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Apart from my general queasiness about the whole AGI scaling business and the power concentration that comes with it, these are the exact four people/entities that I would not want to be at the tip of said power concentration.



Ellison should be nowhere near this:

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2024/09/omnip...

The man has the moral system of a private prison and the money to build one.


<quote> Citizens will be on their best behavior because we are constantly recording and reporting everything that's going on," Ellison said, describing what he sees as the benefits from automated oversight from AI and automated alerts for when crime takes place. "We're going to have supervision," he continued. "Every police officer is going to be supervised at all times, and if there's a problem, AI will report the problem and report it to the appropriate person. </quote>

What is far more important to understand is to ignore all that nonsense and focus on who makes money? It will be Ellison and his buddies making tens of billions of dollars/year selling 'solutions' to local governments, all paid by your property taxes. This also enables an ecosystem of theft, where others benefit a lot more. With the nexus of Private Prisons, kids for cash judges (or judges investing in stock of prisons), DEA/police unions, DEA unions, small rural towns increasing prison population (because they get added to the total pop, and get funds allocated).

More importantly this is extremely attractive to police who can steal billions every day from civil forfeiture, they have access to anyone who makes a bank withdrawal or transacts in cash, all displayed in real time feeds, ready for grabbing!


> "Citizens will be on their best behavior because we are constantly recording and reporting everything that's going on," Ellison said, describing what he sees as the benefits from automated oversight from AI and automated alerts for when crime takes place.

Wow! It is genuinely frightening that these people should be in control of our future!


Literal 'new world order' stuff here. Alex Jones and crew got so excited that their guy was in the driver's seat that they didn't notice the actual illuminati lizard people space lasers being deployed.


I don't think we'll ever have a zero-crime society, neither should we aim to be one. But being left to the vagaries of police (and union) politics, culture and the complications of city budgets is clearly broken.

Example: Cities are being presented a false choice between accepting deadly high speed chases vs zero criminal accountability [1], which in the world of drones seems silly [2]

I don't want the police to have unfettered access to surveil any and all citizens but putting camera access behind a court warrant issued by a civilian elected judge doesn't feel that dystopian to me.

Is that what Ellison was alluding to? I have no idea, but we are no longer in a world where we should disregard this prima facie.

[1]: https://www.ktvu.com/news/controversial-oakland-police-pursu...

[2]: https://www.cbsnews.com/sanfrancisco/news/san-francisco-poli...


> I don't think we'll ever have a zero-crime society, neither should we aim to be one.

This reminded me of https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/optimal-amount-of-fra...


That's a pretty deceptive and ragebaity article.

If you look at the original video [1], starting at 1:09:00, he's talking specifically about police body/dashcams recording interactions with citizens during callouts and stops, not everyone all the time as that article strongly implies. The USA already decided to record what police see all the time during these events, so there's no new privacy issue posed by anything he's suggesting. The question is only how those videos are used. In particular, he points out that police are allowed to turn off bodycams for privacy reasons (e.g. bathroom breaks), which is a legitimate need but it can also be abused, and AI can fix this loophole.

In the same segment he also proposes using AI to watch CCTV at schools in real time to trigger instant response if someone pulls out a gun, and using AI to spot wildfires using drones. For some reason the media didn't condemn those ideas, just the part about supervising cop stops. How curious.

[1] https://www.oracle.com/events/financial-analyst-meeting-2024...


We keep saying people like him shouldn't be involved in certain ventures, and yet, they still are. More than ever, actually.


Do not fall into the trap of anthropomorphizing Larry Ellison.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15886728


2025 is shaping up to be When the Villains Win year.


> "Citizens will be on their best behavior because we are constantly recording and reporting everything that's going on,"

Let's be honest. He isn't wrong. I'd rather live in a society with zero crime than what we have now.


Move to China. You’ll love it. Not only does it have lower crime by virtue of being highly controlled, it also has the added benefit of you never hearing about crimes the government doesn’t want you to hear about, and you won’t hear about any police corruption or brutality either. Ignorance is bliss!


You also don't need to sell your company when you innovate, your well-connected oligarch has either already gotten what you're doing or can seize it without consequence.


it's "technology transfer", not "seizure" ;)


Philosophically I agree, this sounds nice. A bit false dichotomy-ish, but nice.

But if you think about it, an unstated yet necessary prerequisite is that the definition of "crime" must be morally aligned with what is right. If it's not, well then you're living in a dystopia. Imagine a world where slavery is still legal and being a runaway slave is a crime. How do people like Frederick Douglass escape and survive long enough to make a difference?

And that's before we get into the prerequisite that such a state must apply the laws completely evenly with no special tiers based on class, wealth, political connection, celebrity status, etc, which AFAIK has never been done. Given the leadership, it doesn't look like it's goig to happen anytime soon. IMHO I think it's heavily contrary to human nature and just won't be achievable short of altering human nature.


Sorry to break it to you, but oppressing people with cameras to prevent crime will only push the crime to where the cameras aren't.

This makes preventing the crime and protecting people from effects of these crimes extremely difficult.


Yes we have historically low low crime. It's unbearable.

There are a number of countries that might give you a panopticon state of you want one


This is up to debate. The FBI and DOJ numbers disagree with each other.

https://www.themarshallproject.org/2023/11/03/violent-crime-...


Yeah, historically low crime because a lot of the crime is not considered crime anymore. Why thousands of stores are closing in California?


> Why thousands of stores are closing in California?

Because everyone's buying everything online and getting it delivered to their homes.


Well and good as a talking point, but violent crime is still illegal and way down.


Walgreen’s was closing stores anyway and used the pandemic shoplifting as an excuse… but it was never the actual reason.

Crime is at historical lows.


Even if shoplifting at Walgreens was the reason for closure, the downtowns of a few "liberal cities" (it's always the same 3-4 mentioned) are extremely unlikely to have that much impact on national statistics.


The retail industry lobbying group itself noted that "shrink", the term for loss of revenue due to items walking off or being damaged, has remained unchanged since the 90s.

The people telling you that there is an immense wave of shoplifting are outright lying.


There's a few that have tried to implement this, and I want to live in none of them.

The US will fare no better if it walks down this path, and honestly will likely fare worse for it's cultural obsession with individualism over community.


Just be prepared to be never daring to complain; a zero crime society isn't without its faults.


You stop abuse in this country, particularly of children, and you start having zero violent crime a decade later.


So having a policeman in each street and corner, except the policeman bias is set by these four oligarchs.

Welcome to... choose among many of the technodystopies in literature.


If you're lucky, you might get your chance to live in Thiel's and Ellison's techbro utopia. Make sure to tell us how great it is to be subjected to people with no accountability, but all of the power over every aspect of your life.


Who will supervise the gate keepers?


Just Ellison alone brings unwelcome feeling of having Oracle craziness forced down our collective throats, but I share your concern about the unholy alliance generated in front of us.


My immediate reaction to the announcement was one of these is not like the others. OpenAI, a couple of big investment funds, Microsoft, Nvidia, and...............Oracle?


Oracle provides two things: A datacenter for Nvidia chips, and health data. Oracle Cerner had a 21.7% market share for inpatient hospital Electronic Health Records (EHR). Larry Ellison specifically mentioned healthcare when announcing it in the Whitehouse.

The announcement was funny because they weren't quite sure what they are going to do in the health space. Sam Altman was asked, and he immediately deferred to Ellison and Masayoshi. Ellison was vague... it seems they know they want to do something with Ellison's massive stash of health data... but they don't quite know what they are building yet.


If they were smart, they'd build MS Fabric for health data, especially if they control a big chunk of the EHR.

Providing a turnkey HIPAA-compliant but modern health dataverse would be huge.


That already exists: https://www.truveta.com/


That looks like a different use case.

The Snowflake-for-health is more about opening EHR data for operational use by providers and facilities.

Versus being locked into respective EHR platforms.

If Oracle provided a compelling data suite (a la MS) within their own cloud ecosystem, they'd have less reason to restrict it at the EHR level (as they'd have lock-in at the platform level), which would help them compete against Epic (who can't pivot to openness in the same way, without risking their primary product).


I think you mean PostgreSQL for EHR data. MS Fabric and Snowflake are analytical databases, not operational. Patient privacy requirements (and HIPAA law) is a blocker for having an open operational database for EHR.


Oracle makes perfect sense in that they are 1) a massive datacenter company, and 2) sell a variety of saas products to enterprises, which is a major target market for AI.


Oracle has 2-3% market share as a Cloud Provider.

MSFT or even Google (AWS is not as mature in that space imho) made perfect sense, Oracle doesn't.

Elon and Larry are good friends, I would guess that has something to do with this development.


> Oracle has 2-3% market share as a Cloud Provider.

And the market leader is what, 30%? about 1 order of magnitude. That's not such a huge difference, and I suspect that Oracle's size is disproportionate in the enterprise space (which is where a lot of AI services are targeted) whereas AWS has a _ton_ of non-enterprise things hosted.

In any case, 2-3% is big enough where this kind of investment is 1) financially possible, 2) desirable to grow to be #2 or #3


Getting from 2% (Oracle) to 10% (GCP) market share would need 37.97% CAGR in 5 years. In a vacuum where everything else keeps the same, maybe, but I see that goal as very difficult to attain in what is a highly competitive industry right now.

Disclaimer: I work at a highly regulated industry and we are fine running our "enterprise" workloads in Azure (and even AWS for a spinoff company in the same sector). Oracle has no specific moat in that area imho, unless you already locked-in in one of their software offerings.


Sadly, it is not that unexpected given some of his recent interviews[1]. Any other day, I would agree it is a surprise.

[1] https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2024/09/omnip...


Oracle has a lot of valuable classified information about the state and its enemies due to its business.


There is a certain reason that last weeks everybody and their grandma is simping for Trump. Nobody would want to be on his bad side right now. Moreover, we hear here and there that Trump "keeps his promises". A lot of the promises we do not know about and we may never will. These people did not spend money supporting his campaign for nothing. In other places and eras this would have been called corruption, now it is called "keeping his promises".


Trump is one of the most famous people in the world for not keeping promises of paying debts. But there is money to be made temporarily when he is running a caper, as long as you can get your hand in the pot before he steals it.


And you, are you simping for the Obidens of this world?

Corruption is as old as mankind; don't know why it's pointed out prominently. Just look at that Xipeng/Biden photo from the National Archives.


If your knee jerk response to any political discussion even remotely critical of 'your guy' is to snap into whataboutisim instead of participating in the conversation you might need a outrage pornography detox for a while.


> And you, are you simping for the Obidens of this world?

Did I?

> Corruption is as old as mankind

Yeah but seldomly celebrated or boasted about.


> There is a certain reason that last weeks everybody and their grandma is simping for Trump. Nobody would want to be on his bad side

It's worth keeping in mind how extremely unfriendly to tech the last admin was. At this point, it's basically proven in court that emails of the form "please deboost person x or else" were send, and there's probably plenty more we don't know about.

Combine that with the troubles in Europe which Biden's administration was extremely unwilling to help with, the obstacles thrown in the way of major energy buildouts, which are needed for AI... one would have to be stupid to be a tech CEO and not simp for Trump.

Tech has been extremely Democratic for many years. The Democrats have utterly alienated tech, and now they reap the consequences.


> Tech has been extremely Democratic for many years. The Democrats have utterly alienated tech, and now they reap the consequences.

Well, on the other side it can be said that Big Tech wasn't really on the side of democracy (note: democracy, not the Democrat Party) itself, and it hasn't been for years - at the very least ever since Cambridge Analytica was discovered. The "big tech" sector has only looked at profit margins, clicks, eyeballs and other KPIs while completely neglecting its own responsibility towards its host, and it got treated as the danger it posed by the Biden administration and Europe alike.

As for the cryptocoin world that has also been campaigning for the 45th: they are an even worse cancer on the world. Nothing but a gigantic waste of resources (remember the prices of GPUs, HDDs and RAM going through the roof, coal power plants being reactivated?), rug pulls and other scams.

The current shift towards the far-right is just the final masks falling off. Tech has rather (openly) supported the 45th than to learn from the chaos it has brought upon the world and make at least a paper effort to be held accountable.


Yes, big tech was the kid caught in the corner cleaning out the cookie jar and threw a tantrum when one parent moved the jar out of reach as punishment in effort to help the industry learn self-control. Now the other parent has come home and has not only returned the cookie jar to the kid but pledged to bring them packs of cookies by the shipping container to gorge on in exchange for favors.


the troubles in Europe

Nice euphemism for giving people autonomy in their data and privacy.

Most of there companies are so large that they cannot really fail anymore. At this point it has very little to do with protecting themselves, more with making them more powerful than governments. JD Vance are said that the US could drop support for NATO if Europe tries to regulate X [1]. Oligarchs have fully infiltrated the US government and are trying to do the same to other countries.

I disagree with the grandparent. They don't support Trump because they do not want to be on his bad side (well, at least not only that), they support Trump because they see the opportunity to suppress regulation worldwide and become more powerful than governments.

We just keep making excuses (fiduciary duties, he just doesn't know how to wave his arm because he's an autist [2]). Why not just call it what it is?

[1] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politic...

[2] Which is pretty offensive to people on the spectrum.


I do agree that big part of why they support Trump is for anti-regulation reasons. But, it is also a fact that Trump is one of them, a businessman, not a politician. With Trump they can now discuss more business and less policies. There is a certain dealing of business right now that seems not at all transparent. And in this, the amount of public simping is really weird to what usually happens, everybody praising Trump even before he was taking office, and even tiktok, "coming out" as whatever etc.

Oligarchs want less regulation, but they also want these beefy government contracts. They want weaker government to regulate them and stronger government to protect them and bully other countries. Way I see it, what they actually want is control of the government, and with Trump they have it (more than before).


That person is much more of a politician than a businessman.


We have more energy and are pumping more domestic oil than ever. We are a major exporter of LNG. Trump just killed EV subsidies, and electric charging network funding.

What are you talking about via Europe? Holding tech companies accountable to meddling in domestic politics? Not allowing carte blanche to user data?

I understand (though do not like) large corps tiptoeing around Trump in order to manipulate him, it is due to fear. Not due to Trump having respectable values.


What do you prefer ? Letting DeepSeek and China lead the AI war ? DeepSeek R1 is a big wake up call https://open.substack.com/pub/transitions/p/deepseek-is-comi...


Us vs. Them. My favorite perspective [0].

Regarding to your question, yes. I'd prefer a healthy counterbalance to what we have currently. Ideally, I'd prefer cooperation. A worldwide cooperation.

[0]: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/B_AiI9_XIAA67_t.jpg


Treating the world as a bunch of football teams is a great distraction though.


Arguably the cooperation between the US and China has lead to the most economic growth and prosperity in human history, it's a shame the US and China are returning to a former time.


From what I've read about DeepSeek and its founder, I would very much prefer them, even with China factored in. At least if these particular Four Horsemen are the only alternative.

On a tangential note, those who wish to frame this as the start of the great AI war with China (in which they regrettably may be right), should seriously consider the possibility of coming out on the losing end. China has tremendous industrial momentum, and is not nearly as incapable of leading-edge innovation as some Americans seem to think.


>China has tremendous industrial momentum, and is not nearly as incapable of leading-edge innovation as some Americans seem to think.

So those who framing this are correct and that we should matching their momentum here asap?


No, I was rather pointing out that getting into an altercation that you are likely (even if not guaranteed) to lose may not be the smartest of ideas. On occasion, humans have been known to fruitfully engage in cooperation and de-escalation. Please pardon my naive optimism.


"Great AI war with China", "altercation" are excessively harsh characterizations. There is nothing "escalatory" in competing for leadership in new industries with other states, nor should it be "regrettable". No one, to my knowledge, is planning to nuke DeepSeek data centers or something.


I wish I could agree with you. But have you read Aschenbrenner's "Situational Awareness" [1]? I am very much afraid that the big decision makers in AI do in fact think in those terms, and do not in any way frame this as fair competition for the benefit of all.

1. https://situational-awareness.ai/


A person heavily invested in this wave of AI succeeding saying AI will be big and we will have AGI next year? Sure.

I don't think there is much point of reading the whole thing after the following:

"Everyone is now talking about AI, but few have the faintest glimmer of what is about to hit them. Nvidia analysts still think 2024 might be close to the peak. Mainstream pundits are stuck on the willful blindness of “it’s just predicting the next word”."


China is much more peaceful nation compared to US. So, yes, I'd prefer China leading AI research any day. They are interested in mutual trade and prosperity, they respect local laws and culture, all unlike US.


"They respect local laws and culture" - I think people from Xinyang probably have a very different perspective on that........


I encountered this almost first person. When American company goes like an elephant, bribing local officials left and right, using dirty practices to push out concurrents. At the same time, Chinese companies try very hard to abide to local regulations and trying to resolve all issues using local courts, etc. Like actually civilised people.

What happens inside China is nothing of my interest, it's their business. They existed for millennias, they probably know how to manage themselves. They are not trying to expand outside of may be Taiwan, they don't put their military bases in my country, they don't fund so-called "opposition" and that's good enough for me.


Bribery is probably one of the few cases where the US is significantly better than bad actors in both China and the EU, both of which have major problems with overseas bribery


If you had AlQaeda in a hypothetical region near Florida with almost two-yearly terror attacks, you would shit bricks and create jails/prisons with more security than the Pentagon itself.


I think there's a more nuanced version of this: China respects local laws and culture _outside of what they view as China_ more than the US does. It's also worth noting that China's policy in Xinjiang is somewhat narrowly targeted at religion, and less other aspects like cuisine or clothing. That said, religion is nigh impossible to separate from the broader idea of culture in much of the world.


Africa and South America and USA strongly disagree.


Give me a break. China has overseas police stations as bases of operation for harassing ex-pats and dissidents. That's not "respecting local laws and culture".


sorry but you’re not going to convince anyone approaching this with a neutral mind that China is more partial to overseas intervention than the US is


Agree, and would like to say that this is not because many of us see China as some benevolent actor on the world stage, but rather because we see how NOT benevolent the US has been historically (see South America, the middle east, etc)


the US has done lots of positive things as well. i understand it is popular to be a critic nowadays, but in many ways the US has had a strong commitment to majoritarian democracy over the last century and is trending in a better direction.

but regardless of the net balance of actions, it is clearly more interventionist than China has been up to this point


Holy smokes. Do folks like you actually believe this? China has its own style of colonialism (whatever you want to call it) but it certainly exists as strong as the US flavor.


How many countries has China invaded and bombed in the last 30 years?

How many deaths did China's warmongering caused abroad?


Quite a few from an economic perspective. Like I said they have their own style of colonialism. To think they are some peaceful loving nation is foolish. Maybe in the last 10 years China have had the military equipment capable of handling an offensive. They have been smart and done all their dealings via money. Without going too far in whataboutism, I simply find it ridiculous to classify China as a warm fuzzy nation with their long list of human rights issues. That does not mean America is peaceful and loving, simply that perhaps the two countries are not so different in net.


They were asking about bombs and invasions in the literal sense, not metaphorical. I'm sure if you asked someone in Gaza or Iraq if they would rather be subjected to more of America's bombing and war crimes, or China's abstract, metaphorical "economic colonialism" they would pick China in a heartbeat.


if Gaza was neighboring China and treated China like it does its neighbors, it would be treated quite differently by China. For an illustrative example, see Uighurs.

Uyghurs committed frequent acts of terrorism against China throughout the 1990s and 2000s, so you actually don't need to imagine that scenario. The treatment of Uyghurs is unjust and a clear violation of their human rights, but it's nowhere near the level of depravity of the western-backed Gaza Genocide.

Sources: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Uyghur_unrest

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/April_2013_Bachu_unrest

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xinjiang_conflict#1990s_to_200...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaza_genocide


> Like I said they have their own style of colonialism.

That's moving the goalposts and doesn't address the issue.

>They have been smart and done all their dealings via money.

You mean just like the country who issues the world reserve currency and who's intelligence agencies get involved in destabilizing regimes across the world?


> That's moving the goalposts and doesn't address the issue.

Is this how you make a constructive argument? Perhaps I was expecting too much from a joke account but this style of whataboutism is boring.

My post that you responded to set my premise which was that China has its own form of colonialism that is quite different than Americas but it exists and it’s quite strong. To classify China as a peaceful loving nation that respects other cultures is as if we were saying the US has never started a conflict. It’s factually a lie. China has a long list of human rights issues, they factually do not respect other cultures even within their own borders. I am not defending America but pointing out that China is not what the OP stated.


> I was expecting too much from a joke account

Are you the kind of superficial petty person who needs to take jabs at the messenger's name and not the message itself?

And are you really in the position to throw stones from a glass house with that account name? If you had your real name and social media profiles linked in the bio I'd understand, but you're just being hypocritical, petty and childish here with this 'gotcha'.

> To classify China as a peaceful loving nation that respects other cultures

I never made such a classification. You're building your own strammen to form a narrative you can attack but you're not saying anything useful the contradicts my PoV and wasting our time. Since you're obviously arguing in bad faith I won't converse with you further. Goodbye.


If you have an argument that is actually on topic with what I said please continue, otherwise save your troll account for someone else. The whataboutism/gaslighting is silly. You clearly cannot read threads or respond in a logical form to the right person. The conversation at hand was about China and in response to the OP classifying them as a loving and respectful nation. I made no attempt to defend the US and it has been you moving the goalposts. You throw about whataboutism around and then simply runoff with some flimsy excuse about multiple people being unable to converse with you. Troll account.


Cumpiler asked two very clear and direct questions:

>How many countries has China invaded and bombed in the last 30 years? >How many deaths did China's warmongering caused abroad?

You didn't answer those, just started hand waving some stuff about China's "own form of colonialism" -- without even explaining what that is and how it works (which personally I'd be curious to hear about, and believe *is*" likely guilty of violence).

So you very clearly are the one guilty of shifting the goalposts, going on tangents, and bringing up usernames instead of real arguments.


I'm sympathetic to Infecto's positions, but I have to agree. I do think Cumpiler69's username is outrageous enough as to draw some commentary (provided it's civil and is semi-friendly ribbing) and perhaps even raise questions of whether they are a troll, but the substance of their comments is strong enough as to override these minor observations/objections.


Define invade.


Sorry, but If you need a definition for military invasion, you're not arguing in good faith. Goodbye.


> What do you prefer ? Letting DeepSeek and China lead the AI war ?

Me personally? Yes.


the outcome would be exactly the same. AGI leads the human race off of a cliff, not in the direction of one human interest group vs another. the only difference would be that it was china that was responsible for the extinction if the human race rather than another country. i would prefer to die with dignity… the outcome we should all be advocating for is a global halt of AI research — not because it would be easy but because there is no other option.


we need to cooperate and put aside our petty politicking right now. the potential downsides of ‘racing’ without building a safety scaffold are catastrophic.


I would love for Oracle to use AI to put their entire legal department out of work, though.


So you want them to be infinitely more litigious?

A serious question though, what does happen when AIs are filing lawsuits autonomously on behalf of the powerful, the courts clearly won't be able to cope unless you have AI powered courts too? None of how these monumental changes will work has been thought through at all, let's hope AI is smart enough to tell us what to do...


> A serious question though, what does happen when AIs are filing lawsuits autonomously on behalf of the powerful

It won't just be at the behalf of the powerful.

If lawyers are able to file 10x as many lawsuits per hour, the cost of filing a lawsuit is going to go down dramatically, and that's assuming a maximally-unfriendly regulatory environment where you still officially need a human lawyer in the loop.

This will enable people to e.g. use letters signed by an attorney at law, or even small claims court, as their customer support hotline, because that actually produces results in today.

Nobody is prepared for that. Not the companies, not the powerful, not the courts, nobody.


Unless you can afford your lawsuit to take up substantial time on Stargate and make a much stronger case than your average Joe who is still using o1 for their lawsuits


Oracle could reasonably be hit with some sort of stick every time they filed a frivolous lawsuit until the AI got tuned appropriately. Then it'd be a situation where Oracle were continuously suing people who don't follow the law, following a reasonably neutral and well calibrated standard that is probably going to end up as similar to an intelligent and well practised barrister. That would be acceptable. If people aren't meant to be following the law that is a problem for the legislators.


I'm envisioning a future where there's a centralized "legal exchange", much like the NYSE, where high speed machines file micro-ligation billions of times faster than any human can, which is decided equally quickly, an unrelenting back and forth buzz of lawsuits and payouts as every corporation wages constant automated legal battle. Small businesses are consumed in seconds, destroyed by the filing of a million computerized grievances while the major players end up in a sort of zero-sum stalemate, where money is constantly moving, but it never shifts the balance of power.

... has anyone ever written a book about this? If not, I think I'm gonna call dibs.


>A serious question though, what does happen when AIs are filing lawsuits autonomously on behalf of the powerful,

AI controlled cheap Chinese drones will start flying into their residencies carrying some trivial to make high explosives. With the class wars getting hotter in next few years we may be saying that Luigi Mangione had the right ideas towards the PMC, but he was underachiever.


I don't like how OpenAI turned majorly from what it was founded upon and their bias training ... but when considering the actual opponent here is China, it's not the worst.

I think OpenAI was originally founded against that kind of force. Autocratic governments becoming masters of AI.


I’m an American who was definitely raised in a “China Bad” world.

The last few months, between TikTok ban, RedNote, elections, United Healthcare CEO, etc I’ve seen so many people compare the US to China, and favor China. Which is of course crazy because China has things like forced labor and concentration camps of religious minorities, and far worse oppression than the US. But many people just view everything coming out of the US Gov’s mouth as bad.

Is the Chinese government worse than the US government? Probably. Do people universally think that still? Not really. The US Gov will have to contend with the reality that people -even citizens- are starting to view them and not their “enemy” as the “Bad Guys”.


I don’t get the good guys / bad guys mindset tbh. Sure china gov is pretty bad and the us is by many metrics better - but why center your whole worldview around things that probably don’t affect you that much in your daily life?

US also has forced labour, huge prison population, bombing civilians and journalists to oblivion, literally nuking other countries and religious fanatics — do I still think china would be less pleasant as our new overlord? Yes — Do I think the world is better off with US-American hegemony? I’m not so sure.

Maybe it’s a net good for the world if not one power is dominating — maybe it’s the start of a hellish ww3. I choose to believe the former.

edit: typos


Interestingly perhaps, as a foreigner (not from the USA or China) I can tell you not everyone around the world shares this perspective. There's people who trust China's single-party system over the USA's oligarchy.


Propaganda is a powerful tool.


By the time this project is done it will have been dead for 2 years.

Too many greedy mouths. Too many corporations. Too little oversight. Too broad an objective. Technology is moving too quickly for them to even guess at what to aim for.


Need a bit of Zuck too


Yeah, really the only thing missing from this initiative was the personal information of the vast majority of the United States population handed over on a silver platter.


That sentiment calls for reflection - whoever ends up on top of the heap after the AI craze settles down is going to be someone that everyone objects to. Elon Musk was himself an internet darling up until he became wealthy and entrenched.

That said, this does look like dreadful policy at the first headline. There is a lot of money going in to AI, adding more money from the US taxpayer is gratuitous. Although in the spirit of mixing praise and condemnation, if this is the worst policy out of Trump Admin II then it'll be the best US administration seen in my lifetime. Generally the low points are much lower.


Nietzsche wrote about these phenomena a long time ago in his Genealogy of Morality. there will never be someone who reaches the top who doesn’t become an object of ire in modern Western culture.


> That sentiment calls for reflection - whoever ends up on top of the heap after the AI craze settles down is going to be someone that everyone objects to.

I agree in principle. And realistically, there is no way Altman would not be part of this consortium, much as I dislike it. But rounding out the team with Ellison, Son and Abu Dhabi oil money in particular -- that makes for a profound statement, IMHO.


> That sentiment calls for reflection - whoever ends up on top of the heap after the AI craze settles down is going to be someone that everyone objects to. Elon Musk was himself an internet darling up until he became wealthy and entrenched.

Trying to process this but doesn’t his fall from grace have more to him increasing his real personality to the world? Sometime around calling that guy a pedo. Not much bothers me but at the very least his apparent lack of decision making calls into question many things.


Of all the sentiments that call for reflection, the parent's belief about why people don't like Elon is the one that needs it the most.


> That sentiment calls for reflection - whoever ends up on top of the heap after the AI craze settles down is going to be someone that everyone objects to.

Did we see the same fallout from the space-race from a couple generations ago?

I don't think so — certainly not in the way you're framing it. So I guess I don't accept your proposition as a guarantee of what will happen.


A couple of generations ago we didn't have the internet and the only things people heard about were being managed. The big question was whether the media editors wanted to build someone up or tear them down.

The spoils of the space race would have gone to someone a lot like Musk. Or Ellison. Or Masayoshi Son. Or Sam Altman. Or the much worse old-moneyed types. The US space program was, famously, literally employing ex-Nazis. I doubt the beneficiaries of the money had particularly clean hands either


Elon Musk was an internet darling when his top character trait was "space! EVs!". Then he went Kanye/alt-right and weaponized twitter. It didn't have to do with the fact he has a lot of money.

Many people dislike all billionaires, but some have escaped criticism more than others by successfully appearing to have some humanity left in them, like Gates and Cuban.


This seems more like a move designed to frighten China -- or force them to spend money making LLMs -- then an actual threat. The clues are that Trump ceremonially blessed the deal but did not promise money (SoftBank et al will, supposedly), and then Musk said that's all fake because SoftBank doesn't have the money, and Altman countered that Musk should not be butthurt and should put America first. Who does that? I'm thinking, no one who has something real on his hands.


We should NEVER have a lawnmower at the helm of humanity.


It could be worse, Elon Musk could be involved with it.




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