2 words: regulatory capture.
Ban Chinese models because they’re “bad”. (can’t have head to head competition).
Bad open weight model (can’t let people escape the subscription model).
Now we have real companies whose valuation depends on people using their services.
> Ban Chinese models because they’re “bad”. (can’t have head to head competition).
The current scale of current + planned data centres only makes sense if the US exports inference worldwide. 30% of your current total electrical generation capacity, and equivalent to 76% of your total electrical demand in 2022. At least, assuming the "33 GW installed, 300 GW more planned" claim I've heard was not itself an AI hallucination.
And at least OpenAI and Anthropic were persuing the same argumemts continuously to their initial founding, before such capture was plausible.
I don't only mean that GPT-2 was, famously, when OpenAI surprised the world with (paraphrased) "we think this is a good point to start practicing not releasing the weights, before models get too dangerous" or as a surprising number of people interpret it even when I link to OpenAI's own post "we think this is … too dangerous".
I mean even before that.
I wouldn't disagree if you say Musk is full of BS, but he did donate to OpenAI when it was created as a nonprofit, and his wealth was 2 orders of magnitude smaller than today. Back then he was talking about risks, "summoning the demon", now he's the one demanding saying "robot army" to justify a bigger compensation package from Tesla.
1. Those, like OP, that believe AI danger and disruption is all hype to boost valuations.
2. Those, like myself, that believe AI danger and disruption is very real and presents dilemmas (but also opportunities) for society, so we must tread carefully.
The first position is not logically consistent with reality. The danger is real: we have already seen hints about how this will impact everything from jobs to warfare to mental health. that danger does not increase valuation, in fact it does the opposite because of the need for government regulation.
For frontier leaders, regulation is a competitive moat. At trillion dollar scale, compliance teams, legal and lobbyists are a tiny fraction of opex. For emerging startups, early regulation of a new market is a substantial barrier to entry.
That said, I think Anthropic blundered into their current Fable mess unintentionally by underestimating just how much they pissed off the current administration by refusing to let the DoD use Ant's AI's for all the domestic spying and lethal combat ops they want.
But that belief does not imply the doom rhetoric is necessary or the best way to approach those issues.
> It’s all just nonsensical hype
And he’s referring to completely real and reasonable warnings in anthropic blog posts about the exponential rate of AI development.
Because it makes their technology seem more important and powerful?
Do you usually believe 100% what a company says about itself?
> Mythos export control issue, it's obviously not good for profits
Who cares about profits? None of these companies make money like a business currently. It's all speculative valuation and influenced by the same hype/doom cycle
However, arms manufacturers are doing everything in their power to make you feel unsafe and weak and scared. That way, you are more likely to buy a gun.
The whole point of the article is to answer this question, and here's the answer:
Because all the AI doom fear-mongering is driving sky-high valuations. The more the public panics, the more investors open their wallets.
> The more the public panics, the more investors open their wallets.
I don't believe this to be causation, but I can see the correlation.
I remember robo signing of home foreclosures with no checks and people loosing houses despite paying debts.
Weird to think profits matter half as much as ever-increasing valuations, driven by memetic bullshit. E.g. the entire point of the article you're commenting on.
Because Americans are obsessed with eschatological narratives and action hero stories. I talked to a Palantir guy once who told me that he loves it when journalists describe his company as a James Bond villain because every single time the market cap goes up.
If they said that they're SAP with Call of Duty marketing they'd actually lose money. In other countries this strategy might not check out but in the US it's better to pretend to be a supervillain than to be boring
Well, that explains Musk.
It's about ego, not profits.
It helps to look at the history of the AI Alarmist, EA-adjacent mindset. They believe AI could be Dangerous (<--- capital D) if not responsibly managed by the right people (spoiler: themselves or politicians who listen to them). The capital D means more than just some economic and employment disruption, they're thinking much bigger, like "existential threat to humanity" big.
The most extreme alarmists are basically LARPing Terminator 2 and want to shut it down before SkyNet takes over but the more moderate alarmists believe AI is too potentially beneficial to walk away from. And they acknowledge other nations and various bad actors won't stop anyway, so they believe it's their sacred duty to move forward quickly albeit very responsibly. Yes, this leads to some conflicted reasoning and priorities, like they need to keep gaining access to gobs of capital to ensure they are the ones to reach AGI first, as that's the only way to ensure "god" is benevolent.
While I'm sure many of the top AI leadership are primarily (or purely) mercenary, I also think some, if not many, other execs and employees sincerely believe (or at least hope) they are "the good guys" playing a crucial role in an era of historical importance. Obviously, this has some heavy vibes as well as a being quite a buff to one's self-importance. They face each new day feeling the weight of bearing such a consequential role in shaping the future of humanity. Us mere mortals can only pray their wisdom and altruistic ethics match their humility. </s>
So... yeah, that's why we see some weirdly whiplash messaging.
