Hacker News Reader

Comment by overfeed | Hacker News Reader

> ...drag it into a standards committee to either devalue it or slow the leader down

Anthropic et al recently proposed a supranational AI governing body designed to slow everyone down (euphemistically calling it "AI pacing"). Are the Pacer signatories losing?

View on HN

That could be a move towards regulatory capture. Enact standards that they (and OpenAI) largely control, block access to Chinese models in the US, and effectively prevent challengers from catching up.

At the same time they slow down the arms race, so they can back off on training Capex without losing their lead.

Literally nothing in their proposal is about blocking access to Chinese models, HN has devolved so much with these conspiratorial hot takes.

Of course. They’ll never put “stop the Chinese models” in the organization’s bylaws. But don’t be naive about why they are doing it.

In some aspect, yes, or they fear they will. For instance, Anthropic may fear that Chinese models will become “better” because they won’t put as many guardrails up, so they want everyone to agree to the guardrails such that if a model comes out showing better scores than Fable they can say “But it’s a dangerous model that doesn’t conform to our Pacing agreement.”

Or, they may be worried about government regulation that would really hurt their ability to move fast, so they want to get ahead of it with some “regulatory body” that they control. The motion picture, TV and gaming industries did this with self-imposed rating systems. The comic book folks did it with the “Comics Code Authority” back in 1954.

The governing body is only the western allies. USA + AUS + EU. Or anyone else that may sign a deeply disturbing and restrictive treaty. It's to make sure that the global majority does not make a better model or have access to the same hardware. As is currently the case with embargoes on EUV machines going to China, etc.

Models are not a moat, and I think OpenAI/Anthropic know this. They know that their IPO is being weakened by the open models. Neither is hardware. We are not far from other countries catching up with silicon that matches or exceeds western capabilities, and it will be cheaper.

I think you’re spot on here. OpenAI and Anthropic are burning cash at a phenomenal rate (clearly unsustainable in the long run), but it isn’t clear what the exit ramp is for them. If they stop training and just focus on inference (which they claim is profitable), they immediately fall off the list of frontier models. I’m sure China also sees this and is using state subsidies to fund industry and challenging the West to keep up. This is similar to the way that Reagan outspent the USSR in the 1980s, only now the Chinese are funding it. That said, it’s also not clear what happens if the Chinese models “win” (is that bad?), particularly when all the models get so good as to meet the needs of most applications. Anyway, AI lies at this interesting intersection of both standard technology competition and geopolitical competition.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com