Comment by atleastoptimal
5 hours ago
Cartels survive only if they are aligned.
There is no way Elon, Zuckerberg, Altman, and Amodei would ever agree on how AI should be deployed, scaled, and affect society. Their disagreements would lead to a crab-bucket outcome, rather than a shared acceleration outcome imo.
Also it is better if there is a public company at the frontier, at least I can invest in it, rather than 1000x gains going only to early employees and VCs who got in when the public couldn't
They may be competitors but they are made of the same stock. they are all the kind of person to participate in a winner takes all battle to invent the torment nexus.
> There is no way Elon, Zuckerberg, Altman, and Amodei would ever agree on how AI should be deployed, scaled, and affect society
Why? They're business rivals, but when the best business strategy becomes to work together, I'm sure they can put name-calling side. They all agree on the core idea: that their AI will run the society, bedroom to battlefield. That everyone will be the consumer of tokens and rely on AI for all consequential decisions and work, and that big tech companies should be the stewards of this technology, helped by the government.
Their vision is that they're the future kings of the world. I'm sure the throne is big enough for more than one person.
>I'm sure the throne is big enough for more than one person.
You underestimate the scale of resentment and competition between elites. If it were simple a matter of elites always preferring cooperation so they can share a seat at the table, then Musk's ousting from OpenAI wouldn't make sense (they lose their biggest investor), Amodei's departure (they leave the closest company to AGI to start their own firm), the fact that OpenAI was created in the first place was based on a fear of Google holding the keys to AGI, Ilya still left Google though on to join a startup, and then left that same startup (OpenAI) to start his own firm.
The rational decision at all those points would be to stay with the incumbent and share the monopolized glory. At each point, personal and idealogical differences dominated in decision making. I feel such will persist as these companies vie for their slice of the lightcone.
You are underestimating their opportunism
"their" AI is doing a lot of heavy lifting
because they're all assholes, same with everyone else in a position of power - they wouldn't have gotten and remained there if they weren't
You are forgetting how powerful aligned incentives are. If their interests align, they will find a way to reach an agreement.
They are plenty of things they can still align on that will benefit them all, e.g. banning open-weight Chinese models.
Elon is renting Colossus to Amodei, so there is some agreement.