about everything else.
With the benefit of hindsight, you can certainly argue that the pause wasn't long enough or that the mitigations weren't sufficient. But that wasn't a view held by many at the time - indeed, it was mocked as a marketing ploy (and still is; see gp's post as evidence).
What mitigations? Nothing they’ve done is relevant to the four points in the comment above.
> such as public education
Their “public education” is about as meaningful as alcohol warnings.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xj4aRhHJOWU
> With the benefit of hindsight
No hindsight needed. These problems were obvious from the start. Not just to me but to many others. Clearly also to them.
> indeed, it was mocked as a marketing ploy (and still is; see gp's post as evidence)
Two things can be true at once. Of course it’s marketing to say “this is too dangerous to release” if they’re going to do it anyway. Either that or they’re so supremely irresponsible and greedy that they don’t care about the consequences as long as they can profit. And again, all of those can be true at once.
Also, worth noting that when they talk about it being “too dangerous”, they’re usually talking about fantasy scenarios of the AI gaining sentience and enslaving humanity. But there are many other dangers (as listed in the comment above) to consider that come from humans directly misusing the technology.
They did try to place limits on their API, and tried to develop classifiers for AI-vs-non-AI text (which was abandoned in 2023, in a world of many models). A lot of their efforts in those days seemed to be to work with Universities to figure out what to do about all of this incoming tech. They weren't the first to develop a language model.
> when they talk about it being “too dangerous”, they’re usually talking about fantasy scenarios of the AI gaining sentience
They didn't talk about "it" (that model) in those terms, as mentioned above. Or the following few from what I can see. They seem pretty specific about each model's risks and publish what they can find in the model card. But yes, they have a fear of where things may be in the future if models keep progressing.
I don't personally think talk of it being "too dangerous" is good marketing if the goal is to get rich. It invites restrictions from governments and others. I don't know anyone that picked a model because it was apparently restricted: most of their funding comes from Companies that are generally risk-averse. Online AI hype seems to mostly come from the demos, not the doomerism.
I do think there's an uncomfortable trade-off involved in all of this, and some of it comes down to whether you think the tech will be developed regardless of your participation. I believe the people in labs like Anthropic are worried yet think they are better off steering it the right direction, so they push on.
I hate ClosedAI as much as the next guy, but this is an extremely illiberal take. It's not the kitchen knife manufacturer's fault that people are using their product for murder, it's not my fault that people are doing crimes over the Tor relay I run.
The Tobacco industry is evil because it misleads the public about its product being poisonous and bribes politicians through widespread corruption. Tobacco is also different because it is not a neutral tool that can be used for good and bad, but poisonous and will harm you no matter how you use it.
Yeah! It’s not like they predicted these malicious uses before releasing the tools. And it’s not like they’re making them available to a dysfunctional government in order for them to militarise the technology and… Oh, wait…
> but this is an extremely illiberal take.
I’d appreciate if we stopped this Americanised version of poisonous discourse where everything is reduced to a box in a vague political ideology. By this I don’t mean politics don’t matter—they do—but not everything is black and white, right and left, or needs to be categorised to be discussed.
> It's not the kitchen knife manufacturer's fault that people are using their product for murder, it's not my fault that people are doing crimes over the Tor relay I run.
Always with the kitchen knife. That’s not an argument, it’s a talking point. Explosives are tools too, as are machine guns. No tool is entirely neutral. LLMs are not comparable to kitchen knives. Death is not the only possible bad outcome.
> Tobacco is also different because it is not a neutral tool that can be used for good and bad, but poisonous and will harm you no matter how you use it.
Tobacco is not just cigarettes.
https://leafngrainsociety.com/featured/10-surprising-uses-of...
Important safety features ("do not generate child porn", "statements should be factual or backed by evidence") were simply not part of the design of these systems and have yet to truly solved to this day, but AI companies decided to release these technologies onto the general public regardless of their glaring flaws.
I like AI for its shitposting capabilities and its neat parlour tricks, but I also believe so far it has been a net negative for everyone but the richest minority of society who benefits from firing people and having computers do half their jobs badly. It's too late now, but in hindsight I do agree that these systems were too dangerous to release in this shape.
Kind of taking this a step further, what is the worst thing that an AI run amok could do to existentially threaten the human race? I feel like almost anything could be short-circuited by some form of "pulling the plug" before it got too far. But, hypothetically, if it were possible to launch nukes without human intervention, or with maybe a small amount that could be socially engineered, that seems plausible (or releasing some kind of super-pathogen that is stored in a lab somewhere).
So, what if, along the lines of MAD doctrine and the plot of Battlestar Galactica, the best thing we could do for AI safety is just to engineer our other systems so that a hypothetical superhuman adversary could not use them against us? Which is just making our world safer all around rather than trying to kludge arbitrary limitations into an "intelligent" system.
(This doesn't really solve AI child porn and fake news but those things are mostly just imaginative reflections of the people using them and you can't really fix that any more than you can stop people from doing it themselves)
Probably convincing humans that untrue things are true. Think less "AI launches nukes" and more "AI convinces people in country A that country B is trying to subvert & destroy them, while it does the same for country B wrt A."
I strongly disagree with the opinion that it has been a net negative.
Lies and misinformation, or choosing chatbots over therapy and relationships might sound scary, but as of now I see practically negligible impact there. Even social media is still roughly as usable as before AI.
The American Government has weaponised state power in a clumsy, corrupt and punitive attack against Anthropic, in an escalating war over control of AI.
Meanwhile, HN has anchored on "marketing hype" as the only possible explanation - all evidence is contorted to fit into this increasingly contrived explanation. Object level analysis is disregarded in favor of dunking on Anthropic.
AI is a threat to your job, status, beliefs, and way of life. For HN, believing this truth is harder than coming up with rationalisations for why it MUST be untrue.
I appreciate the grounded few on HN who continue to engage with object level analysis, and accept that the world is about to change in a pretty bizarre way.
I assume only the weight of economic pressure and lack of alternatives (and plenty of opposition) kept the doors open, but the same "national interest and security" BS was trotted out then, too.
Big difference this time is nobody needs Fable/Mythos to accomplish anything. There is no magic line here, only improved connective work with less intervention. But it stands to reason that this will cause a huge chilling effect on AI development in the U.S. if it stands and other labs will eventually bypass Fable/Mythos in capability.
To use a car analogy, the models are being built like engine improvements, sometimes going from V6 to V8, but other orgs might improve the car's wind resistance or fuel injection, which leads to a similar speed improvements. There is a lot of space for improvements all along the chain which is why this is such a pointless move.
Knowing this administration (and Anthropic's ham-fisted tactics) this ends in a week or less with some sort of "deal" and was all part of some high stakes negotiation. Possibly even beneficial to Anthropic, because where does it leave OpenAI once they settle on some sweetheart deal? The precedent is set.
Most nerds (like myself) outgrew this edgy mentality in highschool/college. Realistically this mentality just makes it impossible to see anything except through the darkest possible lens.
I think, in the long run, of course AI is a boon. But I’m not immortal, and right now it’s a threat to all our livelihoods. We should put ourselves first, and be selfish, while we’re still alive to be selfish.
- Anthropic is just doing this for marketing stunt
- AI is like NFT's
- circular deals
- the bubble will burst anytime soon
- the hype bro's are propping up the stock market so that they can exit quick like grifters
(I just made the last one up to force terminology they use)
This is really distracting because the main problem here is that AI is getting too powerful to be just handed out to normal people like us. If you still believe it is all hype, you are getting distracted from the real problem.
I'm guessing at some point this kind of rhetoric will die away and we focus on real problem
We need a Second Amendment for AI: the right to keep and bear strong AI shall not be infringed. This safety handwringing is going to solidify the state's monopolies over its subjec... err citizens.
The state is the farmer, and we are the cows.
Mythos found 1000 zero days in a few weeks - if I had asked your thoughts on this a few years ago, I'm sure it would've been "that is a super-weapon".
Plus, scaling laws are impossible to deny: More compute = more intelligence.
AI is going to completely redefine the role of human cognitive ability - if you think this is about "state monopoly", you're really thinking too small.
What’s your answer to it? There are other people who have thought of it and it’s not that simple.
Sure I can! *waves* Thank goodness we have the First Amendment [here in America] and I can just go to a library to find books with that info anyway.
You think this is a coincidence that it's happening shortly before Anthropic IPOs?
How many people in the US government (at senior levels) are currently on track to profiting massively from a huge Anthropic IPO? The answer is, most of them. Most of the most powerful CEOs, senators, congressmen, Trump's retinue, are invested in Anthropic through on vehicle or another.
I use AI all the time and Opus 4.8 can't even get the most basic shit right about a very popular videogame released a few years ago. It's not going to steal your baby and eat your wife.
You sound like you have AI psychosis honestly.
I think they truly believe what they say when they say it's a very dangerous piece of tech and from their wargamed scenarios they figured they really need to be first or shit properly hits the fan - and I agree. their need for money assuming scaling trend holds is transient if they're first.
What’s so funny is that same people are the ones that identify themselves as liberals as long as they can keep their privileged, highly paid jobs.
This again. For the umpteenth time, not everything is about jobs and money. There are at least a dozen other more valid reasons to be critical or skeptical of AI and the people who control them.
Maybe money and job security is all you think about when you think about AI, but I promise you the rest of the world has many other reasons.
> AI truly can lift millions out of abject poverty in the future.
Pray tell, how exactly will that happen, and what’s the time frame for that future?
There simply won't be jobs for them.
The risk is that all of these very incredibly smart and disgruntled people decide to do something about it. Elite overproduction, but instead as a result of enormous shift in supply side economics.
I don't worry about losing my job. I worry about becoming useless. If you know what I am saying..
Therefore, it is impossible to have a conversation with you about AI capabilities, because you are anchored on a ceiling that we've long since exceeded.
The incredibly smart ones are able to use AI to multiply their productivity. The ones having a bad time with it from vibe coding and vague prompting aren't that.
Four months of 50+% MoM growth. I couldn't have done that without the model giving me lots of time to do marketing. And build a complete feature set.
So yeah.
And the year is only halfway done.
I simply don't agree with the doomer takes. Might be wrong. I'm kinda stupid yet here I am.
This is both absolutely key, and also irrelevant. 'Security' is clearly a pretense, as otherwise the demand would not have been restricted to 'foreign nationals'. It is not like any US administration every trusted every 'US national'.
But the reason for the restriction is basically irrelevant. The fact that it happened, should be the final wake up call for the EU to take 'Digital Sovereignty' serious. Not just in 'talk', but with actual commitments in budgets and effort.
Given everything else this administration has done, you now decide to accept their stated intentions at face value?
1) No one is going to build any workflows/capabilities that could have the underlying intelligence rug pulled instantly by a bureaucracy or malevolent politician.
2) Even if a company was silly enough to take on the risk, is Anthropic going to ask all their enterprise customers to provide passports for all their employees and then setup individual Claude accounts for each and every employee of each and every enterprise customer in order to gatekeep access to Mythos? Because a plain ole api key no longer cuts it
But it's also, as sibling comments mentioned, a bend-the-knee between Government and Anthropic. Once OpenAI catches up, and Anthropic lawyers-up as well, it will probably be reversed or morphed into a "models must have the US seal of AI-approval and, therefore and hereafter, we AI-approve the new US-verified Fable 5.1" - which will coincide with a at-large deployment at the DoD, Pentagon, and friends.
Otherwise the Chinese will catch-up and, heavens forbid!
The much-decried EU AI Act provides a safe, predictable regulatory framework to base ones AI development on. It provides legal stability compared to unpredictable arbitrary decisions by the US executive.
If AI companies have any sort of sense in them, they'd be well-advised to consider relocating to Europe.
I don't think assuming the European commission will act rationally or stably on this is really a good idea, and I say that as a European...
Too late now. They wouldn't be allowed to relocate in the name of national security.
Black market LLMs are straight out of a William Gibson story.
OpenAI seems generally less dogmatic and more practically oriented. There's really nothing particularly good about them, but you can at least predict how a normal company will act.
Pretty wild statement given the "Pathological liar" chat around the OAI leader
(I noted the same thing a few weeks back, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48341224 but his recent blogposts should make it crystal clear if there was any lingering doubt).
> We optimize what we can measure, not what we actually want to achieve. We hope and pray that these are the same thing, but they often aren’t.
He points out the core problem with LLMs. I believe it is impossible (or extremely expensive) to ensure that the models are aligned safely for everyone and any intention. And 'safe' can mean different things for a different audience.
It’s not a question of regulate or not regulate. It’s whether it’s ok for the president to not like your company and screw with you.
It’s fun to point out all the Schadenfreude around Anthropic here. But that missed the dangerous precedent of the administration using export controls to punish political enemies.
Tech companies should see this as an existential threat. Not just point at Anthropic and laugh.
If a volatile administration can ban you from running code that you wrote -- without any democratic processes like a law or lawsuit -- why would you build anything in the US?
That's not what's going on. But, what's going on has always been possible. Even to this day, there's software that's is subject to export controls. There's also an often-changing list of countries that US-based companies are prohibited from doing any business with. For software, this has been going on since the 1990s. "Weirdly", the US-based software business has been doing really well.
Anthropic was instructed to prevent Foreign Nationals from using a subset of their software. Anthropic chose to prevent everyone from using that subset of their software.
Anthropic had other options. One of those options was to gate access to the software behind the ID, biometrics, and -if present- passport capture that Big Tech seems to be very excited to do. I expect that -if they end up changing anything at all about access control- we'll see them doing something very similar to that in the coming weeks.
>Anthropic had other options.
Well, not exactly. They weren't given prior notice and a deadline to comply. That was really the only option to comply with the order. However, things may change in the future
I'm hearing a lot of this kind of thing. "Oh if only it was a different government". I'm sorry, but when you cry out for government involvement, it's not always going to be coming from the government you personally wanted. This is the whole problem with government involvement! I don't think that message is getting through, but it's the real lesson that should be learned here.
The real problem is when people demand heavy government involvement but don’t think about what could go wrong if an administration decided to misuse the regulation. They just assume it’s going to be used perfectly as they imagined it, usually to punish the companies they dislike while completely sparing the companies they like.
A good example is the usual chorus of people demanding heavy regulations or bans of social media, who always imagine that the regulator won’t touch their websites. They imagine surgical laws hitting Facebook and TikTok because they don’t use those websites, but they imagine the law won’t touch their Discords or require them to do any age verification on their phone or PC for the sites they use. Then we get the intrusive age and ID checking law proposals that everyone hates.
I only know the time and place I've lived in (United States, born in 1977), but I feel like the trope of "all government is bad" has been the rallying cry of conservatives since the Reagan era.
I'm convinced enough people have grown up hearing that trope that your assumption is incorrect. I think a ton of people believe there can only be bad government because they've never had to think about it-- they've been told that from birth.
I'm not a student of history. Maybe this isn't a new thing and this "all government bad" trope has been a consistent feature of US politics. It doesn't feel like it, though.
As long as I have paid attention to American politics, it’s always had a major undercurrent of “all government bad”, with a subtext of “this thing I know about is an exception”.
Let's take your argument to it's extreme point: The state should never regulate anything because the state might be bad!
This is structurally the same fallacy as "people shouldn't be allowed to do anything, because some people are bad!".
I'm not convinced you understand the sentiment of the parent comment. It's that one should consider all possible scenarios of one's actions when making requests of a powerful entity they can't control. The mechanics of government make it such that once something is under their control, it'll be more effort to remove those controls than what it took to initially add them.
It should also be expected that legitimate regime changes can put people in power that current lobbyists may disagree with. Lobbyists should then be conscious that by lobbying for regulation, they implicitly trust that the will of the people will always align with what they think is best for the industry being regulated in the long term (otherwise they wouldn't be lobbying or would do so in a way that confines the power to the current administration).
Also your argument is along the lines of thinking I argue for: You say I shouldn't lobby for regulation I believe is beneficial because a future government might change the regulations to make them not beneficial. This implicitly assumes that the future government wouldn't implement the non-beneficial regulations if the current government doesn't do the beneficial ones. Possibly! But this is arguing that we should firmly establish principles, values and precedents that future administrations will feel bound by. And that I would agree with: Regulations and governance should arise from principles (practical details and grey areas will always require a ton of messy detailed negotiations, but within the confines of principles!). One of the things the current US administration has done is to show that it is possible to disregard principles if you are powerful with no consequences. You can lie about elections being fraudulent, watch your supporters storm parliament and get reelected a few years later.
But if principles don't matter to those in power then the conclusion is actually the opposite of what you say. While your allies are in power you should use power however you can to further your interests, because when others are in power they will not feel bound by your restraint, and at least they first have to undo your work.
How true is this really? With the government, you can vote in various elections, or contact your representatives, and when it comes to important issues that will do exactly squat. You can also buy politicians or legislation, or run yourself, if you have the wealth and connections to do so.
With corporations, you can vote with your dollars, which again on important issues will probably do squat. Or you can try to get hired and change the company from within. Or if you have the wealth, you can buy the company (partially or wholly), or start a competitor and win in the marketplace.
In both situations there are options, and most of them are basically impossible for the small folk.
But neither is a realistic outcome. And neither do you personally have anything remotely near “control”. The reason everyone argues about this stuff online is that’s literally the only power we have.
However, the same effort and energy spent elsewhere can reap much, much bigger dividends down the line.
So are big corporations.
Only one gives users any kind of democratic influence over policy.
And voting does make a difference. Ask New York.
But Congress won't fire Trump. All of my representatives would, if given a chance, but other representatives in other districts have no accountability to me and don't want to.
So I'm not sure how to avoid the conclusion that I have less practical control over the federal government than I do Google, even if the formal levers of power are meant to achieve a different result.
Its fundamentally different to say governments or individuals should have no power or freedom.
By design, governments have the winning end of a power imbalance and limiting them helps protect those on the losing end. Limiting those already on the losing end makes it worse for almost everyone (assuming the government is a small portion of the population).
We've already seen this play out. Government let's health insurance company get away with almost anything. The GOP wants to let them get away with more. One person who couldn't get the health care he was paying for took matters into his own hand
Fight for localization.
I repeat - don't worry.
Today those tropes are very inaccurate, but many voters still take them as true distinctions. The last balanced budget was under a democratic president. Both parties have voted for expansions of federal authority, the Patriot Act and its renewal for example. Both parties want to tell us what we can and can't do to our own bodies, though they disagree on specific policies. Both parties believe in states' rights only after losing federal office.
The list goes on and on, suffice it to say we don't have a clear distinction of two parties with differing principles of how governments should be designed.
It's a fairy tale, but they do believe/hope for it.
I will gladly live in a conservative county over progressive one. And reading this paragraph in a article about AI is complete nonsense. This is a go touch grass moment if you needed one.
Your personal preferences and beliefs have little to do with conservatism at large and the motivations of the powerful people who promote it. If you want to reach a place of open minded debate and discussion in which there can be different legitimate approaches to governing, you have to start with an honest assessment of the world as it is, not as you would like it to be.
The reason it's relevant in an article about AI should be self-evident. AI is powerful, the industry is already massive, and the leaders in that industry are involved in quite a bit of political maneuvering. You may choose to ignore politics, but politics will not ignore you.
This idea that if some group isn’t all reading from the same sheet of music you imagine they should be reading from means they are hypocrites is just wrong.
Try working in a government office - you will be lucky to get a water cooler - BYOW.
"Small government" means "fuck you, I got mine, now let's gut the IRS so I can do some white collar crime".
If anything, your question reduces to making one party sound incompetent or deceitful, I don't know if that's intended. (And considering that aspect of the party is another fun can full of real-life worms.)
Based on the parent comment, I think it's more "one party sound incompetent and the other deceitful". There was a senator who used to say that American politics was a contest between the stupid party and the evil party.
I thought so in my teens. But now I know that I was naive. How can you be sure that you're not?
But if you've spent the time since your teens to come to the opposite conclusion in spite of everything going on around, then I suspect there will be very little I can say to you that will make sense to you.
We would not have a costly war in Iran, blockaded Strait of Hormuz, $6-7/gallon gas, or blanket import tariffs hiking up the prices of consumer staple goods if we voted for the “party that promises bigger government and does deliver.”
I would submit the idea that the latter party is consistently misrepresented and has been the only one that has delivered smaller budget deficits anytime recently.
See also: Tax Cut and Jobs Act, the Kansas Experiment.
The truth of the matter is, our elites are undertaxed at historic levels. At no point in our lifetime have the wealthy been taxed at a lower rate than they are today. There isn’t actually anything wrong with government spending outside of the endless/aimless wars (started by…). It’s the revenue side that deserves scrutiny.
You either have lost touch with reality so far to be unable to understand what "oppressed" means or you're just parotting someone else who suffers from that affliction.
This 100% applies to you. If you can’t see ICE actions as oppressive, you’ve definitely lost touch with reality.
Complete brainrot...
just look at what's going on in Ukraine right now
Please remind us when Democrats have "taken away guns", and while you're at it when were those small arms last used to fight back against a tyrannical government?
You're right they don't want to carry a musket, but that's because muskets are not sexy. They don't want superdrones either, because superdrones are not sexy.
2A people just like guns. Guns, culturally, are sexy.
It's the other way around. Americans voted for Trump hoping he'd improve the country's economy and address the cost-of-living crisis. For example, one of the main proposals was to make ICE bigger and use it to deport as many people as possible, hoping it'd give back jobs to Americans. Another key proposal was to withdraw from climate agreements and stimulate the mining industry.
On migrant workers, much of the US economy is underpinned by the assumption that cheap manual labor is abundant, with the implicit assumption that this tier of labour isn’t going to try and clamour for workers rights (which is a whole other story, but whatever). It’s (part of) the reason the US continues to have globally extremely cheap gas even as the prices hit highs within a domestic frame of reference.
And restarting mining rather than trying to adapt the mining workforce better to a changing landscape is just going to make it hurt worse when the US has to catch up with the rest of the developed world on that front.
As a close outside observer, it feels more like one side of the US electorate is motivated by sore and a misplaced sense of being owed retribution more than anything else.
>COVID restrictions
>The state of the economy
>The state of culture, broadly-speaking
>Letting a black man become president, and the attendant ramifications (intrinsic and extrinsic, cause and effect)
I'll leave it to readers to judge. (You can probably guess what I, as a progressive, think of these impetuses, in driving half-ish of the country to vote for everything Trump embodies. And, frankly, what drove the other half-ish of the country to vote for Biden and Harris.)
There was like 70 million Americans who voted for Trump, most likely for a wide range of reasons, and sometimes multiple reasons and sometimes probably even conflicting reasons. People are complicated, saying that half a country did something because of some few reasons usually over-simplifies so much it gets harder for you to actually understand what is happening/happened.
> the American electorate is relatively simple-minded
It's favorable for many people who don't agree with the current administration to believe so, I'm not sure how true it is in practice, and again, I believe believing so might hurt your chances of actually understanding things properly. That sort of bias really get in the way.
> https://navigatorresearch.org/2024-post-election-survey-the-...
> findings from our post-election survey among 5,000 self-reported 2024 general election voters
Again, more than 70 million Americans voted for Trump, you're not gonna gain any understanding from a self-reported survey of ~2500 people.
A sample size of ~2500 is statistically huge - the margin of error is very small. You should sign up to a stats course.
I don't think that's been the Republican messaging for years (ever since Trump) and it's certainly not a "large part of why people vote for them".
I think a very large fraction of Republican support in this day and age is based on social and cultural topics and feelings.
So repubblicans have not been about small government for a long time and Trump is not even a pure-blood repubblican so it was to be expected that he would do the thing that repubblicans have not been about for a long time...what in the circular reasoning? Oh and please name one repubblican president who successfully reduced spending or "made government smaller"
You can be critical of the policy of export controls and the meaning of them in modern day but saying it is a problem with the government in general is nonsensical.
Everyone loves enabling broad government authority when people they like happen to be in charge.
Sooner or later, a government that is "bad" (for any possible definition of "bad" that you personally approve of) will someday be in charge. Then, suddenly, enabling all that broad government authority seems like not such a great idea.
One can believe a government shouldn't get involved in *some* things without subscribing to the belief that "no government is beneficial".
Hardly non-sensical. You just have a different default.
That's the constitutional bedrock of our societies. That doesn't mean it's always true but if you denounce that as a legitimate and achievable goal then you don't have a society anymore.
Those that are violent will always exist, and will always attempt to leverage their willingness for violence, and those that are able to - through luck or circumstance - gain leverage will be able to use that leverage to consolidate more until they have a hegemony on violence.
That's simply an observational fact of human history.
Governments are a way of occupying that opportunity space with some structure that _organizes_ that otherwise disorganized "cut people's faces up and flay them alive" sort of violence, and replaces it with "you get to grumble about the taxman every year" sort of violence. The averager person loses more freedom when there isn't a government around. The average violent psychopath gains more freedom (to become the government) when there isn't a government around.
That's why. Because I, and most people, prefer the paying taxes to getting flayed alive for insulting the duke. The government is a _binding_ of the monarchy and the warlord class to rules. If you look at the history of western democracy, it's extremely obvious.
I highly suspect that one of the reasons that Americans speak in this way.. that government as an idea is inherently some nonsensical or flawed concept - is compensation for their own sense of futility and inability to effect change on their own government.
It's hard for them to reconcile their self-image as "free thinking exemplars for the rest of the world" with the idea that they don't actually have control over their society. So they default to the idea that "all government is bad". If government by definition is bad, then obviously you can't accuse Americans and American culture of being particularly poor at creating a government that serves its people: it's just a fundamental structural problem, not a cultural problem.
To use internet slang: it's a cope.
"So, why not now?" I dunno. Something about temporarily embarrassed trillionaires. Everyone seems afraid to dole out the kind of humiliation that would change elite behaviors, under the mistaken impression that what we're dealing with is not just "a tough job market" or "adulthood" or whatever, but our own measure of unnecessary (but politically effective) humiliation, drizzling down from on high.
That said, there is a tendency for a system to drift away from this predictability as it's subjected to "review" by people who really, really want a particular outcome, regardless of the systemically-proscribed conclusion. "Bespoke" judgments for edge cases undermines the principle of predictability, which makes a return to "random" "coercion" desirable for some (as those who coerce in anarchy generally have less absolute power than a large system does).
But then, how do you show mercy (people are driven to do so) in a zero-tolerance environment?
This is the tension.
No government at all can just imply anarchism, ie. a kind of self-governing that doesn't ascribe to our conventional ideas about government, presidents, pms, members of parliament, senators, etc.
I do not think it is something that will work in practice, nor do I think it would be stable if it did.
Anarchy as in political/social chaos, where "everything goes" Mad Max style, and anarchy as in a volunteer governance system of direct democracy with no coercive authority.
The way you wrote it "which is worse than all but the very worst governments, and from which IMO some form of government will emerge anyway.", implied to me the former.
If you meant the latter, I'd call it absolute much better than the "very worst governments" and likely better than even the best traditional governments. Whether it can be long term stable is debatable, but a different claim. In any case, what we have is neither that well working, nor that stable.
Sure you do. You just don't have a society that looks like ours does. And that doesn't necessarily mean monarchy or fascism or chaos as the only alternative.
The society you do get, might still even have a government too! Thinking government is not beneficial doesn't mean you dispense altogether with one. It can mean you have very difference tolerance and guardrails for it, as opposed to when defaulting to "government is beneficial".
What's more "government is not beneficial" might not even mean "any and all government is not beneficial". It might mean government of the type that's the "constitutional bedrock of our societies", and the mockery they call "democratic rule" is not.
You've skipped a few steps, until you overthrow the government all you have a broken society with a system of governance that's deemed to be illegitimate, therefore its rules and actions are illegitimate.
If you want to tear up the constitution and implement a new system of governance with "less government" then you're effectively advocating for a revolution. Just be honest and don't try to sell this as an incremental policy change.
Sure, so? We did that quite a few times in the past, that's how we dont' still have Pharaohs.
>If you want to tear up the constitution and implement a new system of governance with "less government" then you're effectively advocating for a revolution. Just be honest and don't try to sell this as an incremental policy change.
Who said it has to be an incremental policy change? The claim I responded to was:
"That's the constitutional bedrock of our societies. That doesn't mean it's always true but if you denounce that as a legitimate and achievable goal then you don't have a society anymore."
You still get one. It's just not something you get while conveniently sitting on your ass and voting once every few years.
I'm not sure I'd agree. Mostly those in power in the past were overthrown by outside actors or failed gradually without an active "overthrow". The ones we think of as relatively successful are mostly those that are "stop being ruled by someone not local", rather than "change the form of government in place".
You probably don't want the government to stop being involved in securing your property or maintaining roads. None of the tech firms want the government to stop being involved in securing IP rights. Etc. etc. etc...
Hell as much as the drone strikes get simplified down to "Obama killed people without trials" the main complaint at the time was that he was acting without Congressional approval.
Democrats shouldn't have responded to Congress getting blocked up by Republicans realizing that they could make "ineffective government" a self fulfilling prophecy but pretending everyone is okay with it isn't accurate either.
One party is rounding up people and putting them into concentration camps while doing a mass deportation. That same party is trying to end birthright citizenship. That same party set the world order ablaze with a completely pointless tariffs regime. That same party started a war in Iran to please their donors and the Israeli PM, a war that is going to (IMHO) go down as the biggest strategic blunder in US history. One party doesn't want half the population to have bodily autonomy. In fact some of them have openly said they want to hand out the death penalty for getting an abortion. One party has doubled the national debt in a decade to hand out massive tax cuts to the ultra-wealthy and also gutting essential services. One party has a president credibly implicated with Jeffrey Epstein. That entire party bar a handful of individuals (who have been punished for their "disloyalty") have gone to great lengths to hide the evidence of that malfeasance. One party is killing people essentially to manipulate the market with repeated lies about an "imminent deal". One party is wholesale engaged in voter suppression and election rigging.
It's the same party for all of these things. What the other party is guilty of is being complicit in all of the above by refusing to oppose it. Still bad but nowhere near the same.
It is an extreme edge case and the argument for a sane government oversight is still perfectly valid. No oversight makes corporations dump waste into the water supply and market asbestos-lined cigarettes. It's naive to think that no oversight is needed.
Government is fine if it’s done by people that aren’t in it only for themselves. Actually it is often still fine if it’s done by people only in it for themselves. It’s just that the people in it right now will burn the world down to enrich themselves.
Academic studies consistently show that people attracted to a career in politics (regardless of affiliation) score higher on "Dark Triad" personality traits (narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy).
And even for the non-sociopaths, the problem with humans is instinctively we ARE only in it for ourselves and our family. Anyone claiming otherwise, ironically, is probably attempting to signal virtue for...personal gain...yet again.
Rule by parliament by the very way it is set up becomes a snake pit of betrayals, horse dealing and back stabbing, when alliances are made. Look into any European political discourse online and offline, and it's all about which parties should ally with which parties after the elections. A million rules are made and routinely circumvented to try to maintain a non-existent "system" of governance which isn't tied to any person, but some abstract paper construct.
Rule by strong man attracts psychopaths and narcissists for obvious reasons, and if not, at least the most ruthless people you can imagine.
>"how you structure your society"
How who structures your society? Now you're back to step one where either the psycho or the snake conspirators rule.
Any change has to first come from within. People have to personally as individuals decide to not pay taxes and decide to not follow the law when the law is unfair. These things are doable, and when enough people do it, the power starts returning to them.
Social coordination has been done for thousands of years before anybody had ever heard of the concept of "a state".
In the future - maybe in our lifetimes - the idea of a state will be irrelevant and forgotten by most. People will laugh at the idea that people revered and feared and even worshipped that paper tiger. It will collapse and disappear into obscurity just like so many other false ideologies through history. Just like the Soviet Union went from being a super power striking terror into the hearts of the world into becoming just a meeting room with a few powerless men with no country and no people to rule.
In fact the ones who can only classify the behavior as such because they can't even comprehend it look like the real sociopaths.
When you give a government power, there are people in place who can and will abuse that power. If not now, then next year, or in five years. After all, power granted to the government rarely goes away.
This is the reason that you should always consider the worst case, when governments gain power. The power to ban a specific technology? What could go wrong? How could that be abused? Let me count the ways...
“It’s not always going to be the (oligo|mono)polistic corporation you personally wanted” either.
So we invent democracy, term limits, anti-trust, branches of government, environmental safety regulations, the SEC etc. etc.
Whether in the public or private sphere we have created social technologies to make power more diffuse and constrained, and corruption and misalignment less likely (never impossible).
One feature of the last decade is the steady erosion of these safety rails.
In many countries multiple parties and coalition governments are the norm.
Issues with majority support never change in almost all of the biggest democracies in the world right now.
For the US specifically its a representative oligopoly with Madisonian gridlock and a few million non-elected bureaucrats thrown in the middle.
The US gives the smallest amount of say to people to pick either Coke or Pepsi. Don't like sugary soda and think its making you fat? Tough luck, you gotta pick Coke or Pepsi.
That's a claim.
Switzerland is so democratic they refused to let women vote until the 1990s (in the last canton) because the voters (men) didn't allow that. It's my go-to example of how direct democracy has pitfalls too.
I don't think anybody who has actually lived under a pre-democratic regime would call the US "no way democratic". There are many democratic aspects of the US, and it has reasonably strong institutions. But it seems that most Americans have not yet realized what category they're in, and think that the US is some kind of front-runner.
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Economist_Democracy_Index
A multitude of different peoples voting to rule over the others is not democratic and will never be democratic. Just because the voting process is secure does not make it democratic. What makes it democratic is that a people rules themselves, nothing else.
Zulus ruling over Xhosas is not democratic just because the Zulus give the Xhosas votes because Zulus and Xhosas are two different peoples, and contrary to popular belief, soil is not magical and a Xhosa born on territory ruled by Zulus does not make him a Zulu.
Jews ruling over Palestinians is not democratic just because the Palestinians have votes because Jews and Palestinians are two different peoples, and contrary to popular belief, soil is not magical and a Palestinian born on territory ruled by Jews does not make him a Jew.
Reinventing the dictionary will only confuse you, it won't change reality. Nominalism is not only stupid, it's wrong.
Democracy is not just voting. Actual full democracy is predicated on a fairly large number of fundamental rights, as well as duties. Democracy is antithetical to majority rule, in which the rights of minorities can be ignored or trampled by the majority.
Zulus ruling over Xhosas can never be democratic, because nobody is "ruling over" anybody else in a democracy, no matter their ethnicity, religion, gender, sexuality, and so on.
Some people call what I'm describing here "liberal" democracy, but that's to distract from the fundamental fact that there is no meaningful definition of democracy that isn't liberal. If we're not free and equal, we cannot participate in democracy, and therefore it isn't democracy.
This is an entirely modern idea and really has nothing to do with the concept. It's the typical leftist tendency to appropriate a word that people see as good and then redefine it to be something which the leftist themselves want, and then hope that people still associate it with good.
It's the same thing with the word nation, love, marriage and a multitude of other concepts.
> Zulus ruling over Xhosas can never be democratic, because nobody is "ruling over" anybody else in a democracy, no matter their ethnicity, religion, gender, sexuality, and so on.
Zulus making laws for Xhosas is most definitely Zulus ruling over Xhosas. Just because the Zulus also give the Xhosas rights to vote does not make them one people or mean that all of a sudden, Xhosas are ruling themselves.
Demos is a synonym for ethnos, and for all of history except maybe the last 80 years people would have understood democracy as self-determination of ethnic groups. The reason why everyone wanted democracy has always been that peoples, i.e. ethnic groups, want to rule themselves, and don't want to be ruled by others.
If Palestinians are 10% of the electorate in a Jewish nation state then they can never write laws for themselves, they can never rule themselves. There can be no democracy for Palestinians in a situation like that.
If Zulus and Xhosas each make up 50% of the electorate then voting is not democratic, it's a battle for one ethnic group to try and rule the other, and the weapon is just voting.
Xhosas don't want to be ruled by Zulus, Zulus and Xhosas don't want to be ruled by Afrikaners, Afrikaners don't want to be ruled by the English, Poles don't want to be ruled by Germans or Russians, Russians don't want to be ruled over by Lithuanians, Jews don't want to be ruled over by Arabs, and Palestinians don't want to be ruled by Jews.
Everyone knows this, even you. Redefining words won't change this. Nominalism won't change this.
Almost invariably, even under the most favourable conditions of rule by another ethnic group, an ethnic group will still want to rule themselves.
«What is the good of telling a community that it has every liberty except the liberty to make laws? The liberty to make laws is what constitutes a free people.»
It's Voltaire (1694-1778). Depending how you count, The Enlightenment is or isn't part of modernity.
Did you think democracy was not a modern idea? It unequivocally is. The word comes from Ancient Greek, but what they did had almost nothing to do with the current definition of the word.
This focus on ethnic groups that you have is simply just not germane to this discussion. Democracy as it is currently understood does not have anything to do with "ethnic self-determination" (reeks of Blut und Boden - what the hell does it even mean to have an "ethnic self"?).
I don't know if you are inspired by neo-fascist thought or what's going on, but your understanding of democracy is extremely unconventional.
> reeks of Blut und Boden
Definitely linked to that sort of thinking. It sounds very inspired by 18th/19th century ideas of race (the ideas based on science that was debunked by the mid 20th century and has been thoroughly disproved by genetics).
The problem with these sorts of arguments is they take little bit of truth and some real examples (there are societies with politics is very tied into ethnic identities, there are groups defined by culture and language that want their own states) and treats them as the norm.
Find me one single definition of Modernity that excludes the 18th century.
You can already see that one of the biggest problems in Western Europe is that the liberal establishment itself refuse to hold non-westerners to account to western laws because they feel that it would be unfair to enforce one people's laws on another people.
This is why rapists and murderers get lighter sentences than people who say the wrong thing in Britain, as long as the rapist or murderer is non-western enough.
This is why foreign rioters who incite violence get no sentence, while native rioters get the book thrown at them.
Lots of countries (including many western countries) have some ethnic parties. That does not mean people will vote for their ethnic groups party - in general most will not.
> This is why rapists and murderers get lighter sentences than people who say the wrong thing in Britain, as long as the rapist or murderer is non-western enough.
That is just made up. Vickrum Digwa has just been jailed for life with a 21 year minimum while Lucy Connelly served an year for directly calling for violence (telling people they should burn down buildings is not just "saying the wrong thing").
Tell me you've never actually been to Western Europe without telling me... This is so profoundly disconnected from reality that I don't know where to even begin.
But thank you for confirming my hypothesis in another comment that you are indeed inspired by neo-fascist thought.
A look at their comment history would do that!
On the other hand I don't know a solve for every bill having less than a handful of votes that are bipartisan...
After all the federal budget is so large because you can swap states but you can't get away from the IRS.
You might shrug and say "well pobody's nerfect", but the disparity between the American narrative and the reality is actually quite extreme.
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Economist_Democracy_Index
Look at the what The Economist is and promotes. I'd have about as much trust in Faux News Independent Press index.
I used to work and live in Poland for almost a decade (I visit friends there often), and I live and work on the UK and to be fair Poland seems far more democratic. Actual independence of the Judiciary, proportional representation Parliament, vacatio legis (as opposed to UK's "hey, that's your new tax code, effective immediately"), growing local democracies (despite 50 years of Soviet occupation, thanks to the betrayal from the West).
But of course Anthropic has been lobbying hard for this, for government regulation, and finally they've (at least temporarily) got what they want. Maybe they are actually happy with the outcome, who knows. They get to IPO and all get rich, they get to sell current level models, and future development gets heavily regulated.
It was always going to happen anyway - just a matter of time. At some point (whether that is today is beside the point) AI/AGI will become powerful enough to have national security implications and of course the government is going to regulate who can have access or not, put in place export controls, require clearance for developers, etc.
The whole point of government control is at least everyone has some say in it, if we build the government decently. It has to be controlled by one or more human institutions, so choose your poison: government, nonprofits, forprofits, ... ?
I believe the real lesson is that we need to fix government. Too many things that people assumed to be codified were actually only ever enforced by social contract.
Until now, we've largely operated within a band of norms that served us fairly well, if imperfectly.
However, we're now seeing what's possible when the social contract is shattered. We need to codify in ways that insulate government from wide variances in the reasonable operation of our form of government. And, we need to root out regulatory capture while we're at it.
Government involvement should be the people's voice. We need to restore that in earnest versus eliminate government involvement; else we're merely a corporatocracy.
Like, in the US, Trump might do the ICE show for his voters, but Obama's deportated 3 million just fine in his time.
Government intervention is good and useful and keeps a markets free and society fair, preventing things like monopolies, robber barons and insider trading.
When those constraints are removed, when government becomes the source of corruption, we end up wheee the US has arrived today - where companies that bribe government officials get preferred treatment and the law is used selectively as a weapon.
This is a very dangerous moment for the US.
Do you think lobbying did not exist prior to two years ago?
HN perceives America as a temporarily embarrassed Libertarian state.
Crony capitalism, media echo-chambers and inequality have fomented an unshakeable disbelief in positive government intervention, thus the only thing left politically tenable is flagrant corruption (drain the swamp).
I'm vey grateful for the Australian federal government; their actions have steered us to a much better 2025/2026 than many other countries.
I've pointed this out so many times when enforced DEI and cancellation culture was rife, and was asked, basically, why I wanted to be a nazi :-/
so instead of involvment proper there is leverage somebody tries to pass onto competitors
Courts have slapped down some of Trump's actions thankfully, but a lot of what he has done that many disagree with simply shouldn't be legal and only are because in the past we had what may have been good reason to solve a short term problem.
Trump shouldn't have been legally allowed to enact a war without congressional approval before it began. As it stands he was able to sneak through with the war powers act, congress is completely unwilling to enforce their own oversight authority, and Trump eventually redefined how to interpret the war powers act and again congress rolled their eyes and didn't challenge it.
It's perfectly reasonable to want government involvement that for sane governments is OK, even when you don't like that government. The current US government is a completely insane outlier. You cannot expect everything to adjust for the most insane outlier.
This is laughable “both parties are as bad” thinking. By reasonable standards your current government has gone through involvement, passed straight through tampering and is now into nation-destruction mode. It’s a new thing for the rest of the world to see.
That is not the problem with government involvement, it is the problem with bad governments.
Sure, there are some differences and it’s not as scripted, just like how professional sports is not as scripted as WWE or other things people see in their rectangle called a phone/tv (even though people still debate, e.g., which super hero is better), but it’s still controlled by an overarching control harness.
It’s why regardless of voting or party in power, we always get the sane direction of movement even if one is flavored blue and another time it’s flavored red or the March forward has a left or right lean. Just like the manipulation of emotions in WWE or and soap opera drama, the manipulation works best when there’s cycles of tension and conflict to move people. That’s how narcissistic manipulators work.
It’s one of the ways in which you can tell they’re behind it all when you can take a step back and realize that there’s always this tension and constant conflict and drama, but somehow everything always works out in the narcissist’s interest and desired direction. It’s insidious.
Grok and ChatGpT are more in line with the narcissistic system’s interest of world domination by a cabal of psychopathic and extremely narcissistic and supremacist people … so Anthropic that may not want to participate in murder and mayhem and could be used by people who oppose murder, mayhem, and world domination needs to be kneecapped … ideally into submission. That’s all that this is, the constant evil that controls America doing what it has always done, rapaciously consume and abuse.
[1] https://stonecenter.gc.cuny.edu/files/2022/09/Hertel-Fernand...
We've seen how social media sites have always been in contention with govs regarding free speech even tho theyre fundamentally a way for other people to socialize with one another
Turns out the alternative to bureaucracy and regulation (good and bad) is executive fiat, which is a lot less predictable and trustworthy even if their reasoning is good (which in this case it theoretically might be) and often is bad
Every non-American company is now at a disadvantage against American companies. The implications can not be overstated.
ChatGPT was released 4 years ago and still out of 27 countries in EU, only Mistral based in France has a model closer to a frontiers and IMO EU has already lost the race and still trying to catch up to yesterday models.
Mistral might be a bit behind but this might give them a lot more business.
Most of all, a lot more people will switch to Chinese models. They will catchup, soon enough.
I have not had much of a chance to try Fable, but it did not seem better than Opus for what I tried it out on. Maybe its better on bigger jobs/vibe coding type tasks which is not something I do anyway.
Its really not comparable.
For some EU companies this is irrelevant, but for global companies this becomes a problem.
The likely end result of this is that it will shrink the market to which American companies have access by more than it will shrink the market for anyone else.
https://www.wsj.com/world/middle-east/u-s-forces-raid-ship-s...
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I think it is either a missile directed at anthropic, as retribution for not giving the DoD what it wants, in which case it is likely to resolve pretty quickly. Or it is a shift of policy toward export restrictions on powerful LLM and then every model will be impacted as they reach the threshold. In which case this could have massive implications of revenues, valuations, and the whole datacenter buildout. And frankly on the location of the white collar workforce if it is indeed a productivity multiplier, all countries reciprocate, and not all countries can match the US LLMs.
And why would the EU allow exports of chip manufacturing equipment if the US then restricts the export of derivatives of those chips to the EU?
Do you honestly think that this - logic and reason - is going to stop anyone from hyping whatever nonsense he comes up with to the moon and back anyway? Right after the SpaceX IPO of all things?
the first one to do IPO will win big. With the government pressing Anthropic, OpenAI IPO will vacuum up the funds that otherwise would have went into Anthropic IPO as OpenAI was falling behind.
>and the whole datacenter buildout.
somebody just did a $2T IPO with the idea of datacenters in space. One can wonder what laws/jurisdiction those datacenters will be subject to.
Foreign labs releasing open source models won't be able to comply, and as a result open source models will remain stunted at pre-mythos levels or their use will be criminalized.
We should look past the petty fights these closed labs have, and see their common interest in banning open source and/or local models.
We've seen this movie before with crypto export bans in the 90s. The rest of the world caught up and then surpassed the US very quickly - and that was without the enormous financial incentives of AI.
[0] lmao how ironic
I mean, yeah. But did it take this long for that to be apparent to you?
Circumstantial, but... timing is odd.
It got me wondering if this means all big models are US-only now? Are they gonna do the same with GPT-5.6, etc? Seems pretty unlikely to me. So I expect Fable to come back pretty soon.
The insider trading kleptocrat has found a new toy
Means you pay full price per token right? (Which I think works out to roughly 10x more than using Claude Code?)
Actually, for enterprise I think it doesn't make a difference anymore, since they switched to per-token billing.
On Enterprise you might end up saving money if the other harness is more efficient.
If that happens, presumably the weights eventually make their way online...
Why would the makers of open models (mostly Chinese firms) continue to open them up, now that the value chain and economy shifts? Previously, it was a (Chinese) national goal to force the market to compress OpenAI/Anthropic margins (and compressing their revenue along the way), to ensure the Chinese had access to high quality models, and could afford to compete. Now there is an opportunity to usurp and be the international default, and claim the margin for themselves by closing their models.
Beyond that, there is likely an upper bound of capability-per-parameter, which means that there is an upper bound on "local" models, and once you need the cloud, why would the government not target clouds next?
Sacks can choose to self-deport on his own, which will help his chances if he ever decides to re-apply for citizenship or entry into the US.
Such as?
The difference is that still the bio and space hackers are few and SWE are plenty so there is more of a collective voice.
I’d love to build a hobbyist space rocket. However, many tools and fuels required per my research can’t be obtained outside the US. So I didn’t even start.
> Speaking of the HN/Reddit folks, lots of people are gleefully cackling about how Anthropic got what they deserved for their ‘marketing stunt’ with Mythos. As I’ve said before, this isn’t the first time we’ve had an AI CEO argue that something is ‘unsafe’ for personal gain.
Do you not think it is time to give up the whole "it is hype" rhetoric and come to reality -- the models can actually be unsafe and naturally Fable is closed off and the government is pulling access.
Maybe you have evidence otherwise?
They are not wrong, it feels like that Game of Thrones season where someone thought it would be a great idea to let the fanatics re-arm.
> The real story here is that this may be the beginning of governments restricting the availability of strong LLMs to the public, to you. Fable was the strongest model on the market, and the US government has told you you can’t use it (technically, only if you’re not a US citizen, but in practice, even if you are). If you think the solution here is going to be open source Chinese models and / or running on your own hardware, think again. Do you think China is going to allow the strongest LLMs from companies within its borders to be open source a year from now when they have Mythos capabilities, if the US government is keeping the strongest American models back? Unlikely. These are heading in the direction of being powerful cybersecurity weapons and it will be in the interest of nation states to restrict and control them. In 2 years time, I would be surprised if the strongest LLMs are available for general use at all.
The world is a bit bigger than US and China, if Anthropic did it, another company can do it as well.
I am highly skeptical about Mythos's part in the whole cyber security angle and Anthropic seems to agree with me:
> We have reviewed a report that we believe is the basis of the government's directive and validated that the level of capability displayed there is widely available from other models (including OpenAI’s GPT-5.5)
It does sound funny to hear this from Anthropic after they spent recent months with scaremongering about Mythos's capabilities, now they say it was a prank bro, you can actually achieve more or less the same with good old GPT-5.5.
> Will we be the poorer for that, or will we be safer? I think poorer, because I hate being told what technology I can and can’t use, but I’m not certain. Maybe you think the government should restrict strong LLMs. Maybe you don’t. But either way, this is big news and a rubicon has been crossed and a precedent set. That’s true even if the motivation for this is just the government settling scores with Anthropic.
What this has demonstrated: if you can't run the software on your own hardware, you should assume that it can be taken away at any moment.
Well, yes but it also took questionable legality and a massive pile of cash to get there. OpenAI has raised $180b and Anthropic $132b
Don't forget that US and China are the only 2 countries with chips to train and run the models.
You can’t just buy H100 there are government limits on that.
RTX4090 maybe has no government limits but NVidia is definitely limiting bulk orders per retailer. I guess if you buy a lot from each retailer you will most likely get flagged in one way or the other.
With respect to AI capabilities is it really?
I don't see anyone else producing frontier closed source LLM's or frontier open source LLM's outside of US and China.
It's good that they exist, and I hope they catch up, but if you don't have origin constraints for your use case I don't see why you would chose their models today.
[0]: On the only benchmark they both published performance results - SWE-bench Verified -they are within a margin of error Mistral 77.6 vs Qwen 77.2.
What I am trying to get at is that the frontier is great, but you can be fine with less as well.
Not for the EU. Given the political importance of LLMs and the talent pool in France (let alone rest of the EU), I fully expect them to catch up.
Wasn't that when Dario, et al were at the company. One way to view this is that OpenAI expelled the cultists and they went on to form their own organization that continued using the same tactics.
Certainly some of the Anthropic press around Fable seems to me to be just marketing but I also think there's a core of people there who really believe it. I also think like all good advertising/lies there's some truth to the claims even if they're exaggerating.
Edit: if anthropic couldn’t resolve this matter, they can do something reallllly funny right now and open source it to the public :)
And, on other side of coin, it is more great publicity.
This is simultaneously many things and it’s best to view them as a negotiated package:
- No foreign nationals: not subject to US law (locality notwithstanding) -> bolsters America First which is the primary role of the government, accountability to its citizens
- Part of a US citizen AI dividend (not cash but access). Yes Nationals are not always citizens but that’s just why it’s defensible bc it bolsters the former under the guise of the DoD’s purview on the latter. Primary point here is leverage. Nationals can have their visas revoked.
- Semi-legit defense concern that bypasses regulation: stays in the executive, no 5y drawn out deliberations by congressional committees where many are clearly influenced by foreign interests (logistically Trump would be a fool to pursue the latter over the former)
- Anthropic receives the greatest marketing stamp of approval in AI history (the DoD fears the power of what we’ve created)
- Anthropic avoids truly punitive government action. FAFO. Not defending the govt here, but Trump has done nothing historically novel here.
- Within the next month or probably the next week (save this post), Anthropic reenables Fable access gated by drivers license verification (no fly lists will exist, which we effectively surrendered awhile ago, legality notwithstanding)
- Anthropic IPOs with the only DoD grade model (OpenAI doesn’t have this, yet) & firmly acquiesces as an American company first and foremost
- America firmly establishes itself as the AI world leader (both PR wise and going forward from a gating perspective).
- Corporations will nationalize for access, taxes will flow, AI dividends will flourish
- Both Trump & Anthropic will come out looking like titans battling and winning their own respective victories and it’s all pre-negotiated theater (Anthropic’s hand will have been coerced but not forced. They will come out ahead, US govt maintains is legal supremacy, Anthropic maintains its technical supremacy, this is the repeated lens from which all of this has flowed going back at least the last year, probably much longer)
Everyone comes out looking awesome in the long run. The only matter in which they look bad is through the lens of public opinion, not in real measurable outcomes. This is PR laundering with real existential stakes for both parties.
Looks like the weekly limits again reset prematurely during this change. Interesting how this works.
There are more and more posts coming up recently about AI being problematic. But people use it. It's strange. It's like hitting yourself with a hammer on the head, wondering why that hurts but you keep on doing it.
- Staying alive
- Keeping our jobs
?
If AI lived up to a tenth of the promises the American labs produce, the world would be drastically different today. It's not. I'm doubtful of future impact based on that.
I'm happy we can utilise current OSS models to the extent we can now. They'll improve. The world will continue as usual. And hopefully we can put this bubble behind us.
That part is kind of their point - it doesn't have the distribution issues your other examples have.
This technology is not new and has been around since well before the internet.
Gangnam Style is the most popular video ever, surely it means something right?!
If we're cooked, it's only because of a mass hysteria behind this thing. It's an extremely useful technology, we're just losing our collective mind because of it.
This is going to be studied for many, many generations to come.
The Mythos marketing strategy in action
So much smoke, mirrors and SV techbro bullshit going around that it has become impossible to figure out what's what.
What makes you think everyone (and government) should play along and align with your way of dependency on AI? Not even 1% of the people use AI the way you do. Fable model is not a basic need. Government represents the average Joe. You could also say "I make a ton of nuke weapons and this government has stopped the public sharing of how to make them!".