I also like the idea of pacing the frontier and slowing down development so we all have a chance to stop and catch our breath. However, I don't think regulating AI is the way to do it. I would tackle the problem by constraining the resources used to run AI models; the "simplest" way to do that is increasing the costs of running a data center. The two easiest places to raise data center costs are electricity and water tariffs.

I think those two tariffs are the best place to raise costs because they can be increased incrementally, state by state or country by country. The main problem with the regulatory approach is that it's a "big bang" post-board approach. Nothing happens until the regulation is defined and deployed, and corporations are experts at delaying implementation.

Yes, increasing tariffs means touching many individual regulatory domains at the state and municipal levels, but like deploying solar energy or wind power, you can do it incrementally.

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azan_ 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Yes, water not used for human consumption should be more expensive (we should stop subsidies for that). Of course it won’t affect datacenters because they don’t use that much water, but well at least get rid of the most inefficient agricultural practices.

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

I think taxes like these actually worsen the incentive structure. If it’s effectively more expensive to do training and inference, labs will be incentivized even more to improve efficiency. Opaque recurrence seems like a great way to improve efficiency, and it comes at the cost of safety

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xg15 5 hours ago | parent [-]

Even more opaque than the models already are? I take that risk.

I also love how the labs are apparently screaming "Stop us! Please stop us!!!" at the top of their lungs while completely unable to escape their own incentive structure...

	▲	estearum 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> I also love how the labs are apparently screaming "Stop us! Please stop us!!!" at the top of their lungs while completely unable to escape their own incentive structure... It seems like you're implying there's some better alternative, but you're just describing a race-to-the-bottom. It is completely reasonable for every competitor to want an external coordinator (i.e. regulator) to break the pathological competitive dynamics.

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esafak 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

This makes no sense. The hardware is only going to get cheaper. In a decade, everybody could be running an ASI on their phones.

What we need to do is to make unaligned AIs illegal and monitor for them, like we do with nuclear weapons. And make aligned AI strong enough to counter it, for deterrence and defense.

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xg15 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> The hardware is only going to get cheaper.

Is that so? Last time I checked, RAM was getting a lot more expensive...

	▲	dale_glass 5 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Eventually data centers will get sated for one reason or another, or production capacity will increase, or manufacturing will shift toward higher capacities. Or some combination of those.
	▲	esafak 5 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		How long do you think that's going to last? A few more years, at most. Wail 'til the Chinese ramp up production.

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politician 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I downvoted you because I think the OPs model is far simpler to implement and suffers from fewer conflicts of interest.

If we go down the regulation of alignment route, we'll have to ask experts to create those regulations and monitoring regimes. And which experts will the government ask? Oh, right, the parties that stand to benefit the most from regulation: OpenAI and Anthropic!

When "the experts" make certification cost $100M/model because "safety and alignment", then they will have cemented their duopoly.

Meanwhile, tariff rates on compute is a simple percentage that can be scaled up and down. Congress doesn't need experts to do that. Vendors can participate proportionally to their scale. This is far simpler and far more fair.

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convolvatron 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I think the point is even stronger. alignment is really not very well defined, nor are the mechanisms used to provide it. from what I understand it's more of a statistically imposed bias than an impenetrable gate.

personally I would like to flip this around, all of this is a consequence of some really extreme notions about investment. its a tail-wagging-the-dog. the investment community is apparently in love with the idea of an AI-scale vehicle in and of itself. given the amount of power they have, this is funneling a massive amount of resources into something that while really very interesting, probably would never be able to realize proportionate gains without taking down the system that built it. what's the societal control on that.

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3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

[deleted]

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esafak 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Probabilistic safety is too low a bar. We need to project the model outputs onto a safe subspace; lobotomize them, if you will. It may make them dumber, but that's a fine price to pay.

I don't work in this space so I don't know the latest, but here's an example: Provably safe systems: the only path to controllable AGI (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37619285)

	▲	convolvatron 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I don't think the neuro-symbolic model is going to dumb anything down at all. Cyc didn't end up producing anything useful, but the only reason an llm is able to do math at all is that it can keep throwing stuff at lean all day. personally I think that that synthesis will turn out to be more powerful than just llm with constraints, but I don't really work work in the field either.

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esafak 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> And which experts will the government ask? Oh, right, the parties that stand to benefit the most from regulation: OpenAI and Anthropic!

You've never heard of academia, NGOs, and intergovernmental organizations? Sure, the AI labs will have a say but not all of it. You don't ask the fox to guard the henhouse.

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visarga 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Yes, and we need to make microprocessors that do good work, not hack others. /s

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esafak 5 hours ago | parent [-]

Why is it so hard for people to understand the concept of agency in 2026??

What did your CPU do without instruction? Did OpenAI tell its agents to hack the orgs it did? Come on, make a half sensible argument.

	▲	visarga 5 hours ago \| parent [-]
		As long as anyone can put anything they want in the prompt box there is no safety. It's just a tool, the danger comes from what it is being used for.