kalkin

Is social media much better in 2026 now that there's been such a backlash against moderation?

The article says that scores began drifting down around 2012. Gemini is telling me that NAEP peaked in 2013. Elsewhere in this thread there's a claim of an inflection point around 2018 in PISA, which eyeballing Gemini's numbers lines up with NAEP.

Does this correlate with the racial proportion data?

"roma aeterna" is also the sort of alias that's associated with a particular set of political views. (Not conclusive! But a rational thing for someone to notice.)

Honestly I would find a certain satisfaction in a world where the next Democratic administration takes away Fox broadcast licenses, forbids use of Oracle by any government contractor unless Ellison hands CBS over to Rachel Maddow, and tells Bezos that Amazon is going to be banned from public roads unless the Washington Post front page has positive stories every day. But I doubt the same is true for the many pro-Trump people who complained vociferously about Biden officials expressing preferences to social media companies because of the merely implicit threat that they might take government action of some kind if they weren't listened to.

So your argument is that the government is punishing Anthropic for its public statements? And it is correct to do so?

(I think it's also the case that Anthropic didn't make any public statements about the negotiations until after the DoD was already publicly threatening this designation. But that seems less important than the question of: is it good for the US government to try to destroy companies whose public statements it dislikes?)

That's true legally, but the government's public statements did initially very explicitly present this as a ban on any dealing.

"Anthropic a Supply-Chain Risk to National Security. Effective immediately, no contractor, supplier, or partner that does business with the United States military may conduct any commercial activity with Anthropic."

Presumably, according to the defenders of the designation in this thread, this was an innocent mistake that doesn't indicate any political intent.

Nobody is suing to force the DoD to buy anything, so maybe you shouldn't be accusing others of failing to refer to the topic of discussion.

The DoD is free not to sign contracts. Having them be able to get a company blacklisted from a whole sector just because they couldn't agree on terms with that company is obviously very different than that.

The idea that "fair for the military to object to" implies "fair for the military to ban from their supply chain in any capacity no matter how unrelated the use" is so outlandish that it's never been done before (to a US company), and I think we can be confident that the DoD has frequently objected to would-be contractors' terms.

The claim that it being done for the first time - by a Secretary of Defense denounced the politics of the company in the same text where he announced the designation - isn't "political", is something I have a hard time believing a functioning adult who isn't employed defending the government in court could adopt.

But hey, maybe in some language this is a "textbook" official statement with no "politics":

  Cloaked in the sanctimonious rhetoric of “effective altruism,” they have attempted to strong-arm the United States military into submission - a cowardly act of corporate virtue-signaling that places Silicon Valley ideology above American lives.

Why has this never previously been done to an American company from which the DoD decided not to purchase something?

Perhaps people who are noticing politics here - including in the decision of two Trump-appointed judges, against the he vote of another Republican-appointed judge- are not the ones who are choosing not to see reality?

Why has this never previously been done to an American company from which the DoD decided not to purchase something?

What is the evidence that Anthropic said this?

As of writing it still says:

> For Anthropic, Google, and Meta, the catastrophic breakouts happened inside the testing environments of the exact same contractor.

If this is the level of understanding you have of the relevant incidents, there's a lot of chutzpah in saying that other people are "selling garbage", carrying out an "extraordinary confidence trick", etc.

The people who made the LLM revolution happen were by no means exclusively rationalists--but more importantly, lots of people have lots of dreams about the future and even when pursued very, very few of those dreams pan out in anything like this way. LLMs are not what they are because of rationalists' sheer force of will.

Also, nobody ever bothers to argue why a specific proposed regulation is "regulatory capture" or would burden startups more than big companies or anything. It's just supposed to be obvious that corporations love regulation and it's bad for the public, all of post-WWII political history notwithstanding.

I don't understand why strict liability is supposed to advantage smaller players, unless the law is like, specifically Anthropic and OpenAI are responsible for what people do with their models but other model providers aren't.

- If this applies to people who release open weights models, that becomes a terrible idea as long as you're subject to US laws.

- If it just applies to people who host them, that still probably advantages bigger players who can afford in-house legal and won't be destroyed by losing one lawsuit. Or maybe we create some kind of AI-misuse insurance analogous to malpractice insurance, that smaller players can buy in to? But that takes time even if the finances work out at all. And, uh, I'm not sure malpractice is a model we should aspire to in other industries.

Plus, presumably an immediate impact of this is that hosting providers all have much stricter safeguards classifiers. And the fact that somebody else is deciding what you're allowed to do with the model is one of the things that seems to make HN angriest at the frontier labs in the first place...

To be clear, I think this might be a good idea! I think all of the possible downsides I've listed are pretty small potatoes relative to what happens with no regulation of AI at all. But I'm pretty sure that if the big companies were proposing it, people would be calling it "regulatory capture" too.

Again, I think debating export controls is reasonable. I'm not sure I'd trust the CCP with control over powerful AI any less than the Trump administration.

But that's different than saying we don't need new regulations at all. Even strict liability of the form you seem to advocate would seem to need new laws. And it's not clear to me how it's consistent with your aim of just regulating what people _do_ with intelligence. Presumably AI companies would clamp down much harder with restrictive classifiers in that world--including hosting providers for open source models, if they also assumed liability. And then the people with unrestricted access to this technology are only those who can afford home GPUs, which are going to be intrinsically less efficient because they can't batch queries...

I think there are genuinely novel things about AI vs human intelligence which pose genuinely novel problems that would need genuinely novel policy to solve them.

Ah yeah. I think the economic value of AI, unlike bioweapons, is probably too high for anything like that to be viable, but I think it's a reasonable thing to aim for. (Dario probably doesn't because he's a believer in short term positive biomedical impacts of AI in a way that I'm doubtful about.)

I can't even tell whether the poster to whom you're replying is saying that "let's uh, stop" is profoundly naive, or that failing to say it is profoundly naive... I've certainly seen both takes elsewhere.

Hmm, I clicked that link and the first claimed bad prediction I see, from 1996, is "singularity 2035 (actually 2025)".

Predicting 2025-2035 as, at least, the period when AI becomes a really big deal, seems pretty good, even if the jury's still out on "singularity".

Broadly, the rationalists seem to have been pretty early to realizing LLMs were a big deal, and certainly seem to have had a much more accurate picture of how they'd develop than the people who denounce "TESCREAL" and talk about "stochastic parrots". It's fair (and IMHO correct) to ding rationalists for lots of things, but specifically poor prediction about AI seems like a bad one, insofar as anything has been tested so far.

Do you think Anthropic's behavior in the last year is well explained by aiming to be "the favorite child of govt"?

Sure. And there's an OOM more compute coming online in the next year or two, while models at a given capability are getting cheaper. "Two OOMs" of scale relative to the HF swarm seems like a bit of a red herring to me, but also within the realm of possibility.

The Internet is big, but one can do quite a lot of damage with ordinary bots and worms that exploit individual widespread vulnerabilities, which LLMs are perfectly capable of writing. Most of the damage also doesn't rely on hitting every long-tail website.

I'm honestly not that concerned about cyber impacts of LLMs relative to other impacts. I just don't like to see the whole concept of being worried dismissed as obviously baseless on the basis of one pretty shaky scale argument.

I'm curious to hear more about the differences in how bioweapons are regulated vs nuclear weapons.

If Anthropic shut down (or even counterfactually had never been founded), would software development be freed from the impact of AI?

Export controls vs China don't imply Dario's personal control of AI, nor are they broadly in the interest of "tech billionaires" (Jensen hates them). Neither does admitting external auditors at AI companies--if anything that's a surrender of control.

I don't see anything in the essay about restricting open frontier weights.

If you want to argue that the US has no right to be restricting technological development elsewhere, you have a case. But why tie this to free-market pseudo-populism against basic, domestically-scoped safety regulation?

Why should we believe that a scaled out version of something that happened a few months ago "simply cannot happen"? How many dollars of compute do you believe were available to the swarm(s) behind the OAI-HF, German wiki, and Rubygems incidents?

Where in the essay does it propose "The state must use its coercive power to support my control of this technology to the exclusion of [people not like me]"

I don't think that people outside of tech think the problem with "tech billionaires" is that they occasionally support some limited regulation. There's a weird form of tech populism that takes as axiomatic that any government intervention is "regulatory capture" and insists the only way to combat the power of big tech is unfettered capitalism that seems bizarrely prevalent on HN given how little sense it makes in a normal political context. Like, Bernie Sanders' position here is simple to understand: ban it. But on HN you'll see people framing the side with Marc Andreesen and Peter Thiel on it as against "tech billionaires".

If this is posted because it's "still relevant", the headline probably shouldn't say "no longer".

That looks like when the support page was last updated -- was Claude even available for minors before that?

> Why and how it happened is irrelevant

Do you take this attitude for other things that negatively impact society, or is it reserved for cases where it's particularly important for our comfort to deny that anything novel or scary could be involved?

They literally hid this until a third party reported it.

This is chemtrails-level conspiracy theorizing at this point.