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SimianSci • today at 2:24 PM • 2 replies • view on HN

Two things can be true at once here.

1. The American frontier labs made a gamble that training more capable models would be their best return on investment and invested trillions into an area of research that has yet to prove profitable and capable of returning on this investment.

2. The frontier labs have created models that have reached a point of danger where their functionality has exceeded a point where it is responsible to release the product to the public.

The answer here is NOT to start regulating the space to the point where these frontier labs can entrench themselves into the economy and create a regulatory moat. We instead need to be holding these companies liable for their misuse. They took a gamble that hasn't paid out what they were hoping.

When car manufacturers competed over the size and power of their engines, they eventually found that the incredibly large and dangerous engines had a very limited customer base as many evaluated the increased speed to be of marginal benefit when paired with the cost and danger. We've reached a similar point in AI development. But this time the manufacturers seem to want to regulate the field to a point that will ensure the only thing anyone can sell are bigger and bigger engines.


Replies

radicalbyte • today at 2:47 PM

I don't think that 2 is true though. It's exactly the argument we made against open source software.

Yes these models make exploits easier to exploits. Lets use a construction analogy: they've made all of the defects in our buildings easy to see. We have a choice. We either fix those defects, or we ban the tools which lets us see them.

It's clear to me what we do: we use these new tools. Then we fix the defects. Yeah sure it'll mean some work for us but at the end we're in a much much better position.

Anthropic, Open AI and Grok are arguing for hiding the defects. For making us weaker and more vulnerable. For their own profit.

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ryandrake • today at 2:45 PM

> they eventually found that the incredibly large and dangerous engines had a very limited customer base as many evaluated the increased speed to be of marginal benefit when paired with the cost and danger.

When did this happen? At least in the USA, large trucks are eating the lunch of smaller trucks and cars. There isn't a truck so big that the public will say no to. Manufacturers are in an arms race to produce bigger, more dangerous trucks with bigger, more powerful engines.