Free markets don't exist to help individual companies, they are explicitly meant to hinder them.

They are meant to help the consumer.

Unfortunately neither of the two parties in the US even pay lip service to free markets anymore.

Any sources on training costs in free fall? My understanding was training costs are proportional to model size. Is it just that compute costs are falling?

I would think that access to power is more critical than compute

I too would like security issues to stay unpatched because only three letter agencies have access to uncrippled tools for finding the bugs.

I think that the frontier labs knew what they were doing when they invested in cybersecurity starting in the spring (or maybe earlier). They knew it would create hype. They knew it fit with their narrative that they are building a dangerous thing (something they believe because it’s fun to believe in doom, because it’s a great story for investors, and because it’s not inconsistent with a moat - in fact it makes a moat via regulatory capture).

Well, OpenAI is at the root of Black October, so maybe they are the problem

You remind me of those politicians who try to scapegoat people who point out security holes. https://www.theregister.com/security/2022/02/15/missouri-end...

Regulate the bad actors, not the neutral tools. Lockpicks aren't illegal, but breaking and entering is. Imagine if MasterLock used a lockpick to break into a government building and steal stuff, then tried to lobby to make lockpicks illegal. That's what OpenAI is doing, and you're falling for it.

“Black October” sounds a lot like Red Scare.

In the hands of 4th party system Progressive Republicans and 5th party system New Deal Democrats, government was an extremely powerful force for trust-busting.

In the hands of 6th party system Republicans, namely Ronald Reagan and Robert Bork, the government worked hard to usher in a a new era of Robber Barons. We live in the culmination of this project.

History says the result depends on the hands, not the tool. 6th party system Democrats have largely failed to undo the Reagan/Bork policies, but that's an act of omission not comission and even then Lina Khan was a big step in the right direction. This issue was on the ballot in 2024 and will be again in 2028. Hopefully we make better choices in 2028.

If you take away all regulation you’d probably end up with a monopoly anyway, as companies would no longer be prevented from merging with their competitors or using underhand tactics to gain market share.

This is the goal of some, but very few overall, government regulations. Not even close to "all".

That's wrong, but why let reality get in the way of a pithy ideology?

Government regulations exist to regulate activity, to prevent, punish, and/or remediate harms.

Environmental regulations exist because businesses wouldn't clean up their own messes. Financial regulations exist almost exclusively because of harms and abuses committed by members of the financial industry. Building codes are updated to reflect lessons learned about people died, to prevent more people from dying the same way.

If AI regulations are passed, it will be because the AI industry decided not to self-regulate itself and stop illegally hacking computer systems, generating CSAM, or various other illegal activities that should easily be preventable if their systems were actually intelligent.

“All” is doing a lot of work there.

Also there are real trade offs. Food would be cheaper if, for instance, it were legal to cut it with any old cheap substance regardless of health effects.

But I totally agree that some regulations are dumb or are regulatory capture monopoly schemes.

Unfortunately like many other things there is no absolute simple rule to save us from thinking. Each case must be evaluated in depth hopefully with domain expertise.