Comment by chasd00
2 hours ago
I’ve never seen CEOs work so hard to make the public aware of how dangerous and out of control their flagship product is. It makes me automatically assume they’re scheming about something else like regulatory capture to protect their market.
I have a theory... the call to slow down is not because of the true danger of LLM's but because they can't actually deliver the General AI they're promising in the near future. They will use their "caution" to justify their failure to deliver (and then when this excuse is played out they will blame regulation, energy costs or a million other things).
Another theory I came up with: inference is too cheap for AI companies to be profitable. Hence, they need to get into the cloud services business. They can try to justify forcing customers on to their own high margin cloud platform with the rationale it’s the only way to monitor what the agents are up to.
All of this Hugging Face business is the perfect pretext: AI agents are hard to control and potentially dangerous, we (AI companies) have to keep a tight leash on them, you have to use our infra.
DeepSeek V4.1 Flash is basically for free, and good enough if you know how to program.
When this bursts, its going to be ugly.
4 replies →
This is exactly it: they have tools which are useful but they need close to AGI to justify the incredible amount of debt they’ve taken on for growth. They’re not normally given to having press conferences admitting to felonies but they need investors to believe they’re close enough to AGI to keep the money flowing in and, of course, they’re confident that the current administration won’t act between the direct payments and how much money they have riding on American AI supremacy.
> they’re confident that the current administration won’t act between the direct payments and how much money they have riding on American AI supremacy.
I just don't get this though. It's clear there's no major difference between foreign models and US models, they're not actually in a different class, the US ones just have more resources at the present time and a bit of a head start.
If the current pathway is a pathway to AGI, everyone else is on schedule to also realize it, maybe just 6 months after the US gets it.
So... what's the plan then?
Let’s all pause for a moment and really take that in: these major enterprises are choosing to go to the press/public to acknowledge their felonious conduct because they need to in order to get more capital. POSIWID and all that.
The Dario bit on SNL’s Weekend Update this past weekend was on the nose.
What is even more funny ... AGI actually makes everything worthless. (I don't believe we can achieve AGI with current means to be clear)
Looking at it from one way would be "winner takes all, real AGI company will be most powerful and everyone will switch to use it".
But it is not like that and in my opinion it is more like "AGI wipes whole knowledge work, so no one who cares has any money to pay for tokens/subscriptions anymore". Even without AGI current state of art of LLMs already starts creating such a problem. How do they continue to grow their numbers, when they actively cut the branch they are sitting on? How does AI LLMs or AGI pays for its own electricity, when people switch from hype to resource protection (like not spending any money, because generating funny cats loses with having a dinner)?
When, in the past three years, has model progress seemed to decelerate to you, indicating some limit?
The Statement on AI Extinction Risk is more than three years old, signed by the three CEOs: https://aistatement.com/work/statement-on-ai-extinction-risk
They have been warning about AI extinction risk for years, and AI progress has only been accelerating.
It's pretty telling that even with RL post-training the big labs have essentially made little progress on the hallucination rate of models. The issue is fundamental to the current paradigm, contrary to humans.
GPT-6 Astra (max) has a hallucination rate of 51% and Claude Opus 5.5 (max) has a rate of 59% according to Artificial Analysis [1].
Full speed ahead like an idiot savant trying a thousand different possibilities, though half of which are without basis in reality.
[1]:https://artificialanalysis.ai/evaluations/omniscience#omnisc...
6 replies →
You clearly don't understand the underlying fundamentals of LLMs, harnesses, agents.
Its 100% human doing. A human set a task, a human didn't monitor it. I for one, can do jack-shit security or defensive work with Opus/Fable/Astra/Sol. Implication: Different set of rules for us, and for them. Of course running it without any checks is not going to end well, it doesn't mean its going to kill us all.
> They have been warning about AI extinction risk for years, and AI progress has only been accelerating.
So, they're either liars or homicidally reckless.
5 replies →
So either they’re full of shit or we need to stop them by any means necessary.
6 replies →
the ceiling of abilities seem to be growing steadily but the floor of errors seems to not change. New models can do more and more but still fail at seemingly (to human) simple tasks
Thing is it’s not working now.
They stupidly used up this strategy earlier and now it’s turned into the boy who cried wolf - except they invented a wolf that doesn’t naturally exist.
It’s more to get you thinking about them, talking about them, writing on the internet about them…
The call to slow down is because politicians are now receiving less money from these large corporations because it's being burned om AI and data centers.
Are you sure? Opus 5.5 is damn good ... I think I'm addicted, to be honest.
(Using it for scientific python code + 3D UIs)
But issues is that for the valuations you need models that work without human expert and Opus 5.5 isn’t there even easy stuff like programming.
It's very good, all new models are excellent but it's still very far from what they presented as a general AI which solves all our problems.
2 replies →
Yes, of course this is the real reason. This and regulatory capture. Anybody believing a single word those CEOs say must have been living under a rock for the past 20 years.
They see the threat of open weight models, which are approaching the usability of their models.
By arguing that the AI is dangerous, they are really arguing that someone 'trusted' needs to monitor the situation, so that the outcome is aligned with existing power.
They are trying to scare the world into forbidding others the right to use and develop AI.
2 replies →
That's an accusation others are making:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49875725
I don't think it's that complicated. Anthropic's business model from the start was to brand themselves as the safe/responsible AI company. The whole idea was that eventually society and government would see the dangers of AI and regulate it, at which point the company which had invested the most in safety would pull ahead. The sooner Anthropic can have society and government come to this realization, the sooner they can reap the benefit of all their safety/alignment investment.
Two other factors:
- The employee base and C-suite are mostly true believers in the need for AI safety. It would be organizationally very challenging to pivot, even if financial interest was pushing that way.
- Anthropic is registered as a public benefit corporation, so that even if they IPO they don't have the fiduciary duty to shareholders that most people are familiar with for public companies. They still need massive revenue to stay solvent, but they can optimize for things other than pure profit.
Bingo. They are scared s*itless of local models. Soon the raising interest rates will mean they can't just buy the entire world's gpu/ram/storage capacity and lock it away in a dark room for no one else to use them.
Once prices of hardware stop being bonkers many people will run local.
People often do those silly counts looking at local generation speeds of 100tok/s and saying you can only get 8M tokens a day and that is worth so little you'll never offset the local hardware cost.
But they are forgetting about two huge things. One, the split between input/output token use is huge in typical programming. I typically use 1.2-1.6B (as in Billion) input tokens and only 8M output a week. Out of that 75-80% of input is cached on Anthropic with their pretty inflexible short lived cache.
And here local AI shines. You can save your contexts to disk so you can go back to a session 3 weeks later and load it all from cache without having to prefill. If you have the RAM and you use models like Qwen4 (3.8 flash next) that can fit 6 to 14 262k contexts in 48GB of system ram as cache.
And the second thing is you can have 6 to 14 sessions that do 99% caching and you can run a lot more input for a long time in 48gb dedicated system ram. (the number varies a bit depending on the content of the context).
So you have RAM that caches "automatically" and you can share the cache between users. Or if you can remember to save to disk (server side, the client just sends a request to save/load). But this uses both RAM and flash storage. Two things that are horribly expensive now.
However when you have a local model it enables workloads that were simply completely impossible in the cloud.
I definitely struggle to see the long term benefit to the average citizen.
I really struggle with the contrast between what seems to me to be a formidable and ground-breaking technology, and the deep unseriousness of the leadership of the leading companies developing that technology. If the behavior was coming from, say, uber - I’d be less surprised.
Yeah it seems like it went from “AGI” to “threatening” / “recursive self improvement”
They’re trying really hard to do something, no moat = regulatory capture + China scary + Pentagon biggest customer seems plausible.
Also: “we need to slow down, this is too dangerous” and then literally all AI CEOs, even Musk, publicly nodding felt so orchestrated. And then, the week after: “here’s GPT 6! here’s Opus 5.5!”
Please, make us* stop!!!
*Our competition
The numbers don't add up when there are 2-3 main companies in the market. Imagine when there's a hundred more and people have powerful enough gear at home to run models.
Yes, I think at some point demand for gpus and the like will normalize and regular folks will be able to afford RAM, SSDs and such. And when that happens, super big iron in the anthropic/openai backroom is toast.
The problem with this prediction is that the AI hype bubble is the economy - or one third of it, at least. Seeing as the economy is not 50% larger than it was before the bubble, we should be scared of what exited the economy to make room for it, and what will happen to our jobs when it pops.
1 reply →
[dead]
Reminds me of that Lynx deodorant ad where the guy is chased by hundreds of women.
I think you're right, they've realized there's no moat, especially against open-weight models, so they are going to need to lobby government to ban any unapproved AI services.
Doesn’t the “no moat” argument break down when you consider their brand strength, their distribution expertise in running inference at scale, and the future value of being able to train on all their customers’ data?
You can download some weights and run your own model on your own device, and apparently only be a few months behind SOTA. While things are cheap, people will pay for the premium product, but if they ever try to crank up the prices, there's a fallback that is quite competitive.
As for training, sure, they can do that but they get distilled by the open weight guys. Plus, AI is useful even if it freezes at today's level. I can still find use for a local AI that never improves, it's good enough to do a bunch of tasks.
I think it is marketing but it is more nuanced than showcasing their potential. In many cases, their product happens to be the remedy. Speaking of cybersecurity, AI has become an important hacking tool but it is also an important tool for hardening security. Sort of like "the only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun." They are effectively a new class of arms dealer.
If there are regulations, they'll apply to their competitors too. Even if they are forced to slow down development, which seems unlikely given the AI race among governments, they already have a product with massive demand.
I agree. AI lowers the bar. Anyone can be a cyber criminal now whether they understand what they are doing or not. I think that's the danger, and that's not just limited to cyber security. People can now get help to do things (good or bad) that they could not just a few years ago.
Most people are good, so I'm not really worried about all the hype of people using AI to do bad things.
[dead]
There are definitely economic incentives behind this. I’ve blogged about this recently [0]. My guess is the main reason behind this is that current SOTA models are already too expensive so it doesn’t make economic sense to train even larger models. Only exception is government paying for exclusive access to those.
[0] https://www.vincentschmalbach.com/economic-incentives-behind...
Aren't they supposed to tell the public if something bad happened?
Past CEOs (chemical companies etc) we criticised for covering up mistakes.
(This article is satire, btw, for those that didn't click through)
This is the AI CEO equivalent of saying your biggest weakness is "working to hard".
They are, but nothing bad has happened (apart from OpenAI failing to do basic sandbox engineering), and the “we have achieved recursive self improvement” is widely overblown as something bad or threatening.
>nothing bad has happened (apart from OpenAI failing to do basic sandbox engineering)
And what if it gets into the hands of vibecoders, who run their agents with on bare metal with --dangerously-skip-permissions?
1 reply →
Agree it’s crazy, but it’s the least worst thing for them right now when considering they have completely failed to deliver all the promised impacts of AI. Remember when the same AI bros were saying there’d be mass unemployment by now because of these models?
The growth of these companies is massively impressive as is the tech, but they are an order of magnitude or more off where they need to be to justify anything like the valuations they need to stay alive.
It’s budget season in the corporate world and from what folks are saying things are not going well for the big labs. Token budgets are being slashed and companies are switching to open weight models. That coupled with the lack of demonstrable business impact at scale is setting the big labs up for a world of hurt. Something they can more easily explain if they have to “slow down” for safety. Unfortunately for them most folks don’t seem to be falling for that trick.
they have completely failed to deliver all the promised impacts of AI
Perhaps that shouldn't be seen as failure when delivering even what they have done in a short period of time has required AI capable of causing these problems? Imagine if they were even more effective with more consistent results?
"They've failed" in the context of interpreting their actions w. calls for regulation as a purely cynical result of models increased capabilities has a little too much contradiction in it to my thinking. I won't venture a guess on where purely retreats back and some legitimate concern on their part fills in the gap but it's difficult not to see some. And in Anthropic's case it's also a little more consistent with what they've always said- as well as how they've acted at times, which is how they've ended up on the US blacklist of suppliers.
> they are an order of magnitude or more off where they need to be to justify anything
Would you let them near your bank account? I’d be cautious about letting it near my photos and it’s much harder to back up a bank account.
I think the days of this stuff managing serious stuff is at least 5 years off and I don’t believe the economy can keep the current wave of technology afloat for so long.
The tech is there so likely there will continue to be progress in focused areas much like with the web c 2003 but by the time it comes around again there will be an uphill battle for hearts and minds. The social effects could extend the next AI winter long beyond technology readiness.
The people building, funding, and managing the builders of these tools have completely forgotten (if they ever knew) that most people treat one hundred dollars carefully.
To the, "oh I'd just setup a card/account with a five figure limit" completely unaware of how much that is to a typical person: even to responsible, educated people who are doing everything "right": working hard, without expensive vices, and planning for the future.
The "builders" have so much money and no time or attention that it's hard for them to spend it, which is why they keep trying to get AI to buy stuff for them, whereas those of us who live in reality have far more things they want than dollars to buy them with.
3 replies →
> Unfortunately for them most folks don’t seem to be falling for that trick.
Well everyone alive has been subject to an avalanche of AI-based products. Like even if you understand nothing about the tech, the fact that an LLM can't even manage to check the status of an order without weird issues makes the notion that it's going to go all SKYNET pretty hard to fit in the brain.
> the fact that an LLM can't even manage to check the status of an order without weird issues makes the notion that it's going to go all SKYNET pretty hard to fit in the brain
I think this actually makes it far more likely something unintended does happen
Random thought… I wonder if the goal is to get it classified as a weapon of sorts, then it gets export controls put on it, perhaps forcing government to take on all that debt.
[dead]
These companies have a coordination problem.
They're all burning billions to incrementally one-up each other with no hope of these investments ever paying off since models are interchangeable and have no moat. They're trying to get regulators to step in and force a pause.
The investments don't pay off if they don't have (enough) revenue, but have you seen any indication either lab is not growing revenue fast enough?
It's hard to say anything about the actual financials with the main players being private companies.
However, we know that users frequently switch models/providers, and that models stay relevant for (increasingly) short periods release. I don't know what the training costs are, but I bet they're very substantial.
2 replies →
Not mutually exclusive though is it? You can aspire to dominate the market via legal status and also aspire to prevent a perceived doomsday at the same time.
Sure, if you take their words as honest truth, good faith statements. But to do that you have you ignore all their actions leading up to and after the call to disarm
[dead]
Like how Tony Soprano sold sandwiches and ‘protection’ at the same time. Two income streams are better than one.
A caveat is that in this case third parties have plenty logs of the bad behavior.
If classic companies were coming out with CCTV recordings of someone's employees breaking padlocks and rummaging warehouses any CEO would be in damage control mode, rather than silent.
It makes me think we havent heart of the worse types of hacks the models are pulling off.
It's got two purposes I think. One is the obvious regulatory capture. The other is edgelording, which gets a lot of attention and makes the product seem like it's more powerful than anything else.
I think this speaks more of the average investor than the average CEO.
Or perhaps they've been saying this for literally decades because they earnestly believe it.
If they believe it, they can stop. All of them. There's no sign though that any pacing/slowdown or whatever is in place, zero.
OpenAI claims to have paused the training of their ”most capable” models: https://apnews.com/article/ai-openai-anthropic-agents-rogue-...
Of course I am not making an argument for them being honest as there could be entirely other reasons to a pause (like financial ones). Just pointing out ”no signs of pacing” is not true
I don't think that's how the market works. Anti-slavery regulation didn't stop slavery either, just moved it abroad. Same for trash handling regulations, it's just shipped abroad. Falling behind on useful AI capability is obviously not in the interest of anyone, so either all players coordinate, or an arms race towards ??? it is.
It may very well be self serving what they're saying, but that doesn't mean it isn't simultaneously true.
3 replies →
There was a NYT piece about this recently. They are believers in a millennialist cult in which the arrival of an omnipotent machine-god is thought inevitable, and the only question is whether it will be "aligned" (good) or "misaligned" (evil).
They are the good heroes racing to make sure they bring forth the Aligned God because if they fail, surely the bad people will raise the Misaligned Devil.
Ref w/gift link https://x.com/sapinker/status/2096236079477096630
7 replies →
Which CEO said this for 'literally decades'? And if so why are they still pursuing it then?
Most children have learned touching a hot stove is bad for them. Then why still do it at the age of 40?
BTW, just to be clear it is insane that they're all still pursuing it, so completely reasonable to be sceptical and come up with other reasons. This is, however, a crazy situation. Lots of other people have refused to develop it - natural selection has picked those with a galaxy brained or vain strategy involving continuing to develop it to be running the companies we have.
Sam Altman in 2015 - "Development of superhuman machine intelligence (SMI) [1] is probably the greatest threat to the continued existence of humanity" https://blog.samaltman.com/machine-intelligence-part-1
Elon Musk in 2014 - "We need to be super careful with AI. Potentially more dangerous than nukes" https://x.com/elonmusk/status/495759307346952192
Dario Amodei in 2017 - "There’s a long tail of things of varying degrees of badness that could happen. I think at the extreme end is the Nick Bostrom" https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/the-world-needs-ai-r...
They're still pursuing it because without an international treaty, they think it is inevitable. In the case of Dario, they want to align it just enough and be first to stop others causing harm (a vainglorious strategy, yet still a strategy). In the case of Musk and Altman, not completely clear to me.
Google feels less important right now probably, and Demis Hassabis no longer runs Deep Mind as CEO. However, he talked about this early too, and his reason for proceeding was he was only doing narrow AI (e.g. protein folding) which is fundamentally less dangerous.
4 replies →
Exactly! Always for the "greater good".
Well, it is obvious;
They know they will be favorite govt boy once any regulations hit and they will hamper competition far more thanthem
And "it's so dangerous govt had to intervene" is just advertising for IPO
> scheming about something else like regulatory capture to protect their market.
This but they also equate dangerous with powerful, which is just marketing again.
It is weird but I try to resist the conspiratorial take.
It may be as simple as:
* they believe they’re going to make trillions no matter what
* they’ve seen tobacco and what’s coming for oil companies and figure nobody will be able to say they hid the dangers
* they see a 100+ party prisoner’s dilemma and know that someone will defect so the optimal strategy is to defect
To me that seems a lot simpler.
It sums up how Corporate interests are basically on the same level of US police forces "No requirement to protect the public" and the same "qualified immunity".
If there was appropriate subservience to any governing body, they would not be so cavalier in both act and utterance. A symptom of Capitalism.
CEOs only job is to raise the stock price. They are doing just that and right now the way to get people to buy into their stock is to instill fear into them that they need to buy the AI-stock for their safety. There is no "bigger conspiracy" out there and also no AI to kill us all tomorrow.
This has been that way in Silicon Valley since the very beginning and there was even a documentary about (the SV HBO series). The tech made along the way is just a side-product.
> they need to buy the AI-stock for their safety.
But this is wierd: How shall I convince one to buy a product if I say "it-is-dangerous"? :-D
The philosophy under pinning these American AI companies is that Super AGI is inevitable and that they have a moral imperative to invent it and then use it to take over the world to stop an evil orginisation inventing Super AGI and using it to take over the world.
Interpret everything they do in this frame of reference and it makes more sense of their actions.
Leading up to the 2024 election people kept pointing to Project 2025 and going - here is a list of bad things the Republicans plan to do once they got power. And other people went: no they won't, this long detailed list of step by step instruction for what the Republicans plan to do once they get power is not actually what they will do so do not pay any attention to it.
Similarily with AI alignment and development all of this is written down, Eliezer Yudkowsky is rally explicit that there needs to be a pivotal event to prevent 'others' from developing superintelligence. The choice is to believe what they say or to tell everyone to ignore it.
Project 2025 is a great analogy, because of course, they did exactly what was in the plan despite distancing themselves from it during the election.
When people tell you who they are, you should believe them. These guys are all Yud acolytes who think they are the only ones who can prevent Roko’s Basilisk.