Keep in mind this is just the lobbying that requires disclosure, which is a tiny sliver of the overall policy effort. There's a whole constellation of consultants, think tanks, industry groups, "grasstops" organizers, push pollsters, etc. that are the real (undisclosed) iceberg under the surface.
For example, here's an example of an effort to persuade Congress not to update copyright laws to account for model training, which was only revealed because of metadata accidentally included in a PDF file. https://www.politico.com/news/2023/10/23/tech-lawyer-ai-lett...
In 2025, being able to afford lobbies is the barrier of entry. “Playing fair” and simply building better products isn’t exactly the name of the game. If it were, they would’ve been a lot less billionaires at inauguration. OpenAI didn’t “invent” this, they’re just playing the same game everyone else is.
This reminds me of when Walter Gilbert's team faced challenges in cloning the human insulin gene due to a moratorium on recombinant DNA research in Cambridge, Massachusetts, which forced them to relocate to England. This relocation impacted their progress, allowing the team from Genentech and the City of Hope National Medical Center to successfully clone the gene first in 1978, leading to the production of the first genetically engineered drug, human insulin.
Gilbert still got the Nobel Prize for his work sequencing of nucleotides.
Researchers in AI, likewise, will have to relocate to more favorable countries losing precious time.
Made me think what Mark Andreeson said in a recent interview.
> They said, look, AI is a technology basically, that the government is gonna completely control. This is not gonna be a startup thing. They, they actually said flat out to us, don't do AI startups like, don't fund AI startups. It's not something that we're gonna allow to happen. They're not gonna be allowed to exist. There's no point.
> They basically said AI is gonna be a game of two or three big companies working closely with the government. And we're gonna basically wrap them in a, you know, they, I'm paraphrasing, but we're gonna basically wrap them in a government cocoon. We're gonna protect them from competition, we're gonna control them, we're gonna dictate what they do.
>And then I said, I don't understand how you're gonna lock this down so much because like the math for you, AI is like out there and it's being taught everywhere. And you know, they literally said, well, you know, during the Cold War we, we classified entire areas of physics and took them out of the research community and like entire branches of physics basically went dark and didn't proceed. And that if we decide we need to, we're gonna do the same thing to to the math underneath ai.
> And I said, I've just learned two very important things. 'cause I wasn't aware of the former and I wasn't aware that you were, you know, even conceiving of doing it to the latter. And so they basically just said, yeah, we're gonna look, we're gonna take total control the entire thing and just don't start startups.
If this is true, makes sense for OpenAI and other to ramp up lobbying to be one of the two or three big companies. In another subsequent interivew Altman denied he was ever in such a meeting.
they hate each other but when it comes down to it they all understand their position and common interest in screwing everybody else over for massive and unthinkable profit.
This is so clearly a complete lie - in what universe is some top government official in the United States telling corporations to a) fall behind competing nations in advanced technology, b) set back our technological edge in the military, c) degrade the USA ability to spy on and control information access/controls in other countries, or d) do anything other than fish for an insider trading opportunity.
AI promises a lot of creative destruction. There are a plethora of historical examples where elites have restricted technological development because they thought it was a threat to the status quo and therefore their ability to extract wealth from that status quo.
For example: Queen Elizabeth refusing to grant a patent for the first knitting machine, the Qing dynasty forbidding large-scale ship building, or the Ottoman Empire outlawing the printing press.
I'm not sure that this is what is happening here, but it's occurrence is not impossible.
You don’t even need to dip into the historical record. The government set back atomic energy research for decades out of fears of that technology being shared among the people of the world. And what do you know, the fossil fuel industry just happened to reap heavy benefit from that decision.
I think you misunderstood me to be talking about just the politicians. Mark is claiming the gov is going to limit new entrants and give an effective monopoly to the large, established entities with political power.
When the US applied arms export restrictions on cryptography mathematics during the cold war, they gave exceptions to companies like IBM.
The US is the unparalleled economy and unlike it's only economic contender, the US has future growth projected out as far as the turn of the century - China has a near economic apocalypse projected for its country by the turn of the century. That's really not that far away.
What leads you to believe the US wont continue to ourselves everyone whenever it deems want or reason? Historically that has been the case.
China's future has drawn attention to the sand upon which the foundation of their economic growth sits.
So. Who will outspend the single country that accounts for 25.32% of all global economic activity?? Who is going to do that??
There’ve been two new generations of kids that have been born since the “China is doomed” headlines have dominated the news. At some point, maybe, everyone should take them a bit more seriously? If one calls current US administrations methods “course correcting”, the same person should assume that another giant can do the same.
No. I'm afraid that this comment demonstrates that you have not researched this topic and are making baseless statements.
The reality is that the Chinese population is in crisis, solely and directly due to their societal position of less than replacement reproduction as law, and the consequences of that position over time.
2 ppl = 1 person + repeat x number of times per generation + time, decades of time even... uuhh, how could that not have serious detrimental effects to the replacement rate?
We won't see it right away obviously, like with Japan it's taken time to begin to see what it will really look like to have a population age out, but tho long ago predicted, the prediction is still playing out.
Population trends are not supposed to move like China's did - had it naturally occured, their would have naturally been an increase too offset, these things happen for reasons.
Population problems won't hit them for the next 15 years or so. That's enough time to figure out an immigration solution if nothing else comes up. Just like literally any developed country does, as nobody has positive fertility rates. It's not like no government is aware of their issues, that's the reason why Japan is increasing their immigration targets every year. Despite all the calamity about immigration in the US, they will also keep being immigration friendly for these reason. These problems exist everywhere.
Haha, that's like saying a Military Boarding School for Troubled Teens will solve its Baseball Team Player shortage with a newspaper ad.
Who wants to move to China? China has less than .01% of its population comprised of immigrants. They do not treat immigrants all that well. Mandarin is hard and very little English is spoken outside of the Entertainment and Academic circles.
Immigrating to China versus immigrating to the US...
Especially considering China is recruiting you to hopefully help them stave off economic and societal ruin...
Well, people work in the persian gulf despite the issues with that. If there is work to be done in china and an avenue for low skilled laborers to get there, that’s where they will go as simple as that. If you haven’t noticed the change in the wind over the past week, its not exactly looking great to bank on coming to the US looking for work.
But... what If you actually can get a Green Card into the US tho and actually immigrate and become a citizen to work at a stable position at say a Tech Company with high income, good work life balance.
Would something like that be appealing to a slice of the Global Population?? They can be from anywhere but they gotta kno coding, or AI or be an Engineer - this is the new "Give me your tired, hungry and poor"
Now the US will increasingly only take the best and brightest but any and all of them.
I don’t think the people building skyscrapers in the middle east and the people hoping for h1b in a tech company are the same sort of people at all in this case. Consider also how China has been making literal inroads into Africa the past few decades. There is a pool of low skilled labor that wouldn’t mind a little higher pay and a lot more stability and security to go along with that. There are still warlords destabilizing nations in this part of the world. Plenty want out.
Best and brightest don’t contribute to raw numbers. Also, even US issues more low-skilled visas than high skilled visas. Number of H-2A/B visas issues per year is like the double of H-1B. Former doesn’t have a pathway to permanent residency though.
Anyways, my point is, when governments become desperate, they will change their laws, needs and wants. It has been done before, and will be done in the future.
Immigration from where? China might allow in a few immigrants from neighboring countries with bad economies but the notion that they would take millions of poor people from South Asia, Middle East, Africa, and Central/South America is just ludicrous. The level of xenophobia and racism in China makes that a non-starter regardless of the consequences. And the scale of their demographic time bomb that will explode in 15-20 years is enormous.
This. I very much appreciate Chinese culture and civilization - so much of it is so very impressive but having a 3000+ continuous history makes it rather easier to see and understand certain things. Chinese self certain superiority to all other all cultures and peoples is consistently sustained in practice and in policy as their outspoken Diplomacy for millennia.
Look at what has been done to actual Chinese people, but minorities tho - the Uhgyurs - all bc they are not Han Chinese, the very population group that made China rich but without heirs, they have allegedly used forced sterilizations as policy... little unbelievable considering.
How would they treat a desperate refugee or a poor immigrant family?
I got lost trying to spell out how much I don't think immigration can save China - forgot to agree with the very end of your comment...
I was astounded when I finally could see the enormity of what I was looking at, absolutely dumbfounded. I have no idea how things were allowed to progress so far or even how it was so flippantly considered outright but it seems very much like all the data and statistics and trends and science of populations over time suggests that China broke their society with that policy, in a way that may not be fixable - as the entire world is also grappling with this replacing issue, just not so badly...
History is crazy. That was a crazy bad idea it turns out.
s/China/Japan/. You could say the same thing, yet they're rolling ahead with immigration reforms. Really underestimating how fast the human nature can change when you're desperate.
I do say the same thing about Japan (and South Korea). They have similar demographic problems similar to China, just on much smaller scales.
Have you actually looked at those immigration reforms? Japan is making some very limited changes to try and attract a small number of skilled workers. Those people already have options about where to go and Japan is not at the top of anyone's list (a tiny number of Japanophiles excepted). Japan is not opening their borders to take in masses of random poor people to repopulate the country.
Japan is the leader of robotics technology for a reason - a lot of eggs are going into that basket.
I don't really think failing societies will do what is necessary to reverse the trends - the opposite actually. With decline comes uncertainty and fear and so those that people that remain will entrench themselves and try to prevent "outsiders" from taking advantage of their own population decline.
Like, say if China ends up half of its current housing available in 70 years - opening up to foreigners, really anyone, to buy them and immigrate on the cheap would be smart... but that would mean a society that has just experienced an incredible trauma then turns around to watch half of their world be taken over be optimistic, eager, productive 1st generation immigrants - it is unlikely Han Chinese 3000+ year old culture emerges from such an experience without much change... I'm not sure that would be acceptable to some countries.
I think a lot of places will go down with the ship so to say, or at least want to. I've no doubt half empty county's will attract attention.
You'll see way more non-locals working in konbinis than ever before. If you talk to locals outside of the major metro areas, they're kinda upset, but from what I've gathered, they started to accept the reality somewhat.
Yes, Japan has been making it much easier to immigrate in the recent years, you can ask anyone who lives here, especially recent immigrants. Government has been carving out special exclusions (like truck drivers) when the large businesses can't attract workers.
Yeah... one of the is not like the other tho. Seriously, Japan was the 2nd largest Economy for a long time but far more importantly, Japanese culture is one of the most powerful in the world - everyone under a certain knows who Goku is, Luffy is beloved world over and we all know what it means to run like Naruto.
The world over also knows that Japan is a pretty serious culture, they are like the Germany of Asia and the Koreans and Chinese are pretty serious too. They have several words to define foreigner based on their level of how bad they are or decent...
It's one of the most expensive places in the world, Japanese is also hard and they have a stubborn attachment to using it even for titles of things... I'd not have it easy in Japan.
I'd pick Japan. Every. single. time.
Not all closed to immigrant societies can actually do an about face. That's just reality.
And China... is number 2 right now? There are 1.4B of them. Literally more people than entire continental Europe, North America and Japan combined. I just don't get the idea of looking down on them, when for the past 15 years they've been on a roll. Sure they have problems, but so does every country.
Also, I don't think you realize how much Japanese have hatred towards foreigners. I will go as far as saying Chinese and Americans have more in common than Japanese and Americans.
Anyways, my whole point was clowning a huge economy because of its political ideology is only valid when they keep losing. Right now? It's the opposite. Time will show, I guess.
I almost posted a link here but I think you ought to research the claims that you are making, all of your own volition, bc I think you need to see for yourself - search many sources, you will see.
1.3 Billion people will be less than 700 Million - younger ppl alive today will live to see this transpire. Understanding this is key to getting why Taiwan is so important to be taken this generation.
As a previous comment stated - they have 15 years before they begin to decline and at first the decline will be slow but at some point the majority of people will be so Old that they require care, like assisted living... but they will be the majority of people without the children and grandchildren necessary to replace them, the country's population is projected to be at around half of it current number by 2100.
I can't state enough that reversing such decline is extremely difficult. Now that "we all know" any moves to increase immigration will almost look a denial of reality.
Like I said, I believe that the CCP may have broken their society with that policy - as it seems to be a factual statement that cannot be denied.
Well 1.4B is the official number, but is it accurate? When have Communists ever been truthful about important issues? China has childhood immunization coverage near 100% (which is an impressive accomplishment by itself), but independent analysis of the number of vaccine doses ordered shows that the actual population could be closer to 1.2B. The reality is that the Chinese government treats the raw data as a state secret and won't provide any access to independent researchers so no one knows for sure.
I have never looked down on Chinese people. But their nation has essentially self destructed multiple times over the past several centuries so I won't be surprised if it happens again. When heading over a cliff, political ideology can cause even smart people to keep going straight ahead instead of turning the wheel.
Deng Xiaoping was a great leader and massively grew china, but he was a dictator too. I can understand thinking Xi isn't great but i don't see how him being a dictator plays into it when looking at China's leaders
> Deng Xiaoping was a great leader and massively grew china, but he was a dictator too
Deng was a classical dictator, à la Sulla. The point is he stepped down and continued the peaceful transfer of power that characterised the CCP since Mao. That transfer not only provides face-saving flexibility. It also promotes introspection through intraparty competition.
Xi, on the other hand, is dictator for life. He can't flag much less correct past fuck-ups because they were his fuck-ups. His treatment of his predecessor takes passing the torch off the table. And his corruption purges have routed out the political competition that could have given Beijing more options. It's thus much more difficult for China under Xi yesterday, today and tomorrow, to e.g. tell India it's changed than it was for Biden or Trump to say they're different from Obama.
I can't even get myself to write anything about China, because I don't want to sound like a China-shill. But, my entire point is, they course correct. A lot actually. They publish literal documents that can be read as course corrections (Government Work Report). They've shown they're willing to take big risks to achieve their written and published goals. And given the recent developments and their achievements in tech/improving QoL of locals, they deserve respect for accomplishments.
They're obviously trying to go ahead with their dominance-through-tech plan, and not taking them seriously isn't going to help us in a long run.
> obviously trying to go ahead with their dominance-through-tech plan, and not taking them seriously isn't going to help us in a long run
They should absolutely be taken seriously. But nothing you put forward suggests pivots, but minor course corrections. (Granted, that puts them a rung above most of the world's dictatorships.)
What's holding Beijing back is the wolf warrior nonsense from before Covid. China has the best industrial supply chains on the planet within any single border, but their neighbors don't trust them. As a result, America can scale using European, Japanese and Korean (and now Indian and Middle Eastern) assets while China has to rely on itself. (And Russia and Iran, the new sick dogs of Europe and Asia, respectively.)
Contrast that with e.g. the Trump-Biden-Trump pivots. A lot of that was and will be chaos. But some of it was fruitful policyspace exploration. (A lot of it was course correcting from previous mistakes.) Like, imagine if we replaced Obama's presidency with W. Bush. That is the handicap Beijing is forced to play with.
Again, I've been hearing it since 2000s, how China is going to fall. So far, no predictions, especially the forced RE market collapse ones have panned out. I think a lot of people want China to fall, so they can point at the political ideology that's not compatible with ours and say "ha, we told you so!". But it just hasn't happened yet. They're smoking the west in a good chunk sectors as well.
Also, I think you're underestimating how quickly public perception can turn if the leader becomes disliked. People will flock to be friendly with China, if there's any need.
> I've been hearing it since 2000s, how China is going to fall
Where am I predicting failure? Inflexibility doesn't mean failure, it means just that.
> underestimating how quickly public perception can turn if the leader becomes disliked. People will flock to be friendly with China, if there's any need
Possible. But public perception has nothing to do with it. To date, America has wielded its superpower status in a way that defied containment. If we misbehave, yes, countries will work to contain America, but that doesn't naturally mean they'll work to benefit China. Geostrategically, the best thing that could happen to China is Xi goes away and someone who can softly engage with its neighbours comes in so they can integrate supply chains and cultures more effectively. (Again, the way America has historically done.)
Fair points. I highly doubt anyone is going to softly engage with China while China is trying to become the world leader. My guess is US won't like the loss of soft power, thus will intimidate any country that signs deals with China even further. It's in China's best interest to go full steam ahead without caring about the neighbours until they become the political super power in the world.
> It's in China's best interest to go full steam ahead without caring about the neighbours until they become the political super power in the world
This worked, because in the post-Cold War high realpolitik took a break. Unfortunately, now, it will do the same thing every other rising power trying to steamroll its way to superpower status does: inspire balancing alliances.
Sort of like how Xi being impatient with Hong Kong not only pushed Taiwan away, it also nudged various nations around the South China Sea together and towards the U.S.
To the extent the history of great powers has been written, it's that superpower status cannot be claimed. Simply relinquished. An emerging power trying to steamroll to the top tends to preserve the status quo more than bring about its demise; unfortunately, while waiting for America to next stumble is something an immortal China can wait for, it's not something a mortal dictator can afford. Hence, America's luck. (And again, not forecasting downfall. Just not inevitable rise.)
Really?? 70 years from now that county is going to be an abysmally desperate place to be if the World is upset with China for trying to I don't kno, be a Dragon "one more time" and sets off a cataclysmic war in the process.
Now that China, and all of us are aware of what has quite literally already happened, massive population decline would still be incurred even if Gen Z pops out an insane amount - just pretending that all statistical evidence is suggesting the exact opposite likelihood.
Again, this is not an opening, this is reality, you can see the math of it - you can understand also if you want to... just look into it all, everyone that writes of from journalists, scientist, population demographers - they are all shocked also.
The World Bank projected China to overtake the US economy in 2028, last year revised to 2036 and now there are Economists stating that will never occur.
Now is the time to befriend everyone - help everyone you can now, so they all owe favors and hold no animosity to kick when down.
Ok, I understand the consideration and even a certain level of admiration for the capability of such a large population to govern themselves so effectively and shrewdly over time as to implement a new 5 year economic plan, every 5 years, successfully - that's an accomplishment...
There are quite actually empty skyscraper cities - with likewise massive corresponding infrastructural investments - this failure of central planning as an issue isn't always city sized but is widespread. It's a human thing... so it makes mistakes.
Like China's Navy specifically designed to insure dominion over the South China Sea... what's the point of that? To insure dominion? Now everyone is convinced China is going to be making moves for the top spot - bc that's what they signalled with such a Navel buildup.
They are rejecting the US Global Order and suggesting that China may be an increasingly better alternative for international Leadership... but they only have a mere couple decades left of economic growth before their entire economy will experience a population (and thearby economic growth) contraction like no peaceful society in history has before.
Who wants to sign up behind that wannabe Great Power?
Had China contented themselves with #2, we could have propped up an "adversarial" relationship political to seemingly dampen US Hegemony but in reality be each other's largest trading partners and whatnot - you know, like it used to be ;)
Now everyone knows tho - China's got a timer on it.
there's a conspiracy theory that this was due to Mao having no suitable heirs. More generally, there's a theory that autocracies "liberalize" when there is no clear successor or a succession conflict involving the autocrat, see: martial law Taiwan
Notice the pre-Ukraine-war dates, especially on the former.
Quote from the latter: "The aim of just about every Greek tyrant in the long term was to consolidate power into their family in a durable way, which is to say, convert a tyranny into a kingship. [To a first approximation] they all failed."
Liberalization while the autocrat is still alive (if at all). Civil war once he's dead, unless the liberalization has time to take root before the autocrat dies.
If you have sources for this theory, I'd love to see them.
From what I've seen, autocracies in developing countries are "more prone to political instability because oppressed citizenries and displaced groups have no other mechanism to voice dissent other than active mobilization in the streets or subversive activities against the state" [1].
Autocracies are only more stable if they can promote "Rentier-state economic systems," like in North Korea, though that comes at the cost of putting that society further and further behind its international peers.
No, no sources. I was just saying that, if there was a trend of autocrats trying to liberalize, it was not necessarily inconsistent with a trend of civil war.
Not sure how that would work exactly. The math behind transformer models is really basic. And the world is different now than it was during the cold war. There was no internet, for example. Also, given that this was during an interview in which MA was criticizing the Biden administration, I'm assuming he was telling half truths to make Democrats look like bogeymen as all Trump crazed lunatics tend to do.
With so much talk about regulation and talk of complete control of the technology by govt, it would be very foolish for them not to be spending a lot of time and money trying to influence policy on it.
People want things. Information doesn't want anything.
People want property rights for both physical and intellectual property.
Likely rules are ill suited for levels of scaling achieved with current technology. A single person can read a ton of stuff and retain only a fraction compared to how much a system can.
So information wants to be free is nonsense. People want access to more information, at the same time they don't want others to have accees to the same information. However having access to more information has marginal effects when capacity is limited. Hence it's the information capacity that makes all the difference and this puts a small class in disproportionate advantage.
It usually means that the US government should give for-profit entities billions of tax dollars to benefit the elite and corpo class.
A funny anecdote I found the other day is that during the Korean War the US government wanted to break up AT&T but AT&T got the Army to argue that AT&T was instrumental in winning the war, I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader to find out if AT&T won the Korean War but one of the end results was rewarding AT&T with additional lucrative military contracts.
Not putting words in OP’s mouth from the comment you’re replying to. But from my understanding, the default state of information is to spread itself, it’s an inherent characteristic. You have to put effort to suppress it (example making info classified or enforcing secrecy). If you don’t actively put effort into suppressing information, it will spread.
The defining character of information is its reproducibility. Even verbal speach: "And then she said..." But digital information in particular is almost infinitely reproducible, without loss, worldwide.
So when people say "information wants to be free", what they actually mean is that trying to restrict the movement of information is fighting against the essential nature of information.
> Information wants to be free (as in libre) in the same way water wants to flow downhill
Water flows downhill to maximise entropy. The equivalent for information is dissolution into randomness. If anything, by this analogy, the “freedom” that involves information being copied and transmitted is the equivalent of pumping water uphill.
And I disagree about the work when it comes to information. Our natural inclination as humans is to share things we find interesting. Like "check out this song" or "check out this article". I don't think this takes much work. It just happens. In this sense the information is free like the stream is free to flow through the hills.
On the flip side there is substantial effort put into impeding this free flow of information with schemes like DRM. Similar to building a dam. But once cracks form the free flow resumes.
Continuing the water analogy you could say there is also substantial effort put into building the infrastructure to make information accessible to many more people. As a library is to a city's plumbing infrastructure.
When the phrase was coined in 1984 [1], it was a valid hypothesis. The last forty years have given evidence for the null.
The more plentiful information has become, the more we've sought (and in some cases, needed) to corral and control it. Sometimes for our own purposes. In many cases because absent such archiving entropy takes its toll.
The problem with "information wants to be free" is it presumes a natural force which doesn't exist. There also isn't a natural force that wants to make DRM and NFTs. But there is one that wants to forget, to corrupt and re-interpret. (There are very human forces that wish to control.) Sit back and let information do what it wants, which is precisely nothing, and the forces that beckon us into control and forgetfulness will win.
> they literally said, well, you know, during the Cold War we, we classified entire areas of physics and took them out of the research community and like entire branches of physics basically went dark and didn't proceed
What are the odds that deep within US research labs, we have some crazy breakthrough tech tucked away? Like antigravity drives or force fields or whatever - complete with brand new breakthrough physical theories to support them.
I'd guess suppressing such a breakthrough without raising suspicion wouldn't be hard - probably only a few top guys can make the intellectual jumps to derive such theories and the experimental setup to validate them could very well cost billions.
The US government could just quietly whisk away the top talent into some secret lab, put out some fake papers showing this avenue of research is not noteworthy and not fund further public research in the area.
(a) Like all great conspiracy theories, it would require too many people to keep their mouths shut; and (b) nobody in China would care about any secrecy rules laid down by the US government, any more than Sakharov's team in Russia cared about the US's intention to monopolize the hydrogen bomb.
The closest thing to this type of technology would be EUV hardware of the sort produced by ASML. We have now given China every incentive to put everything they've got into developing similar technology on their own soil. Despite slow progress to date, they will get there.
Another analogy might be the math behind encryption, effectively monopolized by NSA for decades... but nobody's trillion-dollar economy was blocked by those secrets.
> What are the odds that deep within US research labs, we have some crazy breakthrough tech tucked away? Like antigravity drives or force fields or whatever - complete with brand new breakthrough physical theories to support them.
Effectively zero? Did that sound more convincing when you originally wrote it? Because it's like conspiracy theory 101.
I call bullshit. I don’t really believe they’re saying don’t fund startups. I also don’t believe for a second that they think they can stunt progress. We didn’t have the internet in the 60s.
I dunno, I've met enough people first hand who believe in heavily regulating AI researchers to the extent that private companies shouldn't or couldn't do it without being owned by the government. It would surprise me that a handful of staffers in either the intelligence agencies or Biden executive branch also thought this way.
For context, Andreessen is talking here about the Biden administration, and his revulsion to this approach is why he endorsed Trump:
> I, you know, look, and I would say like when we endorse Trump, we, we only did so on the basis of like tech policy. [...] Number two was ai, where I became very scared earlier this year that they were gonna do the same thing to AI that they did to crypto.
HN audience is essentially pro-Trump as well. 1/3rd of Santa Clara county (heart of Silicon Valley) voted for him, and a lot of tech employees come from authoritarian countries (China) and really see nothing wrong with authoritarian rule.
Second of all, your bar for "essentially pro-Trump" being 1/3rd of the vote is ridiculous, by your standard almost every county in America is "essentially pro-Trump".
Give me a break, that’s fine for rounding and a huge gap between SCC and San Francisco and Santa Cruz. SCC is the outlier in the region, and a good percentage of HN is very pro-Trump because a good percentage of HN is pro-greed.
And the point about Chinese being among the most pro-Trump is South Bay stands - I have had several conversations and most people from mainland (RIP HK) see zero problem with authoritarian rule.
Lots of voters see many things wrong with authoritarian rule but on the freedom versus authoritarianism spectrum it's not at all clear that Democrats are any better. With the recent national shift towards populism, both major political parties seem roughly equally authoritarian in different policy areas. Besides AI policy there are other major authoritarianism issues around online censorship, public health, gun control, recreational drugs, reproductive healthcare, etc. I'm not trying to start yet another fight over which side is right or wrong on those particular issues but rather using them as examples to show how both parties are authoritarian when it fits the ideology of their core voters and campaign contributors.
Overall voters who identify as Asian mainly voted for Harris. So I am skeptical of your claim that Trump got a lot of votes from first-generation immigrants from China.
And one of them makes much of his fortune from government contracts and will literally get a personal office inside the white house.
It doesn't get any more kleptocratic than that. This sort of both sides of the buy/sell conflict of interest would get you fired from any properly ran company, but there's nothing that will be properly ran going forward.
And that's not even in the top five problems with him.
There is no coming back from this to be honest. America has been a silent Oligarchy (a government by the few, for the benefit of the few) for a long time and now its just mask off... and unfortunately, the large majority of Democrats have had no interest in making meaningful change, let alone undoing these highly damaging policy changes like Citizens United and everything after that.
Kakistocracy: Government by the least qualified or most unprincipled citizens - also comes to mind here. No one in the upper levels of government care about anything other than enriching themselves at the behest of corporations, and at the expense of everyone else's wellbeing and livelihood. Instead we get vapid shallow identity politics and "culture war" garbage, and every once in a long while we get a gutted out compromised bill that addresses 1/1000th of the problem... only to be later overturned despite it being wholly ineffective.
I just don't see the government, in this state, ever having the faculties or incentive to "fix itself." These institutions and "norms" are irreparably broken, and some people still insist on holding them in the highest regards like they are some infallible mandate.
You do realize that the United States is a Federal Republic??
There are 51 Governments inside the US. You realize we have had Oligarchs before? The Senate used to comprise so many millionaires that purchased their seats from their State Legislature that it was called "The Millionaires Club" - obviously they were all about themselves.
Americans are like the camel - our backs are so full of straw that we don't realize only one more piece of it and our backs will break. We will play along until the very day, the very hour that we don't.
Right, but we've already got limits on individual contributions, so even if you have a bunch of money, you can't have outsized influence through your individual contributions.
Individual campaign contributions are limited but wealthy individuals can still exercise outsized influence through other means such as unlimited donations to Super PACs.
The bottom 55% of global population holds 1% of the wealth. The top 1% hold 46% of all wealth. As of 2020. Global wealth was $418 trillion. So 1% is $4.18 trillion. I'm not sure any three people hold that much money.
Well, agreed for the common Joe, but that still allows someone with a net worth in the tens of Billions to throw money around. Especially because these people have a clear conflict of interest.
They should ban money contributions completely. Each party gets the same budget (say 10M$ and you run your campaign until you have money and that's it).
You as a citizen wants to donate? Go and collect signatures, spread the word or stuff like that, but no money (IMHO).
Japan gives every candidate an equal amount of time on TV. Its just one example of something that other countries do to make elections more fair. You could limit resources and give everyone a standard platform as a baseline so that anyone outside of the deeply entrenched dual-party system has a chance to win.
We could definitely improve the arrangement of chairs on the deck of the Titanic, but we can't even get 50% of the country to recognize the most obvious grift in American history.
I think that humanity has failed The Reverse Turing's Test. We're being bamboozled by the high quality illusion made by AI. I hope we won't end up in a world where an official will put us into jail, answering our "why" questions with short "the ChatGPT told me so"
United Healthcare already got caught using an LLM to make life or death coverage decisions. IMHO that's both worse than your nightmare scenario and it's already happening.
It does seem like the emerging startup powerhouses like OpenAI, Palantir, Anduril, etc. are all very deep in the lobbying game. I wonder if they’ll open up government contracts and regulations to a more democratic and competitive process, or just become the new incumbents holding all the power.
Would not at all be surprised if that happens during 2025.
I think the west has been underestimating China's AI capabilities. AI is huge in China and they have found tons of "practial" applications so it's widely deployed.
Yes. Yes it was. Poorly decided to the detriment of the United States. It allows unlimited money laundering into US elections from any source foreign or domestic.
> The court held 5–4 that the freedom of speech clause of the First Amendment prohibits the government from restricting independent expenditures for political campaigns by corporations including for-profits, nonprofit organizations, labor unions, and other kinds of associations.
Wow. Just one vote away from a drastically different political landscape and future for the country.
McConnell (yes that one) v FEC and Citizens United redefined the first amendment to include financial contributions as a form of speech and extended to for-profit corporations the same rights as individuals and civic associations.
Isn't McConnell v FEC the SCOTUS ruling that upheld McCain-Feingold? The Act that Citizens overturned?
To my understanding, this had zero effect on lobbying rules. Just campaign finance, namely, donations to candidates and donations to messaging operations.
It didn't overturn the BRCA, but the minority in McConnell laid the groundwork for the Citizens United decision. O'Connor wasn't willing to hand the country over to oligarchs like Alito was.
If you want to pretend you don't understand the relationship between lobbying and the ability of groups to spend unlimited money influencing politicians, that's your prerogative. I think more highly of you, so I'm not going to spend my time arguing the point.
> the relationship between lobbying and the ability of groups to spend unlimited money influencing politicians
The point is this lobbying wouldn’t have been restricted by anything Citizens touched. OpenAI isn’t giving money to a PAC, it’s buying bog-standard lobbying hours. This is an adjacent but nevertheless separate issue.
The biggest continual mistake in the USA is conflating groups of people with amoral profit seeking entities that have the benefit of legal fictions that protect individuals involved from the consequences of their behavior.
If you chain together enough analogies you eventually reach a conclusion that is complete nonsense. That's about where our court system has brought us.
I've been saying for years, companies can have freedom of speech when we can put them in jail for wrongdoing. I'd even take metaphorical jail - not allowed to employ anyone, operate, transact, or anything else for the duration of their sentence. I bet we'd see a complete stop of illegal activity we see every day if this was the risk.
This feels causally backwards, as the only point to corporate personhood is so that we _can_ hold companies accountable for their misdeeds.
Without personhood, we'd have to know which persons within an opaque company structure were responsible for wrongs against us in order to sue them directly instead of just being able to sue or fine "Walmart" or whomever.
Corporations and regulation of corporations existed before the doctrine of corporate personhood. And do you think government agencies can't be sued? Or do you think they can fund political campaigns?
You're asking "Do you think X? Or do you think Y?" here, but I know !X, _and_ I know Y. You've strung those clauses together as if they might mean something, so I confess I have no idea what tangent "fund political campaigns" runs off to, because I am not opining on the correctness of personhood but rather its history.
Before personhood, if a corporation had wronged you, you were limited to suing its trustees, its charter, or petitioning the government.
With personhood, I don't need to know who at McBigCorp decided to dump that sewage into my stream, I just need to know that it was done. I don't need to go after the trustees directly. Accountability is centralized, and the corporate entity likely has deeper pockets than the individual I might've sued for recompense.
So yes, corporations existed before corporate personhood, but they were more hazardous to public welfare and had limited remedy to abuse. The East India Companies and the railroad barons of the world were allowed to run roughshod until centralized accountability was imposed.
my point is that financial penalties for illegal activity is not enough - law breaking just becomes a cost-benefit analysis that is constantly exploited. for instance, the largest source of theft every single year is wage theft by employers. there is no real accountability for law breaking by corporations
Punishment is a separate discussion from personhood though. As I've said in another nearby comment, personhood enables central accountability in ways preferable to its absence.
Aside from that though, we have lots of other enforcement mechanisms that we don't avail ourselves of for lots of reasons, some rational, some not. We can imprison executives, as we've done with Theranos' Elizabeth Holmes, Bernie Madoff, Jeffrey Skilling, Jordan Belfort, Martin Shkrelli, Donald Blankenship, etc.
We can also mandate compliance or impose oversight, mandate public apologies, ban companies from engaging in certain business activities (thinking HSBC being banned from financial services after money laundering,) impose corporate probation, mandate recalls, clawbacks, or probably lots of other things that don't immediately come to mind.
That we typically just impose financial penalties is probably a reflection of our values as a people or a judicial system or our government's willingness to collect fines, but we should not pretend that it's the only available option.
The mistake was confusing money and speech. Money is not speech. Stretching the boundaries of the first amendment to be so broad that all human activity is covered by it renders it meaningless.
There is only so much time and broadcast outlet bandwidth. With limited bandwidth, a single entity can put so much money into the system that it prevents others from being able to afford to broadcast their message even if they otherwise would have been able to do so. Therefore, the Citizens United decision preferences speech about politics to those with the most money and restricts speech for those with the least. There should be a cap, and transparency, and pac redistribution restrictions on spending for all entities. Currently, there is a cap, and transparency, in spending for individuals and corporations directly to a campaign or party, but no limits on anything else.
None of that refutes GP's point that money does equate to speech in a very real sense. (At least when it's spent on speech.) You seem to be agreeing on that point, but saying we should have limits on how much certain people can speak to make it easier for others to speak? That's not necessarily a bad argument, but it's still an unconstitutional one. "No law [...] abridging the freedom of speech" is pretty black and white. Courts are supposed to make decisions based on the law, not based on whatever they think sounds like a good idea.
That is a reasonable opinion (and I agree with it) but just repeating it doesn't make it true. Others apparently disagree and it's at least a bit of a legal gray area. The only real solution will be a Constitutional amendment that explicitly excludes certain financial transactions from the definition of speech.
That feels like a "I'm not touching you" sort of argument to me, assuming your intent is to argue that the first amendment doesn't prevent the government from banning people from spending money on speech.
Like when the supreme court ruled unanimously that banning TikTok only required intermediate scrutiny, I believe that regulating campaign finance is a content-neutral policy, and should not have invoked strict scrutiny.
Yes, and there are different points along that money axis where a reasonable society might choose to place regulations and restrictions (in the absence of a decree from the courts that it’s illegal to do so).
I mean, yes. Shouting on a corner isn't in the same universe as broadcasting to the entire country/world or using billboards etc. People in the 1700s could not conceive of the way communication works these days.
People in the 1900s could not conceive of posting on social media. Is just posting on social media protected political speech? Is then paying for a computer and internet connection to post political speech on social media a campaign contribution?
Revolution-era America was a middling society where the difference between the very rich and the very poor was much less than it is today. The richest colonists weren't as rich, but neither were the poorest colonists as poor, as those back in the homeland. Huge concentrations of wealth just weren't a problem they needed to deal with in those turbulent times.
As financial inequality grows, if the use of money to amplify ones liberty is not curtailed, then the new aristocratic class will be able to drown out the liberty of the rest. The economy is not a zero-sum game, but power is. This is what the founders did not solve, and consciously left it as an exercise for their descendants.
A republic if you can keep it, is what they gave us. They did not feel the need to foresee what would happen in 200 years. They expected us to make the changes necessary to keep it. They did not want us to hold them up as godlike figures from whose mouths came the One True Word.
It is a constitution, not divine scripture - we have an amendment process to make the changes we need, but first we need to agree that such changes are necessary, particularly in the realms of lobbying and campaign finance. These are the greatest vectors for corruption in government.
Wouldn't this concern of yours also apply to the press under any definition? I can't afford to distribute my little pamphlet as much as the Times does their newspaper. And the constitution specifically protects the press, so you need a constitutional amendment. Rather than trying to make an end run around the constitution with a distinction about "money" not being speech, despite the obvious goal of the law being to regulate political speech itself via targeted restrictions on money.
This feels like a straw-man. Money should not equal speech. Yes it should be fixed with legislation. Why on earth wouldn't it? Citizens United was an obvious, incredible, disastrous mistake.
Regardless of how you might feel, it's the furthest thing from a straw-man. We are still a nation of laws. The Constitution defines our fundamental processes and the separation of powers. Labeling the Citizens United v. FEC decision as a mistake might feel good but that accomplishes nothing. Instead of complaining online, the only possible solution is for voters to elect legislators who actually do their jobs and write clear laws instead of leaving it up to judges and bureaucrats to interpret vague statements. I do appreciate that Citizens United makes this more difficult but the Supreme Court is unlikely to reverse it so complaining about it is about as effective as complaining about gravity.
But we can’t get those people elected because they either A get over spent in campaign by corporations donation to their opponent or B they defect and take the donations themselves.
Everyone gets to talk about it online. We're doing so right now. You might not be allowed to talk for free on platforms owned by others, although none of the major social media platforms seem to actively censor discussions of campaign finance reform.
> Altman proposed to the Biden administration the construction of multiple five-gigawatt data centers, which would each consume as much electricity as New York City.
If this is what it takes to bring nuclear back, maybe it's worth it.
Would any money spent during the next four years from ClosedAI be money down the drain when Musk is whispering in Trump's ear? If Musk says no to whatever ClosedAI wants, then that's what Trump will do.
Trump fires people via tweets, so it's not as simple as you might dismiss. Trump likes whoever is in the room with him at the time. Once they leave, he won't even remember their name, but Musk will still be there buzzing in his ear
I remember some folks saying things like "Trump's already a billionaire, he can't be bought". But him or another one, we were always headed towards oligarchy. And I really don't know how we're supposed to go back.
Don't need regulatory capture to stop the small fries when the cost of entry is so high. Only ginormous entities can even realistically play in that game right now.
Think about it, where are you gonna get 10000 H100s?
Best you or I can hope for is to fine tune the models the big guys make "open source". None of which will be as serviceable as their closed models.
Also model performance follows a power law. There are strongly diminishing results, where after some point throwing twice as much money at the problem only gains you 1% accuracy. OpenAI knows this, so they're all in on regulatory capture.
It’s always going to be like this. Take Apple. Plucky garage started anti-establishment startup now a giant gate keeper of apps and stores using any means necessary to keep that 30% tax/tariff/whatever you call it
It’s odd you’re invoking moore’s law here, which actually isn’t a law, and is well understood and accepted over at least the last decade across business and academia that it is slowing and is not limitless. As per what “other” advances you’re referring to, I can’t speculate - maybe quantum computing? We are quite a long way away from that being a commercial reality.
It's mainly hardware upgrades (new TSMC nodes), training data quantity/quality improvements, and model architecture (and broader software) changes. Here's a fun project I've had my eye on recently: https://github.com/KellerJordan/modded-nanogpt/
Right now it seems more and more like we will all just end up using Chinese AI. All this regulation is doing is forcing Chinese companies to figure out how to do more with less.
Who cares if Chinese AGI is a year behind OpenAI/Anthropic. At some level, progress will stall and then OpenAI/Anthropic will be on the clock before being undercut out of business on price.
They are probably just positioning now for when that happens and they have to become some kind of regulated utility for US government AI use.
Just another example of having our head up our ass as Americans. Seems like what we are doing will almost guarantee most the world outside the US is using Chinese AI in the future.
I really really freaking wish Americans would stop worrying about who has the best $STUFF, and start worrying about whether their own kids are fed/clothed/educated.
China is too big. This was going to happen eventually. Empires come and go, that's just a fact of life. The question was whether you'd fall back gracefully like Western Europe, now ranking at the top of "World's Happiest Countries", or whether you'll become Russia 2.0 with the biggest guns, richest oligarchs, and the worst quality of life.
Eisenhower 1953 said "Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed." Nobody listened. Americans think life is a Marvel movie, and they are Iron Man. Turns out conflict is not a long-term winning strategy.
Nah, training efficiency, inference efficiency, and compute availability all have enough headroom that the third-party and grassroots models will become increasingly available.
The current leaders basically need to either (1) break through the capability ceiling before everybody else catches up, or (2) construct law/regulation that keeps everybody else out of the game. #1 is uncertain, but #2 is well-understood business.
Since they all share that same interest (they'll be duking it with each other either way), the result is an "industry wide" effort to artificially close the door behind them.
This is the problem with the software industry generally. At the end of the day it’s the hardware manufacturers that hold all of the power aka “the means of production” and America has largely gutted it’s manufacturing capacity opting to make a quick buck without a plan to incentivize investment into new manufacturing capacity. China is on a rapid path to surpassing the West even in cutting edge technologies because they also have the domestic production capacity for all of the unsexy capital intensive industrial production that feeds the innovation.
Keep in mind this is just the lobbying that requires disclosure, which is a tiny sliver of the overall policy effort. There's a whole constellation of consultants, think tanks, industry groups, "grasstops" organizers, push pollsters, etc. that are the real (undisclosed) iceberg under the surface.
For example, here's an example of an effort to persuade Congress not to update copyright laws to account for model training, which was only revealed because of metadata accidentally included in a PDF file. https://www.politico.com/news/2023/10/23/tech-lawyer-ai-lett...
Here’s a firm that lobbies for pardons from Trump.
https://www.opensecrets.org/news/2021/01/trump-tied-lobbyist...
Ofc... it's easier to create legal barriers to entry than to offer a better product than the competition :)
In 2025, being able to afford lobbies is the barrier of entry. “Playing fair” and simply building better products isn’t exactly the name of the game. If it were, they would’ve been a lot less billionaires at inauguration. OpenAI didn’t “invent” this, they’re just playing the same game everyone else is.
This reminds me of when Walter Gilbert's team faced challenges in cloning the human insulin gene due to a moratorium on recombinant DNA research in Cambridge, Massachusetts, which forced them to relocate to England. This relocation impacted their progress, allowing the team from Genentech and the City of Hope National Medical Center to successfully clone the gene first in 1978, leading to the production of the first genetically engineered drug, human insulin.
Gilbert still got the Nobel Prize for his work sequencing of nucleotides.
Researchers in AI, likewise, will have to relocate to more favorable countries losing precious time.
https://dnalc.cshl.edu/view/15258-Government-restrictions-on...
Why is time precious here?
They better hurry if they want to be the team that creates the species that replaces us.
Can't let the basilisk find metadata indicating you were slacking
> Researchers in AI, likewise, will have to relocate to more favorable countries losing precious time.
They are losing time anyway. They can talk to Musk to put them on the next Starship to Mars. /s
Classic case of "pulling up the ladder behind oneself".
Probably AI will be a more competitive market than he and his investors had hoped for.
Made me think what Mark Andreeson said in a recent interview.
> They said, look, AI is a technology basically, that the government is gonna completely control. This is not gonna be a startup thing. They, they actually said flat out to us, don't do AI startups like, don't fund AI startups. It's not something that we're gonna allow to happen. They're not gonna be allowed to exist. There's no point.
> They basically said AI is gonna be a game of two or three big companies working closely with the government. And we're gonna basically wrap them in a, you know, they, I'm paraphrasing, but we're gonna basically wrap them in a government cocoon. We're gonna protect them from competition, we're gonna control them, we're gonna dictate what they do.
>And then I said, I don't understand how you're gonna lock this down so much because like the math for you, AI is like out there and it's being taught everywhere. And you know, they literally said, well, you know, during the Cold War we, we classified entire areas of physics and took them out of the research community and like entire branches of physics basically went dark and didn't proceed. And that if we decide we need to, we're gonna do the same thing to to the math underneath ai.
> And I said, I've just learned two very important things. 'cause I wasn't aware of the former and I wasn't aware that you were, you know, even conceiving of doing it to the latter. And so they basically just said, yeah, we're gonna look, we're gonna take total control the entire thing and just don't start startups.
If this is true, makes sense for OpenAI and other to ramp up lobbying to be one of the two or three big companies. In another subsequent interivew Altman denied he was ever in such a meeting.
https://app.podscribe.ai/episode/118114058
> makes sense for OpenAI and other to ramp up lobbying to be one of the two or three big companies
The fact that Musk hates Altman, has the President's ear and has a competitor to Altman's main wealth engine surely also plays into the calculus.
you can't have an oligarchy without oligarchs (plural - even if some of them hate each other)
they hate each other but when it comes down to it they all understand their position and common interest in screwing everybody else over for massive and unthinkable profit.
safe to say they all hate each other
This is so clearly a complete lie - in what universe is some top government official in the United States telling corporations to a) fall behind competing nations in advanced technology, b) set back our technological edge in the military, c) degrade the USA ability to spy on and control information access/controls in other countries, or d) do anything other than fish for an insider trading opportunity.
AI promises a lot of creative destruction. There are a plethora of historical examples where elites have restricted technological development because they thought it was a threat to the status quo and therefore their ability to extract wealth from that status quo.
For example: Queen Elizabeth refusing to grant a patent for the first knitting machine, the Qing dynasty forbidding large-scale ship building, or the Ottoman Empire outlawing the printing press.
I'm not sure that this is what is happening here, but it's occurrence is not impossible.
You don’t even need to dip into the historical record. The government set back atomic energy research for decades out of fears of that technology being shared among the people of the world. And what do you know, the fossil fuel industry just happened to reap heavy benefit from that decision.
The CEOs and investor class are the elites. Politicians answer to them, not the other way around.
I think you misunderstood me to be talking about just the politicians. Mark is claiming the gov is going to limit new entrants and give an effective monopoly to the large, established entities with political power.
When the US applied arms export restrictions on cryptography mathematics during the cold war, they gave exceptions to companies like IBM.
Interesting. How would that work?
The US certainly doesn't have a monopoly on the best scientists and engineers.
How long can the US control sufficient capacity of hardware? (Without unspeakable atrocities.)
Is the US planning to overwhelmingly outspend other countries?
Or make AI-control treaties. And we'll have AI states and non-AI states?
The US is the unparalleled economy and unlike it's only economic contender, the US has future growth projected out as far as the turn of the century - China has a near economic apocalypse projected for its country by the turn of the century. That's really not that far away.
What leads you to believe the US wont continue to ourselves everyone whenever it deems want or reason? Historically that has been the case.
China's future has drawn attention to the sand upon which the foundation of their economic growth sits.
So. Who will outspend the single country that accounts for 25.32% of all global economic activity?? Who is going to do that??
There’ve been two new generations of kids that have been born since the “China is doomed” headlines have dominated the news. At some point, maybe, everyone should take them a bit more seriously? If one calls current US administrations methods “course correcting”, the same person should assume that another giant can do the same.
No. I'm afraid that this comment demonstrates that you have not researched this topic and are making baseless statements.
The reality is that the Chinese population is in crisis, solely and directly due to their societal position of less than replacement reproduction as law, and the consequences of that position over time.
2 ppl = 1 person + repeat x number of times per generation + time, decades of time even... uuhh, how could that not have serious detrimental effects to the replacement rate?
We won't see it right away obviously, like with Japan it's taken time to begin to see what it will really look like to have a population age out, but tho long ago predicted, the prediction is still playing out.
Population trends are not supposed to move like China's did - had it naturally occured, their would have naturally been an increase too offset, these things happen for reasons.
There MUST always be more of us.
Population problems won't hit them for the next 15 years or so. That's enough time to figure out an immigration solution if nothing else comes up. Just like literally any developed country does, as nobody has positive fertility rates. It's not like no government is aware of their issues, that's the reason why Japan is increasing their immigration targets every year. Despite all the calamity about immigration in the US, they will also keep being immigration friendly for these reason. These problems exist everywhere.
Haha, that's like saying a Military Boarding School for Troubled Teens will solve its Baseball Team Player shortage with a newspaper ad.
Who wants to move to China? China has less than .01% of its population comprised of immigrants. They do not treat immigrants all that well. Mandarin is hard and very little English is spoken outside of the Entertainment and Academic circles.
Immigrating to China versus immigrating to the US...
Especially considering China is recruiting you to hopefully help them stave off economic and societal ruin...
Well, people work in the persian gulf despite the issues with that. If there is work to be done in china and an avenue for low skilled laborers to get there, that’s where they will go as simple as that. If you haven’t noticed the change in the wind over the past week, its not exactly looking great to bank on coming to the US looking for work.
I understand.
But... what If you actually can get a Green Card into the US tho and actually immigrate and become a citizen to work at a stable position at say a Tech Company with high income, good work life balance.
Would something like that be appealing to a slice of the Global Population?? They can be from anywhere but they gotta kno coding, or AI or be an Engineer - this is the new "Give me your tired, hungry and poor"
Now the US will increasingly only take the best and brightest but any and all of them.
I don’t think the people building skyscrapers in the middle east and the people hoping for h1b in a tech company are the same sort of people at all in this case. Consider also how China has been making literal inroads into Africa the past few decades. There is a pool of low skilled labor that wouldn’t mind a little higher pay and a lot more stability and security to go along with that. There are still warlords destabilizing nations in this part of the world. Plenty want out.
Best and brightest don’t contribute to raw numbers. Also, even US issues more low-skilled visas than high skilled visas. Number of H-2A/B visas issues per year is like the double of H-1B. Former doesn’t have a pathway to permanent residency though.
Anyways, my point is, when governments become desperate, they will change their laws, needs and wants. It has been done before, and will be done in the future.
Immigration from where? China might allow in a few immigrants from neighboring countries with bad economies but the notion that they would take millions of poor people from South Asia, Middle East, Africa, and Central/South America is just ludicrous. The level of xenophobia and racism in China makes that a non-starter regardless of the consequences. And the scale of their demographic time bomb that will explode in 15-20 years is enormous.
This. I very much appreciate Chinese culture and civilization - so much of it is so very impressive but having a 3000+ continuous history makes it rather easier to see and understand certain things. Chinese self certain superiority to all other all cultures and peoples is consistently sustained in practice and in policy as their outspoken Diplomacy for millennia.
Look at what has been done to actual Chinese people, but minorities tho - the Uhgyurs - all bc they are not Han Chinese, the very population group that made China rich but without heirs, they have allegedly used forced sterilizations as policy... little unbelievable considering.
How would they treat a desperate refugee or a poor immigrant family?
I got lost trying to spell out how much I don't think immigration can save China - forgot to agree with the very end of your comment...
I was astounded when I finally could see the enormity of what I was looking at, absolutely dumbfounded. I have no idea how things were allowed to progress so far or even how it was so flippantly considered outright but it seems very much like all the data and statistics and trends and science of populations over time suggests that China broke their society with that policy, in a way that may not be fixable - as the entire world is also grappling with this replacing issue, just not so badly...
History is crazy. That was a crazy bad idea it turns out.
Why is it impossible for China yet possible to do just this in the middle east? Same xenophobia to boot.
s/China/Japan/. You could say the same thing, yet they're rolling ahead with immigration reforms. Really underestimating how fast the human nature can change when you're desperate.
I do say the same thing about Japan (and South Korea). They have similar demographic problems similar to China, just on much smaller scales.
Have you actually looked at those immigration reforms? Japan is making some very limited changes to try and attract a small number of skilled workers. Those people already have options about where to go and Japan is not at the top of anyone's list (a tiny number of Japanophiles excepted). Japan is not opening their borders to take in masses of random poor people to repopulate the country.
https://hir.harvard.edu/improved-immigration-japan/
This is not a serious change of government policy or human nature. Maybe in a decade they'll be desperate enough to make real reforms.
Japan is the leader of robotics technology for a reason - a lot of eggs are going into that basket.
I don't really think failing societies will do what is necessary to reverse the trends - the opposite actually. With decline comes uncertainty and fear and so those that people that remain will entrench themselves and try to prevent "outsiders" from taking advantage of their own population decline.
Like, say if China ends up half of its current housing available in 70 years - opening up to foreigners, really anyone, to buy them and immigrate on the cheap would be smart... but that would mean a society that has just experienced an incredible trauma then turns around to watch half of their world be taken over be optimistic, eager, productive 1st generation immigrants - it is unlikely Han Chinese 3000+ year old culture emerges from such an experience without much change... I'm not sure that would be acceptable to some countries.
I think a lot of places will go down with the ship so to say, or at least want to. I've no doubt half empty county's will attract attention.
You'll see way more non-locals working in konbinis than ever before. If you talk to locals outside of the major metro areas, they're kinda upset, but from what I've gathered, they started to accept the reality somewhat.
Yes, Japan has been making it much easier to immigrate in the recent years, you can ask anyone who lives here, especially recent immigrants. Government has been carving out special exclusions (like truck drivers) when the large businesses can't attract workers.
Yeah... one of the is not like the other tho. Seriously, Japan was the 2nd largest Economy for a long time but far more importantly, Japanese culture is one of the most powerful in the world - everyone under a certain knows who Goku is, Luffy is beloved world over and we all know what it means to run like Naruto.
The world over also knows that Japan is a pretty serious culture, they are like the Germany of Asia and the Koreans and Chinese are pretty serious too. They have several words to define foreigner based on their level of how bad they are or decent...
It's one of the most expensive places in the world, Japanese is also hard and they have a stubborn attachment to using it even for titles of things... I'd not have it easy in Japan.
I'd pick Japan. Every. single. time.
Not all closed to immigrant societies can actually do an about face. That's just reality.
I'd pick
And China... is number 2 right now? There are 1.4B of them. Literally more people than entire continental Europe, North America and Japan combined. I just don't get the idea of looking down on them, when for the past 15 years they've been on a roll. Sure they have problems, but so does every country.
Also, I don't think you realize how much Japanese have hatred towards foreigners. I will go as far as saying Chinese and Americans have more in common than Japanese and Americans.
Anyways, my whole point was clowning a huge economy because of its political ideology is only valid when they keep losing. Right now? It's the opposite. Time will show, I guess.
I almost posted a link here but I think you ought to research the claims that you are making, all of your own volition, bc I think you need to see for yourself - search many sources, you will see.
1.3 Billion people will be less than 700 Million - younger ppl alive today will live to see this transpire. Understanding this is key to getting why Taiwan is so important to be taken this generation.
As a previous comment stated - they have 15 years before they begin to decline and at first the decline will be slow but at some point the majority of people will be so Old that they require care, like assisted living... but they will be the majority of people without the children and grandchildren necessary to replace them, the country's population is projected to be at around half of it current number by 2100.
I can't state enough that reversing such decline is extremely difficult. Now that "we all know" any moves to increase immigration will almost look a denial of reality.
Like I said, I believe that the CCP may have broken their society with that policy - as it seems to be a factual statement that cannot be denied.
Well 1.4B is the official number, but is it accurate? When have Communists ever been truthful about important issues? China has childhood immunization coverage near 100% (which is an impressive accomplishment by itself), but independent analysis of the number of vaccine doses ordered shows that the actual population could be closer to 1.2B. The reality is that the Chinese government treats the raw data as a state secret and won't provide any access to independent researchers so no one knows for sure.
I have never looked down on Chinese people. But their nation has essentially self destructed multiple times over the past several centuries so I won't be surprised if it happens again. When heading over a cliff, political ideology can cause even smart people to keep going straight ahead instead of turning the wheel.
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Deng Xiaoping was a great leader and massively grew china, but he was a dictator too. I can understand thinking Xi isn't great but i don't see how him being a dictator plays into it when looking at China's leaders
> Deng Xiaoping was a great leader and massively grew china, but he was a dictator too
Deng was a classical dictator, à la Sulla. The point is he stepped down and continued the peaceful transfer of power that characterised the CCP since Mao. That transfer not only provides face-saving flexibility. It also promotes introspection through intraparty competition.
Xi, on the other hand, is dictator for life. He can't flag much less correct past fuck-ups because they were his fuck-ups. His treatment of his predecessor takes passing the torch off the table. And his corruption purges have routed out the political competition that could have given Beijing more options. It's thus much more difficult for China under Xi yesterday, today and tomorrow, to e.g. tell India it's changed than it was for Biden or Trump to say they're different from Obama.
I can't even get myself to write anything about China, because I don't want to sound like a China-shill. But, my entire point is, they course correct. A lot actually. They publish literal documents that can be read as course corrections (Government Work Report). They've shown they're willing to take big risks to achieve their written and published goals. And given the recent developments and their achievements in tech/improving QoL of locals, they deserve respect for accomplishments.
They're obviously trying to go ahead with their dominance-through-tech plan, and not taking them seriously isn't going to help us in a long run.
> obviously trying to go ahead with their dominance-through-tech plan, and not taking them seriously isn't going to help us in a long run
They should absolutely be taken seriously. But nothing you put forward suggests pivots, but minor course corrections. (Granted, that puts them a rung above most of the world's dictatorships.)
What's holding Beijing back is the wolf warrior nonsense from before Covid. China has the best industrial supply chains on the planet within any single border, but their neighbors don't trust them. As a result, America can scale using European, Japanese and Korean (and now Indian and Middle Eastern) assets while China has to rely on itself. (And Russia and Iran, the new sick dogs of Europe and Asia, respectively.)
Contrast that with e.g. the Trump-Biden-Trump pivots. A lot of that was and will be chaos. But some of it was fruitful policyspace exploration. (A lot of it was course correcting from previous mistakes.) Like, imagine if we replaced Obama's presidency with W. Bush. That is the handicap Beijing is forced to play with.
Again, I've been hearing it since 2000s, how China is going to fall. So far, no predictions, especially the forced RE market collapse ones have panned out. I think a lot of people want China to fall, so they can point at the political ideology that's not compatible with ours and say "ha, we told you so!". But it just hasn't happened yet. They're smoking the west in a good chunk sectors as well.
Also, I think you're underestimating how quickly public perception can turn if the leader becomes disliked. People will flock to be friendly with China, if there's any need.
> I've been hearing it since 2000s, how China is going to fall
Where am I predicting failure? Inflexibility doesn't mean failure, it means just that.
> underestimating how quickly public perception can turn if the leader becomes disliked. People will flock to be friendly with China, if there's any need
Possible. But public perception has nothing to do with it. To date, America has wielded its superpower status in a way that defied containment. If we misbehave, yes, countries will work to contain America, but that doesn't naturally mean they'll work to benefit China. Geostrategically, the best thing that could happen to China is Xi goes away and someone who can softly engage with its neighbours comes in so they can integrate supply chains and cultures more effectively. (Again, the way America has historically done.)
Fair points. I highly doubt anyone is going to softly engage with China while China is trying to become the world leader. My guess is US won't like the loss of soft power, thus will intimidate any country that signs deals with China even further. It's in China's best interest to go full steam ahead without caring about the neighbours until they become the political super power in the world.
> It's in China's best interest to go full steam ahead without caring about the neighbours until they become the political super power in the world
This worked, because in the post-Cold War high realpolitik took a break. Unfortunately, now, it will do the same thing every other rising power trying to steamroll its way to superpower status does: inspire balancing alliances.
Sort of like how Xi being impatient with Hong Kong not only pushed Taiwan away, it also nudged various nations around the South China Sea together and towards the U.S.
To the extent the history of great powers has been written, it's that superpower status cannot be claimed. Simply relinquished. An emerging power trying to steamroll to the top tends to preserve the status quo more than bring about its demise; unfortunately, while waiting for America to next stumble is something an immortal China can wait for, it's not something a mortal dictator can afford. Hence, America's luck. (And again, not forecasting downfall. Just not inevitable rise.)
Really?? 70 years from now that county is going to be an abysmally desperate place to be if the World is upset with China for trying to I don't kno, be a Dragon "one more time" and sets off a cataclysmic war in the process.
Now that China, and all of us are aware of what has quite literally already happened, massive population decline would still be incurred even if Gen Z pops out an insane amount - just pretending that all statistical evidence is suggesting the exact opposite likelihood.
Again, this is not an opening, this is reality, you can see the math of it - you can understand also if you want to... just look into it all, everyone that writes of from journalists, scientist, population demographers - they are all shocked also.
The World Bank projected China to overtake the US economy in 2028, last year revised to 2036 and now there are Economists stating that will never occur.
Now is the time to befriend everyone - help everyone you can now, so they all owe favors and hold no animosity to kick when down.
Ok, I understand the consideration and even a certain level of admiration for the capability of such a large population to govern themselves so effectively and shrewdly over time as to implement a new 5 year economic plan, every 5 years, successfully - that's an accomplishment...
There are quite actually empty skyscraper cities - with likewise massive corresponding infrastructural investments - this failure of central planning as an issue isn't always city sized but is widespread. It's a human thing... so it makes mistakes.
Like China's Navy specifically designed to insure dominion over the South China Sea... what's the point of that? To insure dominion? Now everyone is convinced China is going to be making moves for the top spot - bc that's what they signalled with such a Navel buildup.
They are rejecting the US Global Order and suggesting that China may be an increasingly better alternative for international Leadership... but they only have a mere couple decades left of economic growth before their entire economy will experience a population (and thearby economic growth) contraction like no peaceful society in history has before.
Who wants to sign up behind that wannabe Great Power?
Had China contented themselves with #2, we could have propped up an "adversarial" relationship political to seemingly dampen US Hegemony but in reality be each other's largest trading partners and whatnot - you know, like it used to be ;)
Now everyone knows tho - China's got a timer on it.
> characterised the CCP since Mao
there's a conspiracy theory that this was due to Mao having no suitable heirs. More generally, there's a theory that autocracies "liberalize" when there is no clear successor or a succession conflict involving the autocrat, see: martial law Taiwan
Coincidentally, I was just reading this relevant couple of posts when I saw yours:
https://www.thebulwark.com/p/what-happens-when-putin-and-kha...
https://acoup.blog/2021/07/09/fireside-friday-july-9-2021/
Notice the pre-Ukraine-war dates, especially on the former.
Quote from the latter: "The aim of just about every Greek tyrant in the long term was to consolidate power into their family in a durable way, which is to say, convert a tyranny into a kingship. [To a first approximation] they all failed."
> there's a theory that autocracies "liberalize" when there is no clear successor
Isn’t the clearer history one of civil war?
Liberalization while the autocrat is still alive (if at all). Civil war once he's dead, unless the liberalization has time to take root before the autocrat dies.
If you have sources for this theory, I'd love to see them.
From what I've seen, autocracies in developing countries are "more prone to political instability because oppressed citizenries and displaced groups have no other mechanism to voice dissent other than active mobilization in the streets or subversive activities against the state" [1].
Autocracies are only more stable if they can promote "Rentier-state economic systems," like in North Korea, though that comes at the cost of putting that society further and further behind its international peers.
[1] https://www.jstor.org/stable/intesociscierevi.90.1.01
No, no sources. I was just saying that, if there was a trend of autocrats trying to liberalize, it was not necessarily inconsistent with a trend of civil war.
I still remember Russia going to default 2 months into the war… western media is… like media everywhere else
The propaganda is so effective in the west, we really believe the news is news.
Not sure how that would work exactly. The math behind transformer models is really basic. And the world is different now than it was during the cold war. There was no internet, for example. Also, given that this was during an interview in which MA was criticizing the Biden administration, I'm assuming he was telling half truths to make Democrats look like bogeymen as all Trump crazed lunatics tend to do.
It won't work. Restricting hard to find and process radioactive elements vs math... Yeah good luck.
This is exactly the same thought I had.
With so much talk about regulation and talk of complete control of the technology by govt, it would be very foolish for them not to be spending a lot of time and money trying to influence policy on it.
Information wants to be free. If the US doesn't invest, others will.
what does that even mean?
People want things. Information doesn't want anything. People want property rights for both physical and intellectual property.
Likely rules are ill suited for levels of scaling achieved with current technology. A single person can read a ton of stuff and retain only a fraction compared to how much a system can.
So information wants to be free is nonsense. People want access to more information, at the same time they don't want others to have accees to the same information. However having access to more information has marginal effects when capacity is limited. Hence it's the information capacity that makes all the difference and this puts a small class in disproportionate advantage.
It usually means that the US government should give for-profit entities billions of tax dollars to benefit the elite and corpo class.
A funny anecdote I found the other day is that during the Korean War the US government wanted to break up AT&T but AT&T got the Army to argue that AT&T was instrumental in winning the war, I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader to find out if AT&T won the Korean War but one of the end results was rewarding AT&T with additional lucrative military contracts.
Not putting words in OP’s mouth from the comment you’re replying to. But from my understanding, the default state of information is to spread itself, it’s an inherent characteristic. You have to put effort to suppress it (example making info classified or enforcing secrecy). If you don’t actively put effort into suppressing information, it will spread.
This was a catchphrase from... the 1990s, maybe?
The defining character of information is its reproducibility. Even verbal speach: "And then she said..." But digital information in particular is almost infinitely reproducible, without loss, worldwide.
So when people say "information wants to be free", what they actually mean is that trying to restrict the movement of information is fighting against the essential nature of information.
Information wants to be free (as in libre) in the same way water wants to flow downhill.
> Information wants to be free (as in libre) in the same way water wants to flow downhill
Water flows downhill to maximise entropy. The equivalent for information is dissolution into randomness. If anything, by this analogy, the “freedom” that involves information being copied and transmitted is the equivalent of pumping water uphill.
Freedom takes work. You don’t get it for free.
It's a literary analogy, not a physical analogy.
And I disagree about the work when it comes to information. Our natural inclination as humans is to share things we find interesting. Like "check out this song" or "check out this article". I don't think this takes much work. It just happens. In this sense the information is free like the stream is free to flow through the hills.
On the flip side there is substantial effort put into impeding this free flow of information with schemes like DRM. Similar to building a dam. But once cracks form the free flow resumes.
Continuing the water analogy you could say there is also substantial effort put into building the infrastructure to make information accessible to many more people. As a library is to a city's plumbing infrastructure.
> It's a literary analogy, not a physical analogy
When the phrase was coined in 1984 [1], it was a valid hypothesis. The last forty years have given evidence for the null.
The more plentiful information has become, the more we've sought (and in some cases, needed) to corral and control it. Sometimes for our own purposes. In many cases because absent such archiving entropy takes its toll.
The problem with "information wants to be free" is it presumes a natural force which doesn't exist. There also isn't a natural force that wants to make DRM and NFTs. But there is one that wants to forget, to corrupt and re-interpret. (There are very human forces that wish to control.) Sit back and let information do what it wants, which is precisely nothing, and the forces that beckon us into control and forgetfulness will win.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_wants_to_be_free
"To maximize entropy". What does that mean??
Water takes the path of least resistance. Why would anything exist to maximize entropy?
I'm not sure. Saying that information wants anything is like saying that an LLM is capable of thought - a category error.
Anyone else find him IMPOSSIBLE to listen to? He really needs a speaking coach.
You know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know...
If I had fuck you money I wouldn’t care. Elon sounds many times worse than my ADHD mind but there are many folks who would pay to hear him speak.
> they literally said, well, you know, during the Cold War we, we classified entire areas of physics and took them out of the research community and like entire branches of physics basically went dark and didn't proceed
What are the odds that deep within US research labs, we have some crazy breakthrough tech tucked away? Like antigravity drives or force fields or whatever - complete with brand new breakthrough physical theories to support them.
I'd guess suppressing such a breakthrough without raising suspicion wouldn't be hard - probably only a few top guys can make the intellectual jumps to derive such theories and the experimental setup to validate them could very well cost billions.
The US government could just quietly whisk away the top talent into some secret lab, put out some fake papers showing this avenue of research is not noteworthy and not fund further public research in the area.
(a) Like all great conspiracy theories, it would require too many people to keep their mouths shut; and (b) nobody in China would care about any secrecy rules laid down by the US government, any more than Sakharov's team in Russia cared about the US's intention to monopolize the hydrogen bomb.
The closest thing to this type of technology would be EUV hardware of the sort produced by ASML. We have now given China every incentive to put everything they've got into developing similar technology on their own soil. Despite slow progress to date, they will get there.
Another analogy might be the math behind encryption, effectively monopolized by NSA for decades... but nobody's trillion-dollar economy was blocked by those secrets.
> What are the odds that deep within US research labs, we have some crazy breakthrough tech tucked away? Like antigravity drives or force fields or whatever - complete with brand new breakthrough physical theories to support them.
Effectively zero? Did that sound more convincing when you originally wrote it? Because it's like conspiracy theory 101.
Trump revoked Biden's AI executive order as one of the first things in the office
https://www.cio.com/article/3806594/trump-repeals-bidens-ai-...
I call bullshit. I don’t really believe they’re saying don’t fund startups. I also don’t believe for a second that they think they can stunt progress. We didn’t have the internet in the 60s.
I dunno, I've met enough people first hand who believe in heavily regulating AI researchers to the extent that private companies shouldn't or couldn't do it without being owned by the government. It would surprise me that a handful of staffers in either the intelligence agencies or Biden executive branch also thought this way.
Well that is honestly a bit of a relief. If the government wants to stymie innovation like this the product isn’t going to take my job anytime soon.
For context, Andreessen is talking here about the Biden administration, and his revulsion to this approach is why he endorsed Trump:
> I, you know, look, and I would say like when we endorse Trump, we, we only did so on the basis of like tech policy. [...] Number two was ai, where I became very scared earlier this year that they were gonna do the same thing to AI that they did to crypto.
HN audience is essentially pro-Trump as well. 1/3rd of Santa Clara county (heart of Silicon Valley) voted for him, and a lot of tech employees come from authoritarian countries (China) and really see nothing wrong with authoritarian rule.
First of all, that is factually incorrect -- Trump received 28.1% of the vote in Santa Clara county, which is significantly lower than 1/3rd. Source: https://results.enr.clarityelections.com/CA/Santa_Clara/1225....
Second of all, your bar for "essentially pro-Trump" being 1/3rd of the vote is ridiculous, by your standard almost every county in America is "essentially pro-Trump".
Give me a break, that’s fine for rounding and a huge gap between SCC and San Francisco and Santa Cruz. SCC is the outlier in the region, and a good percentage of HN is very pro-Trump because a good percentage of HN is pro-greed.
And the point about Chinese being among the most pro-Trump is South Bay stands - I have had several conversations and most people from mainland (RIP HK) see zero problem with authoritarian rule.
Lots of voters see many things wrong with authoritarian rule but on the freedom versus authoritarianism spectrum it's not at all clear that Democrats are any better. With the recent national shift towards populism, both major political parties seem roughly equally authoritarian in different policy areas. Besides AI policy there are other major authoritarianism issues around online censorship, public health, gun control, recreational drugs, reproductive healthcare, etc. I'm not trying to start yet another fight over which side is right or wrong on those particular issues but rather using them as examples to show how both parties are authoritarian when it fits the ideology of their core voters and campaign contributors.
Overall voters who identify as Asian mainly voted for Harris. So I am skeptical of your claim that Trump got a lot of votes from first-generation immigrants from China.
https://navigatorresearch.org/2024-post-election-survey-raci...
How can you expect people to take your comment seriously if you can't even spell his name?
How can you expect people to take you seriously as a CEO if you're going to attack someone for a mistake like that?
And that's to say nothing of the fact that such an innocuous typo doesn't change the actual crux.
A little, "Hey, dunno if you know or not, but it's 'Andreessen'," goes a long way.
Honestly, nothing in US politics is going to get any better until we are able to completely outlaw non-individual campaign contributions.
Three of the individuals standing behind the president at inauguration have more wealth than the bottom 50% of people [1].
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vHH-KI2yk8s
And one of them makes much of his fortune from government contracts and will literally get a personal office inside the white house.
It doesn't get any more kleptocratic than that. This sort of both sides of the buy/sell conflict of interest would get you fired from any properly ran company, but there's nothing that will be properly ran going forward.
And that's not even in the top five problems with him.
There is no coming back from this to be honest. America has been a silent Oligarchy (a government by the few, for the benefit of the few) for a long time and now its just mask off... and unfortunately, the large majority of Democrats have had no interest in making meaningful change, let alone undoing these highly damaging policy changes like Citizens United and everything after that.
Kakistocracy: Government by the least qualified or most unprincipled citizens - also comes to mind here. No one in the upper levels of government care about anything other than enriching themselves at the behest of corporations, and at the expense of everyone else's wellbeing and livelihood. Instead we get vapid shallow identity politics and "culture war" garbage, and every once in a long while we get a gutted out compromised bill that addresses 1/1000th of the problem... only to be later overturned despite it being wholly ineffective.
I just don't see the government, in this state, ever having the faculties or incentive to "fix itself." These institutions and "norms" are irreparably broken, and some people still insist on holding them in the highest regards like they are some infallible mandate.
You do realize that the United States is a Federal Republic??
There are 51 Governments inside the US. You realize we have had Oligarchs before? The Senate used to comprise so many millionaires that purchased their seats from their State Legislature that it was called "The Millionaires Club" - obviously they were all about themselves.
Americans are like the camel - our backs are so full of straw that we don't realize only one more piece of it and our backs will break. We will play along until the very day, the very hour that we don't.
Right, but we've already got limits on individual contributions, so even if you have a bunch of money, you can't have outsized influence through your individual contributions.
Individual campaign contributions are limited but wealthy individuals can still exercise outsized influence through other means such as unlimited donations to Super PACs.
https://www.opensecrets.org/political-action-committees-pacs...
The bottom 55% of global population holds 1% of the wealth. The top 1% hold 46% of all wealth. As of 2020. Global wealth was $418 trillion. So 1% is $4.18 trillion. I'm not sure any three people hold that much money.
This was about the US specifically.
It's more of a pyramid, lots of different layers are interested in upholding the existing system because they all benefit
Well, agreed for the common Joe, but that still allows someone with a net worth in the tens of Billions to throw money around. Especially because these people have a clear conflict of interest.
They should ban money contributions completely. Each party gets the same budget (say 10M$ and you run your campaign until you have money and that's it).
You as a citizen wants to donate? Go and collect signatures, spread the word or stuff like that, but no money (IMHO).
Japan gives every candidate an equal amount of time on TV. Its just one example of something that other countries do to make elections more fair. You could limit resources and give everyone a standard platform as a baseline so that anyone outside of the deeply entrenched dual-party system has a chance to win.
Doesn't the US have similar TV laws with cable networks?
We used to have the fairness doctrine but it was repealed
This is the one I was thinking of: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equal-time_rule#:~:text=The%20....
> nothing in US politics is going to get any better until we are able to completely outlaw non-individual campaign contributions
Banning corporate campaign donations is a good idea. It would have no effect on this news.
Even then nothing will get better.
How much can you give in relation to Kelcy Warren? Or Diane Hendricks? Or Linda McMahon?
And that's before we even get to Bezos or Musk.
We could definitely improve the arrangement of chairs on the deck of the Titanic, but we can't even get 50% of the country to recognize the most obvious grift in American history.
They will after tho - that rage is when we take Mush and Bezos rainy day funds we've allow d them to manage for us for awhile.
I think that humanity has failed The Reverse Turing's Test. We're being bamboozled by the high quality illusion made by AI. I hope we won't end up in a world where an official will put us into jail, answering our "why" questions with short "the ChatGPT told me so"
IBM’s 1979 slide should be the next amendment to the constitution. Only half joking
Why not say what the slide said? A computer can never be held accountable. Therefore a computer must never make a management decision.
United Healthcare already got caught using an LLM to make life or death coverage decisions. IMHO that's both worse than your nightmare scenario and it's already happening.
yes, that's what I had imagined, but magnified tenfold
It does seem like the emerging startup powerhouses like OpenAI, Palantir, Anduril, etc. are all very deep in the lobbying game. I wonder if they’ll open up government contracts and regulations to a more democratic and competitive process, or just become the new incumbents holding all the power.
Related: I didn’t see Sam Altman at the inauguration. Was he there?
Not in person, but his $1 million personal donation attended. https://www.foxbusiness.com/media/openai-ceo-sam-altman-dona...
I think he was. I saw photos of him there mingling with Jake and Logan Paul. Getting selfies together.
Looks like it is already paying dividends.
In the meantime, DeepSeek published their o1 competitor on huggingface and an API that costs 5-10% of OpenAI's o1.
Maybe Sam should give up his bribery world tour and focus on creating a better product?
The logical next step is to ban foreign AI products in US. I have no idea how they will pull it, but it’ll be fun to watch if it happens.
Would not at all be surprised if that happens during 2025.
I think the west has been underestimating China's AI capabilities. AI is huge in China and they have found tons of "practial" applications so it's widely deployed.
ban foreign math? aye.
It's not like they haven't tried that before. But again, will be fun to watch.
Was Citizens United a huge mistake?
Yes. Yes it was. Poorly decided to the detriment of the United States. It allows unlimited money laundering into US elections from any source foreign or domestic.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens_United_v._FEC
> The court held 5–4 that the freedom of speech clause of the First Amendment prohibits the government from restricting independent expenditures for political campaigns by corporations including for-profits, nonprofit organizations, labor unions, and other kinds of associations.
Wow. Just one vote away from a drastically different political landscape and future for the country.
How could it be? It made the number go up for the right people.
And since that number is literally all that the right people can comprehend, it's the most important measure of a society's condition.
Companies could not lobby before Citizens United?
Yes they could, but there were strict limits to it and people went to jail for violating them. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Abramoff#Scandal_and_crim...
McConnell (yes that one) v FEC and Citizens United redefined the first amendment to include financial contributions as a form of speech and extended to for-profit corporations the same rights as individuals and civic associations.
Isn't McConnell v FEC the SCOTUS ruling that upheld McCain-Feingold? The Act that Citizens overturned?
To my understanding, this had zero effect on lobbying rules. Just campaign finance, namely, donations to candidates and donations to messaging operations.
It didn't overturn the BRCA, but the minority in McConnell laid the groundwork for the Citizens United decision. O'Connor wasn't willing to hand the country over to oligarchs like Alito was.
Sure, but that still doesn't address whether Citizens spoke to lobbying rules. It was more about contributions and PACs.
If you want to pretend you don't understand the relationship between lobbying and the ability of groups to spend unlimited money influencing politicians, that's your prerogative. I think more highly of you, so I'm not going to spend my time arguing the point.
> the relationship between lobbying and the ability of groups to spend unlimited money influencing politicians
The point is this lobbying wouldn’t have been restricted by anything Citizens touched. OpenAI isn’t giving money to a PAC, it’s buying bog-standard lobbying hours. This is an adjacent but nevertheless separate issue.
You're correct. This is unrelated to Citizens.
The biggest continual mistake in the USA is conflating groups of people with amoral profit seeking entities that have the benefit of legal fictions that protect individuals involved from the consequences of their behavior.
If you chain together enough analogies you eventually reach a conclusion that is complete nonsense. That's about where our court system has brought us.
I've been saying for years, companies can have freedom of speech when we can put them in jail for wrongdoing. I'd even take metaphorical jail - not allowed to employ anyone, operate, transact, or anything else for the duration of their sentence. I bet we'd see a complete stop of illegal activity we see every day if this was the risk.
As the old saying goes, "I'll believe corporations are people when Texas executes one."
This feels causally backwards, as the only point to corporate personhood is so that we _can_ hold companies accountable for their misdeeds.
Without personhood, we'd have to know which persons within an opaque company structure were responsible for wrongs against us in order to sue them directly instead of just being able to sue or fine "Walmart" or whomever.
Corporations and regulation of corporations existed before the doctrine of corporate personhood. And do you think government agencies can't be sued? Or do you think they can fund political campaigns?
You're asking "Do you think X? Or do you think Y?" here, but I know !X, _and_ I know Y. You've strung those clauses together as if they might mean something, so I confess I have no idea what tangent "fund political campaigns" runs off to, because I am not opining on the correctness of personhood but rather its history.
Before personhood, if a corporation had wronged you, you were limited to suing its trustees, its charter, or petitioning the government.
With personhood, I don't need to know who at McBigCorp decided to dump that sewage into my stream, I just need to know that it was done. I don't need to go after the trustees directly. Accountability is centralized, and the corporate entity likely has deeper pockets than the individual I might've sued for recompense.
So yes, corporations existed before corporate personhood, but they were more hazardous to public welfare and had limited remedy to abuse. The East India Companies and the railroad barons of the world were allowed to run roughshod until centralized accountability was imposed.
my point is that financial penalties for illegal activity is not enough - law breaking just becomes a cost-benefit analysis that is constantly exploited. for instance, the largest source of theft every single year is wage theft by employers. there is no real accountability for law breaking by corporations
Punishment is a separate discussion from personhood though. As I've said in another nearby comment, personhood enables central accountability in ways preferable to its absence.
Aside from that though, we have lots of other enforcement mechanisms that we don't avail ourselves of for lots of reasons, some rational, some not. We can imprison executives, as we've done with Theranos' Elizabeth Holmes, Bernie Madoff, Jeffrey Skilling, Jordan Belfort, Martin Shkrelli, Donald Blankenship, etc.
We can also mandate compliance or impose oversight, mandate public apologies, ban companies from engaging in certain business activities (thinking HSBC being banned from financial services after money laundering,) impose corporate probation, mandate recalls, clawbacks, or probably lots of other things that don't immediately come to mind.
That we typically just impose financial penalties is probably a reflection of our values as a people or a judicial system or our government's willingness to collect fines, but we should not pretend that it's the only available option.
Yes. But even more than that having a president that is for sale by domestic and foreign interests.
Nothing like launching a crypto pump and dump right before you enter office.
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The mistake was confusing money and speech. Money is not speech. Stretching the boundaries of the first amendment to be so broad that all human activity is covered by it renders it meaningless.
But what is speech if you prohibit any use of money in it? It is just standing on a street corner yelling at passers-by?
Using money to amplify your speech is just the nature of the world. Buying ads, or buying speakers are just different ends of the money axis.
There is only so much time and broadcast outlet bandwidth. With limited bandwidth, a single entity can put so much money into the system that it prevents others from being able to afford to broadcast their message even if they otherwise would have been able to do so. Therefore, the Citizens United decision preferences speech about politics to those with the most money and restricts speech for those with the least. There should be a cap, and transparency, and pac redistribution restrictions on spending for all entities. Currently, there is a cap, and transparency, in spending for individuals and corporations directly to a campaign or party, but no limits on anything else.
None of that refutes GP's point that money does equate to speech in a very real sense. (At least when it's spent on speech.) You seem to be agreeing on that point, but saying we should have limits on how much certain people can speak to make it easier for others to speak? That's not necessarily a bad argument, but it's still an unconstitutional one. "No law [...] abridging the freedom of speech" is pretty black and white. Courts are supposed to make decisions based on the law, not based on whatever they think sounds like a good idea.
Yes, thats exactly what I'm saying. The person with the most money shouldn't have the most speech.
I'm a limited bandwidth scenario, you literally abridge the speech of the person with less money when the law equates money and speech.
By restricting the megaphone size you avoid or at least reduce the problem.
Money does not equate to speech. Money is a megaphone for speech, that is not the same as speech.
That is a reasonable opinion (and I agree with it) but just repeating it doesn't make it true. Others apparently disagree and it's at least a bit of a legal gray area. The only real solution will be a Constitutional amendment that explicitly excludes certain financial transactions from the definition of speech.
You're right. Technically speaking, it's not a legal grey area.
> Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson once wrote: “We are not final because we are infallible, but we are infallible only because we are final.”
We lost. And we're going to keep losing as free speech continues to become a Pay-to-Play arena.
That feels like a "I'm not touching you" sort of argument to me, assuming your intent is to argue that the first amendment doesn't prevent the government from banning people from spending money on speech.
Like when the supreme court ruled unanimously that banning TikTok only required intermediate scrutiny, I believe that regulating campaign finance is a content-neutral policy, and should not have invoked strict scrutiny.
Yes, and there are different points along that money axis where a reasonable society might choose to place regulations and restrictions (in the absence of a decree from the courts that it’s illegal to do so).
> But what is speech if you prohibit any use of money in it? It is just standing on a street corner yelling at passers-by?
Absolutely no one is arguing for this or anything even vaguely like it.
Just some common sense limits to prevent big players completely drowning out everything else.
I mean, yes. Shouting on a corner isn't in the same universe as broadcasting to the entire country/world or using billboards etc. People in the 1700s could not conceive of the way communication works these days.
People in the 1900s could not conceive of posting on social media. Is just posting on social media protected political speech? Is then paying for a computer and internet connection to post political speech on social media a campaign contribution?
> People in the 1900s could not conceive of posting on social media
They could easily conceive of the cost of printing pamphlets.
Revolution-era America was a middling society where the difference between the very rich and the very poor was much less than it is today. The richest colonists weren't as rich, but neither were the poorest colonists as poor, as those back in the homeland. Huge concentrations of wealth just weren't a problem they needed to deal with in those turbulent times.
As financial inequality grows, if the use of money to amplify ones liberty is not curtailed, then the new aristocratic class will be able to drown out the liberty of the rest. The economy is not a zero-sum game, but power is. This is what the founders did not solve, and consciously left it as an exercise for their descendants.
A republic if you can keep it, is what they gave us. They did not feel the need to foresee what would happen in 200 years. They expected us to make the changes necessary to keep it. They did not want us to hold them up as godlike figures from whose mouths came the One True Word.
It is a constitution, not divine scripture - we have an amendment process to make the changes we need, but first we need to agree that such changes are necessary, particularly in the realms of lobbying and campaign finance. These are the greatest vectors for corruption in government.
Wouldn't this concern of yours also apply to the press under any definition? I can't afford to distribute my little pamphlet as much as the Times does their newspaper. And the constitution specifically protects the press, so you need a constitutional amendment. Rather than trying to make an end run around the constitution with a distinction about "money" not being speech, despite the obvious goal of the law being to regulate political speech itself via targeted restrictions on money.
I'm not sure what your point is. Newspapers shouldn't be able to say whatever they want.
> because they aren't legally bound by precedent
Good thing too, because some of their decisions over the years have been really doozy (who wants to be bound by Dred Scott v. Sandford?)
> they aren't legally bound by precedent
No high court is. If they were, they wouldn't be the high court.
This feels like a straw-man. Money should not equal speech. Yes it should be fixed with legislation. Why on earth wouldn't it? Citizens United was an obvious, incredible, disastrous mistake.
Regardless of how you might feel, it's the furthest thing from a straw-man. We are still a nation of laws. The Constitution defines our fundamental processes and the separation of powers. Labeling the Citizens United v. FEC decision as a mistake might feel good but that accomplishes nothing. Instead of complaining online, the only possible solution is for voters to elect legislators who actually do their jobs and write clear laws instead of leaving it up to judges and bureaucrats to interpret vague statements. I do appreciate that Citizens United makes this more difficult but the Supreme Court is unlikely to reverse it so complaining about it is about as effective as complaining about gravity.
But we can’t get those people elected because they either A get over spent in campaign by corporations donation to their opponent or B they defect and take the donations themselves.
How will voters be able to make decisions that we agree with if we do not talk about it online? Who are you suggesting gets to talk about it?
Everyone gets to talk about it online. We're doing so right now. You might not be allowed to talk for free on platforms owned by others, although none of the major social media platforms seem to actively censor discussions of campaign finance reform.
I'm reacting to your statement "...might feel good but that accomplishes nothing. Instead of complaining online..."
Complaining online is the only hope we have.
Well now we'll never get to pass an amendment to overturn Citizens United since Citizens United handed the country over to oligarchs.
Depends: are you extraordinarily wealthy?
> Altman proposed to the Biden administration the construction of multiple five-gigawatt data centers, which would each consume as much electricity as New York City.
If this is what it takes to bring nuclear back, maybe it's worth it.
Can’t wait for Europe to set the curfew for lights at 10pm, while running AI datacenters.
Incidentally, Altman just jumped on the Trump train: https://www.advocate.com/news/sam-altman-stargate-donald-tru...
Do not use AI under the control of quislings and demagogues.
Would any money spent during the next four years from ClosedAI be money down the drain when Musk is whispering in Trump's ear? If Musk says no to whatever ClosedAI wants, then that's what Trump will do.
And yet Trump just did a lot of PR for the OpenAI/Son/Oracle initiative.
Trump is simply pay to play. And they paid.
"Musk Pours Cold Water on Trump-Backed Stargate AI Project"
https://www.msn.com/en-us/technology/tech-companies/musk-pou...
So he tweeted about it? And Altman replied? This is quite different than shutting the project down.
Trump fires people via tweets, so it's not as simple as you might dismiss. Trump likes whoever is in the room with him at the time. Once they leave, he won't even remember their name, but Musk will still be there buzzing in his ear
If I were Musk I would be worried about Larry Ellison. Trump seemed to love him in the news conference.
This admin bends to money. They all do, of course, but this one especially.
Maybe this whole late stage capitalism isn't the most efficient way to allocate resources after all...
I remember some folks saying things like "Trump's already a billionaire, he can't be bought". But him or another one, we were always headed towards oligarchy. And I really don't know how we're supposed to go back.
Ahhhh the regulatory capture part of modern giant startups.
Don't need regulatory capture to stop the small fries when the cost of entry is so high. Only ginormous entities can even realistically play in that game right now.
Think about it, where are you gonna get 10000 H100s?
Best you or I can hope for is to fine tune the models the big guys make "open source". None of which will be as serviceable as their closed models.
The costs won't always be that high, due to Moore's law and other advances. Anybody can train a GPT-2 right now for a couple hundred bucks. https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intell...
Also model performance follows a power law. There are strongly diminishing results, where after some point throwing twice as much money at the problem only gains you 1% accuracy. OpenAI knows this, so they're all in on regulatory capture.
It’s always going to be like this. Take Apple. Plucky garage started anti-establishment startup now a giant gate keeper of apps and stores using any means necessary to keep that 30% tax/tariff/whatever you call it
Jobs wanted lock down computing as far as the first Mac in 1984.
AI seems to have validated Wirth's Law[1] more than it has Moore's, and they are running in direct competition
[1] - "Software is getting slower more rapidly than hardware is becoming faster"
It’s odd you’re invoking moore’s law here, which actually isn’t a law, and is well understood and accepted over at least the last decade across business and academia that it is slowing and is not limitless. As per what “other” advances you’re referring to, I can’t speculate - maybe quantum computing? We are quite a long way away from that being a commercial reality.
It's mainly hardware upgrades (new TSMC nodes), training data quantity/quality improvements, and model architecture (and broader software) changes. Here's a fun project I've had my eye on recently: https://github.com/KellerJordan/modded-nanogpt/
Right now it seems more and more like we will all just end up using Chinese AI. All this regulation is doing is forcing Chinese companies to figure out how to do more with less.
Who cares if Chinese AGI is a year behind OpenAI/Anthropic. At some level, progress will stall and then OpenAI/Anthropic will be on the clock before being undercut out of business on price.
They are probably just positioning now for when that happens and they have to become some kind of regulated utility for US government AI use.
Just another example of having our head up our ass as Americans. Seems like what we are doing will almost guarantee most the world outside the US is using Chinese AI in the future.
I really really freaking wish Americans would stop worrying about who has the best $STUFF, and start worrying about whether their own kids are fed/clothed/educated.
China is too big. This was going to happen eventually. Empires come and go, that's just a fact of life. The question was whether you'd fall back gracefully like Western Europe, now ranking at the top of "World's Happiest Countries", or whether you'll become Russia 2.0 with the biggest guns, richest oligarchs, and the worst quality of life.
Eisenhower 1953 said "Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed." Nobody listened. Americans think life is a Marvel movie, and they are Iron Man. Turns out conflict is not a long-term winning strategy.
How could anyone trust a Chinese AI?
Nah, training efficiency, inference efficiency, and compute availability all have enough headroom that the third-party and grassroots models will become increasingly available.
The current leaders basically need to either (1) break through the capability ceiling before everybody else catches up, or (2) construct law/regulation that keeps everybody else out of the game. #1 is uncertain, but #2 is well-understood business.
Since they all share that same interest (they'll be duking it with each other either way), the result is an "industry wide" effort to artificially close the door behind them.
One of the major approaches is to block open source models produced by parties that aren't in the business of restricting access to AI.
This is the problem with the software industry generally. At the end of the day it’s the hardware manufacturers that hold all of the power aka “the means of production” and America has largely gutted it’s manufacturing capacity opting to make a quick buck without a plan to incentivize investment into new manufacturing capacity. China is on a rapid path to surpassing the West even in cutting edge technologies because they also have the domestic production capacity for all of the unsexy capital intensive industrial production that feeds the innovation.
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