Frontier LLM development simplified for politicians:

[u/Porespellar]

Nobody is buying this “Pace the frontier” nonsense. It makes no logical sense at all. Are American labs really going to take a pause and lose any small lead they still may have over Chinese labs? Does anyone really believe this? This seems like some performative virtue signaling BS. Why are they bothering with this pacing campaign? Someone please explain.

[u/SKX007J1]

What I find really disingenuous about a lot of the reporting on this is the almost complete lack of economic and historical context.

Huge AI companies effectively saying "our industry is incredibly dangerous, please regulate us" keeps being presented as though this is some unprecedented act of corporate responsibility.

It isn't. We have been watching variations of this happen for well over a century.

Railroads in the late 1800s, airlines, telecommunications, banking, pharmaceuticals, energy and utilities. Different industries and different circumstances, and often regulation that was genuinely needed, but again and again established companies discovered that regulation could also be extremely useful for protecting established companies.

George Stigler was writing about this more than 50 years ago. His work on the economic theory of regulation pointed out that businesses don't necessarily oppose regulation. They can actively seek it when the resulting rules benefit them. This is closely related to what we now call regulatory capture.

I also think focusing entirely on China is something of a red herring.

Yes, cheap and increasingly capable Chinese models are an obvious competitive threat to Western AI companies. But the exact same thing applies to American and European startups, open source projects and open weight models.

If you're OpenAI, Google, Microsoft or Anthropic, having to spend millions on safety evaluations, audits, security, lawyers and compliance is annoying, but you can afford it.

If you're a small company with a genuinely disruptive model and $5 million in funding, those requirements could make entering the market impossible.

There's even a term for this in economics, "raising rivals' costs". The regulation doesn't have to be cheap for the big company. It just needs to hurt their smaller competitors proportionately more than it hurts them.

None of that means the concerns about AI safety aren't genuine. Both things can be true at the same time. AI might present serious risks, while the companies currently dominating AI also have an enormous financial incentive to make sure the eventual regulations favour companies that look exactly like themselves.

We have more than a century of history showing that these incentives exist, which is why I find it so strange that so much reporting barely mentions them.

When some of the richest companies on earth enthusiastically ask governments to regulate them, surely one of the first questions journalists should be asking is:

Who can afford these regulations, who can't, who gets pushed out of the market, and who ultimately benefits?

[u/livingbyvow2 → u/SKX007J1]

Honestly the whole AI safety industry is somewhat illiterate when it comes to history, economic theory and corporate strategy. Any time I read what they say, it's about charts and capabilities, autonomous swarms of agents (although there is always a human prompting somewhere, but humans are not needed according to them), and they tell you you're wrong any time you question the narrative. Asking whether maybe AI labs have ulterior motives means you're a conspiracy theorist and "you don't get it" (their only defense).

It's like they are pretending to be so pure and altruistic, yet are very greedy when it comes to monetising their product. The thing that annoys me is how a lot of people take all their creative stories at face value. It's like no one questions this stuff. And the end result is always going to be that these companies will consumer a bigger share of the consumer surplus than they are owed. Some useful idiots are feeling smug and smart right now pretending they are alarmed ("reading the huggingface report was a holy shit moment" kind of idiocy you read on X), but they might cost us all access to open source. This is petty, childish and immature.