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Comment by gr_norm | Hacker News Reader

> Ball, who recently joined OpenAI as Head of Strategic Futures, has argued that frontier AI labs could become a “counterbalance to government.” Before joining the company, he described the organizations building the most advanced AI systems as a “new kind of institution under the sun.”

Upvoted not because this is an agreeable idea, but so more people see their insanity for what it is.

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Some of the people in the tech industry are, for lack of a better word, borderline insane.

They forget how it was literally initial government investments into DARPA and other organizations that laid the foundation for the long ascendance of the tech industry in Northern California, aside from huge pool of talented people imported from mostly Asia.

Even a good chunk of artificial neural network and "AI" research was NSF/government-funded, iirc.

I've been noticing a level of dislike for the tech industry that I haven't ever seen before among my fellow tech peers, and it's all squarely pointed at one thing — insane concentration of wealth, power and compute at the hands of private corporations.

And they are all on hackernews reading these comments, and often participating.

They dont forget that. They dont care about any of that. It is a pursuit of a complete power, origins of DARPA are as relevant as history of typewriter.

These freaks need to be handled.

I expect if someone pulls a Luigi on one of these guys we’re going to see the same surprisingly bipartisan response from the country of “fuck em”

Or rather, unsurprising response. Obviously everyone is going to cheer when what's his face gets killed. I mean how many 100,000s of people can your company murder before you get off'd by one of the survivors.

No doubt. Government is already on the ropes in the struggle against billionaires and large industrial/resource-extraction lobbies. If anything, that’s what needs counterweight.

Bro is delusional. The only reason there aren't 45 LLM competitors is compute costs. Once costs fall the tech will commoditize.

It is interesting that a role like "Head of Strategic Futures" both exists and attracts insane people.

Alternatively, the tech never commoditizes because of the scale of power dynamics at play, and we’re stuck with a few increasingly more wealthy and powerful corporations.

Regulatory capture is always an option, true. Certainly seems to be the favored direction of the current administration.

The role exists because if you and I both know AI is heading towards being a commodity (thanks China!) then openai absolutely knows it too, and they're planning HARD to avoid this existential threat.

well what can you expect?

"Head of" + "Strategic" + "Futures"...?

hard to not attract insane people

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