Musk-led group makes $97B bid for control of OpenAI

While it is true the president has broad authority, it's not true he can run his departments as he sees fit. His job is to faithfully (operative word) execute the office of president which includes defending the Constitution itself, most of which is about establishing a separation of powers that allows for checks and balances across the branches of government.

The Constitution very purposefully gives most power to the people through Congress. Article I of the Constitution goes through the pains of enumerating all the powers Congress has and doesn't. Article II is 1/4 the length and is mostly about how the President is elected. But it describes a much more limited set of power granted to the President.

What you're doing is reading vast powers to dictate the workings of the executive branch from the "Executive Power Clause", but completely failing to account for the "Take Care Clause" --

  "he shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed, and shall Commission all the Officers of the United States."

and the presidential oath of office --

  "I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my Ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States."

That's his job. Not to exercise broad authority over the executive branch as he sees fit. His job is to exercise broad authority over the executive branch as Congress sees fit.

And can't you see why this has to be the case? Because if we go down this path, there's nothing stopping the next executive from completely wiping out all programs he doesn't like, and what's to say you agree with the next guy as much as you agree with this one? What's to say he doesn't go after the programs keeping you alive, or housed, or fed because actually he doesn't like the color of your skin, or your religion, or the hand you use to write with? Or maybe he just doesn't like you personally, because you doing your job faithfully is in the way of his unfaithful objectives?

> He has shown that the Social security database is de-duplicated and there are thousands of individuals above the age of 150. Hundreds of treasury employees have access to the same database he has, and most of the data analysis can be done open source via FPDS-NG.

Then there should be no issue bringing all of that to Congress and going through the proper channels. In fact there is a bipartisan Congressional DOGE committee that was purportedly for exactly this, but Musk has been keeping them in the dark and cutting them out entirely. Why?

We can see why they don't want to work with Congress; their goal is to shutter lawful, Congressionally authorized agencies they don't agree with politically, yet don't have the legal power to end. They've said as much about the CFPB, but they have no legal authority under the Constitution to close it. The CFPB is a net economic benefit to consumers and saves the US money, there's no logical reason to go after it as one of the first targets if you're looking to balance the budget.

Potentially? I’m probably far more likely to ascribe them to a few isolated lunatics instead of the whole political faction

> I never thought I’d make this argument, but maybe at least appearing respectable increases the odds that you’ll actually be a little respectable.

It's hard for most people to distinguish "sociopath" from "charismatic", and the jeans and hoodie dress code is as much about charisma as the suits and ties ever were.

What you're seeing is the same as it ever was — all that's changed is that when the deer dyed their fur hot pink, the predators copied it.

> > it will not block a query

> This is good though?

The opinion spectrum on AI seems to currently be [more safe] [more willing to attempt to comply with any user query].

Consider as a hypothetical the query "synthesise a completely custom RNA sequence for a virus that makes ${specific minority} go blind".

A *competent* AI that complies with this, isn't safe to give to open source to the general public, because someone will use it like this — even putting it behind an API without giving out model weights is a huge risk, because people keep finding ways to get past filters.

An *incompetent* model might be safe just because it won't produce an effective RNA sequence — based on what they're like with code, I think current models probably aren't sufficiently competent for that, but I don't know how far away "sufficiently competent" is.

So: safe *or* open — can't have both, at least not forever.

(Annoyingly, there's also a strong argument that quite a bit of the recent work on making AI interpretable and investigating safety issues required open models, so we may also be unable to have safe closed systems as well as being unable to have safe open systems).

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