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Why YC went to DC

ycombinator.com

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Re: Why YC went to DC

#21

Post by kemitchell »

The line about being the voice of "little tech" rubbed me pretty hard the wrong way. Nothing's stopping me or my clients from contacting senators, reps, and regulators, joining political organizations, or signing open letters. We have our own voices. Some of us know enough to use them.

It's hard to tell what, exactly, the position on "open source AI" was. It's presented here in glittering generalities. Given the many conversations I've had on-theme with not-public-tech-co people, I don't think it's fair to say all of "little tech" has one view or position, when you really get down to details. I rather doubt the whole YC-o-Verse sees it all one way, either, given its burgeoning size.

More broadly, I'd expect positioning off as "little tech" to flop. Policy players know how to follow the money. They know "Big Tech" brings the money that buys startups—they've read about it in exec summaries of the committee reports. They're also plenty aware that startups get founded by, and recruit from, a lot of the same pools of people. They've been lobbied by various policy groups speaking for smaller tech companies, often funded by the bigger tech companies, for years. If they dig just a little bit, they'll see the barriers to entry, and resulting big-co dependencies, for small-cos doing AI work.

There's bipartisan support for "going after Big Tech" competition-wise. I don't think the pols need a tech-co splinter group as reinforcement there. Unless and until IPO becomes the main path of successful ascent again—perpetually private isn't popular—I don't have great arguments against generalizing startups to Big Tech Farm League. There are plenty of gripes up from startups against the Great Houses, especially from investors. But that's feudalism for you.

Compare, say, DHH's lobbying. 37signals had the Bezos investment, but it was an unusual deal, not within the usual system. Speaking from a different place.

Re: Why YC went to DC

#22

Post by no_wizard »

simonw wrote: post #13

This new essay by Jack Clark, who was at OpenAI when they made the decision not to release GPT-2 for safety reasons five years ago, feels relevant: https://importai.substack.com/p/import-ai-375-gpt-2-five-yea... > [...] history shows that once we assign power to governments, they're loathe to subsequently give that power back to the people. Policy is a ratchet and things tend to accrete over time. That means whatever…

I don’t disagree with this assessment but it’s also a narrow view[0] that allows the problem to persist in the first place.

Rather, I’d like to see what positive oversight would look like, but that has not been put forth by any of these organizations thus far. It all comes down to “trust us” which is also hard to stomach

[0]: most often but not exclusively held by Americans (of which i am one). We collectively fail to imagine government being a positive force and what that would look like.

Re: Why YC went to DC

#23

Post by tptacek »

eganist wrote: post #16

I was hopeful YC coming to DC would've meant YC would've been tapping into DC's startup scene. Wishful thinking. Linked is the more common reason (lobbying), but I'm looking forward to more institutions recognizing the talent we have in the DC region.

There's talent in every region, and I think it should be a priority to figure out ways to unlock it without re-siting companies in SFBA and NYC, but it's worth noting here that YC's SFBA-centricity is not an outcome of their belief that there's no talent outside SFBA. It's the opposite: they assume they're importing that talent to the area.

The YC SFBA thing is about network effects from companies working in close proximity, and about the investor market (1) believing the same thing and (2) having themselves an even more significant network effect that keeps them all in the same area.

Re: Why YC went to DC

#25

Post by lolinder »

no_wizard wrote: post #17
lolinder wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're correct if you're focused exclusively on the work surrounding building foundation models to begin with. But if you take a broader view, having open models that we can legally fine tune and hack with locally has created a large and ever-growing community of builders and innovators that could not exist without these open models. Just take a look at projects like InvokeAI [0] in the image space or especially llam…

Taking the broader view of this nature feels like an attempt to change the narrative. The entire point of having transparency is around building those foundations so they don’t inherit the biases of humans, for starters. Right now, we have zero introspection into this and no ability to improve upon it with the widely deployed models being used today, and that has already created problematic situations, let alone situ…

I'm a big believer in not allowing the pursuit of perfection to cause us to lose sight of the good things that we have.

Yes, these open models could stand to be more open and I hope that we'll see that in the future. But at the same time I'm extremely grateful to the companies who have released their weights under reasonable terms. Them doing so has undeniably led to an enormous amount of innovation and collaboration that would not have been possible without the weights.

If we constantly downplay and disparage the real efforts that companies make to release IP to the world because they don't go as far as we'd like, we're setting ourselves up for a world where companies don't release anything at all.

Re: Why YC went to DC

#26

Post by throwup238 »

no_wizard wrote: post #17
lolinder wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're correct if you're focused exclusively on the work surrounding building foundation models to begin with. But if you take a broader view, having open models that we can legally fine tune and hack with locally has created a large and ever-growing community of builders and innovators that could not exist without these open models. Just take a look at projects like InvokeAI [0] in the image space or especially llam…

Taking the broader view of this nature feels like an attempt to change the narrative. The entire point of having transparency is around building those foundations so they don’t inherit the biases of humans, for starters. Right now, we have zero introspection into this and no ability to improve upon it with the widely deployed models being used today, and that has already created problematic situations, let alone situ…

I think they're parallel concerns and everyone has their own priorities. Openness of the models and their training is important but for most people, it wouldn't really matter anyway because they can't afford the computing power to do their own training.

I care about all that in the abstract but what I can download and use on my computer is more concrete and immediate.

Re: Why YC went to DC

#28

Post by superfrank »

siliconc0w wrote: post #9

If you need more things to fix: * Software R&D Amortization - taxes on make-believe profits * Patent law - protect small businesses from patent trolls * Automate government-driven compliance standards - enable small businesses to sell into large companies/government entities, automatic certification when using pre-approved cloud solutions. * Healthcare insurance - employees of SMBs automatically get access to medicar…

Can you remind me what the issue with software R&D amortization (or point me to something that explains it)? I remember reading about the issue in the past and thinking it was a problem, but I've forgotten all the details.

Re: Why YC went to DC

#29

Post by dbish »

willsmith72 wrote: post #20

little tech? i don't buy it. the entire point of YC is growth

It is interesting that you have current YC head lobbying for small and open, while previous lobbies for large and private and is a big driver in why the government wants to regulate so much already.

Thought experiment, if YC had not allowed for or jump started OpenAI would they even have to be lobbying now for openness and “little tech” (at least for AI side of things)?

Is this the appropriate saying now https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoist_with_his_own_petard

Re: Why YC went to DC

#30

Post by redserk »

ralegh wrote: post #18
simonw wrote: post #13

This new essay by Jack Clark, who was at OpenAI when they made the decision not to release GPT-2 for safety reasons five years ago, feels relevant: https://importai.substack.com/p/import-ai-375-gpt-2-five-yea... > [...] history shows that once we assign power to governments, they're loathe to subsequently give that power back to the people. Policy is a ratchet and things tend to accrete over time. That means whatever…

Well said, also applies to many human dynamics - friendships, relationships, work relationships, etc. Ceding power is a ratchet and you either put your foot down to start with or it grinds away.

Hard disagree.

Healthy relationships include negotiating when potential boundaries are in question, or if things change that require re-aligning boundaries.

It's reasonable to give more to the other party from time-to-time, and reasonable to discuss with the other party if it becomes a point where it feels unfair.

Instead we (Americans) take an unnecessarily adversarial stance against what our government could do, ensuring it is perpetually unprepared.

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