Comment by dofm
11 hours ago
Regulatory capture is the OpenAI and Anthropic end goal, for certain.
But I also think they exist in a sort of un-designed corporate narcissism, which is a common trait in bubble economies — I am not judging them particularly severely.
Netscape under Clark and Andreessen and Sun under McNealy both fell into corporate narcissism: the belief that only they really mattered, that they were chosen, and that the world needed to rearrange itself to just let them shine. They arguably let themselves get played by Oracle (a corporate psychopath) and others as a result.
OpenAI's position is profoundly corporate-narcissistic: all we need is all the money in the economy and not to have to do anything upsetting like think about turning a profit for the next four years. Like rich kids. It would be nice if you believed we were so important that we should get an enormous stipend for just being us.
Anthropic's position is: we think we're so unique and ominous that government needs to make us both essential and terrifying. We have to exist otherwise worse people will.
Both narcissistic positions.
> Regulatory capture is the OpenAI and Anthropic end goal, for certain.
it has to be, because the other way around - the government taking over parts or the whole thing - is inevitable if the trend holds.
the inevitable trend is that numbers will be free and nobody will control the whole thing
ai-celebrities are just clinging to relevance like all the other celebrities out there
HN is the builder side of the conversation, and in my experience, few safety people congregate here.
The safety side of tech is a PTSD inducing shit show. Governments are more than happy to champion age verification laws, because parents, around the world, are clamoring for anything to pump the breaks on the social media experiment.
Society outside of HN is quite tired of Tech, and I despair of figuring out a way to make this clear to the commentariat.
7 replies →
Porque no los dos?
this is exactly the play is my point
Spot on. There's a certain level of drinking the kool-aid or getting high on their own supply. Anthropic is a lot worse than OpenAI but OpenAI had to go through rounds of shedding.
A\ and OpenAI each have their own unique kind of nonsense. I think OpenAI has just been less successful with persuading the rest of the world that they should have all the money in the world.
Anthropic has been surprisingly successful at convincing them that they should control frontier models because they're so dangerous that... only Anthropic can be trusted with them.
(If they're really so dangerous, the right way to deal with them is through a democratic process and taking them out of the hands of a for-profit private entity.)
A democratic process, of sorts, elected the current government of the United States. The president even won the popular vote this round. There is no guarantee that AI guidance by democratic process will be an effective counter to corporate autocracy; and more realistically, AI guidance by an autocratic executive branch is the more likely alternative before 2029.
To be maximally fair to them, I think it is difficult to be one of the key businesses in a market bubble and not fall victim to this kind of thinking, especially when the continued inflation of the bubble depends on you — lots of people lose their shirts if you don't push hard to be "special".
But as you say, there is a measure of getting high on one's own supply now.
And there's the curious solipsistic energy of Sam Altman whimsically musing in public that it turns out his product is too expensive for people and they complain when you make the price realistic (when it possibly needs to be more expensive for OpenAI to survive).
They seem to believe that the ordinary rules either will not or somehow must not apply to them; it's increasingly bizarre to watch.
Maybe the people around pets.com were this bizarre; we didn't have so much livestreamed interview content to show us.