[HN Gopher] OpenAI has upped its lobbying efforts nearly sevenfold
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       OpenAI has upped its lobbying efforts nearly sevenfold
        
       Author : Brajeshwar
       Score  : 188 points
       Date   : 2025-01-22 15:05 UTC (7 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.technologyreview.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.technologyreview.com)
        
       | seper8 wrote:
       | Classic case of "pulling up the ladder behind oneself".
       | 
       | Probably AI will be a more competitive market than he and his
       | investors had hoped for.
        
       | klipt wrote:
       | Was Citizens United a huge mistake?
        
         | daveguy wrote:
         | Yes. Yes it was. Poorly decided to the detriment of the United
         | States. It allows unlimited money laundering into US elections
         | from any source foreign or domestic.
         | 
         | https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens_United_v._FEC
        
           | accrual wrote:
           | > The court held 5-4 that the freedom of speech clause of the
           | First Amendment prohibits the government from restricting
           | independent expenditures for political campaigns by
           | corporations including for-profits, nonprofit organizations,
           | labor unions, and other kinds of associations.
           | 
           | Wow. Just one vote away from a drastically different
           | political landscape and future for the country.
        
         | pkaye wrote:
         | Companies could not lobby before Citizens United?
        
           | JumpCrisscross wrote:
           | You're correct. This is unrelated to _Citizens_.
        
           | arrosenberg wrote:
           | Yes they could, but there were strict limits to it and people
           | went to jail for violating them. https://en.wikipedia.org/wik
           | i/Jack_Abramoff#Scandal_and_crim...
           | 
           | McConnell (yes that one) v FEC and Citizens United redefined
           | the first amendment to include financial contributions as a
           | form of speech and extended to for-profit corporations the
           | same rights as individuals and civic associations.
        
             | JumpCrisscross wrote:
             | Isn't McConnell v FEC the SCOTUS ruling that _upheld_
             | McCain-Feingold? The Act that _Citizens_ overturned?
             | 
             | To my understanding, this had zero effect on lobbying
             | rules. Just campaign finance, namely, donations to
             | candidates and donations to messaging operations.
        
               | arrosenberg wrote:
               | It didn't overturn the BRCA, but the minority in
               | McConnell laid the groundwork for the Citizens United
               | decision. O'Connor wasn't willing to hand the country
               | over to oligarchs like Alito was.
        
               | JumpCrisscross wrote:
               | Sure, but that still doesn't address whether _Citizens_
               | spoke to lobbying rules. It was more about contributions
               | and PACs.
        
               | arrosenberg wrote:
               | If you want to pretend you don't understand the
               | relationship between lobbying and the ability of groups
               | to spend unlimited money influencing politicians, that's
               | your prerogative. I think more highly of you, so I'm not
               | going to spend my time arguing the point.
        
               | JumpCrisscross wrote:
               | > _the relationship between lobbying and the ability of
               | groups to spend unlimited money influencing politicians_
               | 
               | The point is this lobbying wouldn't have been restricted
               | by anything _Citizens_ touched. OpenAI isn't giving money
               | to a PAC, it's buying bog-standard lobbying hours. This
               | is an adjacent but nevertheless separate issue.
        
         | lenerdenator wrote:
         | How could it be? It made the number go up for the right people.
         | 
         | And since that number is literally all that the right people
         | can comprehend, it's the most important measure of a society's
         | condition.
        
         | bcrosby95 wrote:
         | The biggest continual mistake in the USA is conflating groups
         | of people with amoral profit seeking entities that have the
         | benefit of legal fictions that protect individuals involved
         | from the consequences of their behavior.
         | 
         | If you chain together enough analogies you eventually reach a
         | conclusion that is complete nonsense. That's about where our
         | court system has brought us.
        
           | 93po wrote:
           | I've been saying for years, companies can have freedom of
           | speech when we can put them in jail for wrongdoing. I'd even
           | take metaphorical jail - not allowed to employ anyone,
           | operate, transact, or anything else for the duration of their
           | sentence. I bet we'd see a complete stop of illegal activity
           | we see every day if this was the risk.
        
             | bmelton wrote:
             | This feels causally backwards, as the only point to
             | corporate personhood is so that we _can_ hold companies
             | accountable for their misdeeds.
             | 
             | Without personhood, we'd have to know which persons within
             | an opaque company structure were responsible for wrongs
             | against us in order to sue them directly instead of just
             | being able to sue or fine "Walmart" or whomever.
        
             | reverendsteveii wrote:
             | As the old saying goes, "I'll believe corporations are
             | people when Texas executes one."
        
         | laidoffamazon wrote:
         | Yes. But even more than that having a president that is for
         | sale by domestic and foreign interests.
        
           | cdme wrote:
           | Nothing like launching a crypto pump and dump right before
           | you enter office.
        
         | reverendsteveii wrote:
         | Depends: are you extraordinarily wealthy?
        
       | nottorp wrote:
       | Ofc... it's easier to create legal barriers to entry than to
       | offer a better product than the competition :)
        
       | FrustratedMonky wrote:
       | Looks like it is already paying dividends.
        
       | gigatexal wrote:
       | Ahhhh the regulatory capture part of modern giant startups.
        
         | bilbo0s wrote:
         | Don't need regulatory capture to stop the small fries when the
         | cost of entry is so high. Only ginormous entities can even
         | realistically play in that game right now.
         | 
         | Think about it, where are you gonna get 10000 H100s?
         | 
         | Best you or I can hope for is to fine tune the models the big
         | guys make "open source". None of which will be as serviceable
         | as their closed models.
        
           | Herring wrote:
           | The costs won't always be that high, due to Moore's law and
           | other advances. Anybody can train a GPT-2 right now for a
           | couple hundred bucks. https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-
           | industry/artificial-intell...
           | 
           | Also model performance follows a power law. There are
           | strongly diminishing results, where after some point throwing
           | twice as much money at the problem only gains you 1%
           | accuracy. OpenAI knows this, so they're all in on regulatory
           | capture.
        
             | gigatexal wrote:
             | It's always going to be like this. Take Apple. Plucky
             | garage started anti-establishment startup now a giant gate
             | keeper of apps and stores using any means necessary to keep
             | that 30% tax/tariff/whatever you call it
        
               | scarface_74 wrote:
               | Jobs wanted lock down computing as far as the first Mac
               | in 1984.
        
             | bmelton wrote:
             | AI seems to have validated Wirth's Law[1] more than it has
             | Moore's, and they are running in direct competition
             | 
             | [1] - "Software is getting slower more rapidly than
             | hardware is becoming faster"
        
             | JohnMakin wrote:
             | It's odd you're invoking moore's law here, which actually
             | isn't a law, and is well understood and accepted over at
             | least the last decade across business and academia that it
             | is slowing and is not limitless. As per what "other"
             | advances you're referring to, I can't speculate - maybe
             | quantum computing? We are quite a long way away from that
             | being a commercial reality.
        
               | Herring wrote:
               | It's mainly hardware upgrades (new TSMC nodes), training
               | data quantity/quality improvements, and model
               | architecture (and broader software) changes. Here's a fun
               | project I've had my eye on recently:
               | https://github.com/KellerJordan/modded-nanogpt/
        
           | swatcoder wrote:
           | Nah, training efficiency, inference efficiency, and compute
           | availability all have enough headroom that the third-party
           | and grassroots models will become increasingly available.
           | 
           | The current leaders basically need to either (1) break
           | through the capability ceiling before everybody else catches
           | up, or (2) construct law/regulation that keeps everybody else
           | out of the game. #1 is uncertain, but #2 is well-understood
           | business.
           | 
           | Since they all share that same interest (they'll be duking it
           | with each other either way), the result is an "industry wide"
           | effort to artificially close the door behind them.
        
           | nullc wrote:
           | One of the major approaches is to block open source models
           | produced by parties that aren't in the business of
           | restricting access to AI.
        
       | bko wrote:
       | Made me think what Mark Andreeson said in a recent interview.
       | 
       | > They said, look, AI is a technology basically, that the
       | government is gonna completely control. This is not gonna be a
       | startup thing. They, they actually said flat out to us, don't do
       | AI startups like, don't fund AI startups. It's not something that
       | we're gonna allow to happen. They're not gonna be allowed to
       | exist. There's no point.
       | 
       | > They basically said AI is gonna be a game of two or three big
       | companies working closely with the government. And we're gonna
       | basically wrap them in a, you know, they, I'm paraphrasing, but
       | we're gonna basically wrap them in a government cocoon. We're
       | gonna protect them from competition, we're gonna control them,
       | we're gonna dictate what they do.
       | 
       | >And then I said, I don't understand how you're gonna lock this
       | down so much because like the math for you, AI is like out there
       | and it's being taught everywhere. And you know, they literally
       | said, well, you know, during the Cold War we, we classified
       | entire areas of physics and took them out of the research
       | community and like entire branches of physics basically went dark
       | and didn't proceed. And that if we decide we need to, we're gonna
       | do the same thing to to the math underneath ai.
       | 
       | > And I said, I've just learned two very important things. 'cause
       | I wasn't aware of the former and I wasn't aware that you were,
       | you know, even conceiving of doing it to the latter. And so they
       | basically just said, yeah, we're gonna look, we're gonna take
       | total control the entire thing and just don't start startups.
       | 
       | If this is true, makes sense for OpenAI and other to ramp up
       | lobbying to be one of the two or three big companies. In another
       | subsequent interivew Altman denied he was ever in such a meeting.
       | 
       | https://app.podscribe.ai/episode/118114058
        
         | Dig1t wrote:
         | This is exactly the same thought I had.
         | 
         | With so much talk about regulation and talk of complete control
         | of the technology by govt, it would be very foolish for them
         | not to be spending a lot of time and money trying to influence
         | policy on it.
        
         | seper8 wrote:
         | Anyone else find him IMPOSSIBLE to listen to? He really needs a
         | speaking coach.
         | 
         | You know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know...
        
           | wil421 wrote:
           | If I had fuck you money I wouldn't care. Elon sounds many
           | times worse than my ADHD mind but there are many folks who
           | would pay to hear him speak.
        
         | akprasad wrote:
         | For context, Andreessen is talking here about the Biden
         | administration, and his revulsion to this approach is why he
         | endorsed Trump:
         | 
         | > I, you know, look, and I would say like when we endorse
         | Trump, we, we only did so on the basis of like tech policy.
         | [...] Number two was ai, where I became very scared earlier
         | this year that they were gonna do the same thing to AI that
         | they did to crypto.
        
           | griomnib wrote:
           | HN audience is essentially pro-Trump as well. 1/3rd of Santa
           | Clara county (heart of Silicon Valley) voted for him, and a
           | lot of tech employees come from authoritarian countries
           | (China) and really see nothing wrong with authoritarian rule.
        
             | Ninjak8051 wrote:
             | First of all, that is factually incorrect -- Trump received
             | 28.1% of the vote in Santa Clara county, which is
             | significantly lower than 1/3rd. Source: https://results.enr
             | .clarityelections.com/CA/Santa_Clara/1225....
             | 
             | Second of all, your bar for "essentially pro-Trump" being
             | 1/3rd of the vote is ridiculous, by your standard almost
             | every county in America is "essentially pro-Trump".
        
         | JumpCrisscross wrote:
         | > _makes sense for OpenAI and other to ramp up lobbying to be
         | one of the two or three big companies_
         | 
         | The fact that Musk hates Altman, has the President's ear and
         | has a competitor to Altman's main wealth engine surely also
         | plays into the calculus.
        
           | baobabKoodaa wrote:
           | you can't have an oligarchy without oligarchs (plural - even
           | if some of them hate each other)
        
             | sweeter wrote:
             | they hate each other but when it comes down to it they all
             | understand their position and common interest in screwing
             | everybody else over for massive and unthinkable profit.
        
         | jncfhnb wrote:
         | I call bullshit. I don't really believe they're saying don't
         | fund startups. I also don't believe for a second that they
         | think they can stunt progress. We didn't have the internet in
         | the 60s.
        
           | loganfrederick wrote:
           | I dunno, I've met enough people first hand who believe in
           | heavily regulating AI researchers to the extent that private
           | companies shouldn't or couldn't do it without being owned by
           | the government. It would surprise me that a handful of
           | staffers in either the intelligence agencies or Biden
           | executive branch also thought this way.
        
         | dole wrote:
         | Information wants to be free. If the US doesn't invest, others
         | will.
        
           | random3 wrote:
           | what does that even mean?
           | 
           | People want things. Information doesn't want anything. People
           | want property rights for both physical and intellectual
           | property.
           | 
           | Likely rules are ill suited for levels of scaling achieved
           | with current technology. A single person can read a ton of
           | stuff and retain only a fraction compared to how much a
           | system can.
           | 
           | So information wants to be free is nonsense. People want
           | access to more information, at the same time they don't want
           | others to have accees to the same information. However having
           | access to more information has marginal effects when capacity
           | is limited. Hence it's the information capacity that makes
           | all the difference and this puts a small class in
           | disproportionate advantage.
        
             | ata_aman wrote:
             | Not putting words in OP's mouth from the comment you're
             | replying to. But from my understanding, the default state
             | of information is to spread itself, it's an inherent
             | characteristic. You have to put effort to suppress it
             | (example making info classified or enforcing secrecy). If
             | you don't actively put effort into suppressing information,
             | it will spread.
        
             | null0pointer wrote:
             | Information wants to be free (as in libre) in the same way
             | water wants to flow downhill.
        
               | JumpCrisscross wrote:
               | > _Information wants to be free (as in libre) in the same
               | way water wants to flow downhill_
               | 
               | Water flows downhill to maximise entropy. The equivalent
               | for information is dissolution into randomness. If
               | anything, by this analogy, the "freedom" that involves
               | information being copied and transmitted is the
               | equivalent of pumping water uphill.
               | 
               | Freedom takes work. You don't get it for free.
        
               | null0pointer wrote:
               | It's a literary analogy, not a physical analogy.
               | 
               | And I disagree about the work when it comes to
               | information. Our natural inclination as humans is to
               | share things we find interesting. Like "check out this
               | song" or "check out this article". I don't think this
               | takes much work. It just happens. In this sense the
               | information is free like the stream is free to flow
               | through the hills.
               | 
               | On the flip side there is substantial effort put into
               | impeding this free flow of information with schemes like
               | DRM. Similar to building a dam. But once cracks form the
               | free flow resumes.
               | 
               | Continuing the water analogy you could say there is also
               | substantial effort put into building the infrastructure
               | to make information accessible to many more people. As a
               | library is to a city's plumbing infrastructure.
        
             | azemetre wrote:
             | It usually means that the US government should give for-
             | profit entities billions of tax dollars to benefit the
             | elite and corpo class.
             | 
             | A funny anecdote I found the other day is that during the
             | Korean War the US government wanted to break up AT&T but
             | AT&T got the Army to argue that AT&T was instrumental in
             | winning the war, I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader
             | to find out if AT&T won the Korean War but one of the end
             | results was rewarding AT&T with additional lucrative
             | military contracts.
        
             | AnimalMuppet wrote:
             | This was a catchphrase from... the 1990s, maybe?
             | 
             | The defining character of information is its
             | reproducibility. Even verbal speach: "And then she said..."
             | But digital information in particular is almost infinitely
             | reproducible, without loss, worldwide.
             | 
             | So when people say "information wants to be free", what
             | they actually mean is that trying to restrict the movement
             | of information is fighting against the essential nature of
             | information.
        
           | kelseyfrog wrote:
           | I'm not sure. Saying that information wants anything is like
           | saying that an LLM is capable of thought - a category error.
        
         | neilv wrote:
         | Interesting. How would that work?
         | 
         | The US certainly doesn't have a monopoly on the best scientists
         | and engineers.
         | 
         | How long can the US control sufficient capacity of hardware?
         | (Without unspeakable atrocities.)
         | 
         | Is the US planning to overwhelmingly outspend other countries?
         | 
         | Or make AI-control treaties. And we'll have AI states and non-
         | AI states?
        
           | NemoNobody wrote:
           | The US is the unparalleled economy and unlike it's only
           | economic contender, the US has future growth projected out as
           | far as the turn of the century - China has a near economic
           | apocalypse projected for its country by the turn of the
           | century. That's really not that far away.
           | 
           | What leads you to believe the US wont continue to ourselves
           | everyone whenever it deems want or reason? Historically that
           | has been the case.
           | 
           | China's future has drawn attention to the sand upon which the
           | foundation of their economic growth sits.
           | 
           | So. Who will outspend the single country that accounts for
           | 25.32% of all global economic activity?? Who is going to do
           | that??
        
             | tokioyoyo wrote:
             | There've been two new generations of kids that have been
             | born since the "China is doomed" headlines have dominated
             | the news. At some point, maybe, everyone should take them a
             | bit more seriously? If one calls current US administrations
             | methods "course correcting", the same person should assume
             | that another giant can do the same.
        
               | lnxg33k1 wrote:
               | I still remember Russia going to default 2 months into
               | the war... western media is... like media everywhere else
        
         | davesque wrote:
         | Not sure how that would work exactly. The math behind
         | transformer models is really basic. And the world is different
         | now than it was during the cold war. There was no internet, for
         | example. Also, given that this was during an interview in which
         | MA was criticizing the Biden administration, I'm assuming he
         | was telling half truths to make Democrats look like bogeymen as
         | all Trump crazed lunatics tend to do.
        
           | bongodongobob wrote:
           | It won't work. Restricting hard to find and process
           | radioactive elements vs math... Yeah good luck.
        
         | loeber wrote:
         | How can you expect people to take your comment seriously if you
         | can't even spell his name?
        
           | jjulius wrote:
           | How can you expect people to take you seriously as a CEO if
           | you're going to attack someone for a mistake like that?
           | 
           | And that's to say nothing of the fact that such an innocuous
           | typo doesn't change the actual crux.
           | 
           | A little, "Hey, dunno if you know or not, but it's
           | 'Andreessen'," goes a long way.
        
         | torginus wrote:
         | > they literally said, well, you know, during the Cold War we,
         | we classified entire areas of physics and took them out of the
         | research community and like entire branches of physics
         | basically went dark and didn't proceed
         | 
         | What are the odds that deep within US research labs, we have
         | some crazy breakthrough tech tucked away? Like antigravity
         | drives or force fields or whatever - complete with brand new
         | breakthrough physical theories to support them.
         | 
         | I'd guess suppressing such a breakthrough without raising
         | suspicion wouldn't be hard - probably only a few top guys can
         | make the intellectual jumps to derive such theories and the
         | experimental setup to validate them could very well cost
         | billions.
         | 
         | The US government could just quietly whisk away the top talent
         | into some secret lab, put out some fake papers showing this
         | avenue of research is not noteworthy and not fund further
         | public research in the area.
        
           | CamperBob2 wrote:
           | (a) Like all great conspiracy theories, it would require too
           | many people to keep their mouths shut; and (b) nobody in
           | China would care about any secrecy rules laid down by the US
           | government, any more than Sakharov's team in Russia cared
           | about the US's intention to monopolize the hydrogen bomb.
           | 
           | The closest thing to this type of technology would be EUV
           | hardware of the sort produced by ASML. We have now given
           | China every incentive to put everything they've got into
           | developing similar technology on their own soil. Despite slow
           | progress to date, they _will_ get there.
           | 
           | Another analogy might be the math behind encryption,
           | effectively monopolized by NSA for decades... but nobody's
           | trillion-dollar economy was blocked by those secrets.
        
           | throwaway314155 wrote:
           | > What are the odds that deep within US research labs, we
           | have some crazy breakthrough tech tucked away? Like
           | antigravity drives or force fields or whatever - complete
           | with brand new breakthrough physical theories to support
           | them.
           | 
           | Effectively zero? Did that sound more convincing when you
           | originally wrote it? Because it's like conspiracy theory 101.
        
         | griomnib wrote:
         | This is so clearly a complete lie - in what universe is some
         | top government official in the United States telling
         | corporations to a) fall behind competing nations in advanced
         | technology, b) set back our technological edge in the military,
         | c) degrade the USA ability to spy on and control information
         | access/controls in other countries, or d) do anything _other_
         | than fish for an insider trading opportunity.
        
           | chrisfosterelli wrote:
           | AI promises a lot of creative destruction. There are a
           | plethora of historical examples where elites have restricted
           | technological development because they thought it was a
           | threat to the status quo and therefore their ability to
           | extract wealth from that status quo.
           | 
           | For example: Queen Elizabeth refusing to grant a patent for
           | the first knitting machine, the Qing dynasty forbidding
           | large-scale ship building, or the Ottoman Empire outlawing
           | the printing press.
           | 
           | I'm not sure that this is what is happening here, but it's
           | occurrence is not impossible.
        
         | miohtama wrote:
         | Trump revoked Biden's AI executive order as one of the first
         | things in the office
         | 
         | https://www.cio.com/article/3806594/trump-repeals-bidens-ai-...
        
       | roddylindsay wrote:
       | Keep in mind this is just the lobbying that requires disclosure,
       | which is a tiny sliver of the overall policy effort. There's a
       | whole constellation of consultants, think tanks, industry groups,
       | "grasstops" organizers, push pollsters, etc. that are the real
       | (undisclosed) iceberg under the surface.
       | 
       | For example, here's an example of an effort to persuade Congress
       | not to update copyright laws to account for model training, which
       | was only revealed because of metadata accidentally included in a
       | PDF file. https://www.politico.com/news/2023/10/23/tech-lawyer-
       | ai-lett...
        
         | wil421 wrote:
         | Here's a firm that lobbies for pardons from Trump.
         | 
         | https://www.opensecrets.org/news/2021/01/trump-tied-lobbyist...
        
       | ryandvm wrote:
       | Honestly, nothing in US politics is going to get any better until
       | we are able to completely outlaw non-individual campaign
       | contributions.
        
         | JumpCrisscross wrote:
         | > _nothing in US politics is going to get any better until we
         | are able to completely outlaw non-individual campaign
         | contributions_
         | 
         | Banning corporate campaign donations is a good idea. It would
         | have no effect on this news.
        
         | bilbo0s wrote:
         | Even then nothing will get better.
         | 
         | How much can you give in relation to Kelcy Warren? Or Diane
         | Hendricks? Or Linda McMahon?
         | 
         | And that's before we even get to Bezos or Musk.
        
         | barbazoo wrote:
         | Three of the individuals standing behind the president at
         | inauguration have more wealth than the bottom 50% of people
         | [1].
         | 
         | [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vHH-KI2yk8s
        
           | 93po wrote:
           | The bottom 55% of global population holds 1% of the wealth.
           | The top 1% hold 46% of all wealth. As of 2020. Global wealth
           | was $418 trillion. So 1% is $4.18 trillion. I'm not sure any
           | three people hold that much money.
        
             | barbazoo wrote:
             | This was about the US specifically.
        
             | buryat wrote:
             | It's more of a pyramid, lots of different layers are
             | interested in upholding the existing system because they
             | all benefit
        
           | vkou wrote:
           | And one of them makes much of his fortune from government
           | contracts and will literally get a personal office inside the
           | white house.
           | 
           | It doesn't get any more kleptocratic than that. This sort of
           | both sides of the buy/sell conflict of interest would get you
           | fired from any properly ran company, but there's nothing that
           | will be properly ran going forward.
           | 
           | And that's not even in the top five problems with him.
        
             | sweeter wrote:
             | There is no coming back from this to be honest. America has
             | been a silent Oligarchy (a government by the few, for the
             | benefit of the few) for a long time and now its just mask
             | off... and unfortunately, the large majority of Democrats
             | have had no interest in making meaningful change, let alone
             | undoing these highly damaging policy changes like Citizens
             | United and everything after that.
             | 
             | Kakistocracy: Government by the least qualified or most
             | unprincipled citizens - also comes to mind here. No one in
             | the upper levels of government care about anything other
             | than enriching themselves at the behest of corporations,
             | and at the expense of everyone else's wellbeing and
             | livelihood. Instead we get vapid shallow identity politics
             | and "culture war" garbage, and every once in a long while
             | we get a gutted out compromised bill that addresses
             | 1/1000th of the problem... only to be later overturned
             | despite it being wholly ineffective.
             | 
             | I just don't see the government, in this state, ever having
             | the faculties or incentive to "fix itself." These
             | institutions and "norms" are irreparably broken, and some
             | people still insist on holding them in the highest regards
             | like they are some infallible mandate.
        
           | aSanchezStern wrote:
           | Right, but we've already got limits on individual
           | contributions, so even if you have a bunch of money, you
           | can't have outsized influence through your individual
           | contributions.
        
         | marcyb5st wrote:
         | Well, agreed for the common Joe, but that still allows someone
         | with a net worth in the tens of Billions to throw money around.
         | Especially because these people have a clear conflict of
         | interest.
         | 
         | They should ban money contributions completely. Each party gets
         | the same budget (say 10M$ and you run your campaign until you
         | have money and that's it).
         | 
         | You as a citizen wants to donate? Go and collect signatures,
         | spread the word or stuff like that, but no money (IMHO).
        
           | sweeter wrote:
           | Japan gives every candidate an equal amount of time on TV.
           | Its just one example of something that other countries do to
           | make elections more fair. You could limit resources and give
           | everyone a standard platform as a baseline so that anyone
           | outside of the deeply entrenched dual-party system has a
           | chance to win.
        
             | aliasxneo wrote:
             | Doesn't the US have similar TV laws with cable networks?
        
         | allemagne wrote:
         | We could definitely improve the arrangement of chairs on the
         | deck of the Titanic, but we can't even get 50% of the country
         | to recognize the most obvious grift in American history.
        
       | ternnoburn wrote:
       | This admin bends to money. They all do, of course, but this one
       | especially.
       | 
       | Maybe this whole late stage capitalism isn't the most efficient
       | way to allocate resources after all...
        
       | asdasdsddd wrote:
       | > Altman proposed to the Biden administration the construction of
       | multiple five-gigawatt data centers, which would each consume as
       | much electricity as New York City.
       | 
       | If this is what it takes to bring nuclear back, maybe it's worth
       | it.
        
         | eastbound wrote:
         | Can't wait for Europe to set the curfew for lights at 10pm,
         | while running AI datacenters.
        
       | baxtr wrote:
       | Related: I didn't see Sam Altman at the inauguration. Was he
       | there?
        
         | CharlesW wrote:
         | Not in person, but his $1 million personal donation attended.
         | https://www.foxbusiness.com/media/openai-ceo-sam-altman-dona...
        
         | latentcall wrote:
         | I think he was. I saw photos of him there mingling with Jake
         | and Logan Paul. Getting selfies together.
        
       | thrance wrote:
       | I remember some folks saying things like "Trump's already a
       | billionaire, he can't be bought". But him or another one, we were
       | always headed towards oligarchy. And I really don't know how
       | we're supposed to go back.
        
       | daghamm wrote:
       | In the meantime, DeepSeek published their o1 competitor on
       | huggingface and an API that costs 5-10% of OpenAI's o1.
       | 
       | Maybe Sam should give up his bribery world tour and focus on
       | creating a better product?
        
         | tokioyoyo wrote:
         | The logical next step is to ban foreign AI products in US. I
         | have no idea how they will pull it, but it'll be fun to watch
         | if it happens.
        
           | daghamm wrote:
           | Would not at all be surprised if that happens during 2025.
           | 
           | I think the west has been underestimating China's AI
           | capabilities. AI is huge in China and they have found tons of
           | "practial" applications so it's widely deployed.
        
           | rgbrgb wrote:
           | ban foreign math? aye.
        
             | tokioyoyo wrote:
             | It's not like they haven't tried that before. But again,
             | will be fun to watch.
        
       | dylan604 wrote:
       | Would any money spent during the next four years from ClosedAI be
       | money down the drain when Musk is whispering in Trump's ear? If
       | Musk says no to whatever ClosedAI wants, then that's what Trump
       | will do.
        
         | azinman2 wrote:
         | And yet Trump just did a lot of PR for the OpenAI/Son/Oracle
         | initiative.
         | 
         | Trump is simply pay to play. And they paid.
        
           | dylan604 wrote:
           | "Musk Pours Cold Water on Trump-Backed Stargate AI Project"
           | 
           | https://www.msn.com/en-us/technology/tech-companies/musk-
           | pou...
        
         | ipaddr wrote:
         | If I were Musk I would be worried about Larry Ellison. Trump
         | seemed to love him in the news conference.
        
       | blackeyeblitzar wrote:
       | It does seem like the emerging startup powerhouses like OpenAI,
       | Palantir, Anduril, etc. are all very deep in the lobbying game. I
       | wonder if they'll open up government contracts and regulations to
       | a more democratic and competitive process, or just become the new
       | incumbents holding all the power.
        
       | dataviz1000 wrote:
       | This reminds me of when Walter Gilbert's team faced challenges in
       | cloning the human insulin gene due to a moratorium on recombinant
       | DNA research in Cambridge, Massachusetts, which forced them to
       | relocate to England. This relocation impacted their progress,
       | allowing the team from Genentech and the City of Hope National
       | Medical Center to successfully clone the gene first in 1978,
       | leading to the production of the first genetically engineered
       | drug, human insulin.
       | 
       | Gilbert still got the Nobel Prize for his work sequencing of
       | nucleotides.
       | 
       | Researchers in AI, likewise, will have to relocate to more
       | favorable countries losing precious time.
       | 
       | https://dnalc.cshl.edu/view/15258-Government-restrictions-on...
        
         | ImHereToVote wrote:
         | They better hurry if they want to be the team that creates the
         | species that replaces us.
        
       | p0w3n3d wrote:
       | I think that humanity has failed The Reverse Turing's Test. We're
       | being bamboozled by the high quality illusion made by AI. I hope
       | we won't end up in a world where an official will put us into
       | jail, answering our "why" questions with short "the ChatGPT told
       | me so"
        
         | baq wrote:
         | IBM's 1979 slide should be the next amendment to the
         | constitution. Only half joking
        
         | dingnuts wrote:
         | United Healthcare already got caught using an LLM to make life
         | or death coverage decisions. IMHO that's both worse than your
         | nightmare scenario and it's already happening.
        
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