Thread

Frontier Labs Are Selling Garbage to Fools in Washington

186 points · 87 comments · nr378

defgeneric · 1789942308 · focus · HN ↗
Watching the latest Ezra Klein NYT video thinkpiece from today [1], it seems to me there's an alliance emerging: some degree of political control will handed to the party of the managerial class, the party that represents the threatened class of knowledge workers, in exchange for the regulatory capture the labs are after.
They've been raising the issue bi-monthly through mini-scandals that have until now been consistently slapped down by Jensen Huang, but it seems an alliance with Democrats, just prior to an election where they're poised to take power in the Senate and the House, might finally be how they crack their "problem."
It won't be long before a massive incident is blamed on an open model in the wild, not from inside the labs, and none of us will be able to leverage open models to run private business workflows for the cost of electricity and hardware.
It's worth noting as well that if the Democrats imagine they'll get a "slow down" to protect one of their main constituencies, the professional class of credentialed knowledge workers (or however you slice it), they're dreaming--the labs have stated openly again and again that their business model is to capture the 10T TAM that represents the sum of wages of that very class of workers.
[1] <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fjZ90V_JREk" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fjZ90V_JREk
1. achierius · 1789943578 · focus · HN ↗
  Slapped down by Jensen Huang? Do you think he's some kind of neutral arbiter? Certainly he's not on your side.
  1. defgeneric · 1789944922 · focus · HN ↗
    Have you not been watching what's been happening? What do you think the open letter in July was about? And the recent (staged) call from the President?
    As far as I can tell Nvidia takes a longer-term view on the diffusion and proliferation of hardware and intelligence, and sees the labs' attempts to impose a regulatory structure to save their business models in the short term as contradicting that longer-term view.
2. 0xDEAFBEAD · 1789944871 · focus · HN ↗
  Regulatory capture basically only works for industries that the public isn't paying attention to. Since the public is paying plenty of attention to AI, the risk of regulatory capture is low.
  <a href="https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2026/09/what-regulatory-capture-actually-looks-like.html" rel="nofollow">https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2026/09/wh...
  1. defgeneric · 1789949464 · focus · HN ↗
    That's not what the article you cited actually says, and Tabarrok is also wrong in his conclusion (that we should take Amodei at his word). The article says regulatory capture has in the past gone through a slow process, and the anti-competitive benefits to industry come at the end. Everyone is speculating on the true motives of the labs in the current moment, which is fine as far is it goes, and many different things have come under the "regulatory capture" term. To my mind, it seems what they're really after in this moment is some kind of ban on the Chinese models.
    0xDEAFBEAD · 1789950107 · focus · HN ↗
    The article says: "Notice that classic regulatory capture [...] happens in the shadows, in the backrooms, away from the public’s eye. As Culpepper argues in Quiet Politics and Business Power, business power goes down as political salience goes up."
    Regulatory capture tends to happen "at the end" because the industry is no longer in the public eye. AI is set to be in the public eye for the forseeable future.
    People are way too willing to believe half-baked conspiracy theories which they cooked up in 30 seconds. The default presumption should be that labs are seeking the policies they are requesting, e.g. <a href="https://darioamodei.com/post/we-must-pace-the-frontier" rel="nofollow">https://darioamodei.com/post/we-must-pace-the-frontier It's true that there has been discussion of open weight models in the past, but that hasn't been the focus of discussion recently.
    defgeneric · 1789951208 · focus · HN ↗
    Again, Tabarrok is wrong. It's a mistake to think these minor differences in the process imply something else is going on, and the previous instances he notes (pharma, railroads) did not have the essential factor that explains much of what is happening right now: a cheap, low cost alternative that threatens to erode margins with no end in sight save for regulatory intervention. Nevermind the error in the logic (that in the past regulatory capture happened in the shadows, therefore this must not be regulatory capture), the bigger error is in Tabarrok's judgment, his failure to recognize what's going on.

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