David Sacks on X: Some thoughts on Dario's post

I agree with Sacks.

Amodei's conception of regulation is difficult to distinguish economically from some form of regulatory capture, protectionism, or rent-seeking in the face of limited infrastructure and resources and intense regional competition.

It doesn't make sense given that the US does not have a monopoly on AI development and regulation would put US companies at a disadvantage, especially given the US's hegemony is debatably potentially over. The idea of US using regulatory sway requires that the US can influence the entire ecosystem, from access to capital to semiconductor development to allied export controls. That world is probably over.

The US has lost its grip on all of these threads and China has picked up the slack. This is like trying to put the genie back in the bottle with one hand tied behind your back.

> Dario acknowledges that AI is structurally centralizing but attributes this mainly to chips and scaling laws.

Is that a correct idea to acknowledge in 2026, with the proliferation of open-weight models hitting an inflection point, and Nvidia and AMD both putting significant effort into developing local AI products at price points already accessible to prosumers and SMBs?

Is this "acknowledgement" actually a rear-guard attempt to protect centralization on the software side of the AI market via the exact sort of regulatory capture that he's hand-waving away, so he can use it to artificially prop up his inferencing-as-a-service business model?

“ I have repeatedly argued for strong antitrust enforcement to keep industries competitive, especially Big Tech.”

Has David Sacks actually called for stronger antitrust enforcement? Not that he has total control of this administration but it’s gone pretty hard in the other direction in my observation.

> As Zuckerberg notes, concentrating power in the hands of an enlightened few has rarely produced the promised results; the practitioners turn out to be less enlightened in practice than in self-conception.

Pot, meet kettle.

David Sacks, the man who has multiple conflicting investments while serving in public office?

Seriously how is twitter still a thing.

You know is peculiar how discourse evolves on the Internet.

So many folks have been posting Twitter links from this exchange in separate threads here on HN and arguing about them.

I’m sure these threads are being argued about in other forums and social media platforms.

Sometimes you get the feeling that there is one social media extravaganza going on and all the different forums and social media platforms are just conduits to access the extravanangza.

See how TikTokers make their videos and upload identical copies to their TikTok accounts and then also YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, etc etc

Each platform the same just a different lens into the same cacophony

The open models are now good enough. The rest of the world needn’t concern itself with the petty dramas of the colonies any longer

This is a well-articulated post but we could address this in a couple of sentences: regulation for protecting people comes from grassroots campaigns by the people. Regulation for capturing the industry comes from industry lobbying. Is Dario the people or the industry? Is there a single person in this world so stupidly naive as to believe that Dario is just looking out for the people when he says that open-weight models must be banned and that only Anthropic should control frontier LLMs?

Related discussion on post in question:

On A.I. regulation and messaging

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49325789

> 2. Dario claims his critics live in a “bubble” where all regulation equals regulatory capture. He calls this an overly simplified view and notes that “Many people outside this bubble think of regulation as something that constrains corporate power and benefits ordinary people.” This argument is a straw man. Of course treating all regulation as capture would be overly simplified – but almost no one holds that view.

If my time on HN is any indication many, many people hold that view. Any call for any kind of new regulation is attempted to be shot down with references to "regulatory capture." It seems like it's one of the standard libertarian arguments.

> Stigler challenged the traditional view that government regulation arises from a benevolent state protecting the public from market failures.

Government regulation arises also from a desire to just limit or prohibit certain unwanted situations the market would otherwise support. For instance: gun regulations limiting high-capacity magazines have nothing to do with "protecting the public from market failures," and are almost certainly hated by the gun industry.

We're probably on the right track if the regulation of the AI industry is something both Amodei and Sacks hate.

Sacks is of course in the space that benefits from deregulation, like cannabis and illegal Adderall startups as well as Solana helping a Trump coin scam on Trump's first day.

I'm waiting for him whining for an AI bailout when the bubble bursts, just like he did for Silicon Valley Bank.

Oh, and maybe deregulate your comment section in the all-in podcast. It is completely censored now with only gushing AI-written one-liner posts.