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Policy on the AI Exponential

darioamodei.com

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Re: Policy on the AI Exponential

#141

Post by pseudalopex »

tptacek wrote: post #56
iamniels wrote: post #20

I like that he comes up with new laws and regulations for AI companies. Can I suggest some more? - You shall not embed copyrighted material in your models. - You shall not bombard every little website in existence with 1 million scraping queries per day. - You shall not use your political influence to pump and dump your AI (or rocket?) company. - You shall not imperill the whole IT sector by buying all CPU and memory…

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.

It is normal, expected, and healthy to offer criticism of self interested proposals. And mock even. What is unhealthy is to imply someone said what they did not.

Re: Policy on the AI Exponential

#142

Post by baq »

Dario has been riding this exponential for longer than almost anyone here, I’d recommend people try to not scream ‘regulatory capture’ immediately when the risks have indeed materialized and the trend critically does not show any signs of slowing down, in fact the only disagreement is whether it’s accelerating. You have to start thinking in log scales to be able to forecast anything.

Re: Policy on the AI Exponential

#143

Post by simianwords »

Of all the points, I find only this one fair: Dario is making it hard for competitor startups to come up because he's proposing additional regulations.

A good proposal here is: should Anthropic and OpenAI become sort of VC's that fund other competitors?

Re: Policy on the AI Exponential

#144

Post by thepasch »

barrkel wrote: post #134
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.

Working to keep a roof over the head of yourself and those you love is a necessity. It can become an identity if you enjoy what you do, sure, but that is not a given for, I'd say, a big majority of the workforce, globally.

Re: Policy on the AI Exponential

#146

Post by balefulboy »

aspenmartin wrote: post #138
oudlys wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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(co…

METR's time horizon is not a reliable metric of LLM capability growth: https://www.transformernews.ai/p/against-the-metr-graph-codi...

Re: Policy on the AI Exponential

#147

Post by baq »

SilverElfin wrote: post #14

I have to be honest, I am tired of reading these arrogant, self-absorbed posts from Dario and Anthropic in general. Opening with this lord of the rings reference just feels like they are trying too hard and are untrustworthy. As annoying as their tone is, the real big danger is what they are setting up for. All this fear-mongering around Mythos, the overly aggressive controls on Fable, and these manifestos they keep…

It’s easy to dunk on them because of incentives, but consider for a moment a world in which they have access to internal, non-lobotomized models, have run evals on them and have been genuinely concerned by what they saw.

Re: Policy on the AI Exponential

#148

Post by snaking0776 »

reducesuffering wrote: post #58
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…

It's denialism, same as climate change, the subconscious fear to really grapple with the actual "what if" alternative scenario. Anthropic are true believers. They got to $1T in 5 years by being exceptionally smart and ahead of the curve here. Meanwhile HN just continually devolves into reactionary cynicism. "must be marketing, they just want to be rich, impossible AI advances much further." Meanwhile at every step of…

I don’t really think it has to do with general denial in this case. I think he’s likely right in that pushback against datacenters is partially the release of angst over the threats which these models pose but in an indirect fashion since power is so unevenly distributed that local political organizing is the only real mechanism for people to act through. I think everyone feels nervous about these tools. People are scared of autonomous weapons, hackers using agents, and any of the other present issues that already exist. I think some of the pushback that comes in these threads is the fact that people like Dario are so focused on the long-term view that they suppress all immediate threats which already exist. You don’t need to argue about exponential growth or “AI being better than humans at everything” to want to better regulate this technology.

I would argue the best way to safeguard against long-term threats is to start by focusing on the issues that already exist. If you can offset the health risks of local datacenters or issues of unequal distribution of wealth by creating a more equal society right now then you’re already on the path to handling these long term issues. To me, this distant focus only distracts from the already present issues and conceals effective policy in this moment. We do need to safeguard against AI risk and it’s already here. Don’t even get me started on the havoc which recommendation systems have caused in society in the last 15 years which we still don’t call AI because it doesn’t speak.

Tl;Dr: These essays can feel disingenuous because:

1) AI risk is already present without exponential growth. The exponential growth argument often feels like a distraction from the fixes we could put in to fix the current issues that are already here.

2) The people stating this argument often have billions of dollars to gain if it comes true. While they may be altruistic, I also don’t see them doing all that much to fix the issues that people are already claiming exist and instead continue onwards on their path by justifying that they are the only ones responsible enough to handle it if the super intelligence does arrive. By continuing down that path, if that day ever does arrive they’ll have ensured the existence of a system which is unable to handle it.

Re: Policy on the AI Exponential

#149

Post by thepasch »

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…

As per usual in situations like these, one must look at the actions in order to assess whether there's any worth in the words. And the actions of Anthropic have, by and large, been steering hard towards establishing a walled garden, empowering corporations over consumers, pushing for regulatory capture under the guise of national security, and consolidating as much power as possible within Anthropic and no one else.

He is certainly skilled at writing philosophical essays that sound like they make cogent and thoughtful points (and sometimes genuinely do make cogent and thoughtful points), but his company's actions disregard his rhetoric at their best and actively contradict it at their worst. For instance: there was zero pressure on Anthropic to release this model to anyone - they were ostensibly in the lead, which is the exact scenario they said they'd hold back model releases back when they axed their safety policy the instant it came under the slightest amount of economic pressure:

> And it promises to “delay” Anthropic’s AI development if leaders both consider Anthropic to be leader of the AI race and think the risks of catastrophe to be significant. https://time.com/7380854/exclusive-anthropic-drops-flagship-...

Yet this essay proposes this extreme auditing and regulatory administration pipeline that new models are supposed to go through before they release, right after they, themselves, under no pressure, ran a months-long marketing campaign under apocalyptic rhetoric, which they continue to harp on to the point of nerfing/auto-downgrading their model into uselessness for many legitimate tasks that older models had absolutely no issue supporting, while the supposedly extremely dangerous version... can be freely used with no guardrails by their corporate partners.

The hypocrisy here is neither difficult to see nor is it particularly sophisticated, which makes it all the more infuriating.

Re: Policy on the AI Exponential

#150

Post by Spartan-S63 »

tptacek wrote: post #56
iamniels wrote: post #20

I like that he comes up with new laws and regulations for AI companies. Can I suggest some more? - You shall not embed copyrighted material in your models. - You shall not bombard every little website in existence with 1 million scraping queries per day. - You shall not use your political influence to pump and dump your AI (or rocket?) company. - You shall not imperill the whole IT sector by buying all CPU and memory…

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.

How is the subject of potential regulation considered a stakeholder?
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