Tech Titans Amass Multimillion-Dollar War Chests to Fight AI Regulation

Agreed. Regulate AI? Sure, though I have zero faith politicians will do it competently. But more IP protection? Hard pass. I'd rather abolish patents.

It's theft. But not all IP theft, or theft in general, is morally equivalent. A poor person stealing a loaf of bread or pirating a movie they couldn't afford is just. A corrupt elite stealing poor farmers' food or stealing content from small struggling creators is not.

And it doesn't even infringe on IP rights.

If there is more than one AI remaining, they will have some sort of an economy between them.

I for one welcome our new AI overlords.

(disclaimer: I don't actually, I'm just memeing. I don't think we'll get AI overlords unless someone actively puts AI in charge and in control of both people (= people following directions from AI, which already happens, e.g. ChatGPT making suggestions), military hardware, and the entire chain of command in between.)

> "Stop the IP theft" - This feels like a cause pushed primarily by the 1%. Let's be realistic: 99% of people don't own patents and have little stake in strengthening IP protections.

Artists are not primarily in the 1% though, it's not only patents that are IP theft.

It's less about who is right and more about economic interests and lobbying power. There's a vocal minority that is just dead set against AI using all sorts of arguments related to religion, morality, fears about mass unemployment, all sorts of doom scenarios, etc. However, this is a minority with not a lot of lobbying power ultimately. And the louder they are and the less of this stuff actually materializes the easier it becomes to dismiss a lot of the arguments. Despite the loudness of the debate, the consensus is nowhere near as broad on this as it may seem to some.

And the quality of the debate remains very low as well. Most people barely understand the issues. And that includes many journalists that are still getting hung up on the whole "hallucinations can be funny" thing mostly. There are a lot of confused people spouting nonsense on this topic.

There are special interest groups with lobbying powers. Media companies with intellectual properties, actors worried about being impersonated, etc. Those have some ability to lobby for changes. And then you have the wider public that isn't that well informed and has sort of caught on to the notion that chat gpt is now definitely a thing that is sometimes mildly useful.

And there are the AI companies that are definitely very well funded and have an enormous amount of lobbying power. They can move whole economies with their spending so they are getting relatively little push back from politicians. Political Washington and California run on obscene amounts of lobbying money. And the AI companies can provide a lot of that.

> "Stop AI from taking our jobs" - This shouldn't be solved through regulation. It's on politicians to help people adapt to a new economic reality, not to artificially preserve bullshit jobs.

This is a really good point. If a country tries to "protect" jobs by blocking AI, it only puts itself at a disadvantage. Other countries that don't pass those restrictions will produce goods and services more efficiently and at lower cost, and they’ll outcompete you anyway. So even with regulations the jobs aren't actually saved.

The real solution is for people to upskill and learn new abilities so they can thrive in the new economic reality. But it's hard to convince people that they need to change instead of expecting the world around them to stay the same.

"Stop AI from taking our jobs" - This shouldn't be solved through regulation. It's on politicians to help people adapt to a new economic reality, not to artificially preserve bullshit jobs.

So politicians are supposed to create "non bullshit" jobs out of thin air?

The job you've done for decades is suddenly bullshit because some shit LLM is hallucinating nice sounding words?

> This shouldn't be solved through regulation. It's on politicians to help people adapt to a new economic reality, not to artificially preserve bullshit jobs.

They already do this[1]. Why should there be an exception carved out for AI type jobs?

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[1] What do you think tariffs are? Show me a country without tariffs and I'll show you a broken economy with widespread starvation and misery.

>There's a vocal minority calling for AI regulation, but what they actually want often strikes me as misguided:

There's a ton other points intersecting with regulation. Either directly related by AI, or made significantly more relevant by it.

Just from the top of my head:

- information processing: Is there private data AI should never be able to learn from? We restrict collection but it might be unclear whether model training counts as storage.

- related to the former, what kind of dystopian practices should we ban? AI can probably create much deeper profiles inferring information from users than our already worrrying tech, even without storing sensitive data. If it can use conversations to deduce I'm in risk of a shorter lifespan, can the owners communicate that data to insurance companies?

- healthcare/social damage: what is the long term effects of people having an always available yes men, a substitution for social interaction, a cheating tool, etc? should some people be kept from access? (minors, mentally ill, whatever). Should access, on the other hand, become a basic right if it realistically makes a lef-behind person unable to compete with others who have it?

- National security. Is a country's economy being reliant in a service offered somewhere else? Worse even, is this fact draining skills from the population that might not able to be easily recovered when needed?

- energy/resources impact: Are we ready to have an enormous increase in usage of energy and/or certain goods? should we limit usage until we can meet the demand without struggle?

- consumer protections: Many companies just offer 'flat' usage, freely being able to change the model behind the scenes for a worse one when needed or even adapt user limits on their server load. Which of these are fair business practices?

- economy risks: What is the maximum risk we can take of the economy being made dependent to services that aren't yet profitable? Is there any steps that need to be taken to keep us from the potential bust if costs can't be kept up with?

- monopoly risks: we could end up with a single company being able to offer literally any intellectual work as a service. Whoever gets this tech might become the most powerful entity in the world. Should we address this impact through regulation before such an entity rises and becomes impossible to tame?

- enabling crime: can an army of AI hackers disrupt entire countries? how is this handled?

- impact on job creation: If AIs can practically DDOS job offer forms, how is this handled to keep access fair? Same for a million other places that are subjected to AI spam.

your point "It's on politicians to help people adapt to a new economic reality" brings a few:

- Should we tax AI using companies? if they produce the same employing fewer people, tax extraction suffers and the non-taxed money does not make it back to the people. How do we compensate? And how do we remake - How should we handle entire professions being put to pasture at once? Lost employment is a general problem if it's a large enough amount of people. - how should the push of intellectual work be rethought if it becomes extremely cheap relative to manual work? is the way we train our population in need of change?

You might have strong opinions on most of these issues, but there is clearly A LOT of important debates that aren't being addressed.

"Stop the laundering of responsibility/liability" - the risk that you can run someone over with a software controlled car and it's not a crime "because AI" whereas a human doing the same thing would be in jail. Image detection leading to false arrests, etc. It's harder to sue because the immediate party can say "it wasn't us, we bought this software product and it did the bad thing!"

I strongly feel that regulation needs to curb this, even if it leads to product managers going to jail for what their black box did.

> "Stop the IP theft" - This feels like a cause pushed primarily by the 1%. Let's be realistic: 99% of people don't own patents and have little stake in strengthening IP protections.

This is being screamed from the rooftops by nearly the entire creative community of artists, photographers, writers, and other people who do creative work as a job, or even for fun.

The difference between the 99% of individual creatives and the 1% is that the 1% has entire portfolios of IP - IP that they might not have even created themselves - as well as an army of lawyers to protect that IP.

> Elon Musk explicitly said in his latest Joe Rogan appearance that he advocates for the smallest government possible - just army, police, legal. He did NOT mention social care, health care.

This would be a 19th century government, just the "regalian" functions. It's not really plausible in a world where most of the population who benefit from the health/social care/education functions can vote.

Like every other self-serving rich “Libertarian,” they want a small government when it stands to get in their way, and a large one when they want their lifestyle subsidized by government contracts.

Of course he only wants the government to do only what benefits him.

It's possible that the interests of the richest man in the world don't align with the interests of the majority, or society as a whole.

I'm sure that "smallest government possible" involves cancelling all subsidies to EV car companies and tax credits to EV customers. What a wanker.

Sounds like a great way to make jobs for a bunch of talkers and parasites.

Maybe there's enough of a "money multiplier" to make it worth their while. Then again, possibly more likely, their entry could spook other investors.

That's the only way the bubble hasn't popped yet.

> I'd argue that "value creation" is already at a decent position considering generative AI and the usecase as "interactive search engine" alone.

> Regarding "value extraction": Advertising should always be an option here, just like it was for radio, television and online content in general in the past.

Not at the actual price it's going to cost though. The cost of an "interactive search" (LLM) vs a "traditional search" (Google) is exponentially higher. People tolerate ads to pay Google for the service, but imagine how many ads would ChatGPT need, or how much it will have to cost, to compensate an e.g. 10x difference. Last time I read about this a few months ago, ChatGPT were losing money on their paid tier because the people paying for it were using it a lot.

It's more likely that ChatGPT will just be spamming ads sprinkled in the responses (like you ask for a headphone comparison, and it gives you the sponsored brand one, from a sponsored vendor, with an affiliate link), and hope it's enough.

I don’t disagree that then AInis of value. The issue at the moment is the whole thing is being kept alive by hype and circular financing. There’s not anywhere near enough money entering in from outside (ie consumers and businesses buying this stuff) to remotely support the amount of money being spent. Not even close.

Not according to both Google’ latest revenue and profit numbers and even Apple hinted they aren’t seeing less revenue from Google searches.

This is crazy for me with how inaccurate Google’s AI summaries are. They’ve basically just added a chunk of lies to the top of every search page that I have to scroll past.

There is zero evidence that the current approach will ever lead to a self-improving model, or that current GPU/TPU infrastructure is even capable of running self-improving models.

It was a genuine question. Do you have anything besides ridicule to offer the discussion?

This fundamentally doesn’t work unless there is collusion involved, which we already have laws against.

That’s quite literally the point I was making. They’re lying to everyone while demanding protective backstops for their highly speculative investment.

None of these companies, investors, or executives are making AI that’s actually going to improve humanity. They never, ever were, and people need to stop taking them at their word that they are.

It is unclear. Everyday I seem to read contradictory headlines about whether or not inference is profitable.

If inference has significant profitability and you're the only game in town, you could do really well.

But without regulation, as a commodity, the margin on inference approaches zero.

None of this even speaks to recouping the R&D costs it takes to stay competitive. If they're not able to pull up the ladder, these frontier model companies could have a really bad time.

The ones they hoped for.

Perhaps P/E ratios?

It's still technically a profit margin if it's less than zero...

There are profit margins on inference from what I understand. However the hefty training costs obviously make it a money losing operation.

That's a good line but it only works if market forces don't commoditize you first. Blithely saying "commoditize your complement" is a bit like saying "draw the rest of the owl."

>Yeah, but we can self-host them

Who is "we", and what are the actual capabilities of the self-hosted models? Do they do the things that people want/are willing to pay money for? Can they integrate with my documents in O365/Google Drive or my calendar/email in hosted platforms? Can most users without a CS degree and a decade of Linux experience actually get them installed or interact with them? Are they integratable with the tools they use?

Statistically close to "everyone" cannot run great models locally. GPUs are expensive and niche, especially with large amounts of VRAM.

>It's a race towards AGI at this point. Not sure if that can be achieved as language != consciousness IMO

However it is arguable that thought is relatable with conscienceness. I’m aware non-linguistic thought exists and is vital to any definition of conscienceness, but LLMs technically dont think in words, they think in tokens, so I could imagine this getting closer.