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Comment by granzymes | Hacker News Reader

>The proposal would also involve other US AI companies giving a similar stake to the government, the FT reported, although it is not clear yet whether companies such as Anthropic, Google and Meta would agree to the plan.

I can't see Google or Meta shareholders agreeing to this? That said, Google, Meta, and SpaceX are all still founder-controlled using supervoting shares.

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the choice is progressively giving more of the company to the government, or the government taking it by force

it was long predicted that it is inevitable for national governments to fully nationalize AI labs and put them under military control

We have had for decades any number of defense contractors in the U.S. not taken by force by the U.S. They seem to have, nonetheless, happily produced what the military was wanting to purchase.

I'm not sure what's different here.

The difference is that military procurement (a) isn't sold to the general public (try buying a machine gun) and (b) doesn't provide an opportunity to surveil and control the population (no citizens are also using F-35s to search how much Trump has made from crypto ventures).

AI is and does.

no US defense contractor can threaten the US government

which is why no US defense contractor is given unsupervised access to nukes, even when maintaining them

As far as I'm aware, this was only predicted by play acting effective altruists who tend to have a histrionic outlook around further developments of large language models.

Are you saying that the "effective altruists" are responsible for the cabal of bigtech+reactionary elites salivating at the power of pervasive surveillance + machine intelligence ? While the former certainly supplement the fervor of the latter, I think they would exist regardless.

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