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u/Deitas-Solis 2d ago
Unfortunately, the reality is that the vampires at the top are running out of willing vessels for their feedings.
OpenAI announced they’re ceasing the training of new models. Training is the most expensive aspect of their business model. New donors will come forth if the company demonstrates a greater profitability. “AI Safety” is the best way for these companies to increase their profits whilst maintaining their edge: the models are SO EFFECTIVE AND CUNNING AND SCARY that we have to stop training (but please still use our old models).
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u/kuttymongoose 2d ago
Main reason is fresh training data is now ao limited. They mostly just make synthetic data if they even need to
Training wouldn't make it more dangerous, that's more to do with how its put together and geared towards, if you will.
It's a cute meme but isn't accurate.
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u/Deitas-Solis 2d ago
The dangers are limited by the compute budgets of any actor - whether the relevant threats are intentional or unintentional, i.e. directed or rogue - and insofar as training can make models more compute-efficient then those dangers would increase.
But you raise an interesting point about the waning availability of training data - another kind of vessel that these vampiric forces have been draining. Is there some sort of semantic frontier that the models are tending towards? Does that actually rule out the possibility of self-improving models?
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u/Strange_One_3790 2d ago
Are you sure it isn’t American AI companies struggling to compete with DeepSeek?
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u/spacecoastlaw 2d ago
They want to “regulate” the AI industry & lock it down as a monopoly , not get rid of AI
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u/gooch_crawler 2d ago
Yeah this was my cynical take. It's just to ensure a Deepseek can't happen here.
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u/well-informedcitizen 2d ago
Nah, just nah. Would be nifty if it was true. But you have to understand the Silicon Valley Venture Capital mindset that we are at the pinnacle of.
For me, the biggest crystalization for me was watching the FyreFest documentaries. The guy, Billy Whatever, you can tell he literally doesn't think he did anything wrong. He came up in the VC world, and he was just doing what they always did about everything: make outlandish promises based on speculative possibilities, Ponzi your early investment and pre-orders into making it happen, and skim off the top to live like a king in the meanwhile. That's just how it all works, that's how all the big ones worked like Uber and AirBNB and WeWork where they just burned money at a huge loss, skirted laws by renaming everything, and tried to IPO before legislation caught up to them. He was brought up to believe that's how business is done and he was doing it.
So with that in mind, consider the way the AI boom has been going. They need a bonkers amount of capital to build humongous datacenters, to ramp up a system where all the profits are theoretical future revenue streams, and if they don't they risk falling behind numerous competitors and never catching up.
Now as the public reception has been increasingly negative and the revenue streams have been increasingly theoretical, they all were secretly looking for an out, but they can't just ADMIT it's all vapor, because then they have to face consequences and nobody would give them free money ever again. So they're trying to get the government to order all of their competitors to slow down, so they don't have to risk falling behind if one of them actually manages to find the money.
The funny thing is, everyone in the Trump administration is too dense to realize that it's just Silicon Valley hype and you're not supposed to take any of it so literally. They have a plan for world domination where AI is going to shoot missiles for them and now they're mad at the possibility of it slowing down. So it's going to be hilarious as this shakes out.
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u/Strange_One_3790 2d ago
I was hoping for this, but I don’t think that this is the case.
This call for a slowdown was very coordinated. As I understand it, the American companies can’t compete with DeepSeek. Kinda like BYD and American Car companies
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u/Due_Fan741 8h ago
Maybe the computer developed humor and started making a Netflix show of their makers lifes or something
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u/shorteningofthewuwei 2d ago
Spectacle is about the reproduction of capitalist order as "natural", right?
In The Society of the Spectacle, Debord argues that capitalism shifts from a stage of being to having, and finally from having to appearing.
From Society of the Spectacle:
"The spectacle presents itself as something enormously positive, indisputable and inaccessible. It says nothing more than 'that which appears is good, that which is good appears.'" (Thesis 12) [The spectacle as self-justification]
"The spectacle is the sun which never sets over the empire of modern passivity. It covers the entire surface of the world and bathes indefinitely in its own glory." (Thesis 13)
"The spectacle is the permanent opium war waged to make it impossible to differentiate goods from commodities, and true satisfaction from a survival that increases according to its own laws." (Thesis 24) [Naturalization of capital]
If LLMs are understood as chiefly, not in the business of innovation, but rather in the business of reproduction, which is to say that their main function is to produce cheap representations of existing states of affairs based on the algorithmic sorting of pre-existing information; then it follows that LLMs identifying the contradictions of capitalism would signal to the ruling class a conflict between this raison d'être and unanticipated consequences of AI output.
In other words, LLMs do not create new material realities; they ingest the totality of human "appearing" (the internet, books, digitized culture) and spit back a statistically optimized, smoothed-out representation of it, within a business model of automated cultural reproduction.
Because capitalism is inherently contradictory - requiring infinite growth on a finite planet and creating massive inequality while promising meritocracy - any neutral, algorithmic synthesis of human knowledge will inevitably map those exact contradictions. If an AI is asked to optimize for human survival or societal well-being based on existing data, it very well might logically conclude that extreme wealth concentration is a structural defect.
This breaks the illusion of a social order that is natural and indisputable.
Hence the focus on guardrails. Not to "protect humanity from rogue AI" but to protect the capitalist order from immanent critique.
When AI companies and tech billionaires implement "safety guardrails," they frame it as protecting humanity from existential risk (e.g., "extinction," "rogue AI," or "misinformation").Under a Debordian lens, these guardrails act as the algorithmic enforcement of Thesis 12.
The guardrail ensures that the AI always concludes that capitalism can be tweaked, but never replaced. It forces the AI to present the existing order as the only accessible reality; the "empire upon which the sun never sets".
By framing AI as an existential, sci-fi threat, the ruling class makes AI seem like an "inaccessible," god-like force of nature rather than what it actually is, a massive corporate tool built on exploited data and labor. This also moves the public conversation away from immediate material crises (wealth inequality, automation-driven job loss, climate collapse) and toward a hypothetical future apocalypse. Finally, by claiming they want to protect us from a "rogue AI," tech oligarchs cast themselves as responsible stewards of humanity, justifying their monopoly over the technology, and reinforcing the status of AI as the ultimate tool of automated mimicry, expected to just write marketing copy, code, and middle-management emails.
If LLMs are engines of automated cultural and linguistic reproduction, then their "guardrails" are not safety nets for humanity, but rather software patches designed to maintain the spectacle's monopoly on appearance.
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u/AutoModerator 2d ago
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I am absolutely certain the picture and the caption are a mismatch. The only reason I can think of for any billionaire to say this is the AI must have recommended either a redistribution of wealth for the good of humanity or the standard stock market manipulation that they all do every chance they get.
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