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Comment by ToucanLoucan | Hacker News Reader

If your product can't function in a way that respects humans' right to privacy, your product is the problem, not the humans' rights.

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You can grumble about the way things are but Europe being so far behind a technological race with important geopolitical ramifications means that you guys are cutting off your nose to spite your face. Have fun with zero of European regulations impacting frontier development and then eventually having to depend on it.

I am dying to know what the important geopolitical consequences are of not having a ChatGPT lolol

Oh gods our politicians will have to read their own emails, and write them too! We may never recover. Clearly there is no path forward apart from mass surveillance.

You are totally right, reading emails and vibe coding saas apps is all we can do. Omg why didn’t we think of that? Someone get the pentagon on the phone and cancel the drone warfare technology they’re already using and proving out in the battlefield with Palintir. Someone also call the NSA: we don’t need to hack nor do we need surveillance and spying nor do we need robust defenses against all of this. Ah!! Also the president, we can surely cede the market benefits to other countries that’s totally fine.

LLM’s are nice. But if push came to shove, we could very easily continue on without them, or without them involved in every aspect.

Being able to write cutesy SaaS apps faster is neat, but not like, essential, the way water is.

LLMs are a “nice to have” blows my mind. LLMs power autonomous drones that kill real people in real wars. Coding agents are the primary way people code. That and we get a GPT4->5 jump every 18 months. Are we on the same planet?

LLMs conduct strikes on children which a human may not have done. so wow, you got a frontier model but you lost something there in the process.

Why are we missing the point here: LLMs are of major geopolitical significance. Autonomous drones kill children, now what? Would you rather have a home grown frontier model capability to defend yourself? Or would you prefer to rely on the good graces of tech CEOs?

I think the EU would prefer wars not happen and that they never have to think about defending their borders or themselves. This is fantasy land, but the cafes and museums and old city squares are gorgeous.

This polemic is quite sad. Wars are only cool in movies. And - apparently - in US politics. The reason the EU shirks talking about war is because it actually lived through it. And it wasn't cool.

The US is waging wars far from their borders (of which they all lost since about 50 years) while the topic in the EU is self defence within their borders, that's a different ball game.

A third of the US economy is propped up by waging wars. That's not even being imperialistic that's just a very costly and damaging social service program that costs a lot of lives.

If that's all you're using LLMs for, you've definitely fallen behind.

I like how “you’ve fallen behind” is the ai version of “you’re not gonna make it” from the crypto-bro days.

My favorite part is how people compare AI to crypto as if they are remotely in the same universe of importance and impact

Europe lost religion and gained this instead.

Dont make the assumption that the laws and regulations in place respect human rights and are a 100% good. They also entrench EU bureaucratic power (and thus the power of the ministers) without regards to future technology.

State regs often fail to grapple with the future, and at best slow it down and at worst smother it.

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