David Sacks: OpenAI and Anthropic Don't Need Regulations to Pace Frontier Models

Insanity

They’ll slow down not because they “are worried” but because their improvements are stagnating as they hit financial and technical challenges.

socalgal2

Admits China won’t stop but says USA’s top should. Reminds me of City in the Edge of Forever

elicash

David Sachs wants to use government to punish people he disagrees with politically, like Dario. He supported the Department of War's illegal actions against Anthropic. He supported the Trump administration's temporary export controls against Anthropic, the first government-imposed pause. He has said Anthropic has created a monopoly, implying that they should be broken up. I don't take him seriously when he says he doesn't favor government action. He favors it when he doesn't like their speech.

nba456_

He's right that if all the frontier labs are in agreement that they should slow down, they don't need the government to do that.

biophysboy

David Sacks is one of the most predictable VCs in Silicon Valley. He could have written "I still have the same thoughts; here's a link to my first and only opinion" and the post would have communicated the same amount of info.

vatsachak

The first time I have agreed with David Sacks

throwaway63467

I guess what they really want is to limit sale of AI models to compliant vendors and then raise the bar to compliance just high enough so they can pass it but smaller labs can’t. There’s no moat, it’s an efficient market that drives margins to zero right now, of course they don’t want that, collusion of the big vendors is the next logical step.

daveguy

But.... Money. (as if no one understands this is regulatory capture and/or failure to improve... aka Money)

agd

Huge amount of skepticism on HN right now, but the models are increasingly capable, and there are real, significant risks. The approach proposed by Amodei looks sensible - voluntary checks at frontier labs, and appropriate regulation to follow. Yes, the devil's in the details, but it feels like the right approach overall.

nialv7

He is neither right or wrong. The reality is that this is a lose-lose situation from the ordinary person's perspective. Regulation -> regulatory capture and things get worse faster, no regulation -> things simply get worse faster. I mean I don't know what we do at this point. Ideally AI researchers need to be treated like nuclear scientists working for an adversary. But we all know that's not going to happen.

dwohnitmok

Eh. This entire tweet smacks of being AI generated. It has a huge amount of LLM-isms. I wouldn't be surprised if Sacks just prompted an LLM to just come up with whatever rebuttal to whatever the regulation side comes up (given the big set of regulation tweets) with sounds most convincing, given his usual anti-regulation stance. Anyone with a Pangram account who can check?

simianwords

(100% AI generated tweet btw) My take is that there's a real impending doom with real reason to coordinate a slow down: I'd put this at 60%. Reasons? All smart people are on this position. Dario has been saying this since 2015 or so. Paul Christiano as well. Hell even Elon Musk. I think its highly unlikely that you would base your entire world-view on a certain thing and then actually act on it when the time comes for a totally different reason (like regulatory capture). The other 15% is that P(doom) and "slow down" are nice shibboleths in the internal EA or AI safety community. You get to be in the community and show commitment to it by taking costly actions that signal that you actually do wanna slow down. For employees it is quitting. For CEO's it is writing these essays. I know this is ridiculous but sometimes things do just come down to this. In 20 years would you look at all of this and think it was not a moral panic and that the slow-down was necessary? The rest 25% is regulatory capture of which people know exactly the reasons

hrpnk

I wished OpenAI and Anthropic IPOd already. They just try to outcompete each other by finding the most splashy headlines undercutting prices in unhealthy and unsustainable means long-term.

Meneth

They might need regulations, if they are for-profit companies with a responsibility to shareholders to maximize profit while sacrificing all other values.

jstummbillig

Like it! Yeah, they can just take action and pressing them on that is fine. It's not like they asked for policy before they started to mine all the data and sell the resulting product, while, surely, at some point, there must have been the thought that the entire enterprise could be considered vaguely problematic. To be fair 1) I feel like Sacks is kind of misrepresenting what is going on – at least according to the stories that the two labs tell, they are already taking it upon themselves to act. 2) Understanding if they should do it is more complicated; I don't think anyone can satisfactorily answer that one, so, as a matter of judgement, it seems like a choice to make and they should just consider this option. At the same time, I don't think that requires the labs to not press for policy changes. Again: Claiming there is an obvious way to do that, that is both realistic and correct seems a little far fetched, but arguably one of the more important and pressing questions of our times to get a hold of.

jacobgold

Make it easy for these companies by passing a law that any AI model a company offers to the public (non-government) has to be released as open weights. This is how we deflate the bubble safely and completely, without having to introduce a government regulator that is likely to go either too far or not far enough. This resolves the coordination problem among these potentially good actors.

deagle50

I'll go a step further, they aren't just pretending, they are blackmailing the country. The sane response would be "we don't negotiate with terrorists, and you will face criminal and financial penalties for damages caused."

yawnxyz

If they want something that looks more like FDA sanction clinical trial proceedings for these products, then what they have to also realize is that they will need a third party to audit every single thing for every single product release and you get something like ERoom's law where every success and model gets more and more expensive release and probably billions of dollars in multiple years release so I don't know if this actually helps them

levocardia

Is it 100% AI-generated? checks Pangram yep, it is. NEXT!

chinathrow

You know what rubs me is that in Darios blog post he talks about "abundance", but what he really means is that Anthropic will bath in endless pools of hard curreny while the rest of the world will try to stay just barely afloat/alive.