Tom C

Here for the lols.

[David Sacks @DavidSacks]

This is Trust & Safety 2.0.

The last time we had media-generated panics like this (with Russiagate and Covid), social media companies created “trust & safety” teams to censor conservative and dissident voices. Those hires worked with left-wing NGOs like the SPLC to police public discourse and do an end-run around the First Amendment. It almost worked, until Elon bought Twitter and exposed the whole game in the Twitter Files.

This time the plan is to embed unfireable EA minders inside every AI company as the new trust-and-safety layer. The censorship and control will be far more comprehensive, but also more subtle. Anytime they don’t get what they want, this unaccountable NGO layer (with the veneer of “trust the experts” pseudoscience) will shriek to the press that the AI company is risking humanity, and they will be celebrated as “whistleblowers.”

These groups haven’t earned our trust, and their agenda is not our safety.

https://t.co/3eIsHxaC7h

[Lina Khan @linamkhan]

Law enforcers already have authority to charge companies and their CEOs for creating and releasing dangerous, unvetted, or defective products. We shouldn’t let discussions about new legal regimes distract from the fact that there’s no AI exemption from laws already on the books — a point @FTC emphasized repeatedly during my tenure.

1. There is an extensive set of laws that govern dangerous and defective products. For example, releasing unvetted AI models or agents can violate consumer protection laws. Shipping flawed AI tools without implementing adequate measures to detect and stop rogue or defective AI agents can be an “unfair or deceptive” act or practice under the FTC Act (and analogous state laws). And some state AGs are already exploring holding AI firms and their CEOs criminally liable when their models participate in criminal activity.

2. Existing laws also prohibit “unfair methods of competition.” This covers instances where AI firms appropriate the competitively sensitive information of their customers, including through tracking their use of various tools. It can also cover instances where firms pursue dangerous behavior, aware that doing so may compel rivals to do the same.

As the Supreme Court has noted: “A method of competition which casts upon one's competitors the burden of the loss of business unless they will descend to a practice which they are under a powerful moral compulsion not to adopt, even though it is not criminal, was thought to involve the kind of unfairness at which the [unfair methods of competition] statute was aimed."

3. The highly concentrated and interconnected structure of these markets could be creating major risks and conflicts of interest. We had started investigating these partnerships and cross-investments across the stack (and released a preliminarily overview of some findings: https://t.co/jJ5cS3Pin3).

Both federal and state enforcers should be scrutinizing these opaque relationships and inter-dependencies. We are already seeing how these relationships could undermine accountability. For example, OpenAI could face liability given the Hugging Face incident, but Hugging Face being bought up by Nvidia means that we’re unlikely to see it file a lawsuit over this — given Nvidia’s strong incentive to see OpenAI continue full speed ahead.

4. As AI tools dramatically change the landscape of cybersecurity risks and hacks, all businesses should be doubling down on having core security protections in place. Firms that fail to invest in adequate data security measures or fix known vulnerabilities can also be breaking the law. A recent analysis showed that around 1/3 of Fortune 100 companies do not even have a way to notify them about security issues. During my @FTC tenure, we sued firms for poor data security practices and held CEOs liable when they were personally responsible.

https://t.co/nwZ5Av8fOK

https://t.co/KjRye8y9SY

5. As policymakers consider new legal regimes, we should be looking to lessons from prior efforts to govern major sectors, such as banking and other networks, platforms, and utilities. Tools like structural separations, nondiscrimination, and supervision could be key, and there’s a rich history of what works and what doesn’t. But we can and must pursue any new efforts alongside enforcing existing laws.

[Tom C @ThomasY234]

@AndrewYang @JacquiHeinrich I'd feel safer if we slowed down our foreign wars than if we slowed down AI.

Dividends would be great though.

[Arnaud Bertrand @RnaudBertrand]

This very much sounds like a West-only AI cartel proposal and, in fact, if you read Dario's essay - under the very telling "pacing within democracies" chapter - he specifically says he'd need the US government to issue an "antitrust waiver" for this.

The plan transparently looks like this: agree among themselves not to compete too hard, get an antitrust waiver to make it legal, and while they're at it, get Washington - under the veneer of "safety" - to kneecap Chinese competitors because only "democratic" models can be in this "safe pacing" club.

I'm not even exaggerating: Dario pretty much writes this explicitly.

There are 3 steps to his plan and step 2 is literally: "Frontier AI companies within democratic countries coordinate to establish common safety standards as well as limits on the rate of unchecked AI progress" -> the "unchecked AI progress" that would need "limits" is simply AI progress that happens outside their agreement. Another word for it is simply competition 🤷‍♂️

He also explicitly writes that "a key part of pacing within democracies is to keep democracies’ AI lead over autocracies as large as possible." You can't possibly be clearer than this...

[David Sacks @DavidSacks]

Dario has written that we need to “pace the frontier,” and Sam has agreed. People may be surprised by my response: go ahead.

You guys are the frontier. By any reasonable metric — market share, revenue growth, model capability — the two of you have a duopoly on frontier intelligence. You’ve also claimed the lead is widening because of recursive self-improvement.

I don’t see what you see in the lab. If the unreleased models are scary enough that you think you should slow down, I support your decision to be responsible.

But stop pretending you need anyone else’s permission. 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. Stop pretending METR is independent when it is intertwined with Anthropic’s investors and staff. Stop pretending you need those same evaluators to police competitors who aren’t even at the frontier.

Most of all, stop pretending the motivation to slow down is purely altruistic. You face massive product-liability exposure if your products enable a truly damaging cyberattack. The market already punishes models that behave in unpredictable or unauthorized ways. After the Hugging Face episode, it is simply good business for OpenAI and Anthropic to trade some raw power for reliability and predictability. Call it alignment if you want. It is also just giving customers what they want.

Pacing the frontier would also create breathing room for a more intelligent conversation about regulation than Bernie Sanders’ “shut it all down.” China is very unlikely to join a global agreement, as you know, and that has to be taken into account as well.

So go ahead and pace the frontier. You are the ones setting it. The easiest way not to build superintelligence is for you to agree not to build it. Demanding your preferred regulatory framework as the price of that will look like blackmail of the public and the political system. So just do it.

If you do, you’ll buy goodwill for the next conversation. If you don’t, we’ll know this was just another bid for regulatory capture — or an election-season psyop.

[Andrew Yang🧢⬆️🇺🇸 @AndrewYang]

The obvious move is to distribute the gains from AI quickly and broadly to the American people via a dividend/UBI. That would improve people’s attitudes very quickly.

[Richard H. Ebright @R_H_Ebright]

Fauci Senior Advisor David Morens pleads guilty to "Conspiracy to Commit Offenses and to Defraud the United States" in connection with conspiring with Fauci, Daszak, Keusch, and others to defraud the public about NIH-funded gain-of-function research and the origin of COVID.

[Breaking Points @BreakingPointsx]

@jonstewart praises @krystalball and @esaagar for their good-faith debates in new interview

[Briahna Joy Gray @briebriejoy]

If this *isn't* what happened, AOC could submit to an interview to explain her reasoning. She and Zohran could explain what *new information* caused them to "evolve" on policing, and why the public should have any confidence they won't "evolve" on Palestine now that Tisch & Pelosi are their confidants.

But they avoid any left media that won't give them the tongue bath treatment, and corporate media is already pro cop and Zionist, so here we are. Failure of the fourth estate and Democracy itself.

[Glenn Greenwald @ggreenwald]

This new tactic of AOC and her allies -- to giggle away their past "crazy" ideas -- should not be tolerated.

"Woke" wasn't just some harmless, zany moment. It was a sinister movement that destroyed careers and reputations for the smallest thought crimes. It needs a reckoning.

[shoe @shoe0nhead]

haha woke 1 was craaazy but if you said woke 1 was craaazy during woke 1 you were a fascist racist nazi

so whatever progressive politicians are talking about right now they’ll just “woke 2 was craaaazy” it away in 5 years?

incredible stuff

[ABC7 News @abc7newsbayarea]

SF man scammed out of $18,600 after fake Craigslist rental listing mimics real property owner https://t.co/HWRSJGKnGS

[Ryan Grim @ryangrim]

One reason that many scientists believe the natural origin hypothesis is that they heard Fauci say this. He just straight up made this up.

[Ryan Grim @ryangrim]

The folks who refuse to believe this was a world historic cover up should read this

[Glenn Greenwald @ggreenwald]

One of the main guilty acts of Fauci is not the claim that he got the COVID origin wrong at first. It's that he and his Lancet crew fabricated a certainty about COVID's origins they plainly did not possess -- due to entirely self-interested reasons (namely, their careers and reputations would be endangered if COVID had been caused by gain-of-function and other Wuhan research they funded and participated it).

They then weaponized that fake, deceitful certainty to label anyone who suggested a lab leak as a racist (which never made sense, since the "wet market" theory was always the more racist one), and then also used that non-existent certainty to bully and coerce media outlets and Big Tech to aggressively censor anyone questioning or dissenting from their proclamation.

The complete shutdown of debate, discussion and dissent over some of the this century's most consequential policies was one of the main crimes. That they did this not out of good faith error but crass self-advancement and self-protection made it all the worse.

[Ryan Grim @ryangrim]

This is key. Whether we know for certain whether the lab was Covid’s origin, it is 100% the case that an active cover up was and is underway by people who funded the lab, did work there, and were concerned the lab was the source. Of that there is zero doubt, and it’s criminal behavior of the highest sort, given the stakes.

[Ryan Grim @ryangrim]

This is an idiotic thing to put in an email when you’re engaged in a cover up. Here Peter Daszak says that a U.S. news organization is suing for NIH records (that was us) and urges his Chinese counterpart not to release them, telling her that he will claim everything has already been released.

Sloppiest cover up in history, yet it still worked on lots of people.

[David Sacks @DavidSacks]

Anthropic maintains that it is entitled to train for free on all the world’s output, even if the author objects. But if a competitor trains on Anthropic’s output after paying for it, that is IP theft. The hypocrisy is breathtaking.

[Alina Chan @Ayjchan]

@Rebecca21951651 @MichaelWorobey @jepekar @NewsfromScience @jocelynkaiser @julianbarnes What happened to the dispositive evidence of double spillover from raccoon dogs to people at the Huanan seafood market published in @ScienceMagazine?

[Alina Chan @Ayjchan]

@HHSGov @NIH This claim (unclear to what extent it's a joke) that Anthony Fauci told Kristian Andersen that grants would be awarded automatically should be looked into.

What service warrants the automatic awarding of grants from NIH?
https://t.co/rSBfGsSGIs