On AI regulation and messaging • Hacker News Board

Re: On AI regulation and messaging

#251

Post by vrganj » Mon, Aug 17, 2026, 12:59 PM UTC

a2ff6eeb0 wrote: post #245

vrganj wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How about we don't create one instead?

It's not a choice we have, unless you want to figure out a global AI ban treaty. AI will make human thought economically useless. In the new economy, the one economically useful thing we will be able to do is legal property ownership.

> The one economically useful thing we will be able to do is legal property ownership.

This is correct. But we don't need to ban AI to avoid the permanent underclass nightmare.

It's time for the means of production to be owned communally.

It's either a cybersocialist utopia or a neofeudalist dystopia.

Rosa Luxemburg formulated it pretty well more than a hundred years ago: Socialism or Barbarism!.

Re: On AI regulation and messaging

#252

Post by kanzure » Mon, Aug 17, 2026, 12:59 PM UTC

RandomLensman wrote: post #244

kanzure wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, first, I would have to check and see if the synoynmous codons are important for virus reproduction. Second, this technique requires (AFAIK) lots of cell line viability testing and lots of tweaking. I don't think it's as simple as code swapping all the codons and then all the biology magically works the right way, biology is rarely that simple. Requires effort.

This sounds highly speculative then, i.e., the biology could never work out, no?

It depends on what you consider to be speculative. It's certainly not a product available to the mass consumer market, if that's what you mean. But that's also kind of an uninteresting fact, right?

"Synthetic genomes unveil the effects of synonymous recoding" https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.06.16.599206v1

"Probing the limits of genetic recoding using multi-omics-guided evolution" https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-026-74300-9

"Escherichia coli with a 57-codon genetic code" https://www.science.org/doi/abs/10.1126/science.ady4368

Re: On AI regulation and messaging

#253

Post by alansaber » Mon, Aug 17, 2026, 1:02 PM UTC

Vast majority of AI headlines are 1. bad or 2. gimmicks or 3. remarkably charitable forward thinking- this is self inflicted

Re: On AI regulation and messaging

#254

Post by TheOtherHobbes » Mon, Aug 17, 2026, 1:02 PM UTC

dist-epoch wrote: post #247

mhaberl wrote: post #213

> 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. 1. He is giving his word that if he cures cancer, he will brag…

> is that planned for a few days before the IPO Anthropic is the fastest revenue growing company in the history of Capitalism. I don't think they need any more marketing for investors.

They do, however, need more profitability and less competition.

Hence the "We're curing cancer, no, really" pitch - because within 6-12 months everyone else is going to be doing code and text cheaper and better.

Re: On AI regulation and messaging

#255

Post by GPerson » Mon, Aug 17, 2026, 1:03 PM UTC

dmd wrote: post #202

jacquesm wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Dario must think people are stupid. All of those guys think people are stupid. That theme has been repeating over and over again.

To be fair, the vast majority of people are stupid, in one way or another. Or do you believe that you are smart in every way there is to be smart?

You’re just inventing an imaginary interpretation of what that guy said and pompously dismissing it.

Re: On AI regulation and messaging

#256

Post by AnodicElegy » Mon, Aug 17, 2026, 1:05 PM UTC

"I wrote Machines of Loving Grace because I didn’t feel the AI industry was painting an inspiring enough picture of how the technology could radically transform the world for the better. The bulk of the essay is devoted to refuting skepticism of AI’s potential in health and biology, and showing why I think it will actually be possible to cure most human disease in ~5-10 years, as crazy as it may sound to ordinary people and frankly to biologists as well (I used to be one!). And, if you read my most recent essay (Policy on the AI Exponential), I discuss concrete proposals for how to streamline the FDA process to make sure the deluge of AI-accelerated drugs isn’t slowed down by the regulatory process."

This is fantasy, and I believe the vast majority of those actually working in pharmaceutical R&D would agree. Contrast Amodei's opinion here to the Derek Lowe post I shared recently: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49313367 . Derek Lowe's opinion is closest to my own experience: AI, whether it be traditional ML or LLMs, can help here and there -- the former to help you to triage paths to explore in a way that's a little better than intuition in some cases, the latter mostly to generate code faster in the code-dependent aspects of pharma research -- but neither of these things are significantly widening the main bottlenecks. I don't think the data exists to do so, especially since so much of pharma R&D is looking for higher and higher hanging fruit (i.e. exploring avenues for which a trove of relevant training data does not already exist).

Re: On AI regulation and messaging

#257

Post by zer00eyz » Mon, Aug 17, 2026, 1:05 PM UTC

glimshe wrote: post #13

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.

> where's the big deliverable from AI ... AI is simply "very useful" rather than being a historical game changer for humanity.

The last 30 years of tech has been about big, the dot com boom, the next unicorn, the magnificent 7 or 11 or whatever.

The thing is that the missing solutions people want have never been the one sized fits all multi Tennant we need 6 rounds of seed funding kinds of problems.

The "app boom" should have been a clue that smaller, niche services are viable.

IF tech were like construction, then most of HN, most of SF Bay Area, most of "tech" seems to be concerned with building the tallest building, or a massive housing development. Your average office worker is more akin to a home owner, who has a busted outlet, a sticky door, a dripping faucet, they just work around it because the resources to fix it (programers) are going to build the next big thing.

Those workers now have tools to address those problems, themselves.

I have lawyers and writers (far removed from tech) talking to me about cron jobs and scripts they are running that solve real problems for them. AI has allowed them to accomplish this.

These things arent showing up on GitHub. They dont make quarterly reports at a publicly traded company. The mountain(s) of change are happening by stacking grains of sand, not one solid rock.

Re: On AI regulation and messaging

#258

Post by derektank » Mon, Aug 17, 2026, 1:05 PM UTC

dist-epoch wrote: post #247

mhaberl wrote: post #213

> 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. 1. He is giving his word that if he cures cancer, he will brag…

> is that planned for a few days before the IPO Anthropic is the fastest revenue growing company in the history of Capitalism. I don't think they need any more marketing for investors.

>Anthropic is the fastest revenue growing company in the history of Capitalism. I don't think they need any more marketing for investors.

What’s the source for this claim? Is this true in real dollars or just nominal? What about as a percentage of total GDP?

Re: On AI regulation and messaging

#259

Post by dgellow » Mon, Aug 17, 2026, 1:06 PM UTC

Sharlin wrote: post #197

dgellow wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The effective altruist and longtermist crowd are into it as a religion. They would happily sacrifice anything human to satisfy their dreams of AI. They care way more about what the AI needs than their what their fellow humans need. We will end up with an AGI having better living and working conditions than humans and the whole AI industry will be clapping

I think you mean effective accelerationist, not effective altruist, whose position is pretty much the exact opposite.

The Effective Altruism(tm) believers are part of the accelerationist. See SBF, the Amodei Siblings, Karnofsky (spouse of Daniela Amodei), and people around them

Re: On AI regulation and messaging

#260

Post by QwenGlazer9000 » Mon, Aug 17, 2026, 1:06 PM UTC

dist-epoch wrote: post #249

QwenGlazer9000 wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Problem with that is that it's not proper rust code, it's some kind of franken zig style rust port. The actual hard part is getting it into idiomatic, safe rust, and I don't believe the LLM port makes the full transition any easier than doing things the old fashioned way: a dual lang code base like Linux.

And compiler generated assembly code is ugly and spaghetti, unlike beautiful hand-crafted human written assembly code, the kind you see in ffmpeg codecs, ... Doesn't matter.

It does matter, because that's the entire point of the language. You know, memory safety?

The vibe coded rust port did not get them any closer to full compiler verified memory safety. They still need to go file by file, bit by bit, and make it memory safe, at which point, why not just do that from zig.