QuitGPT – OpenAI Execs Are Trump's Biggest Donors
quitgpt.org
quitgpt.org
This was despite the tech community being predominantly democrats. They turned to Trump, because the democrats shut them out completely and in some cases were highly antagonistic (crypto and elon companies).
Look, a16z basically are talking their book. They went heavily into crypto, and when the Biden administration started taking actions against crypto, they started supporting Republicans.
Not everything needs to be complicated.
While I didn't agree with a lot of the governmental responses to ChatGPT (the bowlderising of the EU AI act is my personal lowlight), I think that a lot of what the Biden admin was against was monopolies, which I entirely agree with.
It's super dangerous (as an example) that basically 3 companies now control all online advertising, and another 3 have a monopoly on renting servers. This is bad for markets and society so I was mostly onboard with a lot of what they did (and am very disappointed in the results of the trials, particularly the Google ones).
I don't think this is anti-tech, it's anti-monopoly which I think is really good for basically everyone here over the longer term.
That being said, a16z were totally just trying to make sure they had time to unload all their crypto "investments" to another sucker.
As is typical of Democrats, they're trying to balance multiple interest groups (authors, artists, programmers, users, tech vendors, international markets, etc), arriving at a complex, multifaceted, reasonable position that everybody hates.
By all means, one should not become too dependent on OpenAI, and actually should use open models too. I just don't think that other commercial players are going to be much cleaner.
And maybe a few more, so maybe around 1%
From my perspective at most there are attempts to curtail business practices untethered to any morality, which should be a net-positive for society. A completely theoretical pro-business political body would remove any and all obstacles to business: environmental regulations, labour protection, taxation, financial oversight, so on and so forth, I believe we can agree that such move would be detrimental to society at large while making businesses extremely rich, right?
The shift of framing that any attempt to curtail the bad downsides/externalities of untethered capitalism is being "anti-business" is either ignorant, misleading, or purely furthering an agenda. There's no way for capitalism to survive without oversight, its incentives are to minmax on a race to the bottom on anything possible that could give a business an edge, without rules around that the benefits of such a system are completely eroded, you create social fractures that are reflected into politics, exactly what's been happening in the USA even before Trump 1.
Perhaps this aggressive stance on being pro-business is part of the issue, and pursuing it above all else has steadily shown that society at large doesn't improve even though it fosters consumption, assets inflation, and the key economic metrics used to sell this idea.
While this stance is pursued the political power keeps getting accumulated into the hands of an elite detached from reality, uncaring for any social aspect since there's absolutely no moral incentive to think about the social contract when you can live in an ivory tower with the scales tilted to your favour, and among others like you who also don't care about any aspect that can make the life in society better for all. Improvements to society at large are coincidental, not intentional.
Capitalism is amoral, we need mechanisms that imbue some morality to it to avoid social fractures, the core issue is finding that line to balance, and which keeps shifting and needs iterative processes to rebalance when needed. The extremist version of pro-business-nothing-else-matters is clearly not the way you find a balance on anything, like any extremism it's almost by definition wrong when meeting reality.
This assumes that all obstacles and regulations are to the benefit of the environment and people and that the regulation results in intended consequences.
In modern western countries regulation is very often ideological and actively harms the populace and economy. Case in point Germany and their green and anti nuclear hysteria, which resulted in total reliance on coal.
I don't know why you assumed I'm stating as if finding where these regulations lie to be a static thing, I thought I left a lot of nuance so this tired line wouldn't be played against the core of my argument... I didn't assume the current regulations are perfect, nor that there can be a perfect line, but that the process of finding this should exist, and that the answer will never lie in either extreme.
Hope it's even clearer now.
Edit: and also, "ideological" is a non-sequitur, even the criticism of it as you've done is ideological in nature...
Where you probably disagree is that you think the left is broadly on the correct side of this issue.
As an example, take the anti data centre push by the left.
This is just fake morality disguised as "moral capitalism" broadly coming from the black and white ideology that dictates all businesses are bad and require push back.
You and I agree that there is a balance to be made.
For example: I don't agree that we should be curtailing the data center buildup, it bothers me because it's almost a stance of conservatism. While I do agree there's a need to closely monitor the situation with how AI develops, since in case it does pan out that it can, in a 5-10 years time frame, dislodge a big mass of labour without leaving room for those unemployed by a radical change it will create a lot of social strife.
I'm more in the camp of caution, and planning on how to address the scenarios that could be most damaging, while I also understand there's no stopping when the machinery gets going as it is, we can only work around it to adapt to a new reality.
> This is just fake morality disguised as "moral capitalism" broadly coming from the black and white ideology that dictates all businesses are bad and require push back.
But most businesses do tend to go towards "bad" (if we define it as showing no empathy towards their damages to society) because those are the incentives, being "good" has very little financial incentive, and financial incentives are absolute king in this era of hyperfinancialised capitalism. The incentives for creating good products only exist to manage finances, not out of a desire to create good products as a benefit in itself which as a consequence will sell well. If there's a way to increase revenue while minimising attrition of the customer base, even in detriment of a great product, it will be done, because the incentives are there for that.
I think we probably agree more than disagree, my belief is that we have wrong incentives if this is the system we will continue living under. I also believe we can continuously improve it, there's no end game in sight for the "perfect system", it's all experimentation and we ought to take into account the results of these experiments after 20-40 years, and be rational about what works and what doesn't. Whatever was the world in the 1980s when this era of hyperfinancialisation started is not the world in 2026, whomever was the winner of that change wants to keep the status quo because it benefits them while we do see fractures and issues arising from that.
There's a balance to be made, and it will always go against the interests of past winners who will try to pitch the world as it is as the best it can be, and that more of whatever was done to make them winners is the only way forward.
Its the reverse. Most businesses exist to serve consumer needs. The state comes in and tries to regulate because of possible externalities caused by the business.
The fact that businesses serve real demand of consumers means that most businesses don't go twards bad or show no empathy. It is in their interest to please the consumers. Ultimately the way you might see it is ideological.
The pushback against AI crucially misses the point that people actually want to use AI and their actual preference is such. What the left does here is assume (like you did) that by default, AI companies are bad and require regulation and pushback and they do it to an extent that is detrimental for everyone except the elites.
One might ask why? Why is it that the left wants, as a reaction, to curtail AI? It is ideological - assuming all businesses are bad by default. And also status quo preservation.
I agree, I should have phrased it as "big business" instead of just business, it's my mistake to not have been clear about that.
> The fact that businesses serve real demand of consumers means that most businesses don't go twards bad or show no empathy. It is in their interest to please the consumers. Ultimately the way you might see it is ideological.
Which leads me to this point, where I believe a lot of smaller to medium-sized businesses do need to provide good products for consumers to keep their edge. Where this starts to frail is when a business is too big, too detached from any controls, and instead starts to be the tail wagging the dog.
> The pushback against AI crucially misses the point that people actually want to use AI and their actual preference is such. What the left does here is assume (like you did) that by default, AI companies are bad and require regulation and pushback and they do it to an extent that is detrimental for everyone except the elites.
I don't disagree that people actually want to use AI, I do it and the tools have a lot of value. I disagree that big AI companies are not going to turn "bad" when given enough power, and I didn't mention regulation at all at this point, I said "caution, and planning".
> One might ask why? Why is it that the left wants, as a reaction, to curtail AI? It is ideological - assuming all businesses are bad by default. And also status quo preservation.
It's ideological, and dogmatic, which is why I disagree with the current position of the left for pushing back extremely without giving other avenues on how to develop it. I don't agree at all with pushing back without taking into account the reality: these tools are here to stay, their uses are still being discovered, we will settle into a new reality.