They know that LLMs as a product are racing towards commoditization. Bye bye profit margins. The only way to win is regulation allowing a few approved providers.
They are more likely trying to race towards wildly overinflated government contracts because they aren't going to profit how they're currently operating without some of that funny money.
It is unclear. Everyday I seem to read contradictory headlines about whether or not inference is profitable.
If inference has significant profitability and you're the only game in town, you could do really well.
But without regulation, as a commodity, the margin on inference approaches zero.
None of this even speaks to recouping the R&D costs it takes to stay competitive. If they're not able to pull up the ladder, these frontier model companies could have a really bad time.
That's a good line but it only works if market forces don't commoditize you first. Blithely saying "commoditize your complement" is a bit like saying "draw the rest of the owl."
At that point nobody will care though. People pushing for regulation (not uniquely) want power- those that can write the regulation will be in a position to exert a lot of power over a lot of people/companies, making it an attractive thing to push for.
They need to be more worried about creating a viable economic model for the present AI craze. Right now there’s no clear path to making any of the present insanity a profitable endeavor. Yes NVIDIA is killing it, but with money pumped in from highly upside down sources.
Things will regulate themselves pretty quickly when the financial music stops.
Do you mean that they need to find better ways to create value by using AI, or that they need better ways to extract value from end-users of AI?
I'd argue that "value creation" is already at a decent position considering generative AI and the usecase as "interactive search engine" alone.
Regarding "value extraction": Advertising should always be an option here, just like it was for radio, television and online content in general in the past.
Preventing smaller entities (or private persons even) from just doing their own thing and making their own models seems like the biggest difficulty long term to me (from the perspective of the "rent seeking" tech giant).
> I'd argue that "value creation" is already at a decent position considering generative AI and the usecase as "interactive search engine" alone.
> Regarding "value extraction": Advertising should always be an option here, just like it was for radio, television and online content in general in the past.
Not at the actual price it's going to cost though. The cost of an "interactive search" (LLM) vs a "traditional search" (Google) is exponentially higher. People tolerate ads to pay Google for the service, but imagine how many ads would ChatGPT need, or how much it will have to cost, to compensate an e.g. 10x difference. Last time I read about this a few months ago, ChatGPT were losing money on their paid tier because the people paying for it were using it a lot.
It's more likely that ChatGPT will just be spamming ads sprinkled in the responses (like you ask for a headphone comparison, and it gives you the sponsored brand one, from a sponsored vendor, with an affiliate link), and hope it's enough.
The race is to be the first to make a self-improving model (and have the infrastructure it will demand).
This is a winner-takes-all game, that stands a real chance of being the last winner-takes-all game humans will ever play. Given that, the only two choices are either throw everything you can at becoming the winner, or to sit out and hope no one wins.
The labs know that substantial losses will be had, they aren't investing in this to get a return, they are investing in it to be the winner. The losers will all be financially obliterated (and whoever sat out will be irrelevant).
I doubt they are sweating to hard though, because it seems overwhelmingly likely that most people would pay >$75/mo for LLM inference monthly (similar to cell phone costs), and at that rate without going hard on training, the models are absolute money printers.
The music is just getting started. The way it is going, AI will be inevitable. Companies are CONVINCED it’s adopt AI or die, whether it is effective or not.
Every generation has its own copyright war. First file sharing, then blockchains, now LLMs. As long as digital comouters are copy-on-write, this debate shall continue. It will only get solved once we have viable quantum computers.
I cannot help but feel that discussing this topic under the blanket term "AI Regulation" is a bit deceptive. I've noticed that whenever this topic comes up, almost every major figure remains rather vague on the details. Who are some influential figures actually advancing clearly defined regulations or key ideas for approaching how we should think about AI regulation?
What we should be doing is surfacing well defined points regarding AI regulation and discussing them, instead of fighting proxy wars for opaque groups with infinite money. It feels like we're at the point where nobody is even pretending like people's opinions on this topic are relevant, it's just a matter of pumping enough money and flooding the zone.
Personally, I still remain very uncertain about the topic; I don't have well-defined or clearly actionable ideas. But I'd love to hear what regulations or mental models other HN readers are using to navigate and think about this topic. Sam Altman and Elon Musk have both mentioned vague ideas of how AI is somehow going to magically result in UBI and a magical communist utopia, but nobody has ever pressed them for details. If they really believe this then they could make some more significant legally binding commitments, right? Notice how nobody ever asks: who is going to own the models, robots, and data centers in this UBI paradise? It feels a lot like Underpants Gnomes: (1) Build AGI, (2) ???, (3) Communist Utopia and UBI.
> I cannot help but feel that discussing this topic under the blanket term "AI Regulation" is a bit deceptive. I've noticed that whenever this topic comes up, almost every major figure remains rather vague on the details. Who are some influential figures actually advancing clearly defined regulations or key ideas for approaching how we should think about AI regulation?
There's a vocal minority calling for AI regulation, but what they actually want often strikes me as misguided:
"Stop AI from taking our jobs" - This shouldn't be solved through regulation. It's on politicians to help people adapt to a new economic reality, not to artificially preserve bullshit jobs.
"Stop the IP theft" - This feels like a cause pushed primarily by the 1%. Let's be realistic: 99% of people don't own patents and have little stake in strengthening IP protections.
> "Stop the IP theft" - This feels like a cause pushed primarily by the 1%. Let's be realistic: 99% of people don't own patents and have little stake in strengthening IP protections.
This is being screamed from the rooftops by nearly the entire creative community of artists, photographers, writers, and other people who do creative work as a job, or even for fun.
The difference between the 99% of individual creatives and the 1% is that the 1% has entire portfolios of IP - IP that they might not have even created themselves - as well as an army of lawyers to protect that IP.
> This shouldn't be solved through regulation. It's on politicians to help people adapt to a new economic reality, not to artificially preserve bullshit jobs.
They already do this[1]. Why should there be an exception carved out for AI type jobs?
------------------------------
[1] What do you think tariffs are? Show me a country without tariffs and I'll show you a broken economy with widespread starvation and misery.
> "Stop the IP theft" - This feels like a cause pushed primarily by the 1%. Let's be realistic: 99% of people don't own patents and have little stake in strengthening IP protections.
Artists are not primarily in the 1% though, it's not only patents that are IP theft.
It's less about who is right and more about economic interests and lobbying power. There's a vocal minority that is just dead set against AI using all sorts of arguments related to religion, morality, fears about mass unemployment, all sorts of doom scenarios, etc. However, this is a minority with not a lot of lobbying power ultimately. And the louder they are and the less of this stuff actually materializes the easier it becomes to dismiss a lot of the arguments. Despite the loudness of the debate, the consensus is nowhere near as broad on this as it may seem to some.
And the quality of the debate remains very low as well. Most people barely understand the issues. And that includes many journalists that are still getting hung up on the whole "hallucinations can be funny" thing mostly. There are a lot of confused people spouting nonsense on this topic.
There are special interest groups with lobbying powers. Media companies with intellectual properties, actors worried about being impersonated, etc. Those have some ability to lobby for changes. And then you have the wider public that isn't that well informed and has sort of caught on to the notion that chat gpt is now definitely a thing that is sometimes mildly useful.
And there are the AI companies that are definitely very well funded and have an enormous amount of lobbying power. They can move whole economies with their spending so they are getting relatively little push back from politicians. Political Washington and California run on obscene amounts of lobbying money. And the AI companies can provide a lot of that.
"Stop AI from taking our jobs" - This shouldn't be solved through regulation. It's on politicians to help people adapt to a new economic reality, not to artificially preserve bullshit jobs.
So politicians are supposed to create "non bullshit" jobs out of thin air?
The job you've done for decades is suddenly bullshit because some shit LLM is hallucinating nice sounding words?
>There's a vocal minority calling for AI regulation, but what they actually want often strikes me as misguided:
There's a ton other points intersecting with regulation. Either directly related by AI, or made significantly more relevant by it.
Just from the top of my head:
- information processing: Is there private data AI should never be able to learn from? We restrict collection but it might be unclear whether model training counts as storage.
- related to the former, what kind of dystopian practices should we ban? AI can probably create much deeper profiles inferring information from users than our already worrrying tech, even without storing sensitive data. If it can use conversations to deduce I'm in risk of a shorter lifespan, can the owners communicate that data to insurance companies?
- healthcare/social damage: what is the long term effects of people having an always available yes men, a substitution for social interaction, a cheating tool, etc? should some people be kept from access? (minors, mentally ill, whatever). Should access, on the other hand, become a basic right if it realistically makes a lef-behind person unable to compete with others who have it?
- National security. Is a country's economy being reliant in a service offered somewhere else? Worse even, is this fact draining skills from the population that might not able to be easily recovered when needed?
- energy/resources impact: Are we ready to have an enormous increase in usage of energy and/or certain goods? should we limit usage until we can meet the demand without struggle?
- consumer protections: Many companies just offer 'flat' usage, freely being able to change the model behind the scenes for a worse one when needed or even adapt user limits on their server load. Which of these are fair business practices?
- economy risks: What is the maximum risk we can take of the economy being made dependent to services that aren't yet profitable? Is there any steps that need to be taken to keep us from the potential bust if costs can't be kept up with?
- monopoly risks: we could end up with a single company being able to offer literally any intellectual work as a service. Whoever gets this tech might become the most powerful entity in the world. Should we address this impact through regulation before such an entity rises and becomes impossible to tame?
- enabling crime: can an army of AI hackers disrupt entire countries? how is this handled?
- impact on job creation: If AIs can practically DDOS job offer forms, how is this handled to keep access fair? Same for a million other places that are subjected to AI spam.
your point "It's on politicians to help people adapt to a new economic reality" brings a few:
- Should we tax AI using companies? if they produce the same employing fewer people, tax extraction suffers and the non-taxed money does not make it back to the people. How do we compensate? And how do we remake
- How should we handle entire professions being put to pasture at once? Lost employment is a general problem if it's a large enough amount of people.
- how should the push of intellectual work be rethought if it becomes extremely cheap relative to manual work? is the way we train our population in need of change?
You might have strong opinions on most of these issues, but there is clearly A LOT of important debates that aren't being addressed.
> "Stop AI from taking our jobs" - This shouldn't be solved through regulation. It's on politicians to help people adapt to a new economic reality, not to artificially preserve bullshit jobs.
This is a really good point. If a country tries to "protect" jobs by blocking AI, it only puts itself at a disadvantage. Other countries that don't pass those restrictions will produce goods and services more efficiently and at lower cost, and they’ll outcompete you anyway. So even with regulations the jobs aren't actually saved.
The real solution is for people to upskill and learn new abilities so they can thrive in the new economic reality. But it's hard to convince people that they need to change instead of expecting the world around them to stay the same.
Algorithmic Accountability. Not just for AI, but also social media, advertising, voting systems, etc. Algorithm Impact Assessments need to become mandatory.
Musk wants extreme law and order and will beat down any protests. His X account is full of posts that want to fill up prisons. This is the highlight so far:
Notice that the retweeted Will Tanner post also denigrates EBT. Musk does not give a damn about UBI. The unemployed will do slave labor, go to prison, or, if they revolt, they will be hanged. It is literally all out there by now.
Elon Musk explicitly said in his latest Joe Rogan appearance that he advocates for the smallest government possible - just army, police, legal. He did NOT mention social care, health care.
Doesn't quite align with UBI, unless he envisions the AI companies directly giving the UBI to people (when did that ever happen?)
Like every other self-serving rich “Libertarian,” they want a small government when it stands to get in their way, and a large one when they want their lifestyle subsidized by government contracts.
> Elon Musk explicitly said in his latest Joe Rogan appearance that he advocates for the smallest government possible - just army, police, legal. He did NOT mention social care, health care.
This would be a 19th century government, just the "regalian" functions. It's not really plausible in a world where most of the population who benefit from the health/social care/education functions can vote.
We don’t know what kind of insecure systems we’re dealing with here, and there’s a pervasive problem of incestuous dependencies in a lot of AI tech stacks, which might lead to some instability or security risks. Adversarial attacks against LLMs are just too easy. It makes sense to let states experiment and find out what works and doesn’t, both as a social experiment and technological one.
This is why I’ve refused to buy into the argument from these ghouls that AI would make the world a better place, and their occasional lip-service of requesting AI regulation for “human safety”: their own actions paint a dystopian world of mass surveillance, even heavier labor exploitation, the return of company scrip and stores, and the wholesale neglect of human well-being, all while blocking the very regulation they claim to want and/or need to succeed safely.
If these people genuinely believed in the good of AI, they wouldn’t be blocking meaningful regulation of it.
That’s quite literally the point I was making. They’re lying to everyone while demanding protective backstops for their highly speculative investment.
None of these companies, investors, or executives are making AI that’s actually going to improve humanity. They never, ever were, and people need to stop taking them at their word that they are.
Oh they aren't conspiring against democratically made decisions about AI, instead they are "ammassing war chests to fight AI regulation", how submissively worded, but that's expected when they have a grip on all mayor communication channels.
It's theft. But not all IP theft, or theft in general, is morally equivalent. A poor person stealing a loaf of bread or pirating a movie they couldn't afford is just. A corrupt elite stealing poor farmers' food or stealing content from small struggling creators is not.
It's not the tech titans, it's Capitalism itself building the war chest to ensure it's embodiment and transfer into its next host - machines.
We are just it's temporary vehicles.
> “This is because what appears to humanity as the history of capitalism is an invasion from the future by an artificial intelligent space that must assemble itself entirely from its enemy's resources.”
Yes, these decisions are being made by flesh-and-blood humans at the top of a social pyramid. Nick Land's deranged (and often racist) word-salad sci-fi fantasies tend to obfuscate that. If robots turn on their creators and wipe out humanity then whatever remains wouldn't be a class society or a market economy of humans any more, hence no longer the social system known as capitalism by any common definition.
> “This is because what appears to humanity as the history of capitalism is an invasion from the future by an artificial intelligent space that must assemble itself entirely from its enemy's resources.”
I see your “roko’s basilisk is real” and counter with “slenderman locked it in the backrooms and it got sucked up by goatse” in this creepypasta-is-real conversation
(disclaimer: I don't actually, I'm just memeing. I don't think we'll get AI overlords unless someone actively puts AI in charge and in control of both people (= people following directions from AI, which already happens, e.g. ChatGPT making suggestions), military hardware, and the entire chain of command in between.)
Corporations and individuals with more capital and power than medium sized states are more dangerous than my tiny state and local governments, where I actually personally know some and have taken part in choosing my representatives.
What is so novel about LLMs (I assume this is the form of AI being discussed) that they require regulation? It’s a dataset, an algorithm and some UI. Almost all the problems brought on by the scale-up are just supply/demand type things. Every problem people point at AI are also problems on some scale with computer software in general, so I’m wary of any regulation (and don’t kid yourself thinking it would be for the people) bleeding over.
Some proposed regs would cover uses of AI outside LLMs, some of which tech folks might call “machine learning” these days to distinguish them from LLMs.
Using algorithms to provide personalized pricing would be an example, where like a landlord, retailer, or airline would use an ML service trained on your personal data and aggregated purchase history to decide how much to charge you for a short-term rental, Nintendo Switch, or a plane ticket. Basically, instant underwriting at scale for every single purchase. Just got a new job with a raise? Your next vacation will cost you 26% more for the same experience.
"multi-million dollar warchests" Millions, lol. Wrong era, Dr. Evil!
They know that LLMs as a product are racing towards commoditization. Bye bye profit margins. The only way to win is regulation allowing a few approved providers.
They are more likely trying to race towards wildly overinflated government contracts because they aren't going to profit how they're currently operating without some of that funny money.
What profit margins?
It is unclear. Everyday I seem to read contradictory headlines about whether or not inference is profitable.
If inference has significant profitability and you're the only game in town, you could do really well.
But without regulation, as a commodity, the margin on inference approaches zero.
None of this even speaks to recouping the R&D costs it takes to stay competitive. If they're not able to pull up the ladder, these frontier model companies could have a really bad time.
1 reply →
It's still technically a profit margin if it's less than zero...
Perhaps P/E ratios?
The only way to win is commoditize your complement (IMO).
That's a good line but it only works if market forces don't commoditize you first. Blithely saying "commoditize your complement" is a bit like saying "draw the rest of the owl."
AI regulation should wait until after the crash. That way AI can be regulated for what it does and not the fever dream pushed by marketers.
At that point nobody will care though. People pushing for regulation (not uniquely) want power- those that can write the regulation will be in a position to exert a lot of power over a lot of people/companies, making it an attractive thing to push for.
They need to be more worried about creating a viable economic model for the present AI craze. Right now there’s no clear path to making any of the present insanity a profitable endeavor. Yes NVIDIA is killing it, but with money pumped in from highly upside down sources.
Things will regulate themselves pretty quickly when the financial music stops.
Nvidia's biggest mistake is investing money selling shovels into prospecting firms. If not for that they'd be fine.
Maybe there's enough of a "money multiplier" to make it worth their while. Then again, possibly more likely, their entry could spook other investors.
That's the only way the bubble hasn't popped yet.
Do you mean that they need to find better ways to create value by using AI, or that they need better ways to extract value from end-users of AI?
I'd argue that "value creation" is already at a decent position considering generative AI and the usecase as "interactive search engine" alone.
Regarding "value extraction": Advertising should always be an option here, just like it was for radio, television and online content in general in the past.
Preventing smaller entities (or private persons even) from just doing their own thing and making their own models seems like the biggest difficulty long term to me (from the perspective of the "rent seeking" tech giant).
> I'd argue that "value creation" is already at a decent position considering generative AI and the usecase as "interactive search engine" alone.
> Regarding "value extraction": Advertising should always be an option here, just like it was for radio, television and online content in general in the past.
Not at the actual price it's going to cost though. The cost of an "interactive search" (LLM) vs a "traditional search" (Google) is exponentially higher. People tolerate ads to pay Google for the service, but imagine how many ads would ChatGPT need, or how much it will have to cost, to compensate an e.g. 10x difference. Last time I read about this a few months ago, ChatGPT were losing money on their paid tier because the people paying for it were using it a lot.
It's more likely that ChatGPT will just be spamming ads sprinkled in the responses (like you ask for a headphone comparison, and it gives you the sponsored brand one, from a sponsored vendor, with an affiliate link), and hope it's enough.
2 replies →
The race is to be the first to make a self-improving model (and have the infrastructure it will demand).
This is a winner-takes-all game, that stands a real chance of being the last winner-takes-all game humans will ever play. Given that, the only two choices are either throw everything you can at becoming the winner, or to sit out and hope no one wins.
The labs know that substantial losses will be had, they aren't investing in this to get a return, they are investing in it to be the winner. The losers will all be financially obliterated (and whoever sat out will be irrelevant).
I doubt they are sweating to hard though, because it seems overwhelmingly likely that most people would pay >$75/mo for LLM inference monthly (similar to cell phone costs), and at that rate without going hard on training, the models are absolute money printers.
[dead]
The music is just getting started. The way it is going, AI will be inevitable. Companies are CONVINCED it’s adopt AI or die, whether it is effective or not.
It's already starting to replace Google searching for many people. This is why Google (and other big tech firms) started investing in it immediately.
All they need to do is start adding in sponsored results (and the ability to purchase keywords), and AI becomes insanely profitable.
Not according to both Google’ latest revenue and profit numbers and even Apple hinted they aren’t seeing less revenue from Google searches.
Every generation has its own copyright war. First file sharing, then blockchains, now LLMs. As long as digital comouters are copy-on-write, this debate shall continue. It will only get solved once we have viable quantum computers.
Archive: https://archive.is/j1XTl
I cannot help but feel that discussing this topic under the blanket term "AI Regulation" is a bit deceptive. I've noticed that whenever this topic comes up, almost every major figure remains rather vague on the details. Who are some influential figures actually advancing clearly defined regulations or key ideas for approaching how we should think about AI regulation?
What we should be doing is surfacing well defined points regarding AI regulation and discussing them, instead of fighting proxy wars for opaque groups with infinite money. It feels like we're at the point where nobody is even pretending like people's opinions on this topic are relevant, it's just a matter of pumping enough money and flooding the zone.
Personally, I still remain very uncertain about the topic; I don't have well-defined or clearly actionable ideas. But I'd love to hear what regulations or mental models other HN readers are using to navigate and think about this topic. Sam Altman and Elon Musk have both mentioned vague ideas of how AI is somehow going to magically result in UBI and a magical communist utopia, but nobody has ever pressed them for details. If they really believe this then they could make some more significant legally binding commitments, right? Notice how nobody ever asks: who is going to own the models, robots, and data centers in this UBI paradise? It feels a lot like Underpants Gnomes: (1) Build AGI, (2) ???, (3) Communist Utopia and UBI.
> I cannot help but feel that discussing this topic under the blanket term "AI Regulation" is a bit deceptive. I've noticed that whenever this topic comes up, almost every major figure remains rather vague on the details. Who are some influential figures actually advancing clearly defined regulations or key ideas for approaching how we should think about AI regulation?
There's a vocal minority calling for AI regulation, but what they actually want often strikes me as misguided:
"Stop AI from taking our jobs" - This shouldn't be solved through regulation. It's on politicians to help people adapt to a new economic reality, not to artificially preserve bullshit jobs.
"Stop the IP theft" - This feels like a cause pushed primarily by the 1%. Let's be realistic: 99% of people don't own patents and have little stake in strengthening IP protections.
> "Stop the IP theft" - This feels like a cause pushed primarily by the 1%. Let's be realistic: 99% of people don't own patents and have little stake in strengthening IP protections.
This is being screamed from the rooftops by nearly the entire creative community of artists, photographers, writers, and other people who do creative work as a job, or even for fun.
The difference between the 99% of individual creatives and the 1% is that the 1% has entire portfolios of IP - IP that they might not have even created themselves - as well as an army of lawyers to protect that IP.
1 reply →
> This shouldn't be solved through regulation. It's on politicians to help people adapt to a new economic reality, not to artificially preserve bullshit jobs.
They already do this[1]. Why should there be an exception carved out for AI type jobs?
------------------------------
[1] What do you think tariffs are? Show me a country without tariffs and I'll show you a broken economy with widespread starvation and misery.
1 reply →
> "Stop the IP theft" - This feels like a cause pushed primarily by the 1%. Let's be realistic: 99% of people don't own patents and have little stake in strengthening IP protections.
Artists are not primarily in the 1% though, it's not only patents that are IP theft.
7 replies →
It's less about who is right and more about economic interests and lobbying power. There's a vocal minority that is just dead set against AI using all sorts of arguments related to religion, morality, fears about mass unemployment, all sorts of doom scenarios, etc. However, this is a minority with not a lot of lobbying power ultimately. And the louder they are and the less of this stuff actually materializes the easier it becomes to dismiss a lot of the arguments. Despite the loudness of the debate, the consensus is nowhere near as broad on this as it may seem to some.
And the quality of the debate remains very low as well. Most people barely understand the issues. And that includes many journalists that are still getting hung up on the whole "hallucinations can be funny" thing mostly. There are a lot of confused people spouting nonsense on this topic.
There are special interest groups with lobbying powers. Media companies with intellectual properties, actors worried about being impersonated, etc. Those have some ability to lobby for changes. And then you have the wider public that isn't that well informed and has sort of caught on to the notion that chat gpt is now definitely a thing that is sometimes mildly useful.
And there are the AI companies that are definitely very well funded and have an enormous amount of lobbying power. They can move whole economies with their spending so they are getting relatively little push back from politicians. Political Washington and California run on obscene amounts of lobbying money. And the AI companies can provide a lot of that.
1 reply →
"Stop AI from taking our jobs" - This shouldn't be solved through regulation. It's on politicians to help people adapt to a new economic reality, not to artificially preserve bullshit jobs.
So politicians are supposed to create "non bullshit" jobs out of thin air?
The job you've done for decades is suddenly bullshit because some shit LLM is hallucinating nice sounding words?
6 replies →
>There's a vocal minority calling for AI regulation, but what they actually want often strikes me as misguided:
There's a ton other points intersecting with regulation. Either directly related by AI, or made significantly more relevant by it.
Just from the top of my head:
- information processing: Is there private data AI should never be able to learn from? We restrict collection but it might be unclear whether model training counts as storage.
- related to the former, what kind of dystopian practices should we ban? AI can probably create much deeper profiles inferring information from users than our already worrrying tech, even without storing sensitive data. If it can use conversations to deduce I'm in risk of a shorter lifespan, can the owners communicate that data to insurance companies?
- healthcare/social damage: what is the long term effects of people having an always available yes men, a substitution for social interaction, a cheating tool, etc? should some people be kept from access? (minors, mentally ill, whatever). Should access, on the other hand, become a basic right if it realistically makes a lef-behind person unable to compete with others who have it?
- National security. Is a country's economy being reliant in a service offered somewhere else? Worse even, is this fact draining skills from the population that might not able to be easily recovered when needed?
- energy/resources impact: Are we ready to have an enormous increase in usage of energy and/or certain goods? should we limit usage until we can meet the demand without struggle?
- consumer protections: Many companies just offer 'flat' usage, freely being able to change the model behind the scenes for a worse one when needed or even adapt user limits on their server load. Which of these are fair business practices?
- economy risks: What is the maximum risk we can take of the economy being made dependent to services that aren't yet profitable? Is there any steps that need to be taken to keep us from the potential bust if costs can't be kept up with?
- monopoly risks: we could end up with a single company being able to offer literally any intellectual work as a service. Whoever gets this tech might become the most powerful entity in the world. Should we address this impact through regulation before such an entity rises and becomes impossible to tame?
- enabling crime: can an army of AI hackers disrupt entire countries? how is this handled?
- impact on job creation: If AIs can practically DDOS job offer forms, how is this handled to keep access fair? Same for a million other places that are subjected to AI spam.
your point "It's on politicians to help people adapt to a new economic reality" brings a few:
- Should we tax AI using companies? if they produce the same employing fewer people, tax extraction suffers and the non-taxed money does not make it back to the people. How do we compensate? And how do we remake - How should we handle entire professions being put to pasture at once? Lost employment is a general problem if it's a large enough amount of people. - how should the push of intellectual work be rethought if it becomes extremely cheap relative to manual work? is the way we train our population in need of change?
You might have strong opinions on most of these issues, but there is clearly A LOT of important debates that aren't being addressed.
3 replies →
> "Stop AI from taking our jobs" - This shouldn't be solved through regulation. It's on politicians to help people adapt to a new economic reality, not to artificially preserve bullshit jobs.
This is a really good point. If a country tries to "protect" jobs by blocking AI, it only puts itself at a disadvantage. Other countries that don't pass those restrictions will produce goods and services more efficiently and at lower cost, and they’ll outcompete you anyway. So even with regulations the jobs aren't actually saved.
The real solution is for people to upskill and learn new abilities so they can thrive in the new economic reality. But it's hard to convince people that they need to change instead of expecting the world around them to stay the same.
9 replies →
Algorithmic Accountability. Not just for AI, but also social media, advertising, voting systems, etc. Algorithm Impact Assessments need to become mandatory.
Sounds like a great way to make jobs for a bunch of talkers and parasites.
You should ignore literally everything Musk says. He is incredibly unintelligent relative to his status.
There are several concrete proposals to regulate AI either proposed or passed. The most recent prominent example of a passed law is California SB53, whose summary you can read here: https://carnegieendowment.org/emissary/2025/10/california-sb...
Musk wants extreme law and order and will beat down any protests. His X account is full of posts that want to fill up prisons. This is the highlight so far:
https://xcancel.com/elonmusk/status/1992599328897294496#m
Notice that the retweeted Will Tanner post also denigrates EBT. Musk does not give a damn about UBI. The unemployed will do slave labor, go to prison, or, if they revolt, they will be hanged. It is literally all out there by now.
Elon Musk explicitly said in his latest Joe Rogan appearance that he advocates for the smallest government possible - just army, police, legal. He did NOT mention social care, health care.
Doesn't quite align with UBI, unless he envisions the AI companies directly giving the UBI to people (when did that ever happen?)
I'm sure that "smallest government possible" involves cancelling all subsidies to EV car companies and tax credits to EV customers. What a wanker.
It's possible that the interests of the richest man in the world don't align with the interests of the majority, or society as a whole.
Of course he only wants the government to do only what benefits him.
3 replies →
Like every other self-serving rich “Libertarian,” they want a small government when it stands to get in their way, and a large one when they want their lifestyle subsidized by government contracts.
1 reply →
> Elon Musk explicitly said in his latest Joe Rogan appearance that he advocates for the smallest government possible - just army, police, legal. He did NOT mention social care, health care.
This would be a 19th century government, just the "regalian" functions. It's not really plausible in a world where most of the population who benefit from the health/social care/education functions can vote.
1 reply →
I like how building up millions of dollars to bribe elected officials is reported on in such neutral terms.
[dead]
They're also fighting for regulation to keep the competition at bay.
We don’t know what kind of insecure systems we’re dealing with here, and there’s a pervasive problem of incestuous dependencies in a lot of AI tech stacks, which might lead to some instability or security risks. Adversarial attacks against LLMs are just too easy. It makes sense to let states experiment and find out what works and doesn’t, both as a social experiment and technological one.
This is why I’ve refused to buy into the argument from these ghouls that AI would make the world a better place, and their occasional lip-service of requesting AI regulation for “human safety”: their own actions paint a dystopian world of mass surveillance, even heavier labor exploitation, the return of company scrip and stores, and the wholesale neglect of human well-being, all while blocking the very regulation they claim to want and/or need to succeed safely.
If these people genuinely believed in the good of AI, they wouldn’t be blocking meaningful regulation of it.
https://green.spacedino.net/ai-will-never-create-utopia/
> their clamoring for AI regulation for “human safety”
> they wouldn’t be blocking regulation of it
Which is it? Do they want regulation or not?
The answer is, in fact, they do want regulation. They want to define the terms of the regulations to gain a competitive advantage.
That’s quite literally the point I was making. They’re lying to everyone while demanding protective backstops for their highly speculative investment.
None of these companies, investors, or executives are making AI that’s actually going to improve humanity. They never, ever were, and people need to stop taking them at their word that they are.
Is that a lot?
Oh they aren't conspiring against democratically made decisions about AI, instead they are "ammassing war chests to fight AI regulation", how submissively worded, but that's expected when they have a grip on all mayor communication channels.
God forbid we protect people from the theft machine
There's a lot of problems with AI that need some carefully thought out regulation, but infringing on rights granted by IP law still isn't theft.
It's theft. But not all IP theft, or theft in general, is morally equivalent. A poor person stealing a loaf of bread or pirating a movie they couldn't afford is just. A corrupt elite stealing poor farmers' food or stealing content from small struggling creators is not.
11 replies →
And it doesn't even infringe on IP rights.
Agreed. Regulate AI? Sure, though I have zero faith politicians will do it competently. But more IP protection? Hard pass. I'd rather abolish patents.
6 replies →
But are they really the ones in control?
It's not the tech titans, it's Capitalism itself building the war chest to ensure it's embodiment and transfer into its next host - machines.
We are just it's temporary vehicles.
> “This is because what appears to humanity as the history of capitalism is an invasion from the future by an artificial intelligent space that must assemble itself entirely from its enemy's resources.”
Yes, these decisions are being made by flesh-and-blood humans at the top of a social pyramid. Nick Land's deranged (and often racist) word-salad sci-fi fantasies tend to obfuscate that. If robots turn on their creators and wipe out humanity then whatever remains wouldn't be a class society or a market economy of humans any more, hence no longer the social system known as capitalism by any common definition.
If there is more than one AI remaining, they will have some sort of an economy between them.
1 reply →
>We are just it's temporary vehicles.
> “This is because what appears to humanity as the history of capitalism is an invasion from the future by an artificial intelligent space that must assemble itself entirely from its enemy's resources.”
I see your “roko’s basilisk is real” and counter with “slenderman locked it in the backrooms and it got sucked up by goatse” in this creepypasta-is-real conversation
I for one welcome our new AI overlords.
(disclaimer: I don't actually, I'm just memeing. I don't think we'll get AI overlords unless someone actively puts AI in charge and in control of both people (= people following directions from AI, which already happens, e.g. ChatGPT making suggestions), military hardware, and the entire chain of command in between.)
1 reply →
[flagged]
The government is far more dangerous than anything that you want it to regulate.
Corporations and individuals with more capital and power than medium sized states are more dangerous than my tiny state and local governments, where I actually personally know some and have taken part in choosing my representatives.
Only insofar as it's subject to regulatory capture by monied interests.
What is so novel about LLMs (I assume this is the form of AI being discussed) that they require regulation? It’s a dataset, an algorithm and some UI. Almost all the problems brought on by the scale-up are just supply/demand type things. Every problem people point at AI are also problems on some scale with computer software in general, so I’m wary of any regulation (and don’t kid yourself thinking it would be for the people) bleeding over.
Some proposed regs would cover uses of AI outside LLMs, some of which tech folks might call “machine learning” these days to distinguish them from LLMs.
Using algorithms to provide personalized pricing would be an example, where like a landlord, retailer, or airline would use an ML service trained on your personal data and aggregated purchase history to decide how much to charge you for a short-term rental, Nintendo Switch, or a plane ticket. Basically, instant underwriting at scale for every single purchase. Just got a new job with a raise? Your next vacation will cost you 26% more for the same experience.
This fundamentally doesn’t work unless there is collusion involved, which we already have laws against.
1 reply →
We solved regulations everyone, a gun is just some metal, bombs are just some chemicals mixed together, we dont need regulations for this stuff!
It was a genuine question. Do you have anything besides ridicule to offer the discussion?