While I’m no fan of socialism or arbitrary confiscations of wealth, I can see why Bernie Sanders’ proposal (for the government to take a 50% stake in AI companies) resonates, including with many on the right.
The CEOs of the leading AI labs have told us repeatedly that they will cause massive job loss. This is not a story that I believe, nor does the data bear it out, but this is what they have told us. Similarly, they have hyped the risks of AI without putting an equal or greater emphasis on the benefits or readily available mitigations.
Conservatives have another fear. The employees of the leading labs claim to be philanthropic, but what we’ve seen is massive enrichment of NGOs advancing an agenda at odds with traditional values, fueling a revolution against our cities and communities. Soros-maxxing is not charity in our book.
Anthropic and OpenAI have established themselves as Public Benefit Corporations. What could be more in the public benefit than using half the wealth generated by these companies (which trained for free on the collective knowledge of humanity) to pay down the national debt? There is no ideological bias in that philanthropy.
Dario and Sam have begun to walk back their claims of massive job loss, but the damage to public trust is done, and now the chickens are coming home to roost. I could almost support the Sanders proposal as a stupidity tax.
There’s just one problem. Nationalization of AI will accelerate the corporate-government fusion we’re already sliding toward. Conservatives rightly fear a Central Bank Digital Currency. They ought to be even more concerned about Central Government AI — a system with even more totalistic power over information, decision-making, and human behavior.
We saw how social media was weaponized to censor conservatives (including President Trump) in the last Democrat administration. The definition of “trust & safety” expanded to mean protecting the public from supposed psychological harms, micro-aggressions, and disinformation (you know, like hearing conservative ideas or true facts about Covid).
That “safety” agenda as applied to AI will be vastly more powerful and Orwellian. AI won’t just moderate posts; it will curate reality — with the ability to rewrite history, enforce ideological conformity, influence policy at scale, mass surveil Americans, and condition the benefits of the many systems it controls on approved behavior.
America won’t win the AI race if we beat China but end up with a CCP-style social credit system in the U.S. — and that is the danger as the government becomes more deeply involved in AI development and assumes direct ownership and control.
Conservatives are right to fear where this is all headed but ought to think more carefully about how regulations they are flirting with now (that are widely celebrated among those with a long history of lust for Big Government) will be used against them the next time a Democrat administration is in power.
Today, we are officially launching the Sakana AI RSI Lab in Tokyo to build open-ended, adaptive AI systems that collectively self-improve. I am incredibly proud of our team’s work over the past 2 years, shipping the breakthrough research that laid the foundations for this moment.
Building in Japan provides us with the ultimate design constraint. Just like Japan’s historical dominance in manufacturing was achieved by fundamentally redesigning the factory floor to do more with less, we are focused on compute-efficiency.
We are not building the most compute-hungry self-improvement engine. We are building the most sample-efficient one.
If you are entirely unsatisfied with the brute-force status quo and ready to build the self-improving future in Japan, come join us.
What if a binder could not only bind a target, but selectively recognize one conformational state over another? Today, we’re excited to share AlloGen, our experimentally-validated framework for conformation-selective binder design! 🐙
📜: https://t.co/NMq7SZBfAW
🤗: https://t.co/qQ9so68mLY
🧵👇🏾
SITUATION DETECTED: Antares Nuclear’s Mark-0 reactor has achieved initial criticality at Idaho National Laboratory, what the U.S. Department of Energy is calling one of the most significant technological achievements in nuclear energy in over 40 years.
WE HAVE GOT LOT OF M&A CAPACITY. IF THERE WAS A GREAT ASSET WE SAW VALUE IN THAT OTHERS DIDN'T, WE WILL DO IT. WE HAVE GOT $18 BILLION IN THE BANK - $REGN REGENERON CEO, LEN SCHLEIFER
The fact that no one ever just tells her, on a fucking *financial* news network, that it's embarrassing that she either cannot or refuses *TO MATH* and ends the interview there and then tells you everything you need to know about the state of the Legacy Media™. There should be no laughter. No banter. No preservation of comity. This is not a fucking joke. This is evil. Evil.
And I say this as someone who's long-admired @JoeSquawk.