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How does US regulatory capture do anything to impede PRC's advance?

Nothing, they are just trying to scare monger the public and prime the pump for a massive bailout when it crashes out because apparently China are the big bad meanies.

You'd be fine if the PRC gets to ASI first? That's an interesting opinion.

It has nothing to do with being "fine" if the PRC or anyone else for that matter get to some speculative and hypothetical ASI first. There are zero US regulations that would be effective to prevent that.

US regulations apply to US companies and citizens, exclusively. Anthropic crowding out all future potential competitors in the US via regulatory capture has no weight on what the rest of the world does.

Unless you are proposing military action over a speculative sci-fi future


PRC labs reportedly aren't even thinking about getting to ASI, much less trying. They think of AI as a technology that can provide utility across the board even without anything like superhuman smarts.

A lot of this lust for ASI is driven by America attempting to cling onto the power it has wielded over the world over the past 50 odd yrs.

It smells of paranoia.


Nope, they're accelerating towards superhuman smarts as fast as they can too.

Your loaded question presumes that "ASI" is anything more tangible than a useful marketing myth.

> You'd be fine if the PRC gets to ASI first?

How do rules that inhibit what AI can be sold on the US market (adding additional costs to trading in that market) do anything to inhibit a competing nation from reaching ASI first? Insofar as they inhibit anyone from reaching ASI, its firms whose primary commercial interest is selling AI services in the US market, not foreign threat actors except to the extent those two categories overlap.


Yes, why wouldn't I be? How is that worse than China getting it second?

No, because there is zero reason to think LLMs will lead to it but we do know that the massive LLM investment has a huge financial risk for the US. Not too mention it's exacerbating the climate crisis (you know the actual thing that might end civilization, not a fantasy delusion of AGI), giving citizens cancer that live next to data centers, the extreme decrease in quality of life, and the misallocation of capital while Americans lack healthcare, childcare, housing, and education.

Also don't believe China is actually a threat to the world. That's some cold war delusional think you got there.

All the companies seem to believe is that it's okay to immiserate a large percentage for the pursuit of money, you seem to believe the lies they're feeding you.


> my reply is that they are so precisely because we don't have to type type definitions.

My reply is that no, that's not why they're pleasant. If that were the only criteria, we could conclude Python is only as pleasant as Forth.


The argument here is that the AI is a glorified input page. The input field asks for your username and email and sends it to a backend function. Such an input page is working as intended.

The problem is when the backend function doesn't verify that the email matches the username.


Why on earth would the backend function even take an email?

Or perhaps said different: use the submitted info to identify the account; send any sensitive messages (recovery codes, password resets whatever) to only the contact info on file. If the chat bot can send such email it should do so via an API that sends only to contact info on file for the associated account and not to an email that's provided by the bot.


> Why on earth would the backend function even take an email?

In principle, it could be designed to do so to handle cases where a new email address has been confirmed out of band, e.g. for an account representing a company or a political office. But that's a relatively unusual situation, not something you'd want to be available to every user writing in. (Even if you had an all-human support department, this sort of functionality would only be available to a select few agents.)


Some sites do this to prevent password recovery spam; you need to provide two pieces of information. Ideally not telling the client if they wrote the wrong email, that'd be a security issue of its own.

When such systems are hooked up to a web page they often will ask which contact should receive the reset code

(Pick one:

"send text to number ending in -1234"

"send text to number ending in -5678"

"send email to jo......th@gmail.com" )


Fair enough. Never trust client-submitted browser form, but always trust LLM-submitted form.

If the backend function was so poorly coded to allow such a gargantuan security hole, then it is an even worse problem. Basically Meta is throwing its own engineers under the bus so that its AI chatbot can save face. Scary stuff.

Unless the backend was _also_ vibe-coded, in which case it is still an AI problem.


Okay, I hear you. I do. From a technical viewpoint, that may very well be how their systems are implemented. But this still doesn't answer the question of why the fuck this matters to these states' AGs and the people they represent.

They're incentivised because they're offering plans at a loss and/or pricing out potential customers. All these LLM companies are competing on accuracy and price.

> another engineering discipline

I think we're more like car mechanics in a lot of ways. The same way they might learn cars by working on their own, we learn computers. But I suppose that's still background of a sort.


> Such skull-and-dagger behavior by the tech elite is going to provoke a backlash by non-technical people who don't like to be manipulated. You can't tug on the levers of power indefinitely before it starts to annoy other people in your democratic society.

This article is from 2016; now it doesn't feel like backlash is strictly a function of manipulation.


No-one in this thread is talking about layoffs, they're talking about individual firings.

> any grant program would need to be “aligned with administration policies and priorities.”

From a naive perspective, this sounds a lot like the breeding ground for Lysenkoism (Stalin-approved). In that example, aligning science to the party line led to a couple of famines. I say naive because there were other factors at play (e.g. it was forbidden to criticize Lysenko's theories).


The industry, on average, approves of responsible disclosure because there's a tacit agreement that making risk-proof software isn't feasible. Though admittedly some companies don't seem to be trying very hard anymore.

It's not a dichotomy either, they can both have put the customers at risk.


Transforming 'Micro$oft's' name as a form of commentary is a time-honored tradition.


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