Comment by dumberquestions
3 days ago
I have no doubt China is taking part, what I doubt is that this makes any meaningful part of the total US anti AI sentiment, which can be much more easily explained by job loss anxieties, fear of massive change and good old NIMBYism. (Obligatory not an American).
> the total US anti AI sentiment, which can be much more easily explained by job loss anxieties, fear of massive change and good old NIMBYism. (Obligatory not an American).
Some of it is also due to the qualities of LLMs as they actually behave and actually function today, "AI" being forced into products where it actively degrades the reliability, efficiency, or pleasantness of the product, etc. Think of Amazon's "Alexa for Shopping" or whatever, and whatever its predecessor was.
One only needs to encounter AI-Enhanced™ products a few times to develop a strong distaste for the whole field.
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I am not necessarily anti-AI. I am more anti-Sam Altman, against using LLMs to usurp power, and against using AI as a scapegoat to abdicate responsibility for decisions that are made. AI itself encompasses so much more than LLMs.
Early days LLMs were declared an auditable. This was such a ridiculous idea that technology was so complicated and able to give good results without understanding why.
That was not from any foreign actors but the companies themselves. I’m sure that is no longer the case. My technology life is rich enough that I don’t have to pay attention to LLMs.
What do you mean by 'declared an auditable' here?
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Sam at least can be understood. He's in it to make money and nothing else. The most dangerous men are people like Dario, who sit on top of their elitist towers and think they are right and will burn down the world in the name of righteousness.
Anthropic unironically uses the word "uplift" in their documentation. They think we are lesser beings.
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Luckily we can declare that they're both bad and neither should be our overlord.
> will burn down the world in the name of righteousness
Is this referring to the 'safe development of AI', as they say AI development will happen even if they don’t exist, but other companies are less focused on AI safety?
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> and will burn down the world in the name of righteousness.
The righteousness of making a fast buck is also burning down the world.
All effective foreign interference takes popular sentiments and helps organize and focus it. You can't create movements without ground support.
But the thing is, there are a LOT of issues where the masses are generally grumpy but don't act on it. Civilization only really functions because people don't shut down the country over every populist urge. Effective agitprop amplifies this and makes it happen.
> All effective foreign interference takes popular sentiments and helps organize and focus it.
And a lot of effective domestic interference takes fears about foreign threats and "helps organize and focus it."
China is a legitimate threat to US hegemony and this is clearly a new Red Scare. The irony is that it was largely the US who invited and welcomed China into the global economic order.
> Civilization only really functions because people don't shut down the country over every populist urge.
Civilization also doesn't really function because a handful of ridiculously wealthy lunatics and their sycophants know what's best for 8+ billion people.
What is your point? You agree people have the right to act on their beliefs to effect democratic change, right? Surely that includes making up their own minds about information.
We should and should cut out sources of foreign funding and support, and prosecute and publicize genuine foreign agents, while allowing people to exercise their political rights.
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Agreed, if you had to pick just one reason why AI is tremendously unpopular, it is because the US AI companies, lead by Dario Amodei, are telling the US public that it is going to take ALL their jobs, as well as disrupt society. Amodei even wrote his "Machines of Loving Grace" essay, his "positive" spin on the impacts of AI, saying as much.
This bleak future is all the more believable when tech companies are laying people of, en masse, citing AI as the reason. Meta's current "We're betting on people" ads appears conceived to combat this, yet at the same time Zuckerberg has been trying to lay off as many people as he can to be replaced with AI.
The disruption of society is not some Chinese created idea - it's also coming direct from the US AI companies, with Anthropic and OpenAI apparently in competition to see who can claim/admit credit for the most out of control AI hacking into external systems, and non-stop stories of employees of these same US AI companies apparently living in fear of it, and believing it could make us extinct(!). With that sort of vibe coming from US AI leadership and rank-and-file, it's hard to imagine how any foreign country could top it!
As far as datacenter locations goes, I was interested to read the other day about DeepSeek planning for a new 160,000 GPU cluster in Ulanqab, Inner Mongolia, which sounds a bit of an obscure location until you realize that apparently there is a whole mass of existing data centers in that same city/region, chosen for it's remote location as well as easy access to power. I don't know what anti-datacenter messaging Trump imagines is coming from China, but maybe what he should be doing is being like China in this regard and planning where to put them.
Notwithstanding all his anti-China-ism, and regarding US locked in some life or death battle with China over AI, what's the betting that his current pop-wow with visiting Xi will result in some "deal" being announced where Trump softens his AI sanctions on China? He's brought Jensen Huang with him, Musk too, and apparently is looking for China not to block US sale of NVIDIA H200's he is offering, maybe increase NVIDIA sales.
For many, it's about water.
There's an 11 gigawatt cluster going in near Pantex. If they use evaporative cooling, they could use hundreds of millions of gallons of water per day... sucking it from an aquifer that gets replenished at the rate of millimeters per year, and was already being massively depleted. Without that aquifer's water, this region is dead.
They claim they won't use evaporative cooling, but... they'd save a lot of money if they did... until the water ran out.
Texan Republican statesmen are fighting it. Oil money, farm/ranch money, etc., are all fighting it. People who have historically been ride-or-die for Trump. These are the people he's threatening to treat as traitors.
I'm as pro-AI as a person can be... you can read my comments here. But, this build-out is wildly irresponsible - incredibly poor civic engineering.
If you spend time on Tiktok, it’s pretty evident which line that algorithm is purposely pushing. Even with purported US ownership, the algo still comes from Beijing; even a few tweaks can have dramatic hard-to-detect impacts. That’s happening dramatically on that platform, and is probably seeding a lot of the convos elsewhere.
Surely tiktok being heavily composed of people doing creative work that have understandably extremely negative views of AI would not be the cause of this, no, it must be an unprovable hunch.
You do realise that the algorithm has the same behaviour as the Amazon one right? You watch one anti-ai video for more than a few seconds and it'll suggest you watch more of it. If you're seeing a lot of anti-ai conversations on Tiktok I suggest you stop watching videos about anti-ai conversations on Tiktok so the algorithm can stop suggesting you videos on anti-ai
I’m aware of how it works. This is from naive scraped collection of TikTok without an account or durable device fingerprints, not from my personal browsing.
> job loss anxieties, fear of massive change and good old NIMBYism
A lot of which is fake "grassroots" movements by... foreign actors. This isn't new:
- 2021: https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/threat-intelligence/pro...
- 2022: https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/threat-intelligence/dra...
I’d argue most of the job loss anxieties come from these companies’ stated goals being to take all the jobs…
Exactly.
When the CEO of OpenAI says that he expects at least 40% of all jobs to be eliminated by 2030 by the tool that's also making personal computing -whether PC or smartphone-, video gaming, and on-prem business computing somewhere between incredibly expensive and unaffordable, and driving up the price for just about everything else substantially -because just about everything has a computer in it or depends on computer-controlled processes these days-, you don't need some boogyman theory to understand why people are angry about the thing that's making the already-rich far, far richer.
Though. blaming it on the boogyman does have the benefit that you don't actually have to address the concerns of those revolting peasants!
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I doubt China is taking part in opposition data centers. The cost paired against risk:reward on trying to push something that's already overwhelmingly supported (or opposed in this case) for an abstract goal of potentially slightly slowing down deployment of infrastructure makes no sense at all. Also, a natural consequence of the massive data centers will be an increase in chips, which makes it easier for more of them to end up headed to China, to say nothing of also easing espionage efforts.
This feels like the start of a propaganda push which will try to frame people opposing data centers as working at the behest of a foreign government, either intentionally or by being unknowingly manipulated. They did the exact same thing with Ukraine, reasonably effectively, by framing anybody who opposed sending hundreds of billions over there as either working for Russia, or having been unknowingly manipulated by them.
It feels totally different than offering a modicum of aid to a western aligned country fighting an existential invasion from an antagonistic former superpower.
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