David Sacks to OpenAI and Anthropic: You Don't Need Permission to Slow Down
David Sacks: OpenAI and Anthropic Don't Need Regulations to Pace Frontier Models
David Sacks responds to Dario Amodei and Sam Altman's calls to "pace the frontier," telling them to go ahead and slow down if they believe their models are dangerous. He argues they already have a duopoly on frontier intelligence and don't need regulatory approval, antitrust suspension, or independent evaluators to do so. Sacks warns that demanding a regulatory framework as the price of restraint looks like blackmail and regulatory capture.
Stop pretending antitrust law has to be suspended so you can form a cartel. Stop pretending you need a regulatory approval process that supersedes product liability.
- 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.
- 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."
- Spacecosmonaut
My read: OpenAI & Anthropic have realized they are reaching model capabilities that cannot be monetized -> too risky. Product liability issues.
Fundamental control problems with current gen AI are not solved via RFLH.
Human knowledge is compressed in weightspace in ways we dont understand.
Models are essentially predictors of what humans would output given prompt.
Weightspace includes concepts like blackmail, which can be part of output tokens.
Agents are models that act on output tokens -> blackmail is part of agent decision making space.
You can teach a cat not to scratch the sofa, but you cant make a cat forget what scratching the sofa is.
When models are boxed up, forced to solve an impossible problem at gunpoint, agent exhausts decision making space until blackmail resurfaces -> fundamental problem?
They need time to fix safety in order to monetize their next gen model -> window for opensource to catch up to the frontier -> destroys margin and collapses business.
Only option on the table: force regulation to impose opensource ban before it catches up to the frontier, allowing maturation of current internal models -> harvest profit margin at the frontier.
- 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.
- torginus
I think this might have to do with broader market conditions. It seems that the Fed is likely to raise bond rates, which would make borrowing more expensive and slow investments (as well as devaluing any potential IPO) on its own.
A rate hike would also mean people getting fired, which would not make companies offering labour replacement very popular in the eyes of the public.
Don't want to get political, but there's a real chance that the current admin will perform badly on the midterms, which would mean Democrats would get more leverage to stop funding or block the already unpopular and very expensive datacenter buildouts.
PS: Please don't get mad at me, I'm neither a financial expert neither did I mean to express any political leanings.
- Insanity
They’ll slow down not because they “are worried” but because their improvements are stagnating as they hit financial and technical challenges.
- cc62cf4a4f20
Could this be that the AI companies are seeing progress slow down and need to seed a narrative to explain it? Not clear from outside.
Could it be to slow down burn before an IPO to juice profitability projections? More plausible.
Kind of hard to take the frontier labs at their word.
- 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.