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On AI regulation and messaging

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Re: On AI regulation and messaging

#461

Post by nater5000 »

throwaway_7274 wrote: post #214

Just want to say, this comment section on this website would have been unthinkable a few years ago. It’s wild: all the engineers have developed class consciousness. I wonder how that happened? Anyway, it’s fun to watch, but remember to stay sane guys, be aware of the pendulum dynamics.

I've really only ever interacted with two kinds of engineers with respect to their take on AI:

1) Those with cautious, but enthusiastic, optimism for the technology and an understanding that things never work ideally in tech and any advancement that moves the needle even slightly is worth embracing.

2) Those who are so dogmatically opposed to AI that they leave logical conversation at the door in favor of just repeating whatever negative gotcha they heard last when the topic of AI comes up.

I'll say that the ratio of these engineers seems to be about 10:1 in real life versus 1:10 online, at least in my experience, roughly speaking. I don't think I've actually ever interacted with actual "AI/Tech Bros" who are obnoxiously pro-AI the same way that many of the people who are "anti-AI" come off.

The data I'm working with is biased (I've been working in high tech for a while now), but I'm left to conclude that the people who love to hate on AI online are those who love to hate online while most other people aren't particularly interested in defending a technology online that they feel is inevitable and doesn't really need defending.

Re: On AI regulation and messaging

#462

Post by jacquesm »

philipkglass wrote: post #445
a2ff6eeb0 wrote: post #432

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The first one to AGI with enough compute to run the AI wins it all. Humans will not be able to compete.

If Anthropic is the first to develop AGI, then everyone else becomes subordinate to Dario Amodei? And if DeepSeek is the first to get there, everyone instead becomes subordinate to Liang Wenfeng? I cannot believe that there is a threshold of intelligence where getting there first means a decisive and durable advantage. If you do believe that getting there first means ruling the world, then our viewpoints are probably…

It's not so much whether we believe this, it is about whether they and enough of their supporters believe it. Because the effect of believing that is what drives their need to 'be the first' at the expense of everything else.

Re: On AI regulation and messaging

#463

Post by overgard »

alphazard wrote: post #377
alphazard wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Cancer isn't a single disease" is often shouted from the Dunning-Kruger peak of cancer research. I think it was popularized by an explainer video on Youtube, and now it's being memed. The people who think this way want to legitimize funding a particular research niche that they benefit from. A more sophisticated view is that cancer (one idea) is an problem of rates (like most things in biology) and there is a tumor…

I should have expected this level of discourse from 2026 HN. Here's another way of framing things that might encourage better discussion: Suppose in a few years, it was announced that an LLM did discover a cure for a cancer. What approach would you expect it to have taken? 1. Developing an intervention for every possible mutation that leads to loss of cellular identity, and uncontrolled growth. 2. Preserving immune f…

Or maybe these companies are just bullshitting.

Also: https://pivot-to-ai.com/2026/07/30/google-kills-alphafold-so...

Re: On AI regulation and messaging

#464

Post by jacquesm »

watwut wrote: post #441
a2ff6eeb0 wrote: post #418

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure how that changes anything -- sure, if you blocked people from using AI, it wouldn't have any effects on society, but once people have access, what they do with it matters. There's an inevitable effect that it has, and the only lever you have as an individual is being on the right side of that.

The problem is not access to AI. The problem is the lack of antitrust, the lack of white collar crime enforcement, the tax system that allows them to accumulate wealth while avoiding payments. The problem is legal regime with winner takes all monopoly creation support. AI is the least of the problem.

Indeed, but it does provide them with a lot of tools for those other items on your list.

Re: On AI regulation and messaging

#465

Post by user43928 »

A_D_E_P_T wrote: post #427
user43928 wrote: post #336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pathetic discourse in the comments for the most part. As if we didn't know the challenges in translating research into clinical treatments. I wonder if many of the commenters here read the post, where Amodei specifically references his essay with suggestions for streamlining the FDA approval processes: https://darioamodei.com/post/policy-on-the-ai-exponential

Who is "we"? Are you Dario or an Anthropic rep? Writing a paper on streamlining the FDA approval process is nice, and I agree with all of it, but it's one thing to do that (about 4 hours of work) and quite another thing to cure cancer. My point was more that LLMs are exceptionally weak at developing drugs. They're strong at every math/logic/language task, but curing cancer is something of an entirely different nature…

"We" as in the readers here. We all know the basics around how cancer research is hard and how getting new drugs through trials takes time and money.

Did you know that Amodei was working on research about cancer biomarkers at Stanford?

Given his background in biology, it is hardly like he is a random tech guy with no knowledge on the topic, as many here seem to imply.

Amodei mentioned "actually curing cancer" as an example of undeniable public benefit, not as an exclusive research focus or anything like that. He is clearly talking about generally intensifying biomedical efforts, not promising a cure for cancer specifically.

Re: On AI regulation and messaging

#466

Post by jacquesm »

simoncion wrote: post #448
GPerson wrote: post #436

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The early hacker culture in the 1970s inherited the political leanings of 1960s counterculture, so there’s nothing about being into tech that’s in opposition to class consciousness.

> ...there’s nothing about being into tech that’s in opposition to class consciousness. I agree about the ethos and ethics of early hackers. But, I note that -by volume- most of the folks who do programming and nearly all of the people who are software-industry managers [0] are not hackers. [0] I'm including managers at all levels, including the executive levels.

And in spite of the name, most the people on HackerNews.

Re: On AI regulation and messaging

#467

Post by jayGlow »

hn_submit wrote: post #246
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…

It's fairly easy to cure cancer by repairing DNA, but Big Pharma isn't interested because they can't patent it. They want to sell us some kind of "miracle cure" medicine that earns them trillions. The future is being held back by profit motives.

if it's that simple why haven't any other countries done this? there are countries with universal healthcare cancer is very resource intensive to treat if they could cure it so easily why haven't they done so already?

Re: On AI regulation and messaging

#468

Post by kennywinker »

calvinmorrison wrote: post #459
delis-thumbs-7e wrote: post #447

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Combine excess food with amazon or army level logistics, and famine is gone. We do this. Have you ever heard of UN World Food Programme? $14B funding in 2022 (since then dropped drastically, guess why). Has it solved famine? No. Would it solve famine if it got the funding it needs? Unlikely. Because you cannot just spend billions of dollars to send amazin food parcels across the world and expect that to fix climate…

> (since then dropped drastically, guess why). > Has it solved famine? No. Hoist by your own petard

Assuming everything they said is true, how on earth is that a self-own?

You know that saving millions of lives every year is better than NOT saving millions of lives, right? Just because something doesn't solve the problem 100% doesn't mean it's not VERY VERY good.

Re: On AI regulation and messaging

#469

Post by user43928 »

andriy_koval wrote: post #429
user43928 wrote: post #384

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't the fear mongering and position on regulation consistent with the beliefs he shares about the dangers of AI and how frontier models must be developed and deployed in a safe way? I see the conflict of interest of course, but so far I have not seen anything that convinced me Amodei works towards any other goal than benefit for humanity as a whole, like he claims.

> I have not seen anything if many other see it as substantial ground, and you just say "I don't see anything", how do you think this discussion can go forward?

Obviously with someone actually sharing what convinced them Amodei is a bad person and a liar?

It's amazing that I even have to ask for it, as if I am just supposed to believe so.

Alternatively, one could also engage with my argument that Amodei's position seems consistent with his beliefs, and point out flaws with it.

Re: On AI regulation and messaging

#470

Post by ModernMech »

kilpikaarna wrote: post #32

> 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 mo…

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.

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