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Their strategy is regulatory capture.
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Through fear. Specifically making the American public so scared of AI that they hand over regulatory keys to the only “experts” that can keep them safe. This is a centuries old political strategy used by some of the worst regimes including apartheid South Africa where I grew up. It’s horrifically effective.
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I disagree that they’ve invented some “strategy” for this.

1. They, and many other experts, have been saying the same thing since well before the current paradigm existed. 2. There is nothing about regulation that is required to give them an advantage; it’s a fallacy to suggest “regulation = advantage” 3. It would be preferable to argue the facts (is it or is it not dangerous? Why or why not?) than conspire as to why they’re stating what they and plenty of others have been saying for decades

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You are right that they didn’t invent it. It’s a pretty well-established method for cornering a market.

1. All those who have been arguing this - many of them non-technical - are part of the same ideological movement.

2. Technically, there isn’t. In practice, majority of the time regulations benefitted those who wrote them.

3. Not sure if this is a criticism of the comment you are replying to or of the p-doom crowd. We would all appreciate facts stated instead of science fiction tropes repeated.

Look, “a lot of people say this” is a Trumpian fallacy. A lot of people say a lot of crazy things. It says nothing about the factuality about what they say. How many are this lot? Who are they? What do they know? Why are they incapable of expressing it without so much emotion? How come a big portion are non-technical?

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They certainly didn't invent this strategy, but that's because it already existed. Regulatory capture is nothing new.

> 1. They, and many other experts, have been saying the same thing since well before the current paradigm existed.

Some experts sure. "Some experts" say lots of things.

However, this is actually much to their advantage. If you were a frontier AI company, a legitimate concern to use as justification for your regulatory capture is exactly what you want. That is, after all, generally how regulatory capture gains public approval.

AI safety was also why OpenAI had to charge per-token for GPT-3. It must've been such a struggle for them to make that difficult decision. I'm sure Sam Altman spent a lot of nights crying to sleep over that one.

It's good that we never got open weights for a GPT-3 class model, right?

> 2. There is nothing about regulation that is required to give them an advantage; it’s a fallacy to suggest “regulation = advantage”

It's difficult to outline the number of different ways that regulatory capture can and will benefit OpenAI and Anthropic.

If we limit things to "Fable"-class models, then nobody competing with Anthropic/OpenAI is ever allowed to outdo them. If you literally legally aren't allowed to make better models, you can never charge the "premium" of having the current top-tier model. You have to compete by being cheaper than Anthropic instead, which is a lot less enticing from a standpoint of trying to become profitable. Take a look at the per-token pricing of Fable real quick. Yeah. Being able to charge a premium for the model that does the cybersecurity thing is literally their most important asset.

If Anthropic really is making a profit now as rumored, then they need regulatory capture as fast as they can possibly get it. Once Anthropic and OpenAI prove that AI is a viable investment, entities with a lot of capital will suddenly become even more interested in re-allocating it towards taking a slice of this pie.

> 3. It would be preferable to argue the facts (is it or is it not dangerous? Why or why not?) than conspire as to why they’re stating what they and plenty of others have been saying for decades

OK. On the factual end of things, AI safety experts have been raising the alarms for over a decade and so far essentially none of their predictions have come true.

The rationalists, the main group pushing the AI safety rhetoric that dominates the Western AI sphere and is virtually absent in China, which appear to be going entirely off the deep end at this point in time, put together their best minds to produce AI 2027, which of course like most predictions started to fall apart a bit before hitting the one year mark. Predicting the future is hard.

I have made this point before but I will make it again: I think AI safety experts deserve at least as much skepticism as Ed Zitron in their claims. They've been making similar dubious claims about AI capabilities and an incoming singularity for a long time now, and so far the best we can say is that maybe it will eventually come true.

Maybe. Or maybe you've read too much goddamn science fiction.

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They’re for sure losing this.

They seriously underestimating how ready and willing Americans are to use Chinese providers. There’s a ton of spite within the US, nobody trusts the labs

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DeepSeek is simply amazing.
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100%
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I keep seeing this assertion. What regulations have they proposed that would have prevented this new model? I thought they want to pace the frontier, which this model is not.
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You are taking their words literally, rather than looking at the side effects of any effort to "pace the frontier".
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Dario has not (and will not) say he wants to ban Chinese models outright. But:

1. He's made many posts about how he thinks "dangerous" models are bad (https://www.anthropic.com/news/position-open-weights-models)

2. He writes posts proving Chinese open weight models are "dangerous" (https://insightsintegration.com/anthropic-warns-of-advanced-...)

3. He talks about about how he wants stronger govt regulation of AI (https://www-cdn.abcnews.com/Business/exclusive-anthropic-ceo...), and explicitly mentions he does not trust China at all and doesn't want them to have Mythos.

Do the math: 1 + 2 + 3 = he wants to regulate/ban the Chinese open weights.

Of course, Anthropic and OpenAI will then write posts about how their own models are dangerous - but that's okay, they're the good guys.

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Go read Dario's screed on GLM, or his other one one on how your toaster could be part of a distributed open model that self replicates. Every second blog post is some doom scare about the dire consequences of open models. Go look at the new ToU [0] which are now pages and pages of things you can't do with Anthropic models. Check how they will ban your account if you are persistently mean to Claude now.

He's completely transparently campaigning for regulation. It must be very frustrating to him that the Trump admin is completely non-responsive. He probably thought Anthropic would have the whole market stitched up and water tight by now.

[0] https://www.anthropic.com/legal/aup

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Literally zero, but that never stopped a good conspiracy theory, especially when half of HN hates the big labs because of fear for their own economic future.

OpenAI and Anthropic aren’t even slightly worried about DeepSeek.

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> I keep seeing this assertion. What regulations have they proposed that would have prevented this new model?

> Literally zero, but that never stopped a good conspiracy theory

Are you living under a rock and never read any of Dario's blog posts?

Let me give you an example, here: https://darioamodei.com/post/policy-on-the-ai-exponential

Section "1. *Regulation* and public safety" (emphasis mine), then under it:

> AI companies that develop advanced AI models must have strong security standards that protect their model weights

You can't "protect model weights" if the weights are openly available, ergo this is an explicit call for regulation to make open weights illegal.

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Having looked at the sentiment around DeepSeek's models around this thread as well as my own experiences with it I'm going to need a little more to back up that assertion about OpenAI and Anthropic not being at least a little bit worried about DeepSeek...
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I’ve been listening to this rhetoric about the open models eating O/A’s lunch for like 18 months, meanwhile their revenue is up what, like 50x?

May this kind of worry find me…

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People like open models because they are free/cheap. It's not anything deeper than that. Most people will hop in whatever van is handing out free candy.
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It’s about capability.

The model makers are bricking the models with their system prompts, and even the tools are tamper proof.

You can only use it their way. They think we’re stupid.

And their way is the shit way, the babyproofed way, while they talk to you about their unfucked models hacking out of their labs and hacking into other labs, and reminding you you have zero rights.

Fuck them twice, then once more… This is about compute. Who owns compute. China is saying fuck you all we can scale things bigger than you can imagine. And they can! They have so much more energy! Theyre closer to commercial fusion than us too. Meanwhile our guys are trying to… regulate? Lol

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China won’t have more compute than the US for least five years. They’re highly constrained.
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Five years is a long time
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