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Policy on the AI Exponential

darioamodei.com

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Re: Policy on the AI Exponential

#131

Post by cadamsdotcom »

dang wrote: post #59
slopinthebag wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, they know their moat is evaporating as the Chinese models continue to catch up, and at a much cheaper price. Also, why has my comment been flagged? It is sitting at positive votes but has suddenly been flagged for no apparent reason?

If you mean https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48481131 , users flagged it. We can only guess why users flag things. Perhaps it was because they thought the comment broke the site guidelines by being snarky and/or fulminatey? I don't think it was an extreme case of that, so I've turned off the flags now.

Thanks for staying on top of these things dang - such an important topic so it’s great to see the discussion rage but stay constructive.

Re: Policy on the AI Exponential

#132

Post by dang »

ofjcihen wrote: post #100
dang wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you mean https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48481131 , users flagged it. We can only guess why users flag things. Perhaps it was because they thought the comment broke the site guidelines by being snarky and/or fulminatey? I don't think it was an extreme case of that, so I've turned off the flags now.

I mean it’s pretty tame and actually adds to the conversation. It feels somewhat obvious that someone just disagreed and flagged it. Is there a system for holding people accountable who abuse flags?

Yup there is.

I've restored a few other comments that were similarly flagged as well.

Re: Policy on the AI Exponential

#133

Post by aesthesia »

jdw64 wrote: post #69

I read this essay, and it feels like lying behind a mask of moral responsibility and safety for humanity. They are asking for FAA style preclearance and third party audits. That literally means no new AI startup can emerge. Do they not know that audits cost money? Protect your own monopoly, protect your customers' regulations. They want strong regulation like the FAA to raise barriers to entry for the foundation mode…

> They are asking for FAA style preclearance and third party audits. That literally means no new AI startup can emerge. Do they not know that audits cost money?

Training frontier AI models costs money, orders of magnitude more than third-party audits. If you can afford to build the model, you can afford to have it audited.

Re: Policy on the AI Exponential

#134

Post by barrkel »

kingstnap wrote: post #60

Its hard to read the first half of this as anything other than regulatory capture propaganda. It really all ties together as: > AI has become a major commercial technology >Frontier AI models, like airplanes, should be required to go through technical testing and auditing, and their release should be blocked or reversed as a threat to public safety if they do not meet high standards of safety > AI companies that deve…

Working to keep a roof over the head of yourself and those you love is an identity. It's social proof that you have value, that you can do something for someone else.

Re: Policy on the AI Exponential

#135

Post by baq »

jonas21 wrote: post #111
snaking0776 wrote: post #23

I know this is likely just for IPO hype but when I read things like this I sometimes wonder if I must be missing something. I use agents everyday and find them really useful and they save me a lot of headache. At the same time I find that if I let it self-direct at a high level at all it generally makes bad choices that cause me headaches later so I can’t really give them autonomy. Enough people seem to believe this…

What did your AI-assisted workflow look like 1 year ago? I can only speak for myself, but I would carefully specify a class or module in great detail and then hand it off to the model to implement, then carefully review the result. How about 2 years ago? Back then, I wouldn't even trust it to write a 5-line function without making some sort of silly mistake. Today, I can leave an agent running by itself for 20 or 30…

> Now extrapolate how things will look if the trend continues for another 2 or 3 years.

…and humans are famously bad at extrapolating exponentially, which is kinda the point of the essay.

Re: Policy on the AI Exponential

#136

Post by jdw64 »

aesthesia wrote: post #133
jdw64 wrote: post #69

I read this essay, and it feels like lying behind a mask of moral responsibility and safety for humanity. They are asking for FAA style preclearance and third party audits. That literally means no new AI startup can emerge. Do they not know that audits cost money? Protect your own monopoly, protect your customers' regulations. They want strong regulation like the FAA to raise barriers to entry for the foundation mode…

> They are asking for FAA style preclearance and third party audits. That literally means no new AI startup can emerge. Do they not know that audits cost money? Training frontier AI models costs money, orders of magnitude more than third-party audits. If you can afford to build the model, you can afford to have it audited.

Cost as 'money' is not just about a one time audit fee. What I mean by money is that pre approval also affects time and human resources. In reality, it is difficult for startups to hire people to handle this. For example, DeepSeek in China has 300 employees. If they were subject to regulation, they would typically need to hire about 5 to 10 additional people for a compliance team. That is hard for a small company. I partially agree, but even if the monetary amount is small, the very fact that fixed costs arise in organizational operations is the real problem

Re: Policy on the AI Exponential

#137

Post by movealongnow »

ofjcihen wrote: post #75
tptacek wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is normal, expected, and healthy for stakeholders in a regulatory environment to offer proposals about regulations. What's unhealthy is the proposition that the deliberation process is so fragile that a stakeholder needs to cover every angle, lest they corrupt the outcome.

What you say is true but completely ignores the obvious ways in which what he is proposing benefits his company. Its like saying it’s normal for a taxi driver to drive people places while he’s got you handcuffed in the trunk.

[flagged]

Re: Policy on the AI Exponential

#138

Post by aspenmartin »

oudlys wrote: post #117
aspenmartin wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's nice that people are genuinely curious about this. - All of your observations are absolutely dead on - Yet, we have very very very robust scaling laws that as Dario points out we've had and validated for over a decade. This extends to downstream measures like METR time horizon and compsosite benchmarks like the epoch capability index. - If you look at where you're at now, which is again dead on, you're looking a…

Are we plotting against cost? How is the capability advancement vs dollars paid for development? By my read of the (very sparse) data, we're getting linear improvements in capability for super-linear increases in costs. [1] Indicates that by 2027 models will cost $1 billon to train. Dario estimates that model runs will cost $10 billion in 2026 [2]. That to me indicates costs are potentially growing faster than capabi…

I appreciate the data here but I don't think the read is quite right;

Saying we have linear capability for super-linear cost compares an unbounded variable (dollars) to bounded instruments (because benchmarks saturate). On unbounded measures, growth is exponential; you can see METR time horizons double every ~4-7 months (https://metr.org/blog/2026-1-29-time-horizon-1-1/). And capability being proportional to log(compute) is what the scaling law predicts.

Epoch puts training cost growth at ~2.4x/year as your link shows. Meanwhile cost for fixed capability falls ~10-40x/year (https://epoch.ai/data-insights/llm-inference-price-trends), and lab revenue is growing ~10x/year! Anthropic went from $1B to $9B to $30B+ run rate in ~15 months, OpenAI ~$25B.

On [3]: the "destroying value" conclusion flips sign on an assumed 15% baseline rework rate. The report's most direct metric is +16% merged PRs per dev. The RCT evidence is genuinely mixed (METR: -19%, with n = 20 and Claude 3.x; Cui et al: +26%) but its just super hard to do this well, I think Faros stuff was pretty cool, I haven't seen this before so thank you for the reference.

Re: Policy on the AI Exponential

#139

Post by simianwords »

TobyTheCamel wrote: post #30

I feel completely baffled by the other responses on this thread. People viewing this purely as a marketing stunt, regulatory capture or attack on their freedoms, with seemingly no appreciation of the real threat that AI could pose to society and even humanity given its current rate of progress. I'm not going to claim that the CEO of pre-IPO company has no incentive to bolster the claims of his tech, but to completely…

Here's the real reason you are finding these responses in the thread and I'll lay it out in the open.

There are people who simultaneously are scared about AI but refuse to believe that AI is the * real deal * and can do everything Dario thinks it can. These are the same people who think its all marketing hype and Dario is "hyping up" before IPO or some lame conspiracy theory.

It is high time people start accepting the real world performance of LLMs and brace themselves instead of hiding behind two contradictory views

1. AI is hype

2. AI is scary

Re: Policy on the AI Exponential

#140

Post by reducesuffering »

myhf wrote: post #126
TobyTheCamel wrote: post #30

I feel completely baffled by the other responses on this thread. People viewing this purely as a marketing stunt, regulatory capture or attack on their freedoms, with seemingly no appreciation of the real threat that AI could pose to society and even humanity given its current rate of progress. I'm not going to claim that the CEO of pre-IPO company has no incentive to bolster the claims of his tech, but to completely…

lol sure buddy, keep telling yourself that

"This War Will Destabilize The Entire Mideast Region And Set Off A Global Shockwave Of Anti-Americanism vs. No It Won’t"

https://theonion.com/this-war-will-destabilize-the-entire-mi...

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