Rick Zotz

Texan / Technologist / Pragmatic Protagonist

[Rick Zotz @Zotz]

"You may all go to hell, and I will go to Texas."

– Davy Crockett, in 1835, after his exit from Congress

[Rick Zotz @Zotz]

@MyTeslaMoonship The cheesesteak burrito has been a favorite there. The tacos, too. Stopped at the one in Denton a few weeks ago.

[Rick Zotz @Zotz]

@TechOperator Fora is a web forum platform run by VerticalScope. I'm a moderator on one of them.

[Rick Zotz @Zotz]

"No product plan extends with any certainty beyond the first encounters with customers."

– Helmuth von Moltke, following his reincarnation as an auto industry consultant

[Rick Zotz @Zotz]

That day is not today, or anytime soon.

Major automakers will offer autonomous driving of their own or from partnerships within five years. They offer vehicles in various types, capabilities, and styles not offered by Tesla, and unlikely to ever be offered by Tesla. Customers will continue to buy what they want.

[Rick Zotz @Zotz]

@TechOperator Well... you should have asked us. 😄

[Rick Zotz @Zotz]

@TX_MattDaddy I always enjoyed passing the one in Hondo: "This is God's country. Please don't drive through it like Hell."

[Rick Zotz @Zotz]

@TechOperator @TX_MattDaddy @kerrybwalker My NAS is an old Synology DS1515+ (repaired board; upgraded fans) with five relatively ancient 1TB drives, 2 WD Black (from a long-gone Ivy Bridge workstation), and 3 WD Green (from a long-gone Drobo). The drives each have 64,000-68,000 hours. 😳

[Rick Zotz @Zotz]

@TechOperator My multi-level storage:

Workstation: SATA mirror
- Active Backup (all) to NAS
- OneDrive (docs) to O365
NAS: Synology RAID
- iDrive to iDrive cloud

[Rick Zotz @Zotz]

@TechOperator How did we ever survive with such well-placed, clearly-marked, purposeful controls just a flick away? I pity the challenged. No wonder they need a computer making decisions for them. 😉

[Rick Zotz @Zotz]

One's own corporate experience depends much on the sector you play in.

The engineering, manufacturing, and retail sectors run on different and more rewarding energy than the insurance, education, and government sectors.

If you're working in a beige and banal office farm without a truly meaningful mission, you must change the scenery.

[Rick Zotz @Zotz]

"If you build a product or a service and you're not confident in its functionality, capability, or safety, then don't release it. [...] You pace yourself until you are confident you're releasing something the market will appreciate. The market forces are already there. We don't need any new laws. We don't need new regulations."

– Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, yesterday at the All-in Summit

[Rick Zotz @Zotz]

I'm as surprised as you are, sir."

"What do you mean, surprised? What kind of a surprise?"

"If we don't find any bugs in the system... it's built even better than we'd thought."

– Dr. Charles Forbin (Eric Braeden) expresses surprise to the President (Gordon Pinset) about the rapidly evolving intelligence of 'Colossus: The Forbin Project'

[Rick Zotz @Zotz]

@SawyerMerritt I continue to wish for an 'R2T'. Build it, Rivian.

[Rick Zotz @Zotz]

Competitors won't slow down.
Bad actors won't slow down.
China won't slow down.

The "AI race" is toward a theoretical, undefined, and uncertain inflection point in the future at which a single nation or alliance of nations has wielded the technology sufficiently to flip the geopolitical table, achieving an unprecedented level of dominance over civilization. The U.S. had achieved that through industry, warfare, and culture for nearly a century. We either regain it, or allow others to take it.

Sure, we've seen the cautionary science-fiction – 'Colossus: The Forbin Project', among others – and know we've been warned about handing vital control to immense thinking machines. I'm more concerned about handing regulatory control of highly-influential systems to government in the interest of 'safety'. We've been warned about that, too.

Don't let that happen.

[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.

[Rick Zotz @Zotz]

@MyTeslaMoonship Lottery millions will buy a big home. 😁