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Posted by nr378 1 day ago

Frontier Labs Are Selling Garbage to Fools in Washington(deadneurons.substack.com)
186 points | 87 commentspage 2
bishengke 1 day ago|
Same result, different motive: labs want a regulated moat, government wants fewer barriers for incumbents. Safety talk is the costume either way.
bigstrat2003 1 day ago||
That is the entire business model of AI companies: selling garbage to people foolish enough to buy the hype.
0xDEAFBEAD 1 day ago||
"Anthropic is now pacing to generate more than $100 billion in annual revenue, up 50% from just two months ago, the New York Times reported Friday."

https://finance.yahoo.com/technology/ai/articles/anthropic-t...

I don't think people pay that sort of money for technology which is useless.

AlexCoventry 1 day ago||
To all appearances, OpenAI just solved [1] a Nobel-level (Fields medal-leval, strictly speaking) math problem, but you still think it's hype?

[1] https://openai.com/index/navier-stokes-solution/

etcetcetcetceta 1 day ago||
Brute-forcing the plagiarized and in-progress work of an established mathematician, utilizing the collected efforts of hundreds of other mathematicians over the past century is hardly the victory you seem to think it is.

Do you feel like you're getting good value for money if you solve a millenium problem at a fourteen million dollar loss?

another_twist 1 day ago||
> Do you feel like you're getting good value for money if you solve a millenium problem at a fourteen million dollar loss?

Yes you do. If we factor in wages assigned to skilled mathematicians who have worked on this problem, then the 14m for a 1mUSD prize is good value. Also, once things are solved, it on to applications where even more value could potentially be generated. Here its 1m USD simply because theres a proze assigned to it. But once these solution are used in applications, the yield is calculated on the 14m RnD cost. Which (depending on the application) is a good investment.

twelve40 1 day ago||
there is hype for sure, but i don't get what is the goal here? to get a presumably foolish senator to "ban" the Chinese models? how can you "ban" something you don't control to begin with?

side note, i'm very curious why the Chinese companies currently give those away (some handwavey conspiracies like getting the world hooked on evil Chinese tech don't really explain that, and they also don't make any money off that stuff)

jgalt212 1 day ago||
There is really is no excuse for Washington here. Even for the layperson+, it doesn't take much use of an LLM to figure out where they produce good and usable results and where it's of specious of value.

+ every layperson is an expert in 1 or more areas.

randallsquared 1 day ago||
> every layperson is an expert in 1 or more areas.

This isn't even remotely true, unless you're willing to go as far as "being this person is an area of expertise".

basch 1 day ago|||
I dont have to be an expert to recognize when something is said with authority and confidence. Any time a model says something with conviction, my instinct is to double check.

Now if they taught them to express uncertainty and speak in terms of probability, I might be more likely to be blindly fooled by some kind of uncertain conviction.

sublinear 1 day ago||||
Neither of you is wrong? Every lived experience does produce a unique expertise, not in "being" that person, but navigating their experiences. It would be very unusual that all of someone's experiences are completely worthless.

I suppose you've never had a unique perspective on something? Maybe that reflects on your self esteem? How unfortunate.

jgalt212 1 day ago|||
> This isn't even remotely true

That's quite an extraordinary claim there which I doubt would hold up to an even cursory level of scrutiny. But if you yell it loud enough, maybe people will be afraid to challenge your assertion.

AngryData 1 day ago|||
Yeah but most of these politicians stopped using computers in the DOS era if not before. They will take whatever BS is told to them, cut it in half, and still end up with half bullshit. They have no frame of reference for anything involving computers or technology. People keep telling them LLMs are intelligent things that make conscious decisions and will soon become sentient, and even cutting that into 10% of the claim leaves them with basically zero insight into the technology or how it can be used or how to legislate it.

Our average politician is far above the age that scammers target with LLM based scam phone calls, and being a politician with wealth insulates them from reality and most consequences already, they are completely out of their depth from every direction.

tracerbulletx 1 day ago|||
I mean the military was buying dowsing rods as bomb detectors not that long ago so I don't have a ton of faith in them not being hoodwinked.
iLoveOncall 1 day ago||
> + every layperson is an expert in 1 or more areas.

What do you think 70 years old career politicians are an expert in that would allow them to weigh whether a chatbot's answers are bullshit or not.

sublinear 1 day ago||
I thought the whole point of this discussion is that they don't have to care if it works. All that matters is that the majority believes it does, or at least doesn't make a fuss about the continued spending.

That's their expertise.

Kuyawa 1 day ago||
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defgeneric 1 day ago|
Watching the latest Ezra Klein NYT video thinkpiece from today [1], it seems to me there's an alliance emerging: some degree of political control will handed to the party of the managerial class, the party that represents the threatened class of knowledge workers, in exchange for the regulatory capture the labs are after.

They've been raising the issue bi-monthly through mini-scandals that have until now been consistently slapped down by Jensen Huang, but it seems an alliance with Democrats, just prior to an election where they're poised to take power in the Senate and the House, might finally be how they crack their "problem."

It won't be long before a massive incident is blamed on an open model in the wild, not from inside the labs, and none of us will be able to leverage open models to run private business workflows for the cost of electricity and hardware.

It's worth noting as well that if the Democrats imagine they'll get a "slow down" to protect one of their main constituencies, the professional class of credentialed knowledge workers (or however you slice it), they're dreaming--the labs have stated openly again and again that their business model is to capture the 10T TAM that represents the sum of wages of that very class of workers.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fjZ90V_JREk

0xDEAFBEAD 1 day ago||
Regulatory capture basically only works for industries that the public isn't paying attention to. Since the public is paying plenty of attention to AI, the risk of regulatory capture is low.

https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2026/09/wh...

defgeneric 1 day ago||
That's not what the article you cited actually says, and Tabarrok is also wrong in his conclusion (that we should take Amodei at his word). The article says regulatory capture has in the past gone through a slow process, and the anti-competitive benefits to industry come at the end. Everyone is speculating on the true motives of the labs in the current moment, which is fine as far is it goes, and many different things have come under the "regulatory capture" term. To my mind, it seems what they're really after in this moment is some kind of ban on the Chinese models.
0xDEAFBEAD 1 day ago||
The article says: "Notice that classic regulatory capture [...] happens in the shadows, in the backrooms, away from the public’s eye. As Culpepper argues in Quiet Politics and Business Power, business power goes down as political salience goes up."

Regulatory capture tends to happen "at the end" because the industry is no longer in the public eye. AI is set to be in the public eye for the forseeable future.

People are way too willing to believe half-baked conspiracy theories which they cooked up in 30 seconds. The default presumption should be that labs are seeking the policies they are requesting, e.g. https://darioamodei.com/post/we-must-pace-the-frontier It's true that there has been discussion of open weight models in the past, but that hasn't been the focus of discussion recently.

defgeneric 1 day ago||
Again, Tabarrok is wrong. It's a mistake to think these minor differences in the process imply something else is going on, and the previous instances he notes (pharma, railroads) did not have the essential factor that explains much of what is happening right now: a cheap, low cost alternative that threatens to erode margins with no end in sight save for regulatory intervention. Nevermind the error in the logic (that in the past regulatory capture happened in the shadows, therefore this must not be regulatory capture), the bigger error is in Tabarrok's judgment, his failure to recognize what's going on.
achierius 1 day ago||
Slapped down by Jensen Huang? Do you think he's some kind of neutral arbiter? Certainly he's not on your side.
defgeneric 1 day ago||
Have you not been watching what's been happening? What do you think the open letter in July was about? And the recent (staged) call from the President?

As far as I can tell Nvidia takes a longer-term view on the diffusion and proliferation of hardware and intelligence, and sees the labs' attempts to impose a regulatory structure to save their business models in the short term as contradicting that longer-term view.