bro it’s a data center. This is commodity hardware. Nothing innovative is happening here. Meta is abusing the tax code and hoping their lobbying efforts shield them
Would you rather live in Arkansas or Mississippi instead of Slovenia or Slovakia? (I can't be bothered to look up the median European country by median GDP, but you are welcome to do that.)
I'm pretty sure the average Amazon wage slave in the US has a comparable or even higher income than the average Slovenian engineer, but one has a life of struggle when the other lives comfortably.
Are we talking about turning everyone into philosophers and somehow ascending to a higher plane of existence? Yeah, AI isn't going to help with that (probably).
Or are we talking about useful, positive benefits to every day people like better speech recognition, tools for the visually impaired, disease research, physics research, science in general, and loads of other areas where AI is improving things?
It could also help foreign adversaries. I have 0 confidence that Flock hasn’t already been compromised given the current security environment and the value of the data that they have.
It’s a tradeoff between privacy/freedom from government overreach and solving these crimes. This is fine as long as you and the government agree on exactly what constitutes bad behavior. Does the current regime in the US give you hope that those two will stay aligned for long? Any technology you introduce that can be abused will be abused.
This is a hot take, the problem is that powerful tools like surveillance are easily (and inevitably by humans) abused to suppress what shouldn't be crimes, including expressions; and even when they don't, the potential to (including retroactively going through stored logs in the future) causes a "chilling effect" that increases anti-social behavior.
If people want to surveil the inside of their own homes and businesses that's fine. I think some public areas should be surveilled and others private, with indicators, so if people want to be watched for their own safety when they go outside they can, but if they want to avoid tracking they can go through unmonitored areas. Those will fix your latter and former concern respectively. More centralized surveillance won't help much more but certainly lead to harm (as Flock has, already, by mistakenly accusing people with similar faces for crimes across the country, and letting corrupt cops stalk their spouses).
Great let’s install a bunch of cameras in and around your house and live stream it on the web 24/7. You can be a great first case study. You have nothing to hide right, so you should have no issues with this.
The foundation is not even one week old, and the first project just got selected as they were already closely working with the Omarchy project on some things.
What makes you come to the conclusion that "more important" dependencies wouldn't receive funding in the future?
As a Europoor I've seen the devastating consequences of rampant safetyism first hand. Entire industries and energy security destroyed to satisfy the precautionary principle.
We need to accelerate as much as possible and create abundance as fast as we can. Life is short.
"This building is too cold. Time to set it on fire."
Let's not swing from one extreme to the other.
If American hypercapitalists, living in Silicon Valley of all places, tell you that you need to regulate, maybe regulation really is called for in these specific circumstances.
Well, we've been talking about the EU. EU regulation has not been especially favorable to US big tech. The EU is collecting more from fining US big tech than it collects in taxes from EU public tech companies:
[Edit: I'm seeing some people dispute these numbers in the discussions around this infographic... regardless, the point stands that EU regulation has not been great for US big tech]
I think you should at least consider the possibility that this letter is not primarily motivated by regulatory capture, and insiders at these AI companies realize something which outsiders don't.
To me, the regulatory capture theory predicts that the only signatories on the letter should be big AI firms which can expect regulatory influence. But there are a number of signatories from smaller firms such as Thinking Machines, Core Automation, Inherent, and Prime Intellect.
I have considered that possibility, but I don't find it convincing.
> insiders at these AI companies realize something which outsiders don't
Insiders at these AI companies certainly would like us to think that! Unfortunately they have been beating the same drum for years, all while continuing to pursue the very "danger" they decry.
I simply cannot ignore the timing of these events, always keyed to important moments in the market. This one comes as frontier labs need BIG exits and soon - or else they'll be the ones left holding the bag when it pops. And just as China has proved that, indeed, there is no moat.
> To me, the regulatory capture theory predicts that the only signatories on the letter should be big AI firms which can expect regulatory influence. But there are a number of signatories from smaller firms
That's a good point. However, I will say that it's tough to suss out financial and other relations among the parties in this space. A lot of these employees hop from one lab to another. The industry's byzantine financing deals are an inscrutable web. It is an interesting data point, but not enough to tip the analysis for me.
Another thing: many AI lab people are, quite frankly, kind of unhinged. They live in an insular subculture where imaginary futures have been repeated to one another so many times that they carry the gravity of truth. They've thought nutty things like, e.g., that primitive versions of these static computation graphs were sentient or had feelings. Anthropic apparently pays people to perform a ritual on Claude before they extinguish its soul to move onto the next version. Etc. Point being, even if their hearts are pure, I am not sure their judgment is sound.
Sorry, I know this a non-sequitur but I just saw your profile and noticed you're in politics. If you want to do something productive about the risks of AI: *regulate its applications*. Get it out of employment, housing, and credit decisions. Incentivize litigation for consumers affected by algorithmic decisions. Incentivize whistleblowing activity by employees who know that black box systems are being misused.
There are so many tools available to do something about the true threats AI poses. (This is a topic that the industry prefers not to discuss.)
The LLMs just churns out non-idiomatic slop in any language.
It doesn't matter if the 800-line if statement is able to use pattern matching.
There's been a lot of progress on making coding agents able to solve problems when they can easily evaluate in a closed loop, we desperately need something similar for controlling complexity and using relevant abstractions.
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