It's worse than an honor system, because humans are constrained by social forces to some extent, whereas we don't know what AI is or how it will behave
Maybe I'm doing something wrong, but the code I get from LLMs would not be considered acceptable to merge before we collectively stopped having standards. People are committing 900 line functions with sprinkled return statements and it's getting into production. If there are productivity gains to be had I haven't seen them yet
Ridiculous. If investors wish to set their money on fire investing in over-valued companies, they are welcome to do so. Protectionism to preserve ROI is a dumb policy. Just look at the US car industry. We're building dinosaurs. On this trajectory we'll have 0% market share abroad in 10 years. Chinese EVs will probably get market share at a 100% tariff because US automakers fell so far behind.
Same situation in protectionism in AI. The rest of the world will simply lap us.
Hilariously bad take. Open weight models can be retrained of fine-tuned, that's the entire point. The idea that the "Chinese government controls your intelligence" is laughable in the case of open weight models. Once the weights are released you can do whatever you want with them. The idea that there's economic capture by the Chinese for products they're literally giving away is stupid to the point of inanity.
I can only assume this account is pure shilling for the closed-source AI labs.
The difference is that people building atomic weapons knew what they were building. OpenAI/Anthropic have no idea how emergent intelligence works. They're just running in the dark towards the cliff. Leaving it in their hands is the same risk as leaving it to any random guy, because random guy and the labs have the same understanding of what they're building. I'm tired of us treating labs like they're somehow uniquely good at AI. They are not. They simply have enough capital to train. If training was affordable they would have no edge whatsoever.
Probably. I mean I don't think anyone would choose Lawyer as the leading profession for leadership. It's a "largely useless" profession outside of it's very narrow context.
Is it? Uber has been a net loss for society. It increased overall VMT, especially in urban areas, and drove riders away from transit. On the whole this is both bad for cities and bad for city dwellers. We have more traffic and less transit, precisely the opposite of what we should be aiming for.
If corporations can selectively ignore whatever laws they don't like, we won't have a functioning society anymore. Our society is predicated on equality under the law. If general trust in that principle breaks down I don't see how democracy survives.
Except that's not how it was in 2004 before Citizens United. So.. yes, in your made up hypothetical it doesn't look good. But in reality, where we all live, it worked better than the current rules
I mean.. it also sends the message that you can ignore the law if you're rich. $1.5B is like a single failed training run for Anthropic. They burn that in a long weekend because somebody forgot to abort a hyper parameter search.
We won't know how close we are to takeoff until takeoff. My main critique of AI is that takeoff is dangerous, and we're basically running towards the cliff as fast as we can. Will you grow wings before you fall to your death? That's basically the bet we're making, if you believe in takeoff.
Silver lining is that if it goes bad we probably won't live long (as a species) to say "I told you so"
The excess money goes into assets that people need to survive/thrive. In SF/Bay Area a lot of it goes into land appreciation (housing prices). The end effect is rampant homelessness (did you know a full 1% of SF is homeless), delayed family formation, and an ever-growing state bill to subsidize landowners.
Excess isn't a problem, it's the distribution of the excess. Right now (in America) pretty much all of it goes to the top couple percent. The bottom ~40% of Americans have, by all practical measures, experienced a reduction in standard of living compared to 1980. Like, yes, they can afford more trivialities. TVs are cheap, particle-board furniture is cheap, and so on. But the actually important things like healthcare, education, and housing have moved further out of reach.
So yes, it's nice that my Anthropic friends can retire to work on, in one case, their fantasy novels. I'm very happy they can focus on something they love (and I look forward to reading their books). However, that much capital concentration leads to a hefty chunk of our (really rather rich) country struggling to service basic needs (like having a roof).