that's pretty damn smart if this was a long-term plan to block competitors

andersonpico 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Consider how much money is at stake: some industries have leveraged their power to lobby for bombing entire countries or topple regimes across the world for much less.

Creating an industry around an elusive concept of safety to force regulatory capture seems pretty straightforward to me.

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pphysch 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

It's standard regulatory capture.

You don't say "let's ban my competitor".

You say "let's create laws that make it uneconomical for my competitor to access the market".

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dofm 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Indeed. It's transparent and ham-fisted. I think it may cost him in the future.

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pphysch 5 hours ago | parent [-]

People clown on Alex Karp for his unedited maniacal "crashouts", but this is a real public crashout that made it past a team of publicists.

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5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

[deleted]

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api 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I want whatever Karp is on when he does those interviews or writes that shit. Seems like fun.

	▲	dofm 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I am not a fan (he’s really alarming and so is Palantir) but one thing from the recent CNBC interview caught my attention. He rushed past it but he asked something like: if these frontier models are going to be creating so much value, why are they selling tokens and not taking a cut? It is a very provocative question but it just spilled out of his mouth and then he went on to something else.

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tripleee 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

is it opportunistic though, or planned from day one? The safety narrative has been there since the beginning

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sanderjd 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I mean... I'm not even extraordinarily cynical about this stuff, but to me this seems like a totally normal level of corporate gamesmanship?

Companies look for and seek to maintain competitive moats. This is not particularly clever, it's a core part of corporate strategy.

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nextaccountic 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

It's also highly unethical (for some values of ethics)

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tripleee 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

of course, but the safety angle was pushed from day one. I more mean the forethought of how it would play out

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reasonableklout 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Ok but Dario has been thinking about AI Safety since 2016 [1], before even GPT-1. I think the simplest explanation is that the Anthropic folks genuinely believe what they say, it just happens to also help their business a lot.

[1]: https://arxiv.org/abs/1606.06565

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mlcrypto an hour ago | parent | next [-]

That just shows how wrong he's been because there was nothing unsafe about AI in 2016. And the people theorizing about this stuff in the 20th century? I want to see what crazy code they were writing

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sanderjd 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Yeah I think this is right. The best setup is when a true belief aligns with a competitive moat.

I definitely believe that (to his credit!) Amodei is a true believer in safety. But I also think it was important for many of the deep pockets investors who have been involved in the company since early on to recognize that this would be a potentially defensible moat.

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mkss 3 hours ago | parent [-]

"True believer in safety" but happily quoting arse wipe Vance? Give me a break...

	▲	sanderjd 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		What was the quote? For what it's worth, I do really think that Amodei believes in and cares about safety. But that is not the same as believing that he is entirely altruistic or above the influence of politics.

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sanderjd 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Does this really seem exceedingly clever and hard to foresee to you? To me, it seems like a pretty standard regulatory capture strategy.

This doesn't even mean that they're wrong about the risks or that they're lying. But surely all the investors understood this factor in their moat.