You are right that they didn’t invent it. It’s a pretty well-established method for cornering a market.

1. All those who have been arguing this - many of them non-technical - are part of the same ideological movement.

2. Technically, there isn’t. In practice, majority of the time regulations benefitted those who wrote them.

3. Not sure if this is a criticism of the comment you are replying to or of the p-doom crowd. We would all appreciate facts stated instead of science fiction tropes repeated.

Look, “a lot of people say this” is a Trumpian fallacy. A lot of people say a lot of crazy things. It says nothing about the factuality about what they say. How many are this lot? Who are they? What do they know? Why are they incapable of expressing it without so much emotion? How come a big portion are non-technical?

They certainly didn't invent this strategy, but that's because it already existed. Regulatory capture is nothing new.

> 1. They, and many other experts, have been saying the same thing since well before the current paradigm existed.

Some experts sure. "Some experts" say lots of things.

However, this is actually much to their advantage. If you were a frontier AI company, a legitimate concern to use as justification for your regulatory capture is exactly what you want. That is, after all, generally how regulatory capture gains public approval.

AI safety was also why OpenAI had to charge per-token for GPT-3. It must've been such a struggle for them to make that difficult decision. I'm sure Sam Altman spent a lot of nights crying to sleep over that one.

It's good that we never got open weights for a GPT-3 class model, right?

> 2. There is nothing about regulation that is required to give them an advantage; it’s a fallacy to suggest “regulation = advantage”

It's difficult to outline the number of different ways that regulatory capture can and will benefit OpenAI and Anthropic.

If we limit things to "Fable"-class models, then nobody competing with Anthropic/OpenAI is ever allowed to outdo them. If you literally legally aren't allowed to make better models, you can never charge the "premium" of having the current top-tier model. You have to compete by being cheaper than Anthropic instead, which is a lot less enticing from a standpoint of trying to become profitable. Take a look at the per-token pricing of Fable real quick. Yeah. Being able to charge a premium for the model that does the cybersecurity thing is literally their most important asset.

If Anthropic really is making a profit now as rumored, then they need regulatory capture as fast as they can possibly get it. Once Anthropic and OpenAI prove that AI is a viable investment, entities with a lot of capital will suddenly become even more interested in re-allocating it towards taking a slice of this pie.

> 3. It would be preferable to argue the facts (is it or is it not dangerous? Why or why not?) than conspire as to why they’re stating what they and plenty of others have been saying for decades

OK. On the factual end of things, AI safety experts have been raising the alarms for over a decade and so far essentially none of their predictions have come true.

The rationalists, the main group pushing the AI safety rhetoric that dominates the Western AI sphere and is virtually absent in China, which appear to be going entirely off the deep end at this point in time, put together their best minds to produce AI 2027, which of course like most predictions started to fall apart a bit before hitting the one year mark. Predicting the future is hard.

I have made this point before but I will make it again: I think AI safety experts deserve at least as much skepticism as Ed Zitron in their claims. They've been making similar dubious claims about AI capabilities and an incoming singularity for a long time now, and so far the best we can say is that maybe it will eventually come true.

Maybe. Or maybe you've read too much goddamn science fiction.