Does anyone know what are the proposed regulations? Controlling software is impossible, so the only option is banning hardware ownership. No more mac studio.
If you pay attention to how these US CEOs talk, it'll be "safety". If I were to guess, they'll try and require a lot of testing, validation, certification before a model is legally allowed to be used in the US or on US products.
It won't be a great moat, they'll probably try and get trade treaties setup to try and expand the moat. But ultimately it won't slow down chinese model development, just limit who can legally use them.
From the frontier labs, the only publicly stated one seemed to be to give them an exception from anti-trust laws to form a cartel and place - incidentally friendly - regulators in charge of monitoring everyone's work.
From politicians like Bernie Sanders, we've had proposals like 20 year imprisonment for anyone researching "ASI".
Recognising how useful a tool is at dealing with a problem should be applauded.
Some entities may consensually prefer to exist in bubbles of their choosing. Is it then considered ethically dubious to provide the structure they need to feel safe, without it requiring their awareness?
To me it seems like a problem of where to set limits and how boundaries are enforced.
I mean this sympathetically, but you and your partner seem to have an unhealthy relationship with work.
Employment is a business transaction. You sell the company your time - it gives you money. That’s the deal. The company is not your family, your father or a secret ledger of who worked hardest.
Think of it like buying groceries. You don’t expect the supermarket to love you because you’ve shopped there for 15 years. The supermarket doesn’t expect you to keep buying burnt bread out of loyalty. Either side can end the transaction when it stops making economic sense.
Once you understand this, corporate behavior becomes much less mysterious and much less emotionally destructive. You stop thinking you must deserve to be seen, deserve to be noticed, deserve to be loved.
There are no sacrifice points. Unused vacation days aren’t loyalty deposits. Working nights isn’t an insurance policy. Being liked by 30 people doesn’t give you 30 votes at budget time.
Your partner may have been excellent, and the executive may be a fool. Both things can be true. But a corporation is a bundle of incentives, budgets, politics, and contracts wearing a branded hoodie.
Do good work. Be kind to colleagues. Take pride in your craft. But take your vacation, keep your CV fresh, maintain relationships outside the company and never EVER outsource your sense of worth to an org chart.
This is how I view work and any relationship to corporate for a long time now, and it took lots of pain to finally recognize it. I'd go even further than that: your primary role is to be selfish and pull in as much bacon as you can as fast as you can, then get out.
I recognize myself a long time ago in your partner, so much mental energy wasted to the game where I could instead just clock in, do some stuff, clock out and spend the rest of my energy where it matters: at home, with friends, cooking, working on personal projects. Let the insane corporate climbers light themselves on fire to keep management warm, I'll derive my worth elsewhere.
I agree with most of what you write but “Either side can end the transaction when it stops making economic sense.” Is true but only when rationality is assumed and that the interests of those doing the firing actually align with the overall corporation.
Corporations are made of people and the structures can be very dysfunctional. I’ve seen it and I’m sure it’s common elsewhere, many decisions are made with no actual rational understanding of “economic sense”. An example is firing someone to save costs but needing to then hire 2 new people to replace them, increasing communication costs and having to pay a training cost.
Nope, you need a regulatory approval, insurance etc. Self driving cars need to be 10x the average driver. So the trillion dollar question is when Lidar will meet all requirements and when camera-only.
> Self driving cars need to be 10x the average driver.
Why? So long as they're insured and their owners can be held criminally liable for injuries just as a human driver would be, why does the bar have to be higher?
Because driving risk is far from evenly distributed. If a self-driving car drives like an average human driver, for responsible drivers, this would mean incurring more risk by getting into one.
A huge portion of the risk of human drivers is due to confounding human factors like negligence, distraction, medical issues, fatigue, etc. Responsible drivers can take most of these factors into their own hands -- not driving while sleepy, not driving drunk, not using their cell phone. These people don't want a vehicle
A better comparison would be comparing the capability of a self-driving car to the skill of a human driver driving under ideal circumstances of health/responsibility/etc.
We don't measure aggregate risk by discarding a part of the population, even if it's the poorer-performing part.
Even today, you cannot fully avoid this risk: when you get into a vehicle driven by a stranger, you don't know a priori whether the driver is excellent or average. Ideally customer feedback weeds out poor drivers and reduces accident rates, but I'm not privy to data that would prove or disprove whether that actually happens - especially because new drivers join the pool every day.
We absolutely can and do mitigate these risks when getting into vehicles driven by strangers: professional drivers typically have higher standards for driving history, and people can physically observe whether a friend/etc is drunk/distracted/etc.
But besides that, the people who are in the socioeconomic demographic to buy an expensive self driving car overlap with the demographic that have lower driving risk. For them, the self-driving car is more dangerous than driving themselves.
That suggests the comparative bar should be "professional driver," which is perhaps somewhat higher than "average driver" (1.5x? 2x?) but not 10x higher.
That sounds reasonable for a practical general regulatory standard.
For a personal standard, it is reasonable that an individual purchaser may use their own risk profile as that standard... as many of the risks involved are not random but can be controlled through choice or are inherently personal. For example, about half of all traffic deaths are due to drowsy or drunk driving.
Accident risk for any given driver is highly distributed. For someone making a marginal choice to purchase a car, the choice they are faced with is choosing between the safety profile of a self-driving car and their own personal risk profile.
we'll be better off - assuming we'll generate revenue on our own. LLMs have opened up an enormous new frontier of micro-SaaS opportunities. One person can now build what used to require a small team.
The real problem is zero-sum work, especially when the only moat was knowledge asymmetry that is now public knowledge.
I'm in agreement with your claim, though if you recall some of these micro SaaSes went hyperfocused on niches. The value proposition is then smaller, with larger data liability than with some behemoth's of SaaS.
Though for the later ones, one might also ask themselves if they are worth their cost when using 20-30% of provided functionality.
This will also make it harder to compete because it holds true for everyone, not just you. I am already, this year, seeing vibe coders put out some decent stuff on App Stores but the problem is marketing it. You no longer automatically stand out just because you have a cool app. You may not even do so with reasonable early traction via social media. And then what? Throw venture capital onto the problem? In an AI saturated world? Really?
Also the drive to innovate goes down. It took weeks for the creator of 2048 to make a low quality clone of Threes. Now people can make relatively high quality ripoffs in days, even hours.
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