In what industry do you see regulations slowing down the biggest incumbents while allowing cheaper, smaller, less capable competitors to proceed without that regulation?
Slowing down frontier models would impact the biggest incumbents the most as they are the ones making frontier models.
Not all regulation is necessarily regulatory capture. The tobacco industry suffered from the USG's crackdown on cigarettes. AI is topical. Voters think about it. And that's only going to become more true over time. It's harder to do regulatory capture when voters are paying attention.
It's sometimes unclear to me if people are opposed to all regulations or AI regulations in particular. Often I hear arguments that would also apply to food safety regulations or restaurant inspections. Eg the argument that torts make regulation superfluous.
For work I monitor Federal agency rules every day, and it's hard not to get inundated with the amount of capture. This is crazier with local rules, because you have enough inside information to clock reasons certain things were passed. In a city in Ohio, for example, I remember a rule against airsoft within city limits, that basically carved out a spot for the one paintball place. I encounter things like that all the time. Such as with water standards- in the state I live in, the biggest offender is actually a group of companies owned by people who are lawmakers every few years. The shapes of local laws reflect that.
As such, I expect the same from any new industry- I also have a memory of what happened to cryptocurrency.