nationalization to me simply means the government is their main customer and stakeholder, and shield them from liability, governance, and openness. not that the frontier labs become part of the government per se.
[edit] to be clear, I believe regulation is necessary and urgently important for the software engineering field. The damage being done by the unregulated psychological experiments run by social media and adtech companies is awful and should be curtailed. Engineers should be held personally, professionally, and legally liable for what they produce. But we don't need to invent imaginary bogeymen to do it.
the frontier labs are the new top secret defense contractors.
How could we possibly know this?
Political leaders become a problem when they amass too much power. Corporations become a problem when they amass too much power. It doesn't matter what Sam and Dario's purported values are. They aspire to power and absolutely power always corrupts absolutely.
Technologies which are infinitely powerful or whose power grows too quickly outrun any reasonable attempt at regulation. If you imagine that tomorrow everyone were given a tank, we might think, "alright, everyone has a tank so it's not too bad." But humans are squishy, and our houses are (relatively) squishy compared to tanks. Substantial collateral damage would result from everyone having a tank, and it seems likely that substantial collateral damage will result from everyone having a cyberterrorism-capable slop machine.
this is "direct democracy" and it's not even close to exist in USA... even with that a society can allow powerful people to exist if they don't create any law forbidding that
They are dangerous. But it’s managed.
Centralized power never works. We have the worst times in history to look at.
Nationalization just centralizes to a different set of people. It’s personal ownership or oppression.
We all need open weight R2D2s.
It's going to be interesting on how humanity deals with this problem (well, or if we turn it over to AI and make it their problem and suffer whatever consequences falls out). Being able to gather further information and power by acting on the information you already have causing massive power imbalances that is very hard to deal with, it's a natural outcome.
What value set do you perceive that to be, and why would you take your perception of it to be any more sound than it would be with a politician?
It's not like someone can operate companies of that scale, especially startups, through earnestness and openness. Like national politics, their job is fundamentally about perception management and power brokering across dynamic windows of opportunity. Nothing they say or do can be taken at face value, and you can't reduce their incentives to either company or personal profit in any particular form over any particular time scale.
A meat based paperclip maximizer.
Like Lockheed-Martin or Boeing, etc. there's just interpenetration between the corporate boardroom and the state. They act in each other's mutual interests.
The Chinese system is just more explicit and open about this.
And as a non-American, I can't trust the US state anymore than I can trust its dominant corporate entities. So I fail to see the advantage to the world to it being nationalized. In fact under the current administration this would be an even worse outcome.
bix6•48m ago
This is the most interesting point to me. What are they not releasing that has affected real users? We’ve seen some individual reports from people (eg AI wiped my HD).
skybrian•33m ago
(OpenAI does occasionally report on malicious use though. [1] That shows they do some monitoring.)
[1] https://openai.com/index/disrupting-malicious-ai-uses/