I'm reading this in the same voice as Helldivers 2 "managed democracy"
The only way it stops becoming a winning strategy is if we provide consequences, but that requires taking personal responsibility for the state of the world, which was a core American value, but doesn't seem to be anymore.
Tech Company: At long last, we have created the Torment Nexus from classic sci-fi novel Don't Create The Torment Nexus
(@AlexBlechman on twitter)
Quite often this dystopian 'fiction' is just a biography with the names and place rewritten. A scary number of people are rather anti-human.
I'm reminded of the first half of this wonderful short-story that was shared on HN a year back https://www.fortressofdoors.com/four-magic-words/
Open weights and code and models? That's the only way to ensure sovereignty.
I think this company is a walking oxymoron.
https://chatgpt.com/share/681c31e8-67f8-8011-a4b0-2bed9d4da7...
Tech companies only care about growth. They only care about anything else insofar as it supports growth.
As someone who is both expected to keep creating information to train AI while being stripped from the fruit of my labour by it, I find it sickening.
See https://conversationswithtyler.com/episodes/chris-dixon/
> As you know, not many countries have serious AI companies, and even those in Europe may or may not last. They’re not obviously mega profitable. Let’s say you’re the government of Peru, and you can turn over your education system to some foreign, maybe American, AIs. You can turn over how your treasury is managed to the AIs. You can turn over your national defense to the AIs. None of these are Peruvian companies most likely. In the final analysis, are we even left with the government of Peru? Or has it, in some sense, been pseudo privatized to the companies that are running the structures, and indeed to the AI itself?
Interesting to have OpenAI offer up AI infra so other countries are not at quite as large a disadvantage. Also really good for their business.
In this hypothetical world where AI runs the treasury, is the US now in a massively better position to make treasury related decisions? Maybe? Does the US gov have a remote chance of abiding by these decisions? Etc.
I can see Peru being disadvantaged if they don’t use AI, but if they contract out and set up their own stuff that they didn’t actually build - how’s that really worse? I feel like they let the US spend hundreds of billions in development costs and can now reap the rewards.
You don’t see the difference between a self-contained product, and a foreign subscription service with no influence over what it is delivering and the privacy and data sovereignty implications? Let alone the vast array of subtle manipulation possibilities in responses?
Folks, this has already been happening for decades, western consultancies and think tanks have been pushing for privatisation and outsourcing to American firms and as a result many governments, like UK, have been hollowed. In many cases they haven’t got a grip and the country is running on autopilot.
As the consultancies replace employees with AI, the outcome you talk about will be achieved, in about 5 years. No far fetched future required
You can't be seriously considering fancy autocomplete word guessers are replacing governments when Musk can't even get Grok to stop telling Twitter users what a moron he is.
UK has had them in government since 2022, or maybe since Brexit/ Teresa May with her nickname Maybot.
The decline in quality of governance has been so severe, that I’d wager you would not see a difference. Both sides of the isle seem to be full of unintelligent or inexperienced people that do not believe in anything or have a vision
what an oxymoron.
this is testament how good grok is.
The US CLOUD Act (Clarifying Lawful Overseas Use of Data Act) explicitly gives US authorities the power to compel US-based companies to provide data stored on servers, regardless of where those servers are physically located. This effectively undermines any meaningful data sovereignty claims.
Consider the actual arrangement being proposed:
- OpenAI (US company) maintains control of the infrastructure
- OpenAI controls the models and their development
- OpenAI maintains the security protocols and access rights
- The data merely sits physically within national borders
How can one audit that the bytes going from a DC in country A to a DC in the US is not the user queries but some telemetry data for example? Presumably you don't get to look at the unencrypted packets
Companies and governments have been concerned about data and AI sovereignty, and chip (processing) access. The new risks imposed by the USA are increasing this concern / push.
So, it’s hardly surprising that Sama is getting a lot of calls for local instances.
However, if the data etc. moves back to the USA this is exactly the opposite of the control companies and governments are looking for.
So, fair proposal, wrong execution.
Most of the commentary is presuming to know something about OpenAI’s motivations. That’s not honesty; it’s just an opinion. So my question stands. Does anyone have a positive opinion?
Here’s a take. For those of us who use their tools in our day to day, we might take for granted that we have the existing and new infrastructure to support that product. Is it more good than bad that other parts of the world could reach beyond their current grasp? I hope so. It might be.
And yes, I do, and it’s shared in a different comment. Search if you care to read it.
Well, OpenAI, I think you are mixing up your own backend for economic growth with everyone’s!
Though of course this is already the status quo for all US companies abroad, so you have to give props to OpenAI for spelling it out explicitly: Give up what remains of your digital sovereignty to the US government and you get a small piece of the AGI pie.
You can make a lot of complaints about America but we have, looking back on history, been nicer than any other patron. Other good evidence includes the fact that europe is still standing (paying to rebuild) and her extravagant welfare states of the past decades, subsidized largely by American defense spending.
> subsidized largely by American defense spending.
This part is in my opinion ahistoric. US wars have not been popular in Europe. We did not want a war in Afghanistan or Iraq, we supported an ally calling for defense from terror. American war machine spending is rooted in her own desire for hard power, not pleas from her allies.
All of this is coming to an end. Not because the US is retracting. I think most of the west would accept a more nationally interested US, but because the US is starting to see her allies as vassals that she should control. She is realigning as a traditional power, like the USSR.
We are not vassals, we are independent nations seeking our own happiness.
This is straight up Russian mentality.
> extravagant welfare states of the past decades, subsidized largely by American defense spending
This sounds to me like a US partisan narrative rather than anything else. It’s a nice story, because it strokes the American ego, but I’ve yet seen it backed up by serious analysis. Most likely it’s just a story.
Except USA banned export of GPUs to like half of the European Union, let alone third-world countries.
> The Trump administration plans to rescind Biden-era AI chip curbs as part of a broader effort to revise semiconductor trade restrictions that have drawn strong opposition from major tech companies and foreign governments, according to people familiar with the matter.
This unstable circus of a government can't be trusted.
If you have AI which is in the service of an entity which proclaims itself to be the sole franchise of government authority over a given landmass, it is strictly incorrect to say that this AI is "for the country", because it's perfectly plausible (and on sufficiently long time scales, inevitable) that the country will want to evolve, replace, or deprecate that entity.
Honestly though, we have a much bigger issue with climate change in the medium to long run and it doesn't really matter what our governments and companies do with stats and spyware. If anyone thinks we can stop and deal with the climate when it becomes a bigger problem, just take a look at our track record so far.
(only mentioning climate change to offer perspective)
Regulators are still figuring out this “AI” and oAI must move into as many market to sustain their valuation and future before regulations start to close many open doors.
Also, when entire EU comission makes “AI” a core focus, all other governments are having a FOMO, which is the most fertile opportunity to entrench oneself quickly before everyone realises the smoke and mirror of “productivity gain” song means just making another layer of middleman mandatory for everything(see Apple pushing towards modifying Safari to be AI first).
Also what climate change? Everyone was being shamed into indignation recently for their carbon footprints, only to wake up to massive power infra expansion and Nvidia/Amazon/Msft announcing that everything is on the table including burning more fossil fuel to power the energy demand(utilities are usually often govt controlled and hence a social cost overall).
there is no data sovereignty if there's a US entity at the top
Source?
Free markets concentrate wealth and power.
Concentration of wealth and power is antithetical to democracy.
But you can sell options on your family’s votes.
Once someone sells a vote, they are in vote debt, and can default by voting a different person than they agreed.
So now you have to have a credit rating, but for voters. Then you need to have Voter Default swaps, which can be Bundled into Voter Default Obligations, Of VDO’s. And then you can have Synthetic Voter Default Swaps and ahead of a major election you can do a Big Short.
I've read so many sci-fi stories where big tech corporations have similar control over people as countries. Now we are actually heading there.
I'm both excited and a bit worried about the future.
Who is this for exactly? The thing about reneging on your agreements and treaties and threatening and demonizing everyone around you is that they learn not to trust you. US-led AI sounds terrible, it would never pass muster in Canada. Neither in the EU, China, India, Brazil... Like, you Cannot entrust your governments functioning on the US anymore, you can just get cut off at any point for no reason.
So who's this for?
Finance Minister it's in the California trying to bring investments from the big techs... He met with Jensen Huang already.
I wouldn't doubt if Brazil might be interested.
TikTok is also interested in building a datacenter in Ceará, Brazil, as part of this project.
Our attention is dictated or at least influenced in big part, by AI, not LLMs, but the algorithms behind Google, Meta/Insta, TikTok, et al
And our attention is what ends up controlling our actions (this is kinda the core of meditation and Buddhist-style practices)
You provide the capital and the data, we'll co-own the data centers share the models until Trump and the US government decide to shut it off as a bargaining chip.
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374615369/wheretheaxeisbu...
Have you considered that this proposition is even too ridiculous for current reality?
Brilliant in a Bond villain way
I'm deeply pessimistic.
Helping people do more? Scaling our ability to create and produce?
Sadly, none of these things ever made us happier as humans.
lmao, is there a single soul at openai who truly believe this bullshit?
Are they so high on their own supply they can't even tell they're becoming a parody of a black mirror evil corp?
Also, it's not like OpenAI responses aren't censored when it comes to "sensitive" topics.
> Partner countries also would invest in expanding the global Stargate Project—and thus in continued US-led AI leadership and a global, growing network effect for democratic AI.
Yeah, good luck with that pitch... I have to assume that the target market for this page is not other countries, but the US leadership.
The current US government? To protect “long-standing democratic principles”? Give me a break.