Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

On AI regulation and messaging

twitter.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 573 posts

Re: On AI regulation and messaging

#31

Post by afavour »

mschuster91 wrote: post #18
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.

> 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. A product still requires a lot of handholding and human thinking, at least if one does not want everyone even throwing a glance at it to immediately be repulsed by the usual AI slop tells. > I'm an AI advocate but that question makes me feel that AI is…

> It absolutely already is a historical game changer on par with the Industrial Revolution when it comes to the amount of jobs destroyed and economies screwed up

Which economies are already screwed up?

IMO it can’t ever be on par with the Industrial Revolution because AI can only really affect the information economy. Things people do with their hands/bodies have either already been automated or can’t be with current tech. If you’d asked people decades ago they might say no one will ever work in factories by 2026 because they’ll all be automated. It didn’t work out that way. I think AI will go the same way: absolutely game changing to some industries (of which software engineering will be one) but a great many will still survive with less dramatic changes.

If anything it might result in more focus on the human aspects. How many people out there earn their stripes putting together slide decks? In a world where an AI can put together the snazziest presentation you’ve ever seen in a heartbeat it’s going to matter more how you stand at the front of the room and present those slides than it does today.

Re: On AI regulation and messaging

#32

Post by kilpikaarna »

> 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 more a cliche than it is inspiring, and most people think it is deceptive. The thing that will work is actually curing cancer. I think by far the most accurate criticism of AI companies including Anthropic is that we haven’t yet delivered on our big promises to benefit the world. That is totally on us, and I think it’s the criticism you should be making, instead of all this stuff about messaging and marketing.

> 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.

Turns out "winning back trust" doesn't have anything to do with any actual concerns people may have re: employment, electricity prices, stock market bubble, intellectual property, scams, cybersecurity, environmental issues etc. Rather we'll just do all of that even harder and the miracles ("curing cancer", lol) we've so far failed to deliver are bound to arrive in short order!

Re: On AI regulation and messaging

#33

Post by onion2k »

When people talk about Qwen 3.8 being on a par with Fable, they're really talking about Qwen 3.8 Max aka Qwen3.8-2.4T-A95B. That's a 2.4 trillion parameter Mixture of Experts model with 95B active parameters. You need about 400GB of RAM to run it. No one is running that locally.

The distillations of Qwen 3.8 down to a 27B model are good, but they're not on a par with frontier models.

When Dario talks about open weights not being a solution this is what he means - if you don't have 400GB of VRAM lying around the fact that there's an open model like Qwen3.8-2.4T-A95B doesn't really help much. If we're not regulating how models are available, or making sure access is open, then RAM prices will mean everything concentrates on a few very rich companies.

Re: On AI regulation and messaging

#34

Post by dandellion »

blfr wrote: post #29
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.

First, it's not three years since. The real improvements in programming ability arrived in the last 6-8 months. Second, the Internet didn't show up much in GDP and similar measures either! But your point stands. Where are the amazing digital products/stuff? I get that it might take time to arrive as we scale up compute and learn new paradigms. But so much infra already exists (deployment pipeliens, everyone reachable…

I remember people moving the goalposts like that since, let me check... when did AI Dungeon go viral? Wow, 2019.

Re: On AI regulation and messaging

#35

Post by lukeschlather »

glimshe wrote: post #23
mschuster91 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. A product still requires a lot of handholding and human thinking, at least if one does not want everyone even throwing a glance at it to immediately be repulsed by the usual AI slop tells. > I'm an AI advocate but that question makes me feel that AI is…

Not disagreeing with you, but adding to my argument. Despite the human handholding, I feel that 3 years would have been enough for 18 months of thinking about the product plus 18 months where a team could get 3-5 years worth of coding/development done. Yet, we haven't seen anything big yet, like a new Youtube/Instragram, an amazing videogame, a major cure etc. Maybe they are coming, but every day that passes is an in…

It's only been at most the past year where AI has been unambiguously helpful and not a hindrance. 3 years ago it gave the appearance of being helpful but it tended to be more of a hindrance.

Re: On AI regulation and messaging

#36

Post by pas »

pu_pe wrote: post #12

> Overall my view is that AI is structurally a technology that tends to concentrate power, for reasons that have nothing to do with regulation (more to do with the extreme implications of the scaling laws). Open-weights do help some with this but are nowhere near a sufficient solution because they simply shift the concentration somewhat to those with the most compute and chips (which are roughly the frontier labs plu…

Arguably the question is whether it's economically feasible to self-host something similar.

Are you self-hosting Google or Bing? No, but we have quite a huge ecosystem of full-text search tools with PageRank, with options to scale to almost Google scale (if you have the money). After all LLM training starts with the same crawl mechanism.

As long as barriers to entry is not too high (ie. it makes sense to take the risk to start a business that provides something similar - usually for a niche) market forces work.

We have the classic empirical chart reproducing microeconomics.

https://www.fda.gov/about-fda/center-drug-evaluation-and-res...

And setting up a pharma plant is also very capital intensive.

Here the obvious barrier to entry is completely artificial. (Which provides an incentive to spend a lot of money on R&D -- though it naturally raises the question of Pareto efficiency.)

Re: On AI regulation and messaging

#37

Post by woadwarrior01 »

pu_pe wrote: post #12

> Overall my view is that AI is structurally a technology that tends to concentrate power, for reasons that have nothing to do with regulation (more to do with the extreme implications of the scaling laws). Open-weights do help some with this but are nowhere near a sufficient solution because they simply shift the concentration somewhat to those with the most compute and chips (which are roughly the frontier labs plu…

I think his point is hand wavy at best. It presupposes infinite scaling and ignores all the algorithmic efficiency wins that are being discovered. Ironically, many of which are being discovered with autoresearch style workflows, using the very LLMs that his company builds.

The #1 post on HN right now[1] is full of people jubilating about how they can run Qwen 3.8 27B on their > 5 year old GPUs. If that isn't democratization of AI, I don't know what is.

I'm sure he's smart enough to instantaneously realize this too, but as the famous Upton Sinclair quote goes, he won't mention it even if he does.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49324985

Re: On AI regulation and messaging

#38

Post by amarcheschi »

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…

rapture but for tech people

Re: On AI regulation and messaging

#39

Post by nacozarina »

glimshe wrote: post #23
mschuster91 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. A product still requires a lot of handholding and human thinking, at least if one does not want everyone even throwing a glance at it to immediately be repulsed by the usual AI slop tells. > I'm an AI advocate but that question makes me feel that AI is…

Not disagreeing with you, but adding to my argument. Despite the human handholding, I feel that 3 years would have been enough for 18 months of thinking about the product plus 18 months where a team could get 3-5 years worth of coding/development done. Yet, we haven't seen anything big yet, like a new Youtube/Instragram, an amazing videogame, a major cure etc. Maybe they are coming, but every day that passes is an in…

perhaps being 30-50% ‘busier’ is something quite different from being 30-50% more ‘productive’ and ppl are just bad at detecting the difference

Re: On AI regulation and messaging

#40

Post by kingstnap »

> Overall my view is that AI is structurally a technology that tends to concentrate power

> Open-weights do help some with this but are nowhere near a sufficient solution

Which is exactly why Anthropic contributes nothing to, and actively pushes for roadblocks and regulations for open weight models. Can't allow any hope to the masses.

Only people with $$$$$ are allowed to touch Fable. Which of course we have have aggressive guardrails for in case you even try to use it for something dangerous like AI model developement. Plus we are going to retain all data submitted to it just in case someone is trying to be sneaky.

Post reply on HN