Hacker News Reader

Comment by Isamu | Hacker News Reader

This is one of the reasons why AI companies are looking for explicit regulations, it can help to reduce the risk of possible liability and maybe make the legal way forward more tractable. With a regulatory framework in place much of the burden of identifying risks falls on the regulatory authority.

Then the AI companies have more confidence that they can move forward in a certain way, and issue investor guidance that is maybe closer to reality.

View on HN

I think they're mostly looking for regulations because they've spent close to $2T, all to realized they have no technical moat, so they're trying to build a regulatory one.

That's the conspiracy theory, but there's no good evidence for it, and it doesn't really make sense in the long-run.

It's the only thing that makes sense for a lot of these companies to survive to any long term when open models keep nipping at their heels for pennies on the dollar.

You're assuming the open models will follow regulations though.

No, I'm assuming that the open models won't/can't and will be banned from a lot tons of use cases that will mandate use of the large frontier shops in order to comply with said regulations.

The theory is that open models cannot follow regulations and will therefore be banned or not eligible for many of the large contracts that the frontier labs will win.

No good evidence other than their openly stated desire for that regulation? Dario and Sam have both made open pleas for it, repeatedly.

Liability is enough of a reason

Both things can be true.

They want stable rules they can follow, which will limit their liability as long as they stay within them.

They also would like those rules to be as restrictive as possible towards their competitors.

They've spent close to $2T so far. At that scale the legal issues they've had are just the cost of doing business.

I'm quite sure that if there wasn't the existential threat of a lack of a moat, they would not be pushing for regulations at all.

The legal issues can sink their entire business model, not quite the cost of doing business.

A lot of things could sink their business model including opening the can of worms of the wrong regulations.

After all the claims of "the product we are developing could cause the extinction of humanity" I'm honestly surprised Florida is the only place so far to seek an injunction preventing further development of the product.

It's really hard to take these companies seriously or at face value about anything they say.

It doesn't have to be an existential threat. As long as the lobbying is cheaper than the possible legal costs, it will look reasonable to lobby for rules.

As restrictive as possible towards their competitors, while being as permissive as possible for them. Getting control of the regulation making process means they can make sure they don't end up too constrained anywhere that would hurt their bottom line.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com