On A.I. regulation and messaging

I genuinely think Dario is a well intentioned, intelligent dude, but I think him and Anthropic have a huge PR problem and are really out of touch with how they're perceived.

Anthropic in particular has developed this almost Orwellian like veil of condescending rhetoric that on the surface suggests they're looking out for you while underneath they're taking actions that suggest they do not trust you, Mr/Mrs Ordinary Person. All the safety rhetoric, never supporting open weight models, the lockdowns on harnesses outside claude code, etc.

Anthropic if you care about public good, do something to empower people. Release an OSS model. Open source Claude Code. Open source some inference tooling or something. Just give people anything except your words.

> I think it is fundamentally a crisis of trust. I think that ordinary people don’t trust companies, governments, or the tech industry and always suspect that we are cooking up some new way to screw them over.

[...]

> I don’t think that a glitzy marketing campaign with a positive spin (which some have advocated that Anthropic do) is the way to win back that trust — at this point, saying that AI will cure cancer is more a cliche than it is inspiring, and most people think it is deceptive. The thing that will work is actually curing cancer. I think by far the most accurate criticism of AI companies including Anthropic is that we haven’t yet delivered on our big promises to benefit the world. That is totally on us, and I think it’s the criticism you should be making, instead of all this stuff about messaging and marketing.

> We are however doing our best to fix this: Anthropic is ramping up its efforts very quickly in biology and medicine, and we hope to have incredible results in the coming years and some early glimmers in the coming months. When we’ve actually accomplished something real, the whole world will hear about it, as loudly as possible, you have my word on that.

Turns out "winning back trust" doesn't have anything to do with any actual concerns people may have re: employment, electricity prices, stock market bubble, intellectual property, scams, cybersecurity, environmental issues etc. Rather we'll just do all of that even harder and the miracles ("curing cancer", lol) we've so far failed to deliver are bound to arrive in short order!

> Overall my view is that AI is structurally a technology that tends to concentrate power, for reasons that have nothing to do with regulation (more to do with the extreme implications of the scaling laws). Open-weights do help some with this but are nowhere near a sufficient solution because they simply shift the concentration somewhat to those with the most compute and chips (which are roughly the frontier labs plus maybe hardware providers).

This is actually a good point. Open models are getting better and better, some of them might even be useful in consumer hardware now. But if AI performance is still correlated with compute power, then no doubt power will remain with the people owning the chips.

One thing Dario said is important reflecting on (but from another angle): where's the big deliverable from AI? If AI makes us 10x more productive, the 3 years since its popularization were enough for a product that would have taken 30 years to build without AI, for instance.

I'm an AI advocate but that question makes me feel that AI is simply "very useful" rather than being a historical game changer for humanity.

Called it! He was bound to squeal after the release of QWEN 3.8 in one way or another and here it is. I wasn't even a teenager but I'm getting so much Jobs/Ballmer flashbacks with internet explorer and microsoft office.

Edit: Does anyone else notice the switching between dashes and em-dashes between paragraphs? Tells you a lot about the man, doesn't it.

For $20 a month you can experience what it’s like to have a 130+ iq for a few minutes a day.

Why does this need a master?

Do we regulate bio geniuses for the danger they pose? No, we do not.

Do we regulate other tools like hammers and drills? No. Books? No.

It will be interesting to see what kind of progress in biology and medicine they will preview during the fall. He does make a good point that most of the progress so far have not been material in the sense of providing real positive outcomes for ordinary people.

Or even for the HN crowd, when will we see e.g. "Mythos aided research discovers 10 new viable battery technologies"

Why the comment submitted by jacquesm, who posted the link and it's not exactly an anonymous poster, that said "Apologies for linking to X but this is worth reading." has been flagged to death??

When people talk about Qwen 3.8 being on a par with Fable, they're really talking about Qwen 3.8 Max aka Qwen3.8-2.4T-A95B. That's a 2.4 trillion parameter Mixture of Experts model with 95B active parameters. You need about 400GB of RAM to run it. No one is running that locally.

The distillations of Qwen 3.8 down to a 27B model are good, but they're not on a par with frontier models.

When Dario talks about open weights not being a solution this is what he means - if you don't have 400GB of VRAM lying around the fact that there's an open model like Qwen3.8-2.4T-A95B doesn't really help much. If we're not regulating how models are available, or making sure access is open, then RAM prices will mean everything concentrates on a few very rich companies.

> Overall my view is that AI is structurally a technology that tends to concentrate power

> Open-weights do help some with this but are nowhere near a sufficient solution

Which is exactly why Anthropic contributes nothing to, and actively pushes for roadblocks and regulations for open weight models. Can't allow any hope to the masses.

Only people with $$$$$ are allowed to touch Fable. Which of course we have have aggressive guardrails for in case you even try to use it for something dangerous like AI model developement. Plus we are going to retain all data submitted to it just in case someone is trying to be sneaky.

> This is why Anthropic has always made its policy proposals very carefully. We try very hard to make proposals that disadvantage (slow down) frontier AI companies while advantaging smaller competitors.

> ...

> completely exempt any company below a certain amount of revenue or model training costs from being covered at all

One could argue that "Frontier AI" company know they have nothing to fear from company with less than XM$ revenue, and so their support for this type of regulation is still a way to force regulatory capture. In any case, whatever regulation you support, it's a regulation that you didn't have to handle when you were growing, but that incumbent will have to deal with.

Whatever it is Dario's intention or not does not matter. Capitalism push to consolidation and the eventual regulation that will need to be applied to mitigate the externality from a new industry, will mean that their will only be a handful of "very big" winner. Same story since the beginning of the industrial era. Even if that's not what Dario personally want, it's in the best interest of the shareholders, which will force Anthropic to do everything it can to be one of the big one.

> Overall my view is that AI is structurally a technology that tends to concentrate power, for reasons that have nothing to do with regulation (more to do with the extreme implications of the scaling laws).

The same can be said about a lot of other industry (aviation, oil, chip manufacturing, ...). Every country / union big enough will finance their own champion to try to keep a foot in the industry even if they are not the best.

> I know that there’s a sort of Silicon Valley shorthand where regulation = regulatory capture = concentration of power, but I’ve always found this to be an overly simplified picture of the world.

To paraphrase Sinclair "It's difficult to make a man realize the issues with regulatory capture, if they're to be the benefactor of regulatory capture".

> A crude analogy is that the formal court system can sometimes feel stuffy and elitist, but it does a much better job of defending the rights of vulnerable individuals than the alternative, mob justice.

Not so sure. After all lack of the latter did help establish the current tech overlord rule.

From anthropic we now have Science as a PR strategy. God I can't wait until this bubble pops.

    > "I know that there’s a sort of Silicon Valley shorthand where regulation = regulatory capture = concentration of power, but I’ve always found this to be an overly simplified picture of the world."
    > wall of text follows
    > doesnt proceed to clearly tell us what the actual picture of the world is, then

am i correct in summarizing that the line of reasoning is

- frontier llm access means you are at an economic advantage

- a big risk of this is ongoing wealth concentration

- the "open weights" approach can't solve the problem of wealth and llm access being linked; you need compute too, and compute is expensive, thus "open weights" still favors the wealthy

- instead we need "objective and fair institutional processes", as this will allow small labs cook up their stuff while frontier labs get regulated

why would i care about what these smaller players do, if economic advantage = frontier model access? also, the reasoning around "why bother with open weights because compute is expensive too" seems like the kind of logic a motivated 12 year old could work their way around in 30 seconds. things are not either/or dario, you said so yourself.

seems like a 400 word corpo misdirection essay. par for the course.

So, what does a for-profit CEO, beholden to profit-seeking investors, have to say?

> I think that ordinary people don’t trust companies, governments, or the tech industry and always suspect that we are cooking up some new way to screw them over.

It is so tragicomic to see people whose lives are built around companies coming so close to realizing that everything they do is bad, and then at the last minute swerving aside to convince themselves that no, if they just do more of it and somehow do it "better", then it will all be okay. The reason people don't trust companies and believe they are cooking up some new way to screw them over is because that is what they are doing. If Dario or anyone else really wanted to dispel that perception there's an easy way: do a total 180 and start fighting against everything you've been pushing. But none of them will do that because they still fundamentally believe that what they are doing is good, and are unable to see that fundamentally it's bad.

I think that Dario is intelligent, incisive, has good judgement, and is well-intentioned. I hope he continues to wield influence. I think Sam is also most of those things, but I think power has a One Ring-like effect on him. My most contrarian view is that I think Elon’s problems are primarily appalling judgement when it comes to areas outside of tech, and has the emotional regulation of a child, although somewhat incredibly I believe he is fundamentally well intentioned. I don’t think any of those three really want tech feudalism, although I think the current US administration would press a “turn us into Russia” button the second they caught sight of it, which is to say, I think they have the worst of intentions.

Dario's messaging has been extremely confusing and HE'S RESPONSIBLE for further increasing the negative sentiment of the public towards AI.

He's clearly focusing on being on the news to provoke emotions on people, preparing for the Anthropic big blockbuster IPO.

Dario, Sam Altman and others should instead be praying every night that this will take us to the Singularity VERY SOON, because if it doesn't, the entire country will blame them for absolutely destroying their retirement and the US' economy once this AI Datacenter bubble pops.

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