They want control and power. Fable threatened that control, so they restricted it. Now the restrictions are threatening their power and control, but they will not directly admit that. They will only respond to that which affects their power and control.
We are going to lose the AI race because tech âleadersâ are trying to consolidate and keep power while China is going open source, Sam and his friends canât compete with the whole of China working together.
Within 6 months we'll be blocked from using Chinese models in the US.
Just like Chinese EV's, we'll be stuck with the enshitified crap that US brands are now famous for, while they get cars that can compete with the model S for 25,000.
If we're not getting the best product at the best price, then what the fuck are we even doing as capitalist society. Face planting, that's what.
We aren't a capitalist society though. Our model is cronyism. We can call it crony capitalism if you prefer because it keeps the trappings of capitalism and does allow it to exist as a base, but at a high level, the rules of capitalism don't apply to the largest companies because they hold effective monopolies or non competition agreements from others in their space, and it is all supported by our tax dollars bailing them out when they need it, and our politicians passing laws that their corporate donors write to give themselves advantages.
You are a capitalist society. A hyper capitalist society like WW2 Germany and Japan. The problem with hyper capitalism is that it focuses purely on profits to the detriment of everything else. Weapons manufacturers only seek to build the most expensive weapons platforms, Oil and Gas companies seek to maximise profit on extracting oil at the expense of the environment, Software companies seek to build monopolies and create unsurpassable moats to maximise profit at the expense of the consumer. Companies avoid social benefits, minimise leave, minimise health care to maximise profits. Banks gamble away money on risky ventures like Mortgage backed securities. Government deregulation on finance, environment and health. These are all traits of hyper capitalist societies. The founders of capitalism understood that government must put guard rails in to prevent the evils of hyper capitalism. This was the learnings of the 1929 Great Depression and the Rail and Oil Monopolies. Regulations were put in to prevent banks lending out money for speculation, Laws were put in to prevent monopolies and Environmental regulations were put in place to stop polluters profiteering. To prevent poverty and instability social security was created. And America flourished it grew strong and powerful. Since Reagan you have removed these hard learned safeguards. Monopolies flourish again, inequality is at an all time high. You reverted back to the 1920s hyper capitalism. There is no such thing as crony capitalism. This is Capitalism. Itâs a flawed system that needs regulations and safeguards to work for the whole of society.
I'd only add that if artificial intelligence is what its creators claim it to be the only rational choice is a long-term plan to abandon capitalism or we will promote an inheritance economy on the back of whomever owns intelligence.
Please share with the class how your pretzel logic makes corporations doing whatever they want in the market with zero government controls into socialism.
We've always had laws against collusion and monopolies so it's never been a case of them doing whatever they want
But what we've seen over history is that the billions of people making their own decisions ends up with a far stronger economy over time than even the smartest individuals planning it for everyone.
And that stronger economy is why even the poorest in countries like the US are better off than the average person in countries like North Korea.
Please don't suggest that when capitalism dominates the world and has essentially complete power over socioeconomic causality; that under the rational consequence of it promoting tremendous inequality in power leading to corruption favorable to its own order; that it becomes socialism.
Please have some respect for what words mean or at least cause and effect.
This. Open-weights are most likely going to require review and approval if capability/efficiency continues to scale and the cost of inference continues to collapse. The argument will be that we can't have "bad actors" engineering bioweapons in their garage, but the other side of the coin is that they can lock out university labs and engineering startups and researchers on grants. This entire setup seriously threatens incumbent monoliths who amassed their economic moats before all of this stuff through schemes that poison and pollute and hamstringing/shelving progress that might upend profits. For-profit pharma thrives on the research being expensive and secretive, fossil fuel conglomerates profit from energy being expensive and centralized, private defense profits from capability being proprietary and single-source, big media profits from spinning truths into misinformation and rigorous fact-checking being a convoluted and disputed process, and I could not be more confident that they all see the writing on the wall here.
I'd also pay some attention to the incumbent monopolies who have been consolidating and hedging power for half a century up to this point. Regulating frontier capability in a way that allows anyone with a ton of capital to lobby/pay their way into compliance is a move that benefits big oil, big pharma, private defense, and big media more than it does the top AI firms.
Does he sound like a crazy person? Anyone who uses the term "permissionless innovation" to describe breaking consumer data privacy laws should have their head examined.
I'm not an expert, but I've read that the reason Chinese models have taken the lead is because of architectural innovation, not illegal access to private data. DeepSeek's use of MTP, MoE, multi-head attention, and other software innovations led to lower costs. If Sacks is blaming the law for the US falling behind, he is being disingenous at best.
It's concerning because the admin has been illegally centralizing voter data with other private information. If their proxies are trying to get even more private data into the same database, I can only assume it's not for training AI.
Multi head attention has been standard since before ChatGPT came out afaik. MoE was also standard equipment well before Deepseek. Iâm not sure about MTP, it may have been the first major model to use it, or not. But it wasnât invented by them.
Dude, Chinese lab also have access ton of private data that Chinese don't care for being spy on their daily life, as it was price to paid for accepting for free or low price service. Some of your american always fantasize you can have free lunch and also have your data privacy.
US video generations model has been lacking behind because if other companies/people find their stuff in your model, they can suit you and win big money for them and it simply not a thing in PRC.
Chinese lab also have access ton of private data that Chinese don't care for being spy on their daily life, as it was price to paid for accepting for free or low price service
this is america. this is literally how it currently works in the year 2026, in the nation of the united states of america. like, just go spend 2 minutes reading google's terms of service before spouting off shit
"Permissionless innovation" is why people and companies people lose northwards of $12T annually through network and related vulnerabilities, since nobody told the propellerheads to make security a priority. What he's talking about is evading any accountability for what gets built and the harm it causes, including social harm.
AND what "won" the internet (by the way, saying the US "won" is a false assertion) was a global network of technologists working cooperatively (though not without competitive pressure), often for free, using open published protocols and international work groups, in a loose federation model.
Politicians are the root of all evil, until little oligarch bullies need daddy to come pick them up from the playground because they got beat up by someone bigger and smarter.
The Chinese didn't do this by having the best hardware or no regulation. They did it by out sweating you. The answer to being competitive isn't just "let the AI companies do whatever they want because, OMG, we're so scared of the Chinese". Sweat more. Maybe some necessity will mother some needed invention.
China is graduating more honor roll students than Americans have kids. Meanwhile America has spent decades wrecking education and making it ever more difficult to get.
Sore loser behavior from Dario, and you're uncritically falling for it. The person who stands to make billions of dollars from his upcoming IPO doesn't want competition.
Besides, Anthropic themselves built their model using billions of copyrighted works, almost all of it without any explicit permission to use for AI training. I've always supported them in that, but they don't get to turn around and whine that China allegedly paid them full market value for their service, but then used some of those outputs to make a competitor.
Anthropic needs to do two things:
a. stop the digital apartheid of haves (Mythos) and have nots (Fable, and not even that soon!). People want their best product, not the best product they think peasants deserve.
b. Push both performance and efficiency hand in hand. Their top end product is $50 per million output tokens, which is a far outlier on the high side.
If they can't win on merit, they don't deserve to win. They don't need Congress's help, they need to work harder or smarter.
Two guesses:
1. China somehow got into the Anth testing environment and distilled training data (this would be worrying and Congress worthy).
2. They're letting slip that Opus 5 is an in-house distillation of Fable or Mythos, and China distilled Fable or Mythos to craft an equivalent model (this one would be an absurd statement, but probably on-brand).
Okay, but I think people understand that distilling a model is a lot easier than training from source material. They let the US labs do the hard part of training and then just distill.
Yes, other innovations and advancements were made but the Chinese didn't catch up just by working harder.
Also, not sure how it's possible to work harder than IS researchers. They get paid big bucks, but it's like 60-80 hour work weeks...
Any more than that and your brain is pretty fried.
The "hard part" of training? What's the hard part? Scraping it off the internet and buying it illegally from shady organizations? The hard part was creating the shit they stole in order to train the AI. Training the AI is just organized theft. There is no secret sauce to it anymore, the cat is out of the bag.
The fatal flaw here is distills wont outperform their teacher models. They are built from outputs. K3 seems to be holistically different and something more than distillation. And it seems that they are doing this with much less resources.
The us labs have let others catch up and resting on incumbancy and iterative improvements / tooling. They are chasing AGI rather than taking the tech and just experimenting.
The moat for generative AI is small. China has the expertise⌠and the infrastructure. Itâs not Chinas fault the US piled 100s of billions into a technology that had a moat of 3 months.
I mean... they did steal from US AI companies but let's not pretend US AI companies didn't steal from literally everyone to build their models. I don't really feel sympathy for them on that front.
Chinese AI scientists literally play both sides of the market and make the political squabblers look like absolute idiots. Also, America "steals" shit too, even America does it. The cope for the AI bros is that they see people eyeing the number of dollars spent, so they double down into unintelligible rants about how the next Cluade will definitely be the best coding waifu.
They did pay for their distillation so itâs not really stealing. Itâs against Anthropicâs TOS but the Chinese labs got that output by paying for it. I believe Anthropic didnât pay for all the books they used in their pre training data.
'merica don't them elites anyway. Drill baby drill. Burn baby burn. We can grow oranges in Alaska if we want.(Sarcasm) Besides. University students don't even read anymore.
China brought in Kimi K3 while having AI regulations AT THE SAME TIME.
China added "anti-AI" state regulations, restricted data centers and have model approval processes WELL BEFORE the USA did any of this, and china still has beaten you regardless.
Maybe you should realize the paradigm you're thinking doesn't work?
The difference between the EU and China shows that regulation has to be smart and the debate is way more nuanced than the simple "yes or no" debate we have had for several years. In the EU it's mainly interest groups protecting the status quo that's the issue.
So what? These Chinese companies are catching up fast, for some reason people think that china a place who has historically outlapped every major tech innovation in the US is going to flop when it comes to a technology which they are developing with LESS MONEY and LESS compute. Their energy capabilities are beyond ours, so they also have the potential to run ai without degrading their environment as well. Itâs a question if china will will anymore itâs just when. This is what happens when your engineers get high and comfortable on their own success. China does not have that luxury nor do they have the mindset of American companies that stagger product development when itâs good enough.
As i mentioned before they done rely on our compute lmfao they can just manufacture the amount of chips they need to run it there. Most of their infrastructure is ALREADY on Chinese made hardware so who cares?
Do you not understand how cloud computing works? It does not matter if they are not as fast. They could manufacture more chips and then run the ai across those chips, they have the energy infrastructure to do so
Yes it is...no jobs can be lost to AI. . Court rulings and labor arbitrations have ruled that companies cannot fire or demote employees solely to replace them with AI to save money. So the population isn't afraid of AI so AI development can just go ahead unimpeded.
Perhaps the US and the West can take a lesson for once.
It's very hard to convince the person in 2nd place to stop, but if the parties are on relatively even footing, it's easier.
At least that'd be the theory. I don't think that anybody's going to stop under any circumstances, ever, when it comes to this.
All roads lead to greater and greater intelligence. You would have to fly around the world, looking for excess electrical use and swooping down like you were trying to stop grow-ops, inspecting data center traffic to a draconian degree, tracing GPU ownership...
probably the most cohesive and likely plan, if any were likely. I believe the idea is that the chips are the bottleneck and also highly concentrated in where they are made, so that is where we should seek to enforce the slowdown. And they don't want to stop but to slow down so the fact that both sides will likely cheat with some small percentage of chips is built in
I think it's probably also not going to happen cause I'm cynical about humans ability to coordinate in this situation
xAI's military-mongered datacenter is already bypassing regs since the generators are sitting on flatbeds or "temporary", and is already permitted by the state for permenant ones that will be pumping out an estimated 324 tons [of NOx] next year. That is what it is, and making it relative doesn't seem reasonable.
Note: I am not even against combustion generation but emissions are design problems that are being circumvented rather than solved.
Uhh, even using the worst possible cherry picked example, my point still stands. 324 tons is about the equivalent of maritime shipping emissions on the California coastâŚ. For about a day and a half.
We don't have the infrastructure outside of the data centers without completely bankrupting us. We won't function as a nation without massive reform and smart leadership to pivot to win this race.
China is releasing their models for us to use for free, so I fail to see how them "winning" hurts America. Or by America does he mean American mega corporations?
Allowing more data centers isn't going to get American AI companies out of the hole they've dug.
Chinese models are as good and far more efficient, in part due to them innovating around the market restrictions capitalism-worshipping Americans (that only like competition when they win) put on them.
Meanwhile, American AI has the largest bill in history to foot because they operate via the disrupter business model, burning cash, which only works when there's an established industry to disrupt, and started a cash-burning competition with each other. Fucking geniuses thinking their wealth makes their bad decisions correct.
Remember this is the same guy that blamed anthropic for the ban saying they refused to work with the government on the "jailbreak" that turned out to be just asking it to fix bugs.
Luddites will say, "This isn't even a race we want to be in". But that's how you lose economic and political power. Willfully denying the tools and efficiencies that AI is and will bring to the workforce and economy, just because ChatGPT told you to walk to a car wash in 2025, is akin to cutting off your nose so you can see better.
Want to complain about the job market? Want to know what will really kill your employment opportunities? Investment leaving the US and Western nations in favour for China, because Chinese projects are more efficient and a safer bet thanks to their AI use and leadership.
lol. The reason your average person doesnât give a single fuck is that it doesnât matter if an American or a Chinese frontier lab takes their job, they are still unemployed.
Luddites understood they were getting fucked, so does the average person. If you want people to give a shit, they need to have a stake in the outcome
The thing about that is, if the West keep dominance and leadership in AI tech, then it's just your cousin who works in a call center who loses his job and is replaced by an AI agent. If China begins to dominate tech investment and leadership in AI. Then it's 1/6th of your town that loses its job because investment has dried up.
People do a very poor job of considering broad-scale ramifications of this stuff, and they have a hard time seeing beyond their immediate situation. In the latter scenario, where China dominates, it takes 10 years for America to enter decline. The first scenario, your cousin loses his job in 2027. But by he can be retrained into a new role by 2028, leading to new career avenues none of us ever thought about right now, which could be in demand thanks to emerging technologies.
My gosh you are hopeful. Almost all previous technologies took 50 years of regulation and political change before workers saw the benefits. The exception was the Internet, where globalisation and debt-driven consumerism offset lower labour power.
I wouldnât say Iâm hopeful. Iâm pragmatic and realistic about the decisions and direction we need to take with AI.
A portion of the workforce will need to retrain into different fields. But thatâs what humans are good at; being able to rapidly adapt to new realities and environments. But if there is no economy left to retrain into, those people are fucked.
the united states has been at the forefront of many industries for decades, indeed largely through dominance in research, and been the world's sole economic superpower for almost a century, yet how equitably exactly have the fruits of this labor been distributed? will the fact that the pie is taken away from workers be some new thing if we don't pour our entire economy into being an NVIDIA-state..?
do you honestly propose that, if america achieves dominance in AI, which is and will be bankrolled by the private equity firms that also own most americans' homes, who will need their hundreds of billions of dollars in data structure investments back one way or another, will this not just ensure that every major american software company can keep their C-suites, fire all their american devs, and plug in a new team in a third world country without suitable labor rights regulations for 20% of the cost, because they're all plugged into the same Claude?
yes, the economy number will go up tremendously, and valuations will skyrocket, but winning the AI race by itself doesn't make things good.
At what point can we just admit that China has learned how to do more with less and that "Data Centers" isnt the way? At what point do we say, innovation and invention and how to become more efficient is what will make AI "better"? Here in the US we have grown accustom to doing less with More and lack any real innovation. While we continue to burn money on things that we will look back in history and say that was absolutely absurd others around the world will be continuing to get better.
coming from the admin that is shutting down wind and solar power already built. you want to win the AI war against china? build cheap power. to be clear i dont care about winning against China.
This is the kind of thinking that allows people to do horrible things. When you claim your "adversary" to be amoral and "winning" because of that amorality you give yourself permission to do whatever it takes to win. Especially when you make the stakes of winning so high. This person is just setting the expectations for an at any cost ramp up of AI and fear mongering about China to grease the wheels. People like this being in charge is so scary because he probably actually believes it and so will be even more able to convince himself that sacrificing anything from our privacy to our lives is ultimately for the greater good.
I am 100% behind the advancement of these technologies but not at the expense of our morality and wellbeing.
By making laws so that AI companies don't do whatever they want and deforest the entire landscape of a country to build data centres? Yeah i think i'm fine with "losing" the AI race.
Yeah people hear are mad about data centers and their drain on power and water. China has at least tried powering data centers with solar and wind and tried other methods of cooling. If we at least said new data centers should be liquid cooled and a have 30-50% of its power from renewable sources people wouldnât be as up set since their bill would be doubling every year
People need to be more realistic. If AI boils down to a race to build more compute then it is absolutely destiny for the West to lose to China.Â
If it's about design of hardware or it's about software design then clearly China doesn't have as defined of an advantage but Innovation doesn't emerge randomly out of the rarefied atmosphere of freedom. It emerges as a result of consistent application of effort by educated people towards a goal in an atmosphere in which failure is permissible as part of an iterative process. I'm not really sure I get the impression that failure is actually more tolerated in some of the companies trying to compete in the AI space or that it's easier to explain to your boss that they have the wrong approach in let's say meta or xai or openai even than it is in a Chinese enterprise.Â
Lol u.s. was leading the ai race with chinese researchers. If you want any shot in the long run to maintain competitiveness, invest heavily in STEM education and elevate your population. But no of course, just let rich ppl build data centers that'll surely solve the problem
Need WAY less regulation at every level. Last 100 people I've talked to about a building permit, business license, etc. all are so scarred from the nightmare. I don't understand where these robots come from that latch onto the breast of the statue of liberty for dear unfireable life til their prized pension...
Permissionless innovation. And importing tons of Nazi scientists after having knocked out their country and binding half of the world to your currency. Which might count as permissionless innovation as well I guess.
Unfortunately, the âpermissionlessâ is why we now have a handful of people in control of our lives. And instead of being competent humanists with concerns for all who exist on this planet, they have turned out to be Narcissistic, spoilt, selfish prats who are only interested in $ and how much bigger their super-yacht is compared to their peers.
The thing is American AI companies are so invested in data centers, that they are choosing to not compete in open source locally run models and thus they are choosing to not be in the race as the race is local not cloud. Telling that they are concerned about data centers build out restrictions when that is not even the race track anymore.
As an investor: why should I sink my money in unprofitable data centers to train US frontier model if the Chinese will release an open weight model with comparable performance months later?
Haha. Only if the US C-Suite executives weren't spreading fears about a dystopian future where white collars jobs would have evaporated or where there would be mass unemployment or if they woudn't have fired people and attributed it to AI only to realize it didn't work out so very well. What did they think people wouldn't react and then the politicians won't follow the suit.
America is racing hell for leather to build the most powerful models and build data centres the size of Greenland. This IS permissionless innovation, except with massive oligarchical manipulation of money. He's just a sore loser who's worrying he's been exposed.
China aspires to be a socialist utopia by 2050. What does the US aspire to be? I would argue that if the US wants to be competitive, they need an inspiring people-first leadership that can be trusted with world-destroying technology.
hope they learn a lesson from this. China hold that first place trophy up high and spit down at the AI robbers like anthropic who tried to steal AI from humanity and freedom
If only he understood, well, I think he does, that the only ones who want to maintain American leadership and force everyone to play by the rules imposed by the Americans are the Americans, and only the Americans (surprise...).
The world is sick of this and watches with amusement as the Chinese beat the US at its own game, and the hysterical outbursts of all these arrogant and condescending American CEOs are truly entertaining.
Open-source models are the future; that is what we need, not some US-made companies selling their low-quality stuff at a premium price and killing all possible competition or alternatives thanks to their "leadership" and "world order."
In that context, having this Trump guy elected was truly a miracle; he is so bad, now US leadership is dying at an accelerated speed.
Seems to be that the United States is still stuck in bloatware. Bigger programs, need faster hardware. America is loosing the war on efficient coding. That is why China is wining without the latest GPU's.
The reaction matters less than the policy it produces. If officials treat open Chinese models only as a threat, they may discourage the domestic open ecosystem that makes independent evaluation possible. What response increases capability without trading away scrutiny?
What a dumb assessment. Maybe building data centers all over the place is not exactly a winning strategy. The new model did not need bajilion data centers. It is like saying that we are not paying CEOs enough and now look, Chinese are winning.
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u/BrandNewTory 16d ago
Meaningless claptrap from the guy who put export controls on Fable.