Why the comment submitted by jacquesm, who posted the link and it's not exactly an anonymous poster, that said "Apologies for linking to X but this is worth reading." has been flagged to death??
> "I know that there’s a sort of Silicon Valley shorthand where regulation = regulatory capture = concentration of power, but I’ve always found this to be an overly simplified picture of the world."
> wall of text follows
> doesnt proceed to clearly tell us what the actual picture of the world is, then
am i correct in summarizing that the line of reasoning is
- frontier llm access means you are at an economic advantage
- a big risk of this is ongoing wealth concentration
- the "open weights" approach can't solve the problem of wealth and llm access being linked; you need compute too, and compute is expensive, thus "open weights" still favors the wealthy
- instead we need "objective and fair institutional processes", as this will allow small labs cook up their stuff while frontier labs get regulated
why would i care about what these smaller players do, if economic advantage = frontier model access? also, the reasoning around "why bother with open weights because compute is expensive too" seems like the kind of logic a motivated 12 year old could work their way around in 30 seconds. things are not either/or dario, you said so yourself.
seems like a 400 word corpo misdirection essay. par for the course.
> This is why Anthropic has always made its policy proposals very carefully. We try very hard to make proposals that disadvantage (slow down) frontier AI companies while advantaging smaller competitors.
> ...
> completely exempt any company below a certain amount of revenue or model training costs from being covered at all
One could argue that "Frontier AI" company know they have nothing to fear from company with less than XM$ revenue, and so their support for this type of regulation is still a way to force regulatory capture. In any case, whatever regulation you support, it's a regulation that you didn't have to handle when you were growing, but that incumbent will have to deal with.
Whatever it is Dario's intention or not does not matter. Capitalism push to consolidation and the eventual regulation that will need to be applied to mitigate the externality from a new industry, will mean that their will only be a handful of "very big" winner. Same story since the beginning of the industrial era. Even if that's not what Dario personally want, it's in the best interest of the shareholders, which will force Anthropic to do everything it can to be one of the big one.
> Overall my view is that AI is structurally a technology that tends to concentrate power, for reasons that have nothing to do with regulation (more to do with the extreme implications of the scaling laws).
The same can be said about a lot of other industry (aviation, oil, chip manufacturing, ...). Every country / union big enough will finance their own champion to try to keep a foot in the industry even if they are not the best.
Dario's messaging has been extremely confusing and HE'S RESPONSIBLE for further increasing the negative sentiment of the public towards AI.
He's clearly focusing on being on the news to provoke emotions on people, preparing for the Anthropic big blockbuster IPO.
Dario, Sam Altman and others should instead be praying every night that this will take us to the Singularity VERY SOON, because if it doesn't, the entire country will blame them for absolutely destroying their retirement and the US' economy once this AI Datacenter bubble pops.
> Overall my view is that AI is structurally a technology that tends to concentrate power, for reasons that have nothing to do with regulation (more to do with the extreme implications of the scaling laws). Open-weights do help some with this but are nowhere near a sufficient solution because they simply shift the concentration somewhat to those with the most compute and chips (which are roughly the frontier labs plus maybe hardware providers).
This is actually a good point. Open models are getting better and better, some of them might even be useful in consumer hardware now. But if AI performance is still correlated with compute power, then no doubt power will remain with the people owning the chips.
One thing Dario said is important reflecting on (but from another angle): where's the big deliverable from AI? If AI makes us 10x more productive, the 3 years since its popularization were enough for a product that would have taken 30 years to build without AI, for instance.
I'm an AI advocate but that question makes me feel that AI is simply "very useful" rather than being a historical game changer for humanity.
50% productivity gains would be seen in real economic data tho, you're talk about potentially $5-15 trillion in real GDP gains; all we are seeing is just more mass consolidation of wealth into the hands of the few, we're even at the stage were we are designating extinction zones to empower these individuals even more.
Called it! He was bound to squeal after the release of QWEN 3.8 in one way or another and here it is. I wasn't even a teenager but I'm getting so much Jobs/Ballmer flashbacks with internet explorer and microsoft office.
Edit: Does anyone else notice the switching between dashes and em-dashes between paragraphs? Tells you a lot about the man, doesn't it.
I think that Dario is intelligent, incisive, has good judgement, and is well-intentioned. I hope he continues to wield influence. I think Sam is also most of those things, but I think power has a One Ring-like effect on him. My most contrarian view is that I think Elon’s problems are primarily appalling judgement when it comes to areas outside of tech, and has the emotional regulation of a child, although somewhat incredibly I believe he is fundamentally well intentioned. I don’t think any of those three really want tech feudalism, although I think the current US administration would press a “turn us into Russia” button the second they caught sight of it, which is to say, I think they have the worst of intentions.
> I know that there’s a sort of Silicon Valley shorthand where regulation = regulatory capture = concentration of power, but I’ve always found this to be an overly simplified picture of the world.
To paraphrase Sinclair "It's difficult to make a man realize the issues with regulatory capture, if they're to be the benefactor of regulatory capture".
> A crude analogy is that the formal court system can sometimes feel stuffy and elitist, but it does a much better job of defending the rights of vulnerable individuals than the alternative, mob justice.
Not so sure. After all lack of the latter did help establish the current tech overlord rule.
It will be interesting to see what kind of progress in biology and medicine they will preview during the fall. He does make a good point that most of the progress so far have not been material in the sense of providing real positive outcomes for ordinary people.
Or even for the HN crowd, when will we see e.g. "Mythos aided research discovers 10 new viable battery technologies"
> I think it is fundamentally a crisis of trust. I think that ordinary people don’t trust companies, governments, or the tech industry and always suspect that we are cooking up some new way to screw them over.
[...]
> I don’t think that a glitzy marketing campaign with a positive spin (which some have advocated that Anthropic do) is the way to win back that trust — at this point, saying that AI will cure cancer is more a cliche than it is inspiring, and most people think it is deceptive. The thing that will work is actually curing cancer. I think by far the most accurate criticism of AI companies including Anthropic is that we haven’t yet delivered on our big promises to benefit the world. That is totally on us, and I think it’s the criticism you should be making, instead of all this stuff about messaging and marketing.
> We are however doing our best to fix this: Anthropic is ramping up its efforts very quickly in biology and medicine, and we hope to have incredible results in the coming years and some early glimmers in the coming months. When we’ve actually accomplished something real, the whole world will hear about it, as loudly as possible, you have my word on that.
Turns out "winning back trust" doesn't have anything to do with any actual concerns people may have re: employment, electricity prices, stock market bubble, intellectual property, scams, cybersecurity, environmental issues etc. Rather we'll just do all of that even harder and the miracles ("curing cancer", lol) we've so far failed to deliver are bound to arrive in short order!
> Turns out "winning back trust" doesn't have anything to do with any actual concerns people may have re: employment, electricity prices, stock market bubble, intellectual property, scams, cybersecurity, environmental issues etc
No snark here from my side, just curious about your vision - which concrete actions by Anthropic could improve trust for the concerns you listed?
Well, is ”not actively make things worse in the short term?” too ambitious a goal?
Considering the vast amount of money, world-class talent and political and industry vonnections Anthropic has access to, it feels a bit unfair to ask me to solve this for them.
I’m not asking you to solve it. Just curious what are the solutions that Anthropic can do right now from your perspective. The concerns you have are pretty well-defined, so the solutions for them must also flow naturally, I think?
You're not asking me, but I want to say that there is nothing Anthropic or any other AI company can do to make me trust them other than to dissolve and give up their ambitions and do something else. Then maybe, after seeing genuine contrition and humility I would trust them to do something else. But likely not. After all they've done, they should accept that a permanent loss of trust is a reasonable consequence. They should lose their influence, position, and money. They should live the rest of their lives as ordinary people, unable to ever again cause mass harm to others, and they should be grateful to be forgiven, and allowed such a humble opportunity.
My answer to their proposal for what our society should look like, and what kind of technologies we should use is "no". It's not a trust issue, as in I would not accept the proposal from anyone, even if I did otherwise trust them. And if someone I trusted insistently proposed this, I would stop trusting them.
In any case, they don't accept refusal, but try this grotesque and condescending maneuver about "trust", as if I and many others were not really just saying "no".
No one who refuses to take "no" for an answer can ever deserve trust. If you are committed to convincing me to go along with your desires, and have no intent of accepting my refusal, you will never deserve trust, and I will never trust you.
These companies may have the power to do what they want anyway. But they will never have a clear conscience, or trust and support from me or anyone like me.
You are following the logic to its natural conclusion and I find it infinitely better for the discourse when it’s spelled out like this vs vaguely pointing to a set of other concerns without concrete proposals!
My only concern with respect to discourse is that consent be not treated as a commodity that must be offered for a price, as if we were hostage to cancer and willing to trade anything, including our freedom, dignity, and integrity to be free of it.
Thiel et al. have described technological change as a means of forcing unilateral changes on an unwilling public. There is no basis for trust unless there exists a justice system that can appropriately discipline and restrain such people and their coconspirators, and force them to abandon their plans to inflict unwanted conditions on masses of people.
I think this shows how far up his ass his head is.
Creating another medical treatment I can't afford doesn't help me. I'd step in the anthropic cancer treatment machine and it would say card declined.
They should not waste their time on curing cancers. They should waste their time winning the stock market - by doing HFT, market making, or whatever. AI please predict butterfly effect and reap all market money!
Surely it will be quite dystopian future - AI will dictate how the money allocated, where there is only one private company left - Anthropic (as per Dario says)
Amodei > we hope to have incredible results in the coming years and some early glimmers in the coming months. When we’ve actually accomplished something real, the whole world will hear about it, as loudly as possible, you have my word on that.
So, what changed? He went from a promise of AI bonanza any minute now to a promise to maybe cure cancer in the coming years, that's right, an unspecified number of years. Until that time, we're supposed to eat glimmers of hope because the AI-caused inflation will make food unaffordable.
And don't forget to stock on ear protection, because when something happens, it's going to be "as laud as possible", you've got Amo's word too - to marvel at in the meantime.
> I think that ordinary people don’t trust companies, governments, or the tech industry and always suspect that we are cooking up some new way to screw them over.
Well, yeah Dario. You keep PUBLICLY TALKING about ways you want to fuck over people and everyone has noticed. I'm sorry, but when a lot of people are living paycheck-to-paycheck and watching layoffs everywhere, being like "well it'll take all the jobs and maybe kill humanity" is going to set off a LOT of alarm bells, despite your attempts to make concerned looking faces. You're trying to solve hypothetical problems in unproven ways, while completely ignoring real problems people actually face. These people are SO disconnected from the society they live in.
Yeah this is like SpaceX saying people’s problems with us is that we haven’t gotten to Mars yet, and that to solve that we need to double our efforts to get people to Mars.
People have a problem with the efforts, not that they haven’t reached utopia yet. Doubling the efforts will not solve the problem, it will only deepen it.
> at this point, saying that AI will cure cancer is more a cliche than it is inspiring, and most people think it is deceptive. The thing that will work is actually curing cancer.
Other than the fact I doubt that will happen, if it did, I think it would just underline the trust issue.
If some independent group cures cancer using Anthropic’s models as critical support, that would be great—but the nature of biology and medicine is that guardrails to prevent misuse will also cripple research.
If someone with an tight special relationship cures cancer with special privileged access to Anthropic’s models cures cancer making significant use of the models, well, the cure for cancer is nice, but people are going to notice that Anthropic has the control over who gets to try, and the power to set terms, which underlines the stakes for the trust issue.
When people talk about Qwen 3.8 being on a par with Fable, they're really talking about Qwen 3.8 Max aka Qwen3.8-2.4T-A95B. That's a 2.4 trillion parameter Mixture of Experts model with 95B active parameters. You need about 400GB of RAM to run it. No one is running that locally.
The distillations of Qwen 3.8 down to a 27B model are good, but they're not on a par with frontier models.
When Dario talks about open weights not being a solution this is what he means - if you don't have 400GB of VRAM lying around the fact that there's an open model like Qwen3.8-2.4T-A95B doesn't really help much. If we're not regulating how models are available, or making sure access is open, then RAM prices will mean everything concentrates on a few very rich companies.
> Overall my view is that AI is structurally a technology that tends to concentrate power
> Open-weights do help some with this but are nowhere near a sufficient solution
Which is exactly why Anthropic contributes nothing to, and actively pushes for roadblocks and regulations for open weight models. Can't allow any hope to the masses.
Only people with $$$$$ are allowed to touch Fable. Which of course we have have aggressive guardrails for in case you even try to use it for something dangerous like AI model developement. Plus we are going to retain all data submitted to it just in case someone is trying to be sneaky.
> Only people with $$$$$ are allowed to touch Fable.
This was primarily a clever way to try to shore up their revenue numbers. By preventing folks who don't have seven-to-twelve-figure bank account balances from using the tools that were most expensive to build, they might actually stand to make money from those tools... once they're forced to do accounting that includes the cost to make those tools.
As a bonus, R&D cost for serving the fixed-price-subscription rabble can be massively reduced by providing them with older tools that have had the goop around them tweaked just enough to make the tool's output have a different "flavor". That class of customer will never know that they're being conned.
> I think that ordinary people don’t trust companies, governments, or the tech industry and always suspect that we are cooking up some new way to screw them over.
It is so tragicomic to see people whose lives are built around companies coming so close to realizing that everything they do is bad, and then at the last minute swerving aside to convince themselves that no, if they just do more of it and somehow do it "better", then it will all be okay. The reason people don't trust companies and believe they are cooking up some new way to screw them over is because that is what they are doing. If Dario or anyone else really wanted to dispel that perception there's an easy way: do a total 180 and start fighting against everything you've been pushing. But none of them will do that because they still fundamentally believe that what they are doing is good, and are unable to see that fundamentally it's bad.
I genuinely think Dario is a well intentioned, intelligent dude, but I think him and Anthropic have a huge PR problem and are really out of touch with how they're perceived.
Anthropic in particular has developed this almost Orwellian like veil of condescending rhetoric that on the surface suggests they're looking out for you while underneath they're taking actions that suggest they do not trust you, Mr/Mrs Ordinary Person. All the safety rhetoric, never supporting open weight models, the lockdowns on harnesses outside claude code, etc.
Anthropic if you care about public good, do something to empower people. Release an OSS model. Open source Claude Code. Open source some inference tooling or something. Just give people anything except your words.
> Anthropic in particular has developed this almost Orwellian like veil of condescending rhetoric that on the surface suggests they're looking out for you while underneath they're taking actions that suggest they do not trust you, Mr/Mrs Ordinary Person. All the safety rhetoric, never supporting open weight models, the lockdowns on harnesses outside claude code, etc.
This line of reasoning is really very silly. I can be looking out for my young child by choosing not to put them behind the driving wheel of my car.
There are both stupid and malicious people in the world. If you have a tool that you believe may be genuinely dangerous in the hands of the wrong person, it is not the smart thing to do to give the public unrestricted access to that tool. Do you think it would be sensible to give every individual on Earth a nuclear weapon to do whatever they want with?
The tech industry cooking up some new way to screw people over for 25 years
The tech execs waking up on a random monday:
> I think that ordinary people don’t trust companies, governments, or the tech industry and always suspect that we are cooking up some new way to screw them over.
> Overall my view is that AI is structurally a technology that tends to concentrate power, for reasons that have nothing to do with regulation (more to do with the extreme implications of the scaling laws).
If only money thirsty capitals didn’t drain the HBM/DRAM/NAND capacity to rush to build out all the data centers so that they can make money off of inference, driving up memory prices like mad man leaving consumers with not only no chance of local inference setup, but also higher price of consumer electronics. Of course it has nothing to do with regulation, more to do with the greed.
So the solution to convince the public that these companies aren’t “looking for new ways to screw them over” is to try to go into biomedical research.
I guess it’ll be great for Anthropic to have the cure for cancer, but what’s that gonna mean for people with cancer? Funny how he doesn’t talk about that part.
Any argument about regulation in the US which doesn't mention that China and other countries aren't bound by that regulation should be heavily questioned. Exactly who are you stopping from doing what you don't like?!?
Law abiding US citizens won't be able to run them, but you didn't solve anything other than making sure US citizens pay Sam or Dario.
As a US citizen I do not care about regulating China, they can figure out themselves. Just as they figured out how to imprison their corrupt CEOs, I'm confident they won't let corporations destroy their society like the US.
I rather let citizens of my country exercise our own authority and agency when deciding what is necessary for good societal outcomes (LLMs aren't necessary).
I'm lobbying the government by helping elect politicians into Congress that want to impose a national moratorium on new DCs and helping organize groups across the US on how to properly resist these things.
Progressive campaigns are more effective in capturing voters. We're talking a potential 8/10-to-1 differential here, sometimes more extreme for local campaigns.
But yeah if you only rely on money and not people power campaigns are expensive and hard, when you have entire communities backing you things become slightly easier.
All good, but that seems unrelated to what I said, and I'm not sure why you replied to me.
Consider this though: Regulating AI models in the US benefits the data centers, not individuals. That's where regulated models run. Regulated models creates demand for data centers.
102 comments
[ 0.35 ms ] story [ 10.6 ms ] thread- frontier llm access means you are at an economic advantage
- a big risk of this is ongoing wealth concentration
- the "open weights" approach can't solve the problem of wealth and llm access being linked; you need compute too, and compute is expensive, thus "open weights" still favors the wealthy
- instead we need "objective and fair institutional processes", as this will allow small labs cook up their stuff while frontier labs get regulated
why would i care about what these smaller players do, if economic advantage = frontier model access? also, the reasoning around "why bother with open weights because compute is expensive too" seems like the kind of logic a motivated 12 year old could work their way around in 30 seconds. things are not either/or dario, you said so yourself.
seems like a 400 word corpo misdirection essay. par for the course.
> ...
> completely exempt any company below a certain amount of revenue or model training costs from being covered at all
One could argue that "Frontier AI" company know they have nothing to fear from company with less than XM$ revenue, and so their support for this type of regulation is still a way to force regulatory capture. In any case, whatever regulation you support, it's a regulation that you didn't have to handle when you were growing, but that incumbent will have to deal with.
Whatever it is Dario's intention or not does not matter. Capitalism push to consolidation and the eventual regulation that will need to be applied to mitigate the externality from a new industry, will mean that their will only be a handful of "very big" winner. Same story since the beginning of the industrial era. Even if that's not what Dario personally want, it's in the best interest of the shareholders, which will force Anthropic to do everything it can to be one of the big one.
> Overall my view is that AI is structurally a technology that tends to concentrate power, for reasons that have nothing to do with regulation (more to do with the extreme implications of the scaling laws).
The same can be said about a lot of other industry (aviation, oil, chip manufacturing, ...). Every country / union big enough will finance their own champion to try to keep a foot in the industry even if they are not the best.
He's clearly focusing on being on the news to provoke emotions on people, preparing for the Anthropic big blockbuster IPO.
Dario, Sam Altman and others should instead be praying every night that this will take us to the Singularity VERY SOON, because if it doesn't, the entire country will blame them for absolutely destroying their retirement and the US' economy once this AI Datacenter bubble pops.
This is actually a good point. Open models are getting better and better, some of them might even be useful in consumer hardware now. But if AI performance is still correlated with compute power, then no doubt power will remain with the people owning the chips.
I'm an AI advocate but that question makes me feel that AI is simply "very useful" rather than being a historical game changer for humanity.
Maximalists: 10x
Minimalists: were always close to 0x individuals, so opinion rejected 99% of the time
Realists: 30-50% productivity gains
80% of the engineers out there are the 0.5-1x baselines that we have to optimize the 10-20% around to carry...
Edit: Does anyone else notice the switching between dashes and em-dashes between paragraphs? Tells you a lot about the man, doesn't it.
To paraphrase Sinclair "It's difficult to make a man realize the issues with regulatory capture, if they're to be the benefactor of regulatory capture".
> A crude analogy is that the formal court system can sometimes feel stuffy and elitist, but it does a much better job of defending the rights of vulnerable individuals than the alternative, mob justice.
Not so sure. After all lack of the latter did help establish the current tech overlord rule.
Or even for the HN crowd, when will we see e.g. "Mythos aided research discovers 10 new viable battery technologies"
[...]
> I don’t think that a glitzy marketing campaign with a positive spin (which some have advocated that Anthropic do) is the way to win back that trust — at this point, saying that AI will cure cancer is more a cliche than it is inspiring, and most people think it is deceptive. The thing that will work is actually curing cancer. I think by far the most accurate criticism of AI companies including Anthropic is that we haven’t yet delivered on our big promises to benefit the world. That is totally on us, and I think it’s the criticism you should be making, instead of all this stuff about messaging and marketing.
> We are however doing our best to fix this: Anthropic is ramping up its efforts very quickly in biology and medicine, and we hope to have incredible results in the coming years and some early glimmers in the coming months. When we’ve actually accomplished something real, the whole world will hear about it, as loudly as possible, you have my word on that.
Turns out "winning back trust" doesn't have anything to do with any actual concerns people may have re: employment, electricity prices, stock market bubble, intellectual property, scams, cybersecurity, environmental issues etc. Rather we'll just do all of that even harder and the miracles ("curing cancer", lol) we've so far failed to deliver are bound to arrive in short order!
No snark here from my side, just curious about your vision - which concrete actions by Anthropic could improve trust for the concerns you listed?
Considering the vast amount of money, world-class talent and political and industry vonnections Anthropic has access to, it feels a bit unfair to ask me to solve this for them.
My answer to their proposal for what our society should look like, and what kind of technologies we should use is "no". It's not a trust issue, as in I would not accept the proposal from anyone, even if I did otherwise trust them. And if someone I trusted insistently proposed this, I would stop trusting them.
In any case, they don't accept refusal, but try this grotesque and condescending maneuver about "trust", as if I and many others were not really just saying "no".
No one who refuses to take "no" for an answer can ever deserve trust. If you are committed to convincing me to go along with your desires, and have no intent of accepting my refusal, you will never deserve trust, and I will never trust you.
These companies may have the power to do what they want anyway. But they will never have a clear conscience, or trust and support from me or anyone like me.
Thiel et al. have described technological change as a means of forcing unilateral changes on an unwilling public. There is no basis for trust unless there exists a justice system that can appropriately discipline and restrain such people and their coconspirators, and force them to abandon their plans to inflict unwanted conditions on masses of people.
Surely it will be quite dystopian future - AI will dictate how the money allocated, where there is only one private company left - Anthropic (as per Dario says)
So, what changed? He went from a promise of AI bonanza any minute now to a promise to maybe cure cancer in the coming years, that's right, an unspecified number of years. Until that time, we're supposed to eat glimmers of hope because the AI-caused inflation will make food unaffordable.
And don't forget to stock on ear protection, because when something happens, it's going to be "as laud as possible", you've got Amo's word too - to marvel at in the meantime.
> I think that ordinary people don’t trust companies, governments, or the tech industry and always suspect that we are cooking up some new way to screw them over.
Well, yeah Dario. You keep PUBLICLY TALKING about ways you want to fuck over people and everyone has noticed. I'm sorry, but when a lot of people are living paycheck-to-paycheck and watching layoffs everywhere, being like "well it'll take all the jobs and maybe kill humanity" is going to set off a LOT of alarm bells, despite your attempts to make concerned looking faces. You're trying to solve hypothetical problems in unproven ways, while completely ignoring real problems people actually face. These people are SO disconnected from the society they live in.
People have a problem with the efforts, not that they haven’t reached utopia yet. Doubling the efforts will not solve the problem, it will only deepen it.
Other than the fact I doubt that will happen, if it did, I think it would just underline the trust issue.
If some independent group cures cancer using Anthropic’s models as critical support, that would be great—but the nature of biology and medicine is that guardrails to prevent misuse will also cripple research.
If someone with an tight special relationship cures cancer with special privileged access to Anthropic’s models cures cancer making significant use of the models, well, the cure for cancer is nice, but people are going to notice that Anthropic has the control over who gets to try, and the power to set terms, which underlines the stakes for the trust issue.
The distillations of Qwen 3.8 down to a 27B model are good, but they're not on a par with frontier models.
When Dario talks about open weights not being a solution this is what he means - if you don't have 400GB of VRAM lying around the fact that there's an open model like Qwen3.8-2.4T-A95B doesn't really help much. If we're not regulating how models are available, or making sure access is open, then RAM prices will mean everything concentrates on a few very rich companies.
> Open-weights do help some with this but are nowhere near a sufficient solution
Which is exactly why Anthropic contributes nothing to, and actively pushes for roadblocks and regulations for open weight models. Can't allow any hope to the masses.
Only people with $$$$$ are allowed to touch Fable. Which of course we have have aggressive guardrails for in case you even try to use it for something dangerous like AI model developement. Plus we are going to retain all data submitted to it just in case someone is trying to be sneaky.
This was primarily a clever way to try to shore up their revenue numbers. By preventing folks who don't have seven-to-twelve-figure bank account balances from using the tools that were most expensive to build, they might actually stand to make money from those tools... once they're forced to do accounting that includes the cost to make those tools.
As a bonus, R&D cost for serving the fixed-price-subscription rabble can be massively reduced by providing them with older tools that have had the goop around them tweaked just enough to make the tool's output have a different "flavor". That class of customer will never know that they're being conned.
It is so tragicomic to see people whose lives are built around companies coming so close to realizing that everything they do is bad, and then at the last minute swerving aside to convince themselves that no, if they just do more of it and somehow do it "better", then it will all be okay. The reason people don't trust companies and believe they are cooking up some new way to screw them over is because that is what they are doing. If Dario or anyone else really wanted to dispel that perception there's an easy way: do a total 180 and start fighting against everything you've been pushing. But none of them will do that because they still fundamentally believe that what they are doing is good, and are unable to see that fundamentally it's bad.
Anthropic in particular has developed this almost Orwellian like veil of condescending rhetoric that on the surface suggests they're looking out for you while underneath they're taking actions that suggest they do not trust you, Mr/Mrs Ordinary Person. All the safety rhetoric, never supporting open weight models, the lockdowns on harnesses outside claude code, etc.
Anthropic if you care about public good, do something to empower people. Release an OSS model. Open source Claude Code. Open source some inference tooling or something. Just give people anything except your words.
This line of reasoning is really very silly. I can be looking out for my young child by choosing not to put them behind the driving wheel of my car.
There are both stupid and malicious people in the world. If you have a tool that you believe may be genuinely dangerous in the hands of the wrong person, it is not the smart thing to do to give the public unrestricted access to that tool. Do you think it would be sensible to give every individual on Earth a nuclear weapon to do whatever they want with?
Why does this need a master?
Do we regulate bio geniuses for the danger they pose? No, we do not.
Do we regulate other tools like hammers and drills? No. Books? No.
The tech execs waking up on a random monday:
> I think that ordinary people don’t trust companies, governments, or the tech industry and always suspect that we are cooking up some new way to screw them over.
No shit Dario, no shit...
If only money thirsty capitals didn’t drain the HBM/DRAM/NAND capacity to rush to build out all the data centers so that they can make money off of inference, driving up memory prices like mad man leaving consumers with not only no chance of local inference setup, but also higher price of consumer electronics. Of course it has nothing to do with regulation, more to do with the greed.
I guess it’ll be great for Anthropic to have the cure for cancer, but what’s that gonna mean for people with cancer? Funny how he doesn’t talk about that part.
Law abiding US citizens won't be able to run them, but you didn't solve anything other than making sure US citizens pay Sam or Dario.
I rather let citizens of my country exercise our own authority and agency when deciding what is necessary for good societal outcomes (LLMs aren't necessary).
But yeah if you only rely on money and not people power campaigns are expensive and hard, when you have entire communities backing you things become slightly easier.
Consider this though: Regulating AI models in the US benefits the data centers, not individuals. That's where regulated models run. Regulated models creates demand for data centers.