OpenAI has upped its lobbying efforts nearly sevenfold
technologyreview.com
technologyreview.com
For example, here's an example of an effort to persuade Congress not to update copyright laws to account for model training, which was only revealed because of metadata accidentally included in a PDF file. https://www.politico.com/news/2023/10/23/tech-lawyer-ai-lett...
https://www.opensecrets.org/news/2021/01/trump-tied-lobbyist...
Gilbert still got the Nobel Prize for his work sequencing of nucleotides.
Researchers in AI, likewise, will have to relocate to more favorable countries losing precious time.
https://dnalc.cshl.edu/view/15258-Government-restrictions-on...
They are losing time anyway. They can talk to Musk to put them on the next Starship to Mars. /s
Probably AI will be a more competitive market than he and his investors had hoped for.
> They said, look, AI is a technology basically, that the government is gonna completely control. This is not gonna be a startup thing. They, they actually said flat out to us, don't do AI startups like, don't fund AI startups. It's not something that we're gonna allow to happen. They're not gonna be allowed to exist. There's no point.
> They basically said AI is gonna be a game of two or three big companies working closely with the government. And we're gonna basically wrap them in a, you know, they, I'm paraphrasing, but we're gonna basically wrap them in a government cocoon. We're gonna protect them from competition, we're gonna control them, we're gonna dictate what they do.
>And then I said, I don't understand how you're gonna lock this down so much because like the math for you, AI is like out there and it's being taught everywhere. And you know, they literally said, well, you know, during the Cold War we, we classified entire areas of physics and took them out of the research community and like entire branches of physics basically went dark and didn't proceed. And that if we decide we need to, we're gonna do the same thing to to the math underneath ai.
> And I said, I've just learned two very important things. 'cause I wasn't aware of the former and I wasn't aware that you were, you know, even conceiving of doing it to the latter. And so they basically just said, yeah, we're gonna look, we're gonna take total control the entire thing and just don't start startups.
If this is true, makes sense for OpenAI and other to ramp up lobbying to be one of the two or three big companies. In another subsequent interivew Altman denied he was ever in such a meeting.
With so much talk about regulation and talk of complete control of the technology by govt, it would be very foolish for them not to be spending a lot of time and money trying to influence policy on it.
You know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know...
> I, you know, look, and I would say like when we endorse Trump, we, we only did so on the basis of like tech policy. [...] Number two was ai, where I became very scared earlier this year that they were gonna do the same thing to AI that they did to crypto.
Second of all, your bar for "essentially pro-Trump" being 1/3rd of the vote is ridiculous, by your standard almost every county in America is "essentially pro-Trump".
And the point about Chinese being among the most pro-Trump is South Bay stands - I have had several conversations and most people from mainland (RIP HK) see zero problem with authoritarian rule.
Overall voters who identify as Asian mainly voted for Harris. So I am skeptical of your claim that Trump got a lot of votes from first-generation immigrants from China.
https://navigatorresearch.org/2024-post-election-survey-raci...
The fact that Musk hates Altman, has the President's ear and has a competitor to Altman's main wealth engine surely also plays into the calculus.
People want things. Information doesn't want anything. People want property rights for both physical and intellectual property.
Likely rules are ill suited for levels of scaling achieved with current technology. A single person can read a ton of stuff and retain only a fraction compared to how much a system can.
So information wants to be free is nonsense. People want access to more information, at the same time they don't want others to have accees to the same information. However having access to more information has marginal effects when capacity is limited. Hence it's the information capacity that makes all the difference and this puts a small class in disproportionate advantage.
Water flows downhill to maximise entropy. The equivalent for information is dissolution into randomness. If anything, by this analogy, the “freedom” that involves information being copied and transmitted is the equivalent of pumping water uphill.
Freedom takes work. You don’t get it for free.
And I disagree about the work when it comes to information. Our natural inclination as humans is to share things we find interesting. Like "check out this song" or "check out this article". I don't think this takes much work. It just happens. In this sense the information is free like the stream is free to flow through the hills.
On the flip side there is substantial effort put into impeding this free flow of information with schemes like DRM. Similar to building a dam. But once cracks form the free flow resumes.
Continuing the water analogy you could say there is also substantial effort put into building the infrastructure to make information accessible to many more people. As a library is to a city's plumbing infrastructure.
When the phrase was coined in 1984 [1], it was a valid hypothesis. The last forty years have given evidence for the null.
The more plentiful information has become, the more we've sought (and in some cases, needed) to corral and control it. Sometimes for our own purposes. In many cases because absent such archiving entropy takes its toll.
The problem with "information wants to be free" is it presumes a natural force which doesn't exist. There also isn't a natural force that wants to make DRM and NFTs. But there is one that wants to forget, to corrupt and re-interpret. (There are very human forces that wish to control.) Sit back and let information do what it wants, which is precisely nothing, and the forces that beckon us into control and forgetfulness will win.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_wants_to_be_free
Water takes the path of least resistance. Why would anything exist to maximize entropy?
A funny anecdote I found the other day is that during the Korean War the US government wanted to break up AT&T but AT&T got the Army to argue that AT&T was instrumental in winning the war, I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader to find out if AT&T won the Korean War but one of the end results was rewarding AT&T with additional lucrative military contracts.
The defining character of information is its reproducibility. Even verbal speach: "And then she said..." But digital information in particular is almost infinitely reproducible, without loss, worldwide.
So when people say "information wants to be free", what they actually mean is that trying to restrict the movement of information is fighting against the essential nature of information.
The US certainly doesn't have a monopoly on the best scientists and engineers.
How long can the US control sufficient capacity of hardware? (Without unspeakable atrocities.)
Is the US planning to overwhelmingly outspend other countries?
Or make AI-control treaties. And we'll have AI states and non-AI states?
What leads you to believe the US wont continue to ourselves everyone whenever it deems want or reason? Historically that has been the case.
China's future has drawn attention to the sand upon which the foundation of their economic growth sits.
So. Who will outspend the single country that accounts for 25.32% of all global economic activity?? Who is going to do that??
The reality is that the Chinese population is in crisis, solely and directly due to their societal position of less than replacement reproduction as law, and the consequences of that position over time.
2 ppl = 1 person + repeat x number of times per generation + time, decades of time even... uuhh, how could that not have serious detrimental effects to the replacement rate?
We won't see it right away obviously, like with Japan it's taken time to begin to see what it will really look like to have a population age out, but tho long ago predicted, the prediction is still playing out.
Population trends are not supposed to move like China's did - had it naturally occured, their would have naturally been an increase too offset, these things happen for reasons.
There MUST always be more of us.
The world over also knows that Japan is a pretty serious culture, they are like the Germany of Asia and the Koreans and Chinese are pretty serious too. They have several words to define foreigner based on their level of how bad they are or decent...
It's one of the most expensive places in the world, Japanese is also hard and they have a stubborn attachment to using it even for titles of things... I'd not have it easy in Japan.
I'd pick Japan. Every. single. time.
Not all closed to immigrant societies can actually do an about face. That's just reality.
I'd pick
Also, I don't think you realize how much Japanese have hatred towards foreigners. I will go as far as saying Chinese and Americans have more in common than Japanese and Americans.
Anyways, my whole point was clowning a huge economy because of its political ideology is only valid when they keep losing. Right now? It's the opposite. Time will show, I guess.
1.3 Billion people will be less than 700 Million - younger ppl alive today will live to see this transpire. Understanding this is key to getting why Taiwan is so important to be taken this generation.
As a previous comment stated - they have 15 years before they begin to decline and at first the decline will be slow but at some point the majority of people will be so Old that they require care, like assisted living... but they will be the majority of people without the children and grandchildren necessary to replace them, the country's population is projected to be at around half of it current number by 2100.
I can't state enough that reversing such decline is extremely difficult. Now that "we all know" any moves to increase immigration will almost look a denial of reality.
Like I said, I believe that the CCP may have broken their society with that policy - as it seems to be a factual statement that cannot be denied.
I have never looked down on Chinese people. But their nation has essentially self destructed multiple times over the past several centuries so I won't be surprised if it happens again. When heading over a cliff, political ideology can cause even smart people to keep going straight ahead instead of turning the wheel.
Have you actually looked at those immigration reforms? Japan is making some very limited changes to try and attract a small number of skilled workers. Those people already have options about where to go and Japan is not at the top of anyone's list (a tiny number of Japanophiles excepted). Japan is not opening their borders to take in masses of random poor people to repopulate the country.
https://hir.harvard.edu/improved-immigration-japan/
This is not a serious change of government policy or human nature. Maybe in a decade they'll be desperate enough to make real reforms.
Yes, Japan has been making it much easier to immigrate in the recent years, you can ask anyone who lives here, especially recent immigrants. Government has been carving out special exclusions (like truck drivers) when the large businesses can't attract workers.
I don't really think failing societies will do what is necessary to reverse the trends - the opposite actually. With decline comes uncertainty and fear and so those that people that remain will entrench themselves and try to prevent "outsiders" from taking advantage of their own population decline.
Like, say if China ends up half of its current housing available in 70 years - opening up to foreigners, really anyone, to buy them and immigrate on the cheap would be smart... but that would mean a society that has just experienced an incredible trauma then turns around to watch half of their world be taken over be optimistic, eager, productive 1st generation immigrants - it is unlikely Han Chinese 3000+ year old culture emerges from such an experience without much change... I'm not sure that would be acceptable to some countries.
I think a lot of places will go down with the ship so to say, or at least want to. I've no doubt half empty county's will attract attention.
Look at what has been done to actual Chinese people, but minorities tho - the Uhgyurs - all bc they are not Han Chinese, the very population group that made China rich but without heirs, they have allegedly used forced sterilizations as policy... little unbelievable considering.
How would they treat a desperate refugee or a poor immigrant family?
I was astounded when I finally could see the enormity of what I was looking at, absolutely dumbfounded. I have no idea how things were allowed to progress so far or even how it was so flippantly considered outright but it seems very much like all the data and statistics and trends and science of populations over time suggests that China broke their society with that policy, in a way that may not be fixable - as the entire world is also grappling with this replacing issue, just not so badly...
History is crazy. That was a crazy bad idea it turns out.
Who wants to move to China? China has less than .01% of its population comprised of immigrants. They do not treat immigrants all that well. Mandarin is hard and very little English is spoken outside of the Entertainment and Academic circles.
Immigrating to China versus immigrating to the US...
Especially considering China is recruiting you to hopefully help them stave off economic and societal ruin...
But... what If you actually can get a Green Card into the US tho and actually immigrate and become a citizen to work at a stable position at say a Tech Company with high income, good work life balance.
Would something like that be appealing to a slice of the Global Population?? They can be from anywhere but they gotta kno coding, or AI or be an Engineer - this is the new "Give me your tired, hungry and poor"
Now the US will increasingly only take the best and brightest but any and all of them.
Anyways, my point is, when governments become desperate, they will change their laws, needs and wants. It has been done before, and will be done in the future.
And that's to say nothing of the fact that such an innocuous typo doesn't change the actual crux.
A little, "Hey, dunno if you know or not, but it's 'Andreessen'," goes a long way.
What are the odds that deep within US research labs, we have some crazy breakthrough tech tucked away? Like antigravity drives or force fields or whatever - complete with brand new breakthrough physical theories to support them.
I'd guess suppressing such a breakthrough without raising suspicion wouldn't be hard - probably only a few top guys can make the intellectual jumps to derive such theories and the experimental setup to validate them could very well cost billions.
The US government could just quietly whisk away the top talent into some secret lab, put out some fake papers showing this avenue of research is not noteworthy and not fund further public research in the area.
The closest thing to this type of technology would be EUV hardware of the sort produced by ASML. We have now given China every incentive to put everything they've got into developing similar technology on their own soil. Despite slow progress to date, they will get there.
Another analogy might be the math behind encryption, effectively monopolized by NSA for decades... but nobody's trillion-dollar economy was blocked by those secrets.
Effectively zero? Did that sound more convincing when you originally wrote it? Because it's like conspiracy theory 101.
For example: Queen Elizabeth refusing to grant a patent for the first knitting machine, the Qing dynasty forbidding large-scale ship building, or the Ottoman Empire outlawing the printing press.
I'm not sure that this is what is happening here, but it's occurrence is not impossible.
When the US applied arms export restrictions on cryptography mathematics during the cold war, they gave exceptions to companies like IBM.
https://www.cio.com/article/3806594/trump-repeals-bidens-ai-...
Banning corporate campaign donations is a good idea. It would have no effect on this news.
How much can you give in relation to Kelcy Warren? Or Diane Hendricks? Or Linda McMahon?
And that's before we even get to Bezos or Musk.
It doesn't get any more kleptocratic than that. This sort of both sides of the buy/sell conflict of interest would get you fired from any properly ran company, but there's nothing that will be properly ran going forward.
And that's not even in the top five problems with him.
Kakistocracy: Government by the least qualified or most unprincipled citizens - also comes to mind here. No one in the upper levels of government care about anything other than enriching themselves at the behest of corporations, and at the expense of everyone else's wellbeing and livelihood. Instead we get vapid shallow identity politics and "culture war" garbage, and every once in a long while we get a gutted out compromised bill that addresses 1/1000th of the problem... only to be later overturned despite it being wholly ineffective.
I just don't see the government, in this state, ever having the faculties or incentive to "fix itself." These institutions and "norms" are irreparably broken, and some people still insist on holding them in the highest regards like they are some infallible mandate.
There are 51 Governments inside the US. You realize we have had Oligarchs before? The Senate used to comprise so many millionaires that purchased their seats from their State Legislature that it was called "The Millionaires Club" - obviously they were all about themselves.
Americans are like the camel - our backs are so full of straw that we don't realize only one more piece of it and our backs will break. We will play along until the very day, the very hour that we don't.
https://www.opensecrets.org/political-action-committees-pacs...
They should ban money contributions completely. Each party gets the same budget (say 10M$ and you run your campaign until you have money and that's it).
You as a citizen wants to donate? Go and collect signatures, spread the word or stuff like that, but no money (IMHO).
Maybe Sam should give up his bribery world tour and focus on creating a better product?
I think the west has been underestimating China's AI capabilities. AI is huge in China and they have found tons of "practial" applications so it's widely deployed.
Wow. Just one vote away from a drastically different political landscape and future for the country.
McConnell (yes that one) v FEC and Citizens United redefined the first amendment to include financial contributions as a form of speech and extended to for-profit corporations the same rights as individuals and civic associations.
To my understanding, this had zero effect on lobbying rules. Just campaign finance, namely, donations to candidates and donations to messaging operations.
The point is this lobbying wouldn’t have been restricted by anything Citizens touched. OpenAI isn’t giving money to a PAC, it’s buying bog-standard lobbying hours. This is an adjacent but nevertheless separate issue.
And since that number is literally all that the right people can comprehend, it's the most important measure of a society's condition.
If you chain together enough analogies you eventually reach a conclusion that is complete nonsense. That's about where our court system has brought us.
Without personhood, we'd have to know which persons within an opaque company structure were responsible for wrongs against us in order to sue them directly instead of just being able to sue or fine "Walmart" or whomever.
Before personhood, if a corporation had wronged you, you were limited to suing its trustees, its charter, or petitioning the government.
With personhood, I don't need to know who at McBigCorp decided to dump that sewage into my stream, I just need to know that it was done. I don't need to go after the trustees directly. Accountability is centralized, and the corporate entity likely has deeper pockets than the individual I might've sued for recompense.
So yes, corporations existed before corporate personhood, but they were more hazardous to public welfare and had limited remedy to abuse. The East India Companies and the railroad barons of the world were allowed to run roughshod until centralized accountability was imposed.
Aside from that though, we have lots of other enforcement mechanisms that we don't avail ourselves of for lots of reasons, some rational, some not. We can imprison executives, as we've done with Theranos' Elizabeth Holmes, Bernie Madoff, Jeffrey Skilling, Jordan Belfort, Martin Shkrelli, Donald Blankenship, etc.
We can also mandate compliance or impose oversight, mandate public apologies, ban companies from engaging in certain business activities (thinking HSBC being banned from financial services after money laundering,) impose corporate probation, mandate recalls, clawbacks, or probably lots of other things that don't immediately come to mind.
That we typically just impose financial penalties is probably a reflection of our values as a people or a judicial system or our government's willingness to collect fines, but we should not pretend that it's the only available option.
If this is what it takes to bring nuclear back, maybe it's worth it.
Do not use AI under the control of quislings and demagogues.
Trump is simply pay to play. And they paid.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/technology/tech-companies/musk-pou...
Maybe this whole late stage capitalism isn't the most efficient way to allocate resources after all...
Think about it, where are you gonna get 10000 H100s?
Best you or I can hope for is to fine tune the models the big guys make "open source". None of which will be as serviceable as their closed models.
Also model performance follows a power law. There are strongly diminishing results, where after some point throwing twice as much money at the problem only gains you 1% accuracy. OpenAI knows this, so they're all in on regulatory capture.
[1] - "Software is getting slower more rapidly than hardware is becoming faster"
Who cares if Chinese AGI is a year behind OpenAI/Anthropic. At some level, progress will stall and then OpenAI/Anthropic will be on the clock before being undercut out of business on price.
They are probably just positioning now for when that happens and they have to become some kind of regulated utility for US government AI use.
Just another example of having our head up our ass as Americans. Seems like what we are doing will almost guarantee most the world outside the US is using Chinese AI in the future.
China is too big. This was going to happen eventually. Empires come and go, that's just a fact of life. The question was whether you'd fall back gracefully like Western Europe, now ranking at the top of "World's Happiest Countries", or whether you'll become Russia 2.0 with the biggest guns, richest oligarchs, and the worst quality of life.
Eisenhower 1953 said "Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed." Nobody listened. Americans think life is a Marvel movie, and they are Iron Man. Turns out conflict is not a long-term winning strategy.
The current leaders basically need to either (1) break through the capability ceiling before everybody else catches up, or (2) construct law/regulation that keeps everybody else out of the game. #1 is uncertain, but #2 is well-understood business.
Since they all share that same interest (they'll be duking it with each other either way), the result is an "industry wide" effort to artificially close the door behind them.