Disagree, they want regulation because their models have hit diminishing returns and they need a reason why duck taping more GPUs together doesn't create AGI. The answer there going with is "We need to slow down or else we'll be TOO powerful"

They still get to pretend progress is linear and thus keep their stock price high while slowing down the pace that they have to produce results.

Containment breaking is overblown. The hype is to muddy the waters around laws determining who is responsible for the “crimes” of a robot. Ai companies signal they’d accept limits because all Vera Rubin components are already all spoken for, there’s no more slack in the market and they are busting at the memory constraints of gbxxx hardware.

When a company calls for limits and regulation it’s because the market has already spoken.

Also they’re probably pushing public launch of the 60 series back if you even get the privilege of spending two months salary on a 6050 this generation, gamer!

I think a big part, along the same vein, is that these companies want to be part of the regulating authority, as 'experts' in the field. Never gonna be on it if you oppose it.

If a business can get its greasy hands on influencing its own regulation, they can basically do whatever they want while regulating out all their competition.

Being pedantic the Chinese models are open weight not open source.

That said that's one of the most likely explanations.

The other is that, like all the talk of AGI wiping out humanity, it's just a distraction from the real threat, which is the surveillance state the Epstein class can create with AI.

Of course these aren't mutually exclusive either. They could be preparing to lobby for the licensing of AI hardware, effectively banning personal ownership of it. Which would force anyone who wants to use AI to use their centralised servers where they can spy on every prompt.

It's partly that I think.

It's partly to create a three company cartel under the guise of a safety board that wouldn't have to compete and can become a quasi-governmental outfit to ensure future pivot funding / bail out when the bottom drops out.

It's partly so that the likes of OpenAI can keep the grift going and the venture capital money taps on a bit longer by delaying an IPO that would expose that they don't make any money and probably never will, collapsing the funding.

The War on General Purpose Computing moves into a new era.

It could be both!

These fuckers are crafty

I tend to agree, but I suspect they want to rile everyone up, get Chinese AI products “banned” in the us as national security threats (both cheaper commercial products and open source efficient models you can run yourself), and as a side benefit make themselves seem too important to fail so that when they hit the cliff next year when all their compute agreements start coming online, the government will bail them out. I doubt any of the guys running things have any serious interest worrying about kill switches or achieving “alignment” (if that was ever even a possible thing, who knows; humans aren’t exactly “aligned” for the good of humanity, we’re gonna smoke the whole atmosphere for fun). They’ve already spent oodles lobbying to avoid “bad regulation” but in reality there isn’t any real regulation they’d accept unless it was purely fig leaf.

The alternative is that people like Dario Amedei actually believe that the industry can “pace itself” globally, which would mean he’s incredibly stupid/delusional or both. It would be absurd if they actually believed the stuff they write; implausible. I get that possibly Anthropic is a little religious/culty, and that could explain them, but they’re all supposed super rationalists. They all know that if there’s anything to actually mine out of this gold rush, it will be mined, and humanity doesn’t really do pre-emptive self-limiting; we’re not going to chose, as a global population, to not explore this avenue. Usually the bad thing has to happen, and be very very bad, and then we do some international taboo policing about it for a generation or two.

Deep down they think it can be managed and controlled. And they want to be the ones who control it.

In my opinion, they can’t win this way. Actually I guess I believe they can’t win anyway in this. They might get a carved out market of the US to themselves, but they don’t beat China on these terms—the entire rest of the world will adopt Chinese ai, or derivatives, and they will likely surpass our development ability. They would have to achieve the god-like systems they’re always threatening to make. And if they do make those, I rate it very low that they will both be super-intelligent, and also controllable by a gaggle of Bay Area tech people.

Who knows I guess… entirely possible it will go the other way, but seems like one way or the other we’ll be finding out in the next little while.

Good take

i think it's a combination of this, they need to spend less money training so they can IPO, and look how dangerous our tech is, it's going to make you so rich if you invest. i really don't buy that the ai is going to go rogue and end humanity.

Of course it's marketing too or the companies wouldn't all bring that up about their own models all the time