That's exactly what has been happening:
Ask HN: Why is OpenAI pushing for regulation so much - 2023
If I want to use an LLM to augment my work, and don't have a massively powerful local machine to run local models, what are the best options?
Obviously I saw the news about OpenAI's head of research openly supporting war crimes, but I don't feel confident about what's up with the other companies.
E.g. i'm very outspoken about my preferences for open llm practices like executed by Meta and Deepseek. I'm very aware of the regulatory caption and pulling up the ladder tactics by the "AI safety" lobby.
However. In my own operations I do still rely on OpenAI because it works better than what I tried so far for my use case.
That said, when I can find an open model based SaaS operator that serves my needs as well without major change investment, I will switch.
For my "vibe coding" I've been using OpenAI, Grok and Deepseek if using small method generation, documentation shortcuts, library discovery and debugging counts as such.
Who’s chill? Groq is chill
https://www.schneier.com/essays/archives/2005/09/terrorists_...
You actually can't fault llama either, as a standalone product. However it's still in Zuck Paradise
Trump should have a Most Favored Corporate status, each corporation in a vertical can compete for favor and the one that does gets to be "teacher's pet" when it comes to exemptions, contracts, trade deals, priority in resource right access, etc.
I am not saying you’re wrong, but please educate me why is this form of corruption/cronyism is unique to fascism?
> An important aspect of fascist economies was economic dirigism,[35] meaning an economy where the government often subsidizes favorable companies and exerts strong directive influence over investment, as opposed to having a merely regulatory role. In general, fascist economies were based on private property and private initiative, but these were contingent upon service to the state.
The scary thing with fascism is just how quickly it can snowball because people at the top of so many powerful structures in society benefit. US Presidents get a positive spin by giving more access to organizations that support them. Those kinds of quiet back room deals benefit the people making them, but not everyone outside the room.
They then get access, get special treatment, and come out singing the praises of [errr.. what's his name again?]
Start looking and you’ll find powerful forces shaping history. Sacking a city is extremely profitable throughout antiquity, which then pushes cities to have defensive capabilities which then…
In the Bronze Age trade was critical as having Copper ore alone wasn’t nearly as useful as having copper and access to tin. Iron however is found basically everywhere as where trees.
Such forces don’t guarantee outcomes, but they have massive influence.
This can be bad without invoking godwin's law.
That does not imply that fish are snakes. Nor does the presence of scaled fish invalidate the observation that having scales is a defining attribute of snakes (it's just not a sufficient attribute to define snakes).
https://www.morphmarket.com/morphpedia/corn-snakes/scaleless...
That's a strange definition of "correlation" that you're using.
Imagine there are three equally sized groups of animals: scaly snakes, scaly fish, and scaleless fish. So we have three data points (1,1) (0,1) (0,0) with probability 1/3 each. Some calculations later, the correlation between snake and scaly is 1/2.
I am noting that the logical argument does not hold in the provided definition. If “some” attributes hold in a definition, you are expanding the definitional set, not reducing it, and thus creating a low-res definition. That is why I said: ‘this is a poor definition.’
---
The term emerged in the post-World War II era to describe the economic policies of France which included substantial state-directed investment, the use of indicative economic planning to supplement the market mechanism and the establishment of state enterprises in strategic domestic sectors. It coincided with both the period of substantial economic and demographic growth, known as the Trente Glorieuses which followed the war, and the slowdown beginning with the 1973 oil crisis.
The term has subsequently been used to classify other economies that pursued similar policies, such as Canada, Japan, the East Asian tiger economies of Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea and Taiwan; and more recently the economy of the People's Republic of China (PRC) after its economic reforms,[2] Malaysia, Indonesia[3][4] and India before the opening of its economy in 1991.[5][6][7]
---
It's a pretty normal word in British English, tbh.
Maybe it's because we do French at school.
All real world countries have some of this, but in fascism it’s really overt and dialed up and for the private sector participation is not optional. If you don’t toe the line you are ruined or worse. If you do play along you can get very very rich, but only if you remember who is in charge.
“Public private partnership” style ventures are kind of fascism lite, and they always worried me for that reason. It’s not an open bid but a more explicit relationship. If you look back at Musk’s career in particular there are ominous signs of where this was going.
This is pretty common fascist practice that is used all over Europe and in any left-leaning countries, when with regulations governments make doing business on large scale impossible, and then give largest players exemptions, subsidies and so on. Governments gain enormous leverage to ensure corporate loyalty, silence dissenters and combat opposition, while the biggest players secure their place at the top and gain protection from competitors.
So the plan was push regulations and then dominate over the competitors with exemptions from those regulations. But fascists loose the election, regulations threaten to start working in a non-discriminatory manner, and this will simply hinder business.
You mean like Germany has done?
Or his lackeys have anyway. I’m unwilling to believe the man has ever read a book.
Donald Trump, Jr. is in charge. Vivek Ramaswamy and Peter Thiel are involved. Azoria ETF and 1789 Capital are funds designed to fund MAGA-friendly companies.
But this may be a sideshow. The main show is US CEOs sucking up to Trump, as happened at the inauguration. That parallels something Putin did in 2020. Putin called in the top two dozen oligarchs, and told them "Stay out of politics and your wealth won’t be touched." "Loyalty is what Putin values above all else.” Three of the oligarchs didn't do that. Berezovsky was forced out of Russia. Gusinsky was arrested, and later fled the country. Khodorkovsky, regarded as Russia’s richest man at the time (Yukos Oil), was arrested in 2003 and spent ten years in jail. He got out in 2013 and left for the UK. Interestingly, he was seen at Trump's inauguration.
[1] https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2025/03/13/maga-influ...
[2] https://apnews.com/article/russia-putin-oligarchs-rich-ukrai...
> Khodorkovsky [...] was arrested in 2003
Something doesn't square here
[0] https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2022/03/29/1088886554/how...
If there’s anyone to copy it’s China in industry and maybe elements of Western Europe and Japan in some civic areas.
Russia is worse on every metric, even the ones conservatives claim to care about: lower birth rate, high divorce rate, much higher abortion rate, higher domestic violence rate, more drug use, more alcoholism, and much less church attendance.
I. Do. Not. Get. The Russia fetish.
It's not a Russia fetish. It's a Strongman fetish.
>Russia is worse on every metric, even the ones conservatives claim to care about: lower birth rate, high divorce rate, much higher abortion rate, higher domestic violence rate, more drug use, more alcoholism, and much less church attendance.
In the case of OpenAI, were I to guess, they'll likely do things like push for stronger copyright laws or laws against web scraping. Things that look harmless but ultimately will squash new competitors in the AI market. Now that they already have a bunch of the data to train their models, they'll be happy to make it a little harder for them to get new data if it means they don't have to compete.
It can be through keeping regulation to be mild or look the other way, but as often to put up high cost/high compliance burdens in place to pull up the drawbridge for new entrants.
A great example - people forget what life was like pre-Snowden. The authoritarians were out in locked ranks pretending that the US spies were tolerable - it made any sort of organisation to resist impossible. Then one day the parameters of the debate get changed and suddenly everyone is forced to agree that encryption everywhere is the only approach that makes sense.
I'm not saying LLMs are useless, but I do not understand your use case.
Very doubtful: The current "AI" hype craze centers on LLMs, and they don't do math.
If anything they capabilities favor the other side, to obfuscate and protect falsehoods.
Unless they delete the Internet Archive of such info?
>>*and they don't do math.*
Have you ever considered the "Math of Politics"
Yeah - they do that just fine
((FYI -- Politics == Propaganda.. the first iteration of models is CHAT == Politics...
They do plenty of "Maths"))
The most-charitable paraphrase I can come up with it: "Bad people can't use LLMs to hide facts, hiding facts means removing source-materials. Math doesn't matter for politics which are mainly propaganda."
However even that just creates contradictions:
1. If math and logic are not important for uncovering wrongdoing, why was "tabulation" cited as an important feature in the first post?
2. If propaganda dominates other factors, why would the (continued) existence of the Internet Archive be meaningful? People will simply be given an explanation (or veneer of settled agreement) so that they never bother looking for source-material. (Or in the case of IA, copies of source material.)
[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20160112000701/http://www.timecu...
---
I am saying that AI can be used very beneficially to do a calculated dissection of the Truth of our Political structure as a Nation and how it truly impacts an Individual/Unit (person, family) -- and do so where we can get discernible metrics and utilize AIs understanding of the vast matrices of such inputs to provide meaningful outputs. Simple.
EDIT @MegaButts;
>>Why is this better than AI
People tend to think of AI in two disjointed categories; [AI THAT KNOWS EVERYTHING] v [AI THAT CAN EASILY SIFT THROUGH VAST EVERYTHING DATA GIVEN TO IT AND BE COMMANDED TO OUTPUT FINDINGS THAT A HUMAN COULDN'T DO ALONE]
---
Which do you think I refer to?
AI is transformative (pun intended) -- in that it allows for very complex questions to be asked of our very complex civilization in a simple and EveryMan hands...
Not LLMs: They might reveal how people are popularly writing about the political structure of the nation.
If that were the same as "truth", we wouldn't need any kind of software analysis in the first place.
Truth: The real meaning behind the words which may or may not be interpreted by the receiver in A/B/N meaning
Truth: The actual structure of the nature of whats being presented.
When you can manipulate an individual's PERCEIVED reception of TRUTH between such, you can control reality... now do that at scale..
Period.
If you dont understand the benefit of an AI augmenting the speed and depth of ingestion of Domain Context into a human mind.. then... go play with chalk.||I as a smart Human operate on lots of data... and AI and such has allowed me to consume such.
The most important medicines in the world are MEMORY retention...
It s youd like a conspiracy, eat too much aluminum to give you alzheimers asap so your generation forgets... (based though. hope you undestand what I am saying)
And time spent dealing with laws and regulations may decrease efficiency, leading to increased power consumption, resulting in greater water usage in datacenters for cooling and more greenhouse gas emissions.
They don't care about that if they get a regulatory moat around them.
[1] https://www.itpro.com/technology/artificial-intelligence/peo...
I predict Waymo will have their own struggles with profitability. Last I heard the LIDAR kit they put on cars costs more than the car. So they'll have to mass produce + maintain some fancy electronics on a million+ cars.
[0] https://languagesystems.edu/history-of-idioms-to-be-in-black...
OpenAI rejected a 97.4B USD buyout in February 2025 and won’t be absorbed anytime soon: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/14/technology/openai-elon-mu...
There's a reason they're sweating the data issue. As much as it sucks to say it, Google/Bing/Meta/etc. all have a shitton of proprietary human-generated data they can work with, train on, fine tune with, etc. OpenAI _needs_ more human generated data desperately to keep going.
No moat means Joe Anybody can compete with them. You just need billions in capital, a zillion GPUs, thousands of hyper skilled employees. You need to somehow get the attention of tens of millions of consumers (and then pull them away from the competition, ha).
Sure.
The same premise was endlessly floated about eg Uber and Google having no moats (Google was going to be killed by open search, Baidu, magic, whatever). These things are said by people that don't understand the comically vast cost of big infrastructure, branding, consumer lock-in (or consumer behavior in general), market momentum, the difficulty of raising enormous sums of capital, and so on.
Oh wait the skeptics say: what about DeepSeek. To scale and support that you're going to need what I described. What's the plan for supporting 100 million subscribers globally with a beast of an LLM that wants all the resources you can muster? Yeah, that's what I thought. Oh but wait, everyone is going to run a datacenter out of their home and operate their own local LLM, uhh nope. It's overwhelmingly staying in the cloud and it's going to cost far over a trillion dollars to power it globally over the next 20 years.
OpenAI has the same kind of moat that Google has, although their brand/reach/size obviously isn't on par at this point.
Microsoft has a mote. Oai does not.
OpenAI copilot, not microsoft copilot, actually looks like a stronger product and they're going full force after the enterprise market as we speak. We're setting a demo in motion with them next month to give it a go.
We'll have to wait for the first one to crack Powerpoint, that'll be the gamechanger.
If what the admin is doing is illegal, then a court stops it, and they appeal and win, then it wasn't illegal. If they appeal all the way up and lose, then they can't do it.
So what exactly is the problem?
Mind you, I am asking for nits, this isn't my idea. I don't think "the administration will ignore the supreme court" is a good nit.
And you have people arguing that on the one hand the executive has had too much leeway to regulate, but then in the same breath saying that the executive now needs to unilaterally ignore the orders of past congresses in order to fix whatever perceived problems have led us here. Which is a kind of irony that makes me think that this is being done not to solve problems but to reshape our government for some other end. And all of this is compounded by the legislature's unwillingness to exercise the exact power that they have been granted, which is to change the law of the United States.
So in this situation it's hard to see the courts siding with these people as simply rationally applying the law, because the law itself as written by past legislatures is simply being ignored, as are past judicial precedents, because they are inconvenient to the goal of dismantling the US government. It's also extremely dangerous because the "full faith and credit" of the United States depends on us honoring our commitments even when they are inconvenient to us.
Deepseek already proved regulation will not be effective at maintaining a market lead. =3
If you get fined millions of dollars (for copyright, of course) if you're found to have anything resembling DeepSeek on your machine - no company in the US is going to run it.
The personal market is going to be much smaller than the enterprise market.
Copyright licensing is just a detail corporations are well experienced dealing with in a commercial setting, and note some gov organizations are already exempt from copyright laws. However, people likely just won't host in countries with silly policies.
Best regards =3
Note: Data centers often naturally colocate with cold-climates, low-cost energy generation facilities, and fiber optic distance to major backbones/hubs.
At a certain scale, Energy cost is more important than location and hardware. The US just broke its own horses leg with tariffs before the race. Not bullish on the US domestic tech firms these days, and sympathize with the good folks at AMCHAM that will ultimately be left to clean up the mess eventually.
If businesses have opportunity to cut their operational variable costs >25%, than one can be fairly certain these facilities won't be located on US soil.
Have a great day =3
Is there opportunity? Lower risks and energy prices may well outweigh the cost of tariffs. It is not like any other horse in the race has perfectly healthy legs.
Depends on the posture, as higher profit businesses may invest more into maintaining market dominance. However, the assumption technology is a zero-sum economic game was dangerously foolish, and attempting to cheat the global free market is ultimately futile.
Have a wonderful day, =3
That would be as successful as fighting internet piracy.
Not to mention that you could outsource the AI stuff to servers sitting in Mexico or something.
"Building a moat" frames anti-competitive behavior as a defense rather than an assault on the free market by implying that monopolistic behavior is a survival strategy rather than an attempt to dominate the market and coerce customers.
"We need to build a moat" is much more agreeable to tell employees than "we need to be more anti-competitive."
A moat by definition has such a large strategic asymmetry that one cannot cross it without a very high chance of death. A functioning SEC and FTC as well as CFPB https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consumer_Financial_Protection_... are necessary for efficient markets.
Now might be the time to rollout consumer club cards that are adversarial in nature.
* The secret formula for Coke
* ASML's technology
* The "Gucci" brand
* Apple's network effects
These are genuine competitive advantages in the market. Regulatory moats and other similar things are an assault on the free market. Moats in general are not.
I'm hardly the only one to think this way, hence regulation such as data portability in the EU.
The protocol example is a good one. However I don't think it's the network effect that's beneficial in that case but rather the innovation of the thing that was built.
If it's closed, I think that facet specifically is detrimental to the consumer.
If it's open, then that's the best you can do to mitigate the unfortunate reality that taking advantage of this particular innovation requires multiple participating endpoints. It's just how it is.
Moreover, they shouldn't have any way to force (or even nudge via defaults) the user to use Apple Payments, App Store, or other Apple platform pieces. Anyone should be on equal footing and there shouldn't be any taxation. Apple already has every single advantage, and what they're doing now is occupying an anticompetitive high ground via which they can control (along with duopoly partner Google) the entire field of mobile computing.
Apple's network effects are anti-compeitive creating vendor lock-in, which allows them to coerce customers. I generally defend Apple. But they are half anti-competitive (coerce customers), half competitive (earn customers), but earning customers is fueled by the coercive app store.
This is a very clear example of how moat is an abusive word. Under one framing (moat) network effects are a way to earn customers by spending resources on projects that earn customers (defending market position). In the anti-competitive framing, network effects are an explicit strategy to create vendor lock in and make it more challenging to migrate to other platforms so apple's budget to implement anti-customer policies is bigger.
ASML is a patent based monopoly, with exclusivity agreements with suppliers, with significant export controls. I will grant you that bleeding edge technology is arguably the best case argument for the word moat, but it's also worth asking in detail how technology is actually developed and understanding that patents are state sanctioned monopolies.
Both Apple and ASML could reasonably be considered monopo-like. So I'm not sure they are the best defense against how moat implies anti-competitive behavior. Monopolies are fundamentally anti-competitive.
The Gucci brand works against the secondary market for their goods and has an army of lawyers to protect their brand against imitators and has many limiting/exclusivity agreements on suppliers.
Coke's formula is probably the least "moaty" thing about coca cola. Their supply chain is their moat and their competitive advantage is also rooted in exclusivity deals. "Our company is so competitive because our recipe is just that good" is a major kool-aid take.
Patents are arguably good, but are legalized anti-competition. Exclusivity agreements don't seem very competitive. Acquisitions are anti-competitive. Pricing games to snuff out competition seems like the type of thing that can done chiefly in anti-competitive contexts.
So ASML isn't an argument against "moat means anti-competitive", but an argument that sometimes anti-competitive behavior is better for society because it allows for otherwise economically unfeasible things to be be feasible. The other brand's moats are much more rooted in business practices around acquisitions and suppliers creating de facto vertical integrations. Monopolies do offer better cheaper products, until they attain a market position that allows them to coerce customers.
Anti-trust authorities have looked at those companies.
Another conceptual metaphor is "president as CEO." The CEO metaphor re-frames political rule as a business operation, which makes executive overreach appear logical rather than dangerous.
You could reasonably argue that the president functions as a CEO, but the metaphor itself is there to manufacture consent for unchecked power.
Conceptual metaphors are insidious. PR firms and think tanks actively work to craft these insidious metaphors that shape conversations and how people think about the world. By the time you've used the metaphor, you've already accepted many of the implications of the metaphor without even knowing it.
https://commonslibrary.org/frame-the-debate-insights-from-do...
Also, the Gucci brand does not have lawyers. The Gucci brand is a name, a logo, and an aesthetic. Kering S.A. (owners of Gucci), enforces that counterfeit Gucci products don't show up. The designers at Kering spend a lot of effort coming up with Gucci-branded products, and they generally seem to have the pulse of a certain sector of the market.
The analysis of Coke's supply chain is wrong. The supply chain Coke uses is pretty run-of-the-mill, and I'm pretty sure that aside from the syrup (with the aforementioned secret formula), they actually outsource most of their manufacturing. They have good scale, but past ~100 million cans, I'm not sure you get many economies of scale in soda. That's why my local supermarket chain can offer "cola" that doesn't quite taste like Coke for cheaper than Coke. You could argue that the brand and the marketing are the moat, but the idea that Coke has a supply chain management advantage (let alone a moat over this) is laughable.
This is a drastic take, I think to most of us in the industry "moat" simply means whatever difficult-to-replicate competitive advantage that a firm has invested heavily in.
Regulatory capture and graft aren't moats, they're plain old corrupt business practices.
Worse that "moats" are a good thing, which they are for the company, but not necessarily society at large. The larger the moat, the more money coming out of your pocket as a customer.
It is insidious.
US tech, and western tech in general, is very culturally - and by this I mean in the type of coding people have done - homogeneous.
The deep seek papers published over the last two weeks are the biggest thing to happen in IA since GPT3 came out. But unless you understand distributed file systems, networking, low level linear algebra, and half a dozen other fields at least tangentially then you'd have not realized they are anything important at all.
Meanwhile I'm going through the interview process for a tier 1 US AI lab and I'm having to take a test about circles and squares, then write a compsci 101 red/black tree search algorithm while talking to an AI, being told not to use AI at the same time. This is with an internal reference being keen for me to be on board. At this point I'm honestly wondering if they aren't just using the interview process to generate high quality validation data for free.
幸运的是，通过转换器模型，当我们光荣的领导人习近平从资本主义走狗手中解放我们时，我不需要学习中文。
Funny how they like to crow about free markets, while also running to daddy government when their position is threatened.
In the US right now you can have a death match between every AI lab, then give all the resources to the one which wins and you'd still have largely the same results as if you didn't.
The reason why Deepseek - it started life as a HFT firm - hit as hard as it did is because it was a cross disciplinary team that had very non-standard skill sets.
I've had to try and head hunt network and FPGA engineers away from HFT firms and it was basically impossible. They already make big tech (or higher) salaries without the big tech bullshit - which none of them would ever pass.
Can confirm. There are downsides, and it can get incredibly stressed at times, but there are all sorts of big tech imposed hoops you don't have to jump through.
Could you kindly share some examples for those of us without big tech experience? I assume you're talking about working practises more than just annoying hiring practises like leetcode?
Not sure if that is accurate, but one of the reasons why DeepSeek R1 performs so well in certain areas is thought to be access to China's Gaokao (university entrance exam) data.
Its a niche product that tried to go mainstream and the general public doesn't want it, just look at iPhone 16 sales and Windows 11, everyone is happier with the last version without AI.
embrace. extend. extinguish.
infiltrate. assimilate.
done, tovarisch ...
The article seems to indicate they want all AI companies to get relief from these laws though.
Given OpenAI's history and relationship with the "AI safety" movement, I wouldn't be surprised to find out later that they also lobbied for the same proposed state-level regulations they're seeking relief from.