The whole thing was a scam
garymarcus.substack.com
garymarcus.substack.com
It very clearly is, the present AI instance is far from the only recent case.
> I don't see how any rational investor could still see US companies as a secure investment.
They evaluate the propensity and ability to profitably engage in open corruption the same as they evaluate other capacities of the company. “Secure” isn't a binary category, and the risk here is much like any other risk.
> When the rule of law degrades into pay-to-play politics, the inevitable result is a mass exodus of both capital and top-tier talent.
That is the expected result of increasing perceived risk. yes, probably one of those “slowly and then all at once” things.
2025 was also the first year that the majority of stocks were traded off-market (i.e. hedgie darkpools, no public price discovery).
----
Hope ya'll bought your gold before Monday.
#RemindMe2days [gold@5290USD, this post]
Do you have any sources for that?
Almost all equity ETFs do their balancing against dark pools or directly with market makers to avoid arbitrage and to ensure enough liquidity.
Since index ETFs have more AUM than the underlying instruments (the “ETF tail wagging the dog”), this sounds like a natural evolution.
There is nothing nefarious about this, it’s just how the markets work.
first_time.meme | Gold "up" 3.12% pre-Monday trading ($5411) #USDeflation #ThisGuyGetsIt
It’s the best investment - just bribe your way to contracts
A lot of things that people call "bribery" is really just ensuring that your preferred candidate gets in office. You couldn't give money directly to the candidate for personal use. Donations went to the campaign of the guy who already agreed with you. The FEC used to take a dim view of outright pay-for-service, even dressed up.
This is new. And now people need to decide how they feel about that. They get one chance to say "no, that's not how we do things." Even if the administration suffers a blow this November, if they hear that this is mostly acceptable to their base, it will be what every politician does from here on.
And they did so, so they could take bribes with no consequences as long as they take them the right way.
Yep. cf. Snyder v. United States[0]
[0] https://www.scotusblog.com/2024/06/supreme-court-limits-scop...
Having a preferred candidate you give money to is already bribery - whatever the law says. You fund your favorite pony to get the power. They then scratch your back or lend a sympathetic ear.
To the degree great inequality leads to this being decisive in elections, it is a corrupting influence, but the term for it is still not “bribery”.
But when a presidential candidate tells oil companies they should donate because he is going to help them, that’s solid bribery.
When companies pay to “settle” ridiculous accusations, or “donate” to a president’s causes, while their mergers or other business legal issues depend on an openly pay-for-play president’s goodwill, that’s solid bribery.
The country’s policies, discipline, reputation and competence (economic, diplomatic and political) are being sold off for a tiny fraction of what their future adjusted value is worth.
Say, a single donor can contribute a maximum of €6,000 per parliament candidate per election.
Yes, that's a real limit.
It's so broken.
To the extent that a pretty big chunk of donations are used to fund very short movies (we call them ads) for or against candidates, I'm not sure how that can be distinguished. I could see how one would distinguish get-out-the-vote or other similar non-speech type activities, but those on the Left seem to not oppose such expenditures.
The Citizen's United case being relevant to the former.
In other words, by your distinction, the decision was about stacks of cash, not movies.
A case regarding a movie was indeed brought to the court. The court decided to make a far more expansive decision. The movie became a footnote, and has effectively no meaningful relationship to the court’s final decision or its impact.
As for getting lost in a discussion about the difference between an ad and a movie, that’s really going down a rabbit hole of deliberately missing the point completely. Some word play is just too divorced from reality to engage with. There are many very short movies, and any rational person would be able to distinguish them from ads to a high degree of accuracy.
Now all that's required is a thin fig leaf that you're not actually directly coordinating with the actual campaign. And even that much is never enforced. It almost completely undoes campaign limits.
Ideally they "shouldn't". But in practice they do.
Because the Supreme Court determined that money is free speech, its use in elections cannot be limited in general.
And where coordination between purportedly independent groups isn't supposed to happen, there is a strong "don't ask, don't tell" code, and a mountain of lawyers ready to scream "political oppression!" on the dime of the rich.
Alright then what should it be called, because it's also not democracy.
We used to have some limits on it, but now it's trivial to bypass those limits because the Supreme Court decided that the First Amendment isn't limited (except for all of those other limits.)
To where?
I'm in Europe, I'd like to see it come here. The news I see suggests China's ahead of us in this race, but I don't know if that's for all talent, or if it was just an artefact of a lot of Chinese people in the US on work visas returning home.
Or indeed whether the news about China doing well here was real or hallucinated by an LLM.
Immigration is hard.
I moved to Germany in 2018, and only just this month reached B1 level in the language; and that was a pre-Brexit move so I don't need to care about visa.
The EU has a "blue card" scheme modeled on US green card: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Card_(European_Union)
If language is your biggest barrier, pick a country whose language you already speak. As this clearly includes English, Ireland if you want specifically EU, and UK if you just want the continent (mainly London, but I spent a long time in Cambridge tech sector).
Germany may still be an option even without being a native speaker (depending on your skills), but with all the difficulty everyone has today with AI messing with job hunting, get the contract before considering a move.
I suggest you do the same -- the reply lists a dozen promising sites.
https://www.perplexity.ai/search/if-an-american-citizen-a-tr...
Without a job offer, yeah not gonna happen easily unless you e.g. show an ancestral connection to the specific country.
0: Various kinds of engineers are on the so-called Positive List, see sections 21 & 25 on this page: https://nyidanmark.dk/en-GB/You-want-to-apply/Work/Positive-...
1: The supplementary pay limit track requires an annual salary of DKK 446000 (~$70000). This track could close if unemployment rises sharply, but it has been open for 6 out of the last 7 years: https://nyidanmark.dk/en-GB/You-want-to-apply/Work/Fast-trac...
There's plenty of room to fall if people are complacent.
General corruption: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corruption_Perceptions_Index
Us US-ians are no longer naive. US was certainly corrupt before, and muckrakers had an uphill battle showing how e.g. Democratic admins were subservient to the oligarchy. But Trump has certainly taken this to a new level, and while it's a little bit sanity-enhancing to finally have middle-of-the-road friends see how bad things are for once, the brazen-ness of it all is nothing to celebrate.
What's more, it's precisely what happened with Putin, Orban, Berlusconi, Modi, Bukele &c &c &c. The right wing seeks to "finish the job" of private capture of public interests, and the populist side of it adds the mafioso "all in the family" touch where corporations explicitly kiss the ring.
The US is probably more corrupt that the most developed European countries, but they have also been becoming more corrupt.
kinda a stretch, don't you think?
While most of the network in in the US, there are very many highly placed people in Europe who will have been involved, and so far only a few have suffered. One Norwegian charged, two in the UK under investigation arrested and released.
> wow. you're comparing EU
Apart from the investigation in France, have guilty parties in any EU countries been charged, convicted, or are even facing invetigation?
Investors just care for the returns. As long as they can identify and bet on the side doing the bribing, they're fine...
No, it's not inevitable. What you've described is the way a lot of authoritarian states work, such as China. China attracts plenty of capital and external talent, including people from other countries such as Taiwan and the United States. You have be all-in on the CCP's rules, though.
Vietnam operates in a similar way. Untold billions of FDI in the past 20 years from Japan, the U.S. and China. Talk with top executives there, and you'll frequently find close connections or family ties with leaders in Hanoi.
I the problem is that from the companies’s side you just have a whole country to exploit, so I’m fairly certain the investments still work.
Tldr; Rich people can bribe more, hence Rich people can be more rich+er..
I think a lot of poor tech multi-millionaires hate this in US but all rich billionaires must be loving it...
This HST quote seems severely outdated by now. They have already been caught, committed all the sins of stupidity and some more. All of it to the clapping mob of people who yearn for some kind of social revenge.
And it’s happening everywhere these last years.
Who could possibly know we have so many wife beaters?
Not saying he wouldn't have banged on the button, for all he was worth, but no one in their right (or even severely sick) mind would ever let him near it.
Probably doesn't know who Thompson was.
I'll never forget Thompson speaking at my school as the war in Vietnam was drawing to a close.
He did not mince words.
Thompson: The man who invented gonzo journalism, writing beginning in the 1950s for numerous publications but most notably Rolling Stone, best known for Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, serialised in RS, published as a book, and the basis of two films, Where the Buffalo Roam (loose adaptation, 1980) and more faithfully in 1998 under the original name, starring Johnny Depp and Benicio del Toro.
There are a lot of conspiracy nuts like Alex Jones, and the amusing thing to me is that there is a conspiracy of elites who are exerting large amounts of unelected control of the government, and who are actively working to keep you down to enrich themselves, and it's not even a secret.
We call these people "billionaires", and at this point they don't even bother hiding it. Trump had a streamlined bribery system with his stupid cryptocurrency and being in charge of a publicly traded company while in office, Musk bought his way in so he could be in charge of a new department and start defunding any organization that has ever tried to investigate him, and there are hundreds of examples.
Instead morons like Alex Jones will go on the radio and blame lizards or something, and then his listeners will take that and then start blaming Jews or Mexicans, while cheering on the actual conspiracy that's making their lives terrible.
They can steal as long as they are our thieves.
To get through to these people you have to validate their deep fears. Not just say - shut up, you are stupid, vote for me.
Everyone says this kind of stuff, but honestly I don't think I agree. Everyone says that you have to be nice to these people to attract them, but that doesn't seem to have been the case for people like Trump or any of the other demagogues that have popped up in the last decade or so.
These people are decidedly huge assholes. Trump is the most easily offended person I have ever seen, and whenever anyone ever goes against him he will go on his stupid Twitter clone and give a diatribe about how they're not true Americans and they're radical left and they're traitors and a bunch of other bullshit.
People like John McCain and Mitt Romney tried to meet people where they are and negotiate, and both of them failed to win the presidency. Trump went on stage, rambled a bunch of incoherent nonsense about how Mexico not sending their best or trying to brag about having a giant cock and he's been elected twice now.
I'm not convinced that being polite to these conservatives is actually the right path forward. I tried being polite to my grandmother when we would discuss these things and instead of reflecting on her believes she's fully fallen down the QAnon rabbit hole and has actively said to me that my wife should be deported.
Listening to QAnon is a desperate attempt to understand the world after every other mainstream figure of authority failed that person.
What I am talking about is not politeness. Politeness is tone management. The McCain/Romney approach. I respect my opponent, let's find common ground, here's my reasonable plan. That is only decorum. But Trump did validate. That's precisely why he won. He just validated the ugliest parts. When he said the system is rigged, that the elites despise you, that your way of life is under siege, millions of people heard the first person in power say what they felt. The content was often vile, the solutions were fraudulent, but the emotional recognition was real. He didn't win by being polite. He won by being the first one to say your rage makes sense.
The mistake is thinking validation means being nice. It doesn't. It means demonstrating that you understand what someone is actually experiencing before you ask them to go somewhere with you. Trump does this instinctively, he just leads people somewhere destructive.
I am exceedingly impatient with this kind of stuff, from people that I think should know better. I try to avoid these arguments now entirely and live in my happy progressive NYC bubble.
No doubt that diplomacy with this stuff is necessary but I don't think that that's something anyone should want me specifically for.
I’m one of the politically homeless, and not even a resident of the USA, so I suppose I have an easy out.
Life can be very hard, and I don’t fault anyone for prioritizing their life over a political situation that is so very hard to affect. I do appreciate those that dedicate themselves though, the ones that seem to be helping and not hurting, anyway.
It’s not like I am apolitical; I donate money to causes I support, and I am generally willing to argue my beliefs if it’s something I believe it. I have my opinions, many of them very strong.
I am just saying that I am not an ambassador. I don’t really have a strong desire to “convert” people, and I don’t think I am the right person for that particular job. There’s value in it and I am ok with people doing it. Just not me.
It’s easier to tempt someone into getting a pizza with you than starting a diet, because pizza is more fun than diets. All that to say: the same mechanisms by which the alt-right is tempting people with cruelty aren’t going to be as effective when employed towards pro-social activity.
In the end I think to preserve democracy one has to become involved. Standing on the sideline at this point doesn’t cut it.
My parents are pretty decent people so I still talk to them a lot, but I can't deal with my grandmother anymore. If she thinks my wife (who was evidently on a Green Card at the time she said that) doesn't deserve to be here, she's allowed to think that, but she's not entitled to me being nice to her. I weighed my options and it came down these three choices: a) swallow my pride and roll my eyes and let her continue to be a racist sack of shit towards my wife, b) push back on the stuff and constantly argue, greatly upsetting my mother, or c) cut off contact to avoid this.
For someone like me option A really isn't a viable option, and and of the remaining two C seemed like the best.
Sometimes I wish I didn't have principles; that grandmother is ridiculously rich, and I likely could have wormed my way into the inheritance pretty easily. If anyone doubts that I believe in my principles just remember I turned down being a potential millionaire because I refused to yield on what I think is right.
Then we had a child. Once our kid was old enough to start understanding what people were saying, I put my foot down at one point when we came to visit. To paraphrase: I said, look, you're free to think whatever you want about whoever you want but the racist shit has to end when my daughter is around. Otherwise we need to head back home.
After that, it never happened again and we still keep in touch with her to this day. Some people just need to be told exactly where the boundaries are and then they respect them. (But of course not all will.)
This 'drive-by downvoting' is becoming endemic on HN. Downvoting should be reserved for comments that do not contribute to the conversation, not as a lazy way of signalling disagreement because you can't be arsed writing a rebuttal.
Such downvoting leads to groupthink and unpopular ideas being hidden. It's turning this place into another Reddit (a statement of truth, no matter what the HN guidelines say).
For those doing the supporting, they often want to be assured that they’ll not be hurt or retaliated against by those they put ‘above’ them.
So, leverage, and what is the best kind of leverage? the most despicable thing one can think of.
I have all the equipment necessary for a podcast (a decent Shure microphone and Zoom sound interface), but my political opinions don't usually stray too far from typical American progressive stuff and there's already a million podcasts for those kinds of viewpoints from people more educated on these subjects than I am.
When I have a perspective that I do think is unique I'll write something on my blog but generally I've stayed away from any kind of partisan politics on there because I don't see the point in regurgitating the same stuff everyone else is.
This might be the funniest thing I’ve read today.
Discredit By Association is written all over his yelling face.
Other things are used too. A lot of the attention given to culture wars issues distracts attention from other issues. Its not just the right either. It allows people to pose as left wing while actually not being left wing on economic and business issues which are the traditional definition (the labour party in the UK - to be fair the left within it does seem to the reviving now).
With the Epstein affair, the shock people feel about sex crimes is being used focus just on those to avoid investigating the corruption in the US and other countries . The UK's two high profile arrests, of former Prince Andrew, and the far more important Peter Mandelson (former cabinet minister, for EU Commissioner, very close to multiple Prime Ministers) have been for passing on sensitive information but this is almost certainly a tiny fraction of what was going on.
If you’re unfamiliar with HST, I highly recommend Hell’s Angels and Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ‘72
But women are generally ignored in our society.
- The Kushner family has invested in OpenAI.
- OpenAI uses Oracle cloud. Ellison is close to Trump.
- Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan (the “spy sheikh") has invested $500 million in World Liberty and is also invested in OpenAI.
- Altman is a protege of Thiel, whose Palantir integrates the external AI at the Pentagon.
- The scam occurs right before the Iran war starts. The Groq sale scam (where Trump Jr.'s 1789 Capital bought shares just months before the sale) occurred right before Christmas. So both were timed to be overshadowed by larger events or holidays.
If it doesn't pop while Trump's in office, his successor will inherit this mess, bubble will pop, and that person will have to deal with managing the fallout.
The time to lock-in gainful employment is now (if you can).
Lather, rinse, repeat.
There is this constant boogeyman narrative with him I find very disingenuous
Like, this is opex
https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x6tqvzt?start=872&mute=fal...
"I'm sorry, you... You think I'm a prostitute?"
looks at offered cash
"A $40 prostitute?"
Sir Winston Churchill supposedly asked Lady Astor whether she would sleep with him for five million pounds. She said she supposed she would. Then he asked whether she would sleep with him for only five pounds. She answered,"What do you think I am?" His response was, "We've already established that; we're merely haggling over price."- Marcus Felson, Crime and Everyday Life, Second Edition, 1998
We love to pretend humans have unflinching morals but they don't
I think that’s a fallacy, too.
In my view we have some unflinching morals, some more flexible ones, and some you don't adhere to at all, and which is which tends to differ between people.
I personally don't believe in non-religious ontological good because of this aspect of human nature.
To be clear, I'm not making any claims about whether this is a large proportion or not, because I have absolutely no idea (and I have doubts this would even be possible to calculate with even a remote degree of confidence purely via philosophical discussion). If anything, some sort of study that provides evidence that this number is lower than expected would be a strong argument against typical "tough on crime" policies that are often popular with people who express concern about human nature in this regard.
There are people that wouldn't do it no matter the amount. Not for billions. Not for a trillion. And that's why no matter how rich the other party, there are people to whom they simply aren't rich enough.
"No" is the most powerful word in the dictionary. And when some people say no, they really mean no. And no amount of money can change that.
And most filthy, corrupt, bribed politicians and corrupt public servants out there know that fully well: they feel filthy and miserable because they know there are people out there with moral and ethics.
Additionally, there are people who honestly really don't give a fuck about money (it's not my case): so they'll say no not because of particularly high moral or high ethics, they'll say no just because they enjoy their simple life.
Honestly it's a sign of low moral and low ethics to believe that anyone can be bought out and that it's just about the amount.
Citation most definitely needed.
I agree with your ultimate point that some people can't be bought, and I aspire to be one of them - though I don't think anyone actually knows until they face a temptation with a life-changing upside - but spare me the "evil-doers are always punished, even if it's in ways we cannot see" rhetoric. Sociopaths, at least, are just fine (in fact show happier than the average person on standard "life satisfaction" metrics), and I'll put it to you that there are a lot of ways that both you and I don't perfectly live up to our highest ideals (do you own anything that's plausibly been manufactured by slave labor? Have you bothered to check? Or, if not that one, have you sold everything you own and given it to the poor?) and we both feel pretty good about ourselves, am I right?
I'm sorry. I really didn't mean to come at you that hard, but I'm going to leave it stand - it's not truly personal - because I think moral fables (ie, "do the right thing and you'll be happy") aren't true, and thus are counter-productive. Acting morally is hard, and often (usually?) comes at a personal cost. It's more honest to tell people that.
The nuance you're looking for didn't exist.
Everyone knew that a lot of politicians have been for sale, but I didn't realize how cheaply they were for sale. Musk able to buy his way into being in charge of an idiotic department with basically no regulation while still being allowed to CEO like five companies, and he did it for like $100 million. That's a lot of money, more than I'll ever be worth, but it's way less than I would think it would cost to buy the presidency, in charge of billions (and maybe trillions?) of dollars of sales and contracting.
Decades of believing we are blessed with some sort of perpetual exceptionalism has made the American people not only susceptible to corruption but actively unknowingly promote it. Propaganda has convinced them to invite it into their house and let it know where all your money is and your bank account information.
I'm sure the Crypto AI Czar (David Sacks) being a major Anthropic hater didn't hurt either
Or that Kushner put a billion in OpenAI recently
EDIT: wow they got in at a huge discount too and OpenAI bought stake in Thrive...
https://www.wsj.com/articles/thrive-capital-bought-shares-in...
I don't know, Anthropic is providing 10K open source developers with $200 subscriptions to their bot, for up to 6 months. 200 * 10000 * 6 = $12 Million total. That's even cheaper, I'm not sure what conclusion to draw from all this.
While the specifics may differ, this is neither their first time doing a deal like this nor will it be their last.
There is a cabal of extremists steering technology contracts in this administration and among their donors. The names are familiar - Peter Thiel, Joe Lonsdale, Elon Musk, David Sacks, Palmer Luckey, etc. A future administration will need to purge all their companies from our government and investigate them for corruption and treason.
Good luck, democrats will put some of that easy money on their pockets and look the other way, like they always did.
"I was born in 1601. I’m a vampire. I’ve been around forever."
If you predict a corrupt cartel in "the US" will do a thing, then on a long enough timescale you'll eventually be right in general but wrong about every significant detail.
(also the people with this opinion don't seem to do anything with it - it doesn't appear to motivate them to vote, organize, think critically or come up with compromises - they simply turn out to belittle people on the internet while actually acting to normalize new excesses).
Yes.
> You learn to tune it out and then you never notice if they start being less wrong.
Speak for yourself. I have not tuned them out, I notice them a lot.
You were not around for the 2017-2021 preview? Thisis the second term! Everybody cpuld see exactly what the country would be getting into!
The second term is Elon dismantling the entire intelligence system, infiltrating every government agency and compromising every datacenter, piping all the data into a centralized database for stalking and mass deportation, etc.
While it was absolutely clear that Trump's bad news, I don't think anybody quite predicted the absolute fascism that would spring up, and just how quickly it would overwhelmingly FUCK everything.
His first term was relatively harmless but I guess it really rallied the goons, who proceeded to have four entire years to prepare the next dark ages.
There were plenty of people, we just didn't believe them.
An dpeople have short memories when it comes to this stuff. If the USA somehow manages to survive this and Trump and his allies are peacefully voted out and removed from power, I'd bet $250 that a lot of 2024 Trump voters would still happily vote for a platform consisting mostly of Trump's 2024 platform and Project 2025 plans. They're not learning the lesson that the core policy approach is designed to facilitate our decline into corporate feudalism; they're just learning the lesson that Trump himself and a few other specific individuals are bad, for them, personally. Trump Regret is not going to be enough to save us.
That is literally exactly what Leopards Eating People's Faces Party means.
> "'I never thought leopards would eat MY face,' sobs woman who voted for the Leopards Eating People's Faces Party."
Like, it's just weird and creepy to see closeted fascists wearing Democrat skins who will try and convince you they still hate Trump.
Still fascist though, huh
Who cares about ethics and morality? Those aren't profitable!
That's not to say anyone should be excused but the system's fragility compounds the problem.
That does resonate to some extent, when I see people of actual merit (or at least, people who have done things with actual merit) like Jeff Bezos and Jensen Huang, lining up to suck meritless people like Trump off.
The problem is, once the rich people have secured their fortunes through self-abasement, they never seem to use those fortunes to redress the humiliation they've suffered. That makes your argument a hard sell. Would Bezos and Musk and Cook and Huang and Dell and Altman and Soon-Shiong and Zuckerberg and Mickey Mouse -- all the figures from the famous Ann Telnaes cartoon and more -- still be as supportive of Trump if they didn't have to be?
We have no evidence to the contrary.
It's because the government can print money. The government is the ultimate fallback, if interest rates increase and money becomes scarce, these big corporations need the government to provide big contracts to back them up to get through that tough period.
This is what I mean by all-or-nothing situation. These big corporations NEED huge, constant inflows of cash to stay solvent. The system is always full of debt; the liquidity is always under threat of being sucked out rapidly... So all these big companies are terrified of such event. They need to know that if money gets scarce, they've got a reliable stream they can draw from and the only reliable source of money in times of monetary scarcity is the government.
You may criticize and you may get downvoted, but it may not be the case that you are being downvoted just because you criticize, and it is certainly not the case that all criticism gets downvoted.
Those people also get down voted to oblivion. Their text is gray. I can't read it unless I click the timestamp.
Clearly, HN doesn't want us to listen to them.
Yes, sometimes they can be combative and inflammatory. But even the ones that are otherwise reasonable get down voted because how dare we insult capitalism and billionaires?
That is "HN". HN is the people who read and post here.
> Those people also get down voted to oblivion. Their text is gray. I can't read it unless I click the timestamp.
I'm sure some are but quite a few are not because I have been able to see them quite a lot without clicking.
> Yes, sometimes they can be combative and inflammatory. But even the ones that are otherwise reasonable get down voted because how dare we insult capitalism and billionaires?
I must say that I have never seen that happen, but I don't tend to trawl through a lot of hidden comments. There certainly seem to be some favored billionaires who might upset people to criticize here. Trump is obviously not among them.
It's just a variation on Snowball being chased off Animal Farm.
There is not a single Democrat candidate I agree with or would gladly donate to. That party is almost as much of a joke as the Republicans are, and they all fuck kids anyways.
Besides, that money would only end up being spent on an absentee, self-obsessed, do-nothing Governor who wants to play more corrupt politics like his Aunt. Scam artists across the board.
According to him. These are same people that said we'd have self driving cars by 2017. That we'd be able to buy things with BitCoin. But here we are, it's 2026 and all of it has turned out to be a lot less revolutionary and world changing than advertised. We're just barely getting the internet as it was advertised before the dot com bubble, and to be honest, it kinda sucks. AI can do some cool stuff, but I'm very sceptical about all the hype.
I'd love to hear if Anthropic actually would accept this deal, if offered.
The tech industry was never perfect. It was never a charity. But there was a time, several years ago now, when people were more driven to build things that delighted others.
I asked gemini.
The one detail was that the contract enforced the law with anthropic, but with openai it was legal uses.
Sounds like hair splitting, but this article explains the real story.
He should get together with Musk and commiserate about how worldly success is no substitute for adoration on Twitter.
That said, I doubt he's wrong about the nature of this debacle. A thousand years from now, the ghosts of Altman and Amodei are still going to wander the earth in search of ways to dunk on each other.
Marcus is so overrated. He's not even good at straight factual reporting. The terms were not "pretty similar". He missed the whole point of the recent controversy.
> Anthropic deserves a chance at EXACTLY the same terms
No, those terms are bullshit.
*has transitioned
So it's more that only psychopaths will continue to push up the mountain when they already have many hundreds of lifetimes worth of wealth. Imagine being in that situation and still wanting to be involved in backstabbing power games rather than enjoy time with your kids.
You would think he might have something interesting technical to say... but no.
You had your answer around the time that he decided to side with Altman when he could have kept his own counsel.
Not even trying to justify the switchover would have raised less eyebrows than giving it a clearly nonsense justification.
No, capital (i.e. money) decides. It’s called capitalism not marketism. The difference is important because it means that if you’re already rich (or are perceived as such, and thus can get loans, extensions, and the like) you can continue to survive longer than the alternatives.
US government officials said "we're thinking of ruining Anthropic if they don't play ball".
Sam Altman publicly said "oh no, don't do that, that's terrible, they're right to not play ball".
Sam Altman signed a deal to play ball after he said that, and it turned out he had been working on this deal even before the US government officials said the thing about ruining Anthropic.
In oligarchy, connections and donations decide.
It sure look like the US is transitioning from the former to the latter.
As someone from genx I can definitively confirm this is how it always worked. If you're younger do not delude yourselves into thinking this is all somehow new and things were better in the past. They weren't.
I had been finding it super unsettling: Like, why would DoD go nuclear over wanting to build fully autonomous weapons… with Claude?
But no, it’s just run-of-the-mill Trump administration corruption. Phew!
[1] - https://nautil.us/deep-learning-is-hitting-a-wall-238440/
In oligarchy, connections and donations decide.
It sure look like the US is transitioning from the former to the latter"
I honestly can't understand how anyone sees things this way. The US isn't transitioning at all. It is and has been a complete oligarchy for at least 70 years.
I've taken to discounting any political talking-head that wont consistently acknowledge and push that axiom as THE fundamental assumption of all political discourse.
> In oligarchy, connections and donations decide.
> It sure look like the US is transitioning from the former to the latter.
The US probably always was like that. Now they just don’t bother hiding it.
It has always been an old boys club where connections and hand greasing decided it all. President Trump is the product of this system, not its creator or builder.
> In oligarchy, connections and donations decide.
> It sure look like the US is transitioning from the former to the latter.
One has to wonder on what planet Gary Marcus has lived so far.
Sure you could smear an opposition company, but just straight bribing the government is new, at this scale
> In oligarchy, connections and donations decide.
> It sure look like the US is transitioning from the former to the latter.
I thought this was already pretty clear - since Elmo bunny hopped on Trump’s rally stage
> In oligarchy, connections and donations decide.
> but after Brockman had donated 25M to Trump’s PAC
Sounds like they paid Trump and the government, can it get more capitalistic?
Oligarchy and capitalism don’t contradict each other
They lie and cheat to accumulate power
But maintenance requires supervision, which seems to contradict "free" in "free market capitalism." Without restrictions, greed makes corporations (or armies, or the maffia) seek influence at the highest levels of governance.
> In capitalism, the market decides.
> In oligarchy, connections and donations decide.
Author is confused about what Capitalism is. It worked exactly as expected, Capital used itself to advance it's own needs - maximizing (own) growth.
Capitalism is not about markets, it's about Capital.
There is a reason why lobbying is an accepted practice in one of the most Capitalistic countries in the world, and generally forbidden in Socialist EU.
This is one of those cases where you wish your critics were right. One in 40 people in Brussels is a lobbyist, but apparently it's forbidden.
This style tends to increase the likelihood of others responding in kind. The end result is often a less substantive conversation.
In oligarchy, connections and donations decide."
Who's gonna tell him there never was a difference?
Is there evidence the donation cause them to win the contract? Seems like the evidence is that their competitor backed out, no?
I suspect this is a conspiracy theory feeding on people's pre-existing hatreds.
I got baited into clicking another AI post.
Everyone here needs to take a deep breath, step back, and remind yourselves that everything you're claiming is unproven and is a conspiracy theory. The language of the contracts is not publicly available
I don’t understand anyone who believes that. What do you expect to happen during the midterms exactly that would bring the US back on some mythical track of rule of law, with a just and fair government? The corruption runs so deep, the institutions have been gutted, there are no good people in charge left. This ride is going to last a while, and the way out (if there’s one) looks nothing like the way in.
Sure, there will be things that Trump wants to do that he might actually need Congress for, and maybe there's room to make deals to advance some kind of progressive/liberal policies here and there. But I don't think this will slow Trump down too much, honestly.
And in 2028? Who knows what the state of things will be by then. Maybe we'll end up with a non-shit president at the start of 2029, but what kind of executive branch will they be inheriting? It would take an entire presidential term, possibly two, to undo the damage Trump and his shit-heels have done. And even then, it will never be the same, not to mention reputational, economic, and scientific losses that will -- at best -- set us back decades (if not permanently).
Honestly making them veto a bunch of popular to regular people legislation would probably do wonders for the "they're both the same" crowd.
Republicans are on track to win the mid-terms…
S&P500 is all you need
Fed cuts interest rate, jobs go up, 401k go up, RSU go up, credit card points go up, everyone is happy
This is literally the politics of running massive business interests, which I understand is relevant for technology and everything…
… but isn’t Gary Marcus’s whole game that AI is not capable and people are wrong/lying about AI tech capabilities?
I feel like this is a handy moment for Gary where he can say he could basically ignore all of his previous claims (because they’re all technically wrong) and shift into “AI is bad for society because it’s more crony capitalism” or something kind of muddy argument.
My intention is for other people to think what I believe which is Gary Marcus is a hack and has no business being listened to with respect to technical evaluation of AI because he’s not technically competent enough to do. The existence of his polemics waste everybody’s time and generally waste resources like we’re wasting right now.
His entire schtick has been as the debunker in chief of claims of AI capabilities
If you actually look at his polemics they increasingly have nothing to do with his original argument because his original argument not only is flawed but is ignorant of the technical capabilities
Transitioning? That happened post WW2. How many more wars in the Middle East do we need to convince people?
Though, I think it’s hard for Marcus’ generation to see this. Odd given Vance’s connections to Thiel et al.
To be fair, there has been a notable recent shift in the sense that nobody even tries to hide what is going on anymore.
We've moved beyond manufacturing consent to ass out corruption on full display, "try to stop me."
Other posts from G.Marcus are much longer. Go read them, but be prepared for some "adversarial thinking" if you strongly believe in the scaling hypothesis. Might border on "bubble popping ". You're all for free speech and the free market of idea, so it won't be a problem.
However, he has a low threshold for bullshit. And SamA is probably not getting any higher in his esteem this week.
I agree that the author gets a bit childish when he goes into name dropping of people who used to disagree with him and don't any more - there's probably some background drama that I'm not particularly interested in.
Still. I believe having both Gary Marcus and Dwarkesh Panel in a timeline, in chronological fashion, whiteout and algo to tell me who's right, is one of the perks of substack.
And they are the majority. Thats what Sam Altman understands
The biggest tell for AI writing is just being AI adjacent. I've started avoiding reading AI articles here because (surprise) they all feel like a chatGPT transcript.
Anthropic’s Super Bowl ads weren't fair play either.
So because you saw it once in one company, it will happen in every company? By that logic, wont Claude eventually get ads too, even though they are saying that they wont?
Even now, Google ads wrap around the content, they don't mess with the search results.
> Were you around then?
Yes. I was around for AltaVista, WebCrawler, and Lycos too. None of those were LLMs.
1. Anthropic should be free to sell its services under whatever legal terms and conditions it wants.
2. The Pentagon should be free to buy those services, negotiate for different terms, refuse to buy those services, and terminate contracts subject to any termination clauses.
You may or may not agree with what the Pentagon wants to do, but if things had stayed there, there would be no real issue.
The problem is that the Pentagon is trying to bury Anthropic as a company, calling it a danger to the United States because it exerted its non-controversial right in (1).
Any “explanation” that doesn’t address that is confused itself or trying to confuse the issue.
I leave it to you as to which category the linked source falls under.
2. Agree
> The problem is that the Pentagon is trying to bury Anthropic as a company, calling it a danger to the United States because it exerted its non-controversial right in (1).
My take is that the DoD very much wanted to continue using Claude. However, Amodei refused to budge on relinquishing final say over Claude usage. The DoD took this as a personal offense (how dare this guy, does he know who we are, etc) and lashed out in retaliation. The whole sequence of events makes sense when viewed under this lense.
So did Altman. The terms of each company’s agreement with the DoW are roughly the same when they come out of the wash.
“Mr. Altman negotiated with the Department of Defense in a different way from Anthropic, agreeing to the use of OpenAI’s technology for all lawful purposes. Along the way, he also negotiated the right to put safeguards into OpenAI’s technologies that would prevent its systems from being used in ways that it did not want them to be.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/27/technology/openai-agreeme...
And that's 100% acceptable and legal. They have the right to do that. And DoW can then turn around and say "no deal". And that's 100% acceptable and legal.
So Hegseth going above and beyond and lashing out on the People's behalf like a butthurt child is unwarranted at best, and should definitely be illegal if it's not already.
It is more likely the plan purposely gave Anthropic terms it knew it would not accept to give a certain public perception. OpenAI was always going to be the recipient, but for reasons unknown, they could not make the deal directly, and had to create the perception that they had no choice.