Comment by nostromo
23 days ago
You’re almost there…
The only way Anthropic and OpenAI can stop the Chinese open models is by convincing the US public and government that AI is dangerous and needs strict regulation.
Of course, they will be at the table writing the regulations (but you and I won’t be).
Viewed through this angle, their histrionics make complete sense.
> The only way Anthropic and OpenAI can stop the Chinese open models is by convincing the US public and government that AI is dangerous and needs strict regulation
I'm British and live in Germany.
The US is 25% of global GDP, and cannot support current AI market caps if they can't sell basically worldwide.
> Viewed through this angle, their histrionics make complete sense.
It also makes sense if they are completely sincere; also independently it makes sense if they're lying their faces off so long as the hacks everyone else caught them doing actually happened; also it makes sense if none of that happened and also they were completely silent, just by downloading some of the newer better open weights models and asking them to look for coding vulnerabilities.
Occam's razor: we can see the problems, we don't need a grand conspiracy predating the foundation of these companies to get here.
> The US is 25% of global GDP, and cannot support current AI market caps if they can't sell basically worldwide.
Oh they definitely can. Irrespective of whether you are living in US or not, you still have to get yourself various certifications (take for example SOC Type-2 or HIPAA depending on your business category) to even become vendors to US companies or the US Government. If the US Government decides that all companies MUST use "safe AI", no company can use any other model other than what is decided by US Government. And that has a viral effect on the entire supply chain.
If you don't want this scenario to happen, where you are held to ransom by US Government, all middle-powers have to de-risk and diversify away from US dollars as reserve currency. That is the only way you can bring in some balance of power and leverage. There is no other way.
> If the US Government decides that all companies MUST use "safe AI", no company can use any other model other than what is decided by US Government.
This has already happened with e.g. allowed cryptographical algorithms. What actually happened is that European companies built either a feature flag or a fork of their product that fulfilled those demands, while using whatever seemed best algorithms outside of the specific sale to US government.
> Oh they definitely can. Irrespective of whether you are living in US or not, you still have to get yourself various certifications (take for example SOC Type-2 or HIPAA depending on your business category) to even become vendors to US companies or the US Government. If the US Government decides that all companies MUST use "safe AI", no company can use any other model other than what is decided by US Government. And that has a viral effect on the entire supply chain.
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_trade_of_the_United_St...
That would be about 4.3/126 = 3.4% of global GDP, even if they forced all imports (not just government contracts) to go for 100% US models. Even with generous assumptions about each step of the supply chain behind that having its profit margin turned over to a US AI model provider (at which point the rest of the world says "why bother with the US as a customer?" and the US says "why bother with the rest of the world as a supplier?"), I don't think this would generate enough revenue to justify the market cap.
Viral effects can be countered by local laws, and local sentiment; sentiment is pretty US-hostile these days, and also pretty AI-hostile.
> If you don't want this scenario to happen, where you are held to ransom by US Government, all middle-powers have to de-risk and diversify away from US dollars as reserve currency. That is the only way you can bring in some balance of power and leverage. There is no other way.
Indeed. I strongly suspect this is already underway, though the ships of state are famously slow to turn. After all, Trump was one misjudgement away from starting a war with the rest of NATO earlier this year, and I don't think the leadership of all other nations have forgotten this (hard to forget when he keeps posting memes that put the US flag over 4 other countries' territory)… though they also understand his personality and will make moves congruent with manipulating him in the meantime.
1 reply →
> the hacks everyone else caught them doing actually happened
My firsthand knowledge of these is that yes, they happened.
However in most cases OpenAI informed the victim, not the other way round.
Even medium to large organisations are typically unable to detect a breach unless it does obvious damage.
Everyone can notice their whole network getting encrypted for ransom.
Few can notice SQL injection blended in with application requests that contain SQL snippets in the normal case.
From what I’ve seen in the logs, the “AI agent breaches” are almost polite for the want of a better word. Like a gentlemanly catburgler picking a lock to sneak in and… take a picture of a rare artwork in a private collection.