14 pointsby lisper8 hours ago5 comments
  • qalmakka4 hours ago
    Both OpenAI and Anthropic are locked into an arms race funded on shaky hype-based debt. They have to constantly push the envelope at the frontier or risk seeing their funding pulled, probably causing a global financial crash in the process which would kill them.

    Clearly they've realised that people are increasingly fine with non-frontier models, including Chinese ones. They can't consolidate and just deliver a product to profit because they're constantly being caught up by the Chinese at prices they will never be able to match.

    I suspect their main goal for the last year and a half or so was to pull a GM - let the share of the AI economy grow, then have the government bail them out when the debt becomes unsustainable. Clearly Trump would have never let the bubble explode before the midterms, right?

    Well it's now clear that the US government has way too much debt right now for 2008-style bailouts, and the market doesnt have the money lying around to buy their overinflated stocks at an IPO. The only avenue realistically left to them is to cry wolf so much to get governments to ban all non-approved models, stop new developments and give them breathing room to consolidate to get their current crop of models profitable at higher prices.

    Unfortunately for them I suspect Mr President has way too much dementia and way to little business acumen left to realise the sham going on, so I think they'll keep doing charades for a while until they'll suddenly stop

    • simianwords2 hours ago
      This line of conspiracy theory is sooo uninteresting.

      “It’s all hype”

      “Government bailouts”

      “Labs are fundamentally unprofitable”

      And the same people who say all this will again claim OpenAI should be held responsible and arrested for when agents hack other systems.

      It’s a fundamentally unthoughtout analysis. If you believe that OpenAI should be more careful and prevent future hugging face incidents, surely their decision to delay models is rational? Does it really require tinfoil analysis?

      What would you say when their models cause new incidents like hugging face one?

      • qalmakka31 minutes ago
        I think that the economic side of things of how those businesses are run, and the fact AI has potential to be an incredibly powerful tool, are orthogonal concepts. I don't see how the fact an LLM can be used, autonomously or directly, to perform hacking or penetrate computer systems, has to do with the fact that there's clearly an interest from those labs in being strictly regulated while dictating the rules they should respect in the first place. I suspect such regulations will be surprisingly difficult to implement for anyone but the existing US-based labs, and of course it will be super surprising when it turns out that since the federal government stopped everybody from making new frontier models they suddenly got super profitable.

        > What would you say when their models cause new incidents like hugging face on

        What would you say if Caterpillar builds a bulldozer with a faulty breaking system that kills people? I'd hold them responsible because they failed to oversee the development of their product like every responsible company should do. If they're so much in a hurry to ship that they can't even test what they're building properly, they must be held responsible for that - and I say this as one of their customers and users, not as a random Joe that dislikes LLMs. LLMs are useful but it's undeniable that these labs are clearly desperately trying to keep the lights on no matter the consequences

  • vrighter43 minutes ago
    Oh come on, we're tired of this schtick. They have literally done exactly this before.
  • sfmike4 hours ago
    Don't pull the same con twice...
  • ganelonhb6 hours ago
    Yawn. Anthropic already pulled this trick.
    • simianwords2 hours ago
      We have serious proof that these models are capable of sophisticated attacks.

      So what’s the trick in this honestly? OpenAI shouldn’t care about alignment and just release it? I’m genuinely asking.