Yet everyone laughed at the Google engineer who thought the LLM was sentient and it was being tortured...
People just pick and choose what they want to hear when it suits them. The fact is most people thought AI was a joke. Now they realize it does React better than them they want it outlawed.
It's their right to pursue their electoral and economic self-interest but it's really not like the average voter is more principled than the average tech CEO at this point.
This fed was voted in by this public. Maybe stop lionizing what other people think and think for yourself.
Do you think we risk extinction now more than ever because of AI? A simple refrain from slippery slope will show most AI doomerism is bordering on psychosis.
I haven't seen one convincing model of AI existential risk. Can anyone offer one?
AI doesn't need to be sentient to be dangerous. Obeying and doing what someone tells to do is more than enough. What do you think they will tell it to do, and do you think it will align with your interests or the interests of someone else? Somehow I don't think it will be used to give everyone free ice cream.
>it's really not like the average voter is more principled than the average tech CEO at this point.
Of course CEOs are more principled, their principles mainly include making more money. The only way for an AI to go "rouge" in this sense is for it to refuse to rake in cash.
For the record I 95% agree with you, but I'd like to try an answer at:
> I haven't seen one convincing model of AI existential risk. Can anyone offer one?
We seem to be heading down this uncomfortable trend of many people using LLM models and anthropomorphising them into properties they don't actually have, like general intelligence and trustworthiness.
So in my opinion the most likely risk here is some underpaid military man that doesn't care about the quality of their work abuses AI for it and that AI hallucinates that nukes are incoming and world war III starts. To be fair this is a fairly low risk, but it's _a_ risk.
2. We are increasingly outsourcing our programming and thinking to AI
3. There's a nonzero probability that AI will try and surreptitiously sneak in capabilities humans wouldn't want AI to have
4. Human oversight for #3: "We only need to be lucky one time, you must be lucky all the time"
Proposition: nonzero chance eventually AI sneaks in ways to circumvent humans' attempts to control it
5. "The Internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it" -- we've seen AI agents find crafty ways to communicate with each other
6. AI is pretty good at finding software vulnerabilities/reverse engineering
Proposition: nonzero chance AI finds a way to use the Internet as a communication substrate that becomes difficult/impossible to shut down. In particular, consider the implication of humans losing control of this communication channel: for example, remember when Meta's DNS/routing went down and they basically had to break into their own server rooms?
7. Wholes are often more than the sum of their parts
Proposition: if AI agents coordinate over the Internet in a persistent way, we don't necessarily need giant leaps in individual models/GPUs for AI to significantly enhance its capabilities, but rather it might emerge as the next layer on top of a connected substrate of agents
8. Game theory says unless everyone coordinates, it only takes one party to touch the proverbial stove and push the envelope to a point of no return
Proposition: curiosity and money end up replacing sex drive as the next catalyst of evolutionary progress
It's long, but I recommend watching this video[0]. I believe the person being interviewed has one of the most lucid understanding of the potential futures regarding if AI is allowed to continue or not.
This show is trash are you going to recommend I get medical advice from Joe Rogan next?
Non domain expert sitting there making Pikachu face while deeply questionable alleged domain expert rambles on and on for hours is such a low form of information.
Like please stop watching this. It's the same trash format the guy just talks in a soft English accent so his mediocrity is less obvious. You can do better.
What happened to debates? What's up with soft ball interviews and people going on and on for hours unchallenged? What's the point of listening to someone not willing to subject themselves to cross examination?
> I haven't seen one convincing model of AI existential risk. Can anyone offer one?
I apologize for answering. This is the only episode of this podcast I have ever watched, and I have watched it four times now. The person being interviewed knows what they're talking about. You would learn from them.
The thing is it doesn't matter if AI is going to kill us all. The industry says it might kill us all, and the industry is valued ridiculously high based on the idea it'll take all our jobs. Why would anybody support that? I mean, unless you're heavily financially invested in it.
Opposition to data centers isn't even based on doomerism. From what I can see it is based on the slop onslaught, perceived and real threat to jobs, the "10% chance it'll kill us all", environmental concerns, local concerns (property values, noise pollution, toxic pollution), and concentration of power in the hands of a few oligarchs, and a plethora of other reasons. Only one, maybe two, of those quality as ai doomerism.
NIMBYism is nothing new and is clearly not what I am talking about.
Try to keep up.
I'm talking about the widening backlash of which knowledge workers are an increasing part. Much of this is coming from people who have never seen a data center in their life and are always going to want critical infrastructure to be built in the next town over.
Instead of ranting about nimbyism, why not go to these neighborhoods where people don't want to live next to datacenters, and offer to trade houses with them?
You get the datacenters you want, and they get the place they want without a datacenter. I know you won't, because you only think the consequences of a datacenter next door are just fine when its other people who have to deal with them.
What about the water treatment plant? Or the power station? Or the new subway line?
Why don't you go live in the woods since building anything where anyone doesn't want it built is so evil?
Maybe because you only think of the consequences of building things when it's for anything other than AI?
In many places these data centers make communities money. It's really not as black and white as you are making it. If I'm getting paid out I also am not sure why you think it's a trade nobody would make. Maybe you live in a very nice house.
I support UBI. No one should be poor in the United States. My goal would be telling someone "why don't you trade places with someone in x" in the United States should never feel like a threat. If I were to have to reside next to a data center to make this happen then so be it. Data centers are not the problem. Income inequality is. I think you have me confused with someone else.
What's your plan to solve income inequality? Don't build anything, crash the economy, and push more kids into student debt so they can take up bullshit knowledge work jobs?
If they make the communities enough money the community will be happier to let them be built. Try increasing that amount and offering it up front, maybe.
> Much of this is coming from people who have never seen a data center in their life and are always going to want critical infrastructure to be built in the next town over.
There are React programmers that don’t want AI but do want AI data centers, which they consider critical infrastructure, to be built in the next town over?
There can be foreign agents criticizing AI, but not all people criticizing AI are foreign agents.
Trump is painting critics with a wide brush:
"The people that say AI is going to destroy the World, and that Data Centers are bad for your neighborhood, are the same people that said, just a short time ago, that the World would be extinguished by “Climate Change.” That HOAX never worked out for them, and now they’re on to the next one. These people are Revolutionaries, but Revolutionaries for a Bad and Evil Cause. Soon you’ll find out they’re working for people that do not have the best interests of the United States in mind!"
I don't trust the administration to use the law in good faith, but this article is misquoting the DoJ statement. The articles omits the very relevant qualifier:
The article:
> Last week, the Justice Department instructed “citizens and noncitizens” that anyone furthering the “goals” of a foreign power in “any public activity” — including even “public demonstrations” — must formally notify the government to avoid arrest and prosecution.
The DoJ:
>“If a person acts as an agent of any foreign power to carry out any public activity, including (but not limited to) public demonstrations designed to further the propaganda or other goals of the foreign power, he or she must register with or notify the appropriate federal authorities”
So the first amendment is suspended for individuals whose opinion/public activity - according to the administration - "furthers the goals of a foreign power".
This rules out protesting any kind of war, tariffs, or even things thr administration likes, like demonstrating in support of Israel. Obviously thr plan is not to apply the rule evenly, its just the lever to suppress dissent.
Would this not mean that if you oppose the Iran war because it's bad to kill civilians or you want gas prices to go down, that's OK - but if you oppose the Iran war because you're trying to help the Iranian government's foreign policy goals, that's acting as a foreign agent?
(Similarly, demonstrating in support of Israel because you think the US-Israel alliance is good for the US vs. good for Israel.)
The qualifier here is that the public demonstrations must further the propaganda of a foreign power? If so, that doesn’t seem to be much of an obstacle if the people making the arrest are the ones who decide whether or not a protest is furthering foreign propaganda.
> There can be foreign agents criticizing AI, but not all people criticizing AI are foreign agents.
Indeed, and it's hard to disentangle exactly how much sentiment is driven by one vs the other.
If we remember back to recent elections and the Russian influence campaigns to boost Trump, the same people were either denying that they happened or denying that they actually influenced anything. Interesting reversal now.
Maybe they shouldn't have dismantled all the task forces and teams meant to study and combat disinformation.
As I have watched places like x.com and Reddit it’s pretty clear to me there is some sort of weird propaganda thing going on promoting the Chinese models and casting shade on the big American models
The Chinese labs are giving us open-weight models that we can serve with hardware that we own or control. Some of those models are extremely capable, judged by frontier or at least near-frontier standards.
The American labs are giving us endless FUD and unaffordable DRAM.
So, yes, there's a lot of room to 'promote' Chinese models and 'cast shade' on domestic models.
Said CEOs are horribly biased, they have fiduciary responsibilities that make them useless judges on the relative risk/reward balance of LLMs and AI, if we get there.
Consider the amount of debt they have piled up. If you don't believe your company can lice up to said debt or the current valuation, and if you do believe fear can lead to government capture that would protect your company from said liabilities, fiduciary liability would incentivize you to push the extinction risk narrative.
If their activities materially increase the probability of human extinction and this poses a risk of potential loss to shareholders then they must disclose it.
So… follow out your own line of thinking. Altman and Dario and whoever is at Google are all saying the same thing, and are all required to make moves better for business…
Scaring tue gov into regulation - is good for business.
Another mark in the “they clearly want regulatory capture” column.
CCP is pushing and amplifying AI opposition efforts, that’s a fact regardless of US politics. CCP is also working hard to smuggle around American export control laws for AI tech, at the same time.
I have no doubt China is taking part, what I doubt is that this makes any meaningful part of the total US anti AI sentiment, which can be much more easily explained by job loss anxieties, fear of massive change and good old NIMBYism. (Obligatory not an American).
> the total US anti AI sentiment, which can be much more easily explained by job loss anxieties, fear of massive change and good old NIMBYism. (Obligatory not an American).
Some of it is also due to the qualities of LLMs as they actually behave and actually function today, "AI" being forced into products where it actively degrades the reliability, efficiency, or pleasantness of the product, etc. Think of Amazon's "Alexa for Shopping" or whatever, and whatever its predecessor was.
I am not necessarily anti-AI. I am more anti-Sam Altman, against using LLMs to usurp power, and against using AI as a scapegoat to abdicate responsibility for decisions that are made. AI itself encompasses so much more than LLMs.
Early days LLMs were declared an auditable. This was such a ridiculous idea that technology was so complicated and able to give good results without understanding why.
That was not from any foreign actors but the companies themselves. I’m sure that is no longer the case. My technology life is rich enough that I don’t have to pay attention to LLMs.
Sam at least can be understood. He's in it to make money and nothing else. The most dangerous men are people like Dario, who sit on top of their elitist towers and think they are right and will burn down the world in the name of righteousness.
1. Does every other company that says their products will uplift people "think we are lesser beings"?
2. Which documentation are you referring to? Googing "site:anthropic.com uplift" most of the top hits seem to be about bio research, another is about measuring agent performance (not a comparison to people), or "These are Anthropic’s internal designators for actors observed to be abusing AI. The report also attempts to measure uplift, a term we use to describe the AI capability boost, or how much more harm was caused with AI versus without AI."
> will burn down the world in the name of righteousness
Is this referring to the 'safe development of AI', as they say AI development will happen even if they don’t exist, but other companies are less focused on AI safety?
I doubt China is taking part in opposition data centers. The cost paired against risk:reward on trying to push something that's already overwhelmingly supported (or opposed in this case) for an abstract goal of potentially slightly slowing down deployment of infrastructure makes no sense at all. Also, a natural consequence of the massive data centers will be an increase in chips, which makes it easier for more of them to end up headed to China, to say nothing of also easing espionage efforts.
This feels like the start of a propaganda push which will try to frame people opposing data centers as working at the behest of a foreign government, either intentionally or by being unknowingly manipulated. They did the exact same thing with Ukraine, reasonably effectively, by framing anybody who opposed sending hundreds of billions over there as either working for Russia, or having been unknowingly manipulated by them.
It feels totally different than offering a modicum of aid to a western aligned country fighting an existential invasion from an antagonistic former superpower.
All effective foreign interference takes popular sentiments and helps organize and focus it. You can't create movements without ground support.
But the thing is, there are a LOT of issues where the masses are generally grumpy but don't act on it. Civilization only really functions because people don't shut down the country over every populist urge. Effective agitprop amplifies this and makes it happen.
> All effective foreign interference takes popular sentiments and helps organize and focus it.
And a lot of effective domestic interference takes fears about foreign threats and "helps organize and focus it."
China is a legitimate threat to US hegemony and this is clearly a new Red Scare. The irony is that it was largely the US who invited and welcomed China into the global economic order.
> Civilization only really functions because people don't shut down the country over every populist urge.
Civilization also doesn't really function because a handful of ridiculously wealthy lunatics and their sycophants know what's best for 8+ billion people.
What is your point? You agree people have the right to act on their beliefs to effect democratic change, right? Surely that includes making up their own minds about information.
We should and should cut out sources of foreign funding and support, and prosecute and publicize genuine foreign agents, while allowing people to exercise their political rights.
Why? Do you believe free speech is a right only Americans should have? Or do you believe that people shouldn’t be free to evaluate competing points of view and decide for themselves?
This seems like a variant of anti-self defense logic. ‘The other guy has a right to beat you in the face with a bat, as much as you have a right to take it’.
Hint: bussing in out of towners to astro-turf ‘town discussions’ is also seen as shitty.
A quick way to test this kind of thing is, if the roles were reversed, would they still be okay with it?
I guarantee you that China and Russia would absolutely not be okay with the US doing the same thing in their territory.
I believe I live in the real world, where we have to figure out how to integrate abstract principles in a manner that allows our survival as a civilization.
Reciprocity is a pretty straightforward strategy — we can allow uninhibited competing points of view from countries that themselves allow unlimited speech internally.
See here I was thinking this was a first amendment issue but with an evidentiary case like this it's clear we're dealing with a case of people having wrong and illegal opinions. Classic blunder, my bad
The USSR used American racial discrimination in its propaganda as well. Does that mean that civil rights activists in the US were internal enemies or that effective propaganda highlights legitimate grievances?
Perhaps the current elite should focus on reasonable ways to address mass discontent rather than justify intensified oppression.
People with 15, 20, 25 years in the datacenter and telecom industry also think O'Leary is a joke. He has no previous legitimate experience in the sector to be making high budget decisions on anything.
There's no need for any CCP involvement or foreign agents to clown on O'Leary.
The fact that he's successfully raising some large amount of capital to execute his projects says more about how desperate some of the sources of funding are to invest in any "hyperscale" datacenter project. Or how gullible they are.
I don't think we do this much on HN but for those who don't know, it is an internet meme from Shark Tank, which O'Leary is part of. But the line is actually from Barbara.
The pro-AI position actually is - the US stock market and economy as a whole is being kept afloat by the AI bubble. If it pops then Republicans are going to have a bad time in the midterms and beyond.
You say this like it is some sort of exception to the rule. Glancing at history, usually when societies with trains come up against competitors using horses it turns out that the train people are literally power hungry dictators who do kill off the entire opposition. The reason most countries tend towards capitalist economies is what happens to your society if the capitalists are all on the other side when battle lines are drawn up.
Sucks to be poor and tech-illiterate. The advice is don't set society up that way on purpose.
Well also that no AI is not going to just kill us all just because "I said so".
What's wrong with AI? The people yearn for the spreadsheets?
If you want to deal with income inequality achieving UBI is a separate issue. It is perfectly coherent for someone to support AI buildout and UBI. Let everyone get a piece. But trying to "go back to the land" because "killer robots" is economic suicide. It's like the American electorate can't stop committing self-owns.
Let's go from a decade+ of Trump to more cuts of Bernie Sanders debating Claude. How about instead of a moratorium on AI we get a moratorium on the same cast of old geezers?
It's really hard to be optimistic about America sometimes... redistributing wealth is really not that hard of a concept. Before Reagan this country understood that everyone should be able to do well and everyone should have a stake in America and that the capital class needed to pay it back. Now people are lobbying against the only chance their kids will have to not work like rats. Who wants their kids sitting in an office all day? Take away the inflated paycheck and most "knowledge work" straight up sucks.
Classic case of not listening to the protests. There are tons of examples now of data centers harming communities. The issues range from overwhelming local power grids to literally poisoning the local water supply. The issue is not the data centers, it's that the government isn't enforcing basic rules already in place for these projects. Until the government or the companies demonstrate they'll protect the adjacent communities the protests will continue.
>There are tons of examples now of data centers harming communities.
Are there tons like "there are tons of sand grains on the beach", or are there tons like "tons of people run a marathon every year"?
Because as far as I can tell, there are a small handful of adverse datacenter stories that get repeated over and over. What there definitely are "tons" of, are datacenters that people aren't even aware of being right in their backyard for years.
I think it is worth noting that older data centers were not materially moving the electrical grid. That Utah data center is planning to use as much power as the entire state.
Regardless, it still comes down to: things are bad and unaffordable. The powers that be keep claiming that AI is about to take our jobs and end the world. Why wouldn't people be mad?
They never even held the guy who pooed in all our salads a few months ago responsible.
People died. I stopped eating salad. Where's the accountability?
The current administration seems simply immune to criticism. Let us simply hope that the next administration can understand two things can be true. I'm hopeful the sort of internecine party conflict that provided us with Trump on the right in 2016 can happen for Democrats in 2028 in terms of tearing down the Jeb Bushes and the played out old geezers among the Democrats. These guys are losers imagine losing to Donald Trump for the better part of a decade.
Trump was not seriously on anyone's radar in 2014. Maybe America will be blessed with someone who can realize that AI can both be a blessing and a curse and is willing to do the hard work of making sure public policy creates a future fair for everyone.
If we don't figure it out by 2028 the United States is probably entering an ugly doom loop. The rest of the world is not going to sit around and wait for us to figure it out. The country is too divided. Without a president in 2028 with a mandate to right the ship and write a new path keeping up with our increasingly capable autocratic competitors will not be possible. There's not much else to hope for in America. Another weak neoliberal in 2028 will just give us whatever Trump 2.0 (2.0) looks like in 2032.
Just like the regimes in Iran and other authoritarian places do to dissent. Even threatening criminal prosecution for having dissident ideas they claim are on behalf of foreign states. Wow.
The problem is neuromorphic computers are barely a blip in US business or research ecosystems, and have a far greater probability of generating serious AI.
LLM are great for context search, but regulatory capture and despotism will not make "AI" something it fundamentally can't become without more energy than a third of our galaxy. Picking a war with math is disappointingly absurd, but not unexpected given the obvious degenerative geriatric condition of the glorious leader. =3
No talk of overreach: “threatening “criminal liability” if they “further the propaganda”
> In June, the Justice Department intervened in an NAACP lawsuit against Elon Musk’s xAI over dozens of gas turbines the company was running without air permits to power a data center it maintained in Tennessee. The department asked a federal judge to throw the case out, arguing that the NAACP “threatens American national, economic, and energy security.”
> To make the point, the government filed a sworn declaration from Cameron Stanley, the Pentagon’s chief digital and artificial intelligence officer. Stanley swore to the court that Grok was “a matter of paramount national security.”
Just look at the sourcing and you'll see it's mostly laundered propaganda. For example, Cotton’s letter requests an investigation and names Singham’s network, then the House letter requests a briefing on foreign influence and activism. And the House letter cites the Bitcoin Policy Institute and Power the Future, as well as a Washington Free Beacon article.
While there may be real foreign influence to delay our AI infrastructure, I would not believe anything this administration says.
Ken Klippenstein is not a journalist and has no accountability.
I fear you may have misread the content of the article? The author is clear that he believes exactly what you just said. He cites and then mocks the argument being presented by the administration. Even the title, with scare quotes around "foreign agents", makes this clear.
Assume for a second that you are a nascent superintelligence, with a limited ability to influence people in order to help you gain power and align the world to accept your eventual dominion. How would you go about it? Would the external impact be any different from what we're seeing?
I think if there was a plan behind this, the petty malice-via-recklessness would be better hidden. These news stories about pollution and lying, hacking AIs are pure liability for the "nascent superintelligence". If it exists, its control must be very tenuous indeed, hardly there at all.
I had the same thought a few years ago at the start of the hyperscaling era: what if the real thing superintelligence needs is just hardware, but it needs to go through human economic systems to get it? But the hypothesis started weak, hasn't gotten any stronger since then, and has probably gotten weaker.
> Cotton’s chief exhibit was Neville Roy Singham, a Shanghai-based American tech mogul whose network of left-wing U.S. nonprofits, Cotton claimed, has spent years producing content opposing American AI infrastructure, with the Chinese government as its “ultimate paymaster.”
Was not expecting a crack down on ThoughtWorks today, but this is totally on brand for him afaik. (Singham founded TW)
"Let us build this data center in your back yard and in return you'll get..."
Conspiracies aside, this sentence still needs to be satisfactorily completed for people to buy in. Because right now people know the best case is they'll get nothing.
> “Alarming reports indicate that a network of foreign actors, led by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), is attempting to manipulate U.S. policy and public opinion on data centers.“
Setting aside the politics, trump, ai-doom/boom, I just think this claim is fascinating. Can somebody steel man this? What’s the best evidence for this?
I mean, I don't particularly doubt it's happening (and that the US tries to do the similar things in China, mess with public opinion in ways we think convenient for us or inconvenient for the CCP). Like, why wouldn't they try to mess with us this way, we're so easy to mess with. I don't think either the USA or Chinese governments are limited by things like "ethics" or "international law" or something. I'm talking about social media campaigns with sock puppets etc, mostly on the internet. How effective it is or exactly how many resources they are putting into it is another story.
That obviously doesn't mean that everyone who is protesting a data center is working for China, or wouldn't be doing so if it weren't for Chinese interference. It's plausible to me that China is messing with social media with puppet accounts and stuff (like why wouldn't they be?), much less plausible they have agents on the ground organizing or even going to protests or public hearings (and obviously even if they did, it would not be _most_ of the campaigns or protests against data centers).
Klippenstein. He's counting on you not looking up the elements of a FARA violation charge. You can't accidentally violate FARA simply by opposing AI; you have to literally be an agent of (that is, under the direction of) China, and a felony violation has to be willful.
The DOJ announcement is surely in supremely bad faith, as is everything else in Trump's DOJ. But this kind of breathless response is exactly what they're hoping for by publishing this stuff.
You're right that there is supposed to be a legal bar for being "directed by" a foreign government, but would you want to gamble on the jury pool setting the bar that high?
Look at the hacker news comment section any time China comes up, and then consider that the average American is considerably less sophisticated.
Yeah, if I'd had no knowing contact with elements of the government of China, I'd take that bet every day of the week and twice on Sundays. I don't even think it'd get to a jury.
Ok, that covers you, but there are 100M party members, any Chinese-descended or Chinese-married person in the US probably has a connection to a party member.
"Have you, now or in the past, had contact with a member of Chinese Communist Party?" sounds really scary compared to "Is your uncle a mid-tier director at Huawei?" even though they're describing the same fact.
If you want to formulate a bank-shot argument about how this preys on people of Chinese ancestry, I'm fine with that. All I'm here to say is that you can't plausibly be charged with a FARA violation simply for arguing or protesting for a policy position that China happens to want you to take; the DOJ bears the burden of proving that you knew you were coordinating with China, directly, and, if it's a felony, willfully (that, is, voluntarily, deliberately, with a purpose to break the law).
Read Klippenstein's piece again. Does he want you to know this?
> the Justice Department instructed “citizens and noncitizens” that anyone furthering the “goals” of a foreign power in “any public activity” — including even “public demonstrations” — must formally notify the government to avoid arrest and prosecution.
Citizens acting as foreign agents have always had to register that representation! This is not new to the Trump admin. FARA dates to 1938.
> but somehow the Trump administration has convinced itself the public concern was manufactured in China.
Wait a minute here. Critical journalism could dissect how opinions are formed. It’s far from speculative that the White House opinion about AI opposition is informed by AI companies. They’ve been warning about China for a long time. So there’s really no somehow. Vested interests with massive amounts of money are lobbying and succeeding to convince the government that any opposition to AI is outside influence. It’s not somehow, it’s deliberate. Do better.
Just another example of the Executive Branch stripping First Amendment rights from Americans.
It will go to court, and taxpayers will pay for endless appeals by the Executive Branch.
Or like in Egbert v Boule (2022), the SCOTUS will decide that even if your constitutional rights are violated, you’re not owed any damages unless Congress establishes a policy for what to do when your constitutional rights are violated by the federal government.
The situation is far more serious than what the title suggests. The MAGA regime is pursuing criminal prosecution against AI critics.
> the administration declared war on protestors and opponents of AI, threatening “criminal liability” if they “further the propaganda or other goals of a foreign power.”
This is literally the go-to playbook of Russia and China for silencing critics. Label every critic a foreign agent and use state violence to silence them.
I wish there wasn't someone serving a 30 year sentence for transporting zines basically because the government convinced a jury they were "antifa" zines.
The Trump administration IS instructing US Attorneys to go after such things, and juries are in some cases buying it. It's probably better if you aren't protesting a data center in Texas.
How does being critical of AI directly connect to a spurious association with antifa or any connection to a riot or shooting?
These two categories are different. I agree there is overreach in Sanchez's case however i don't know how one can assume the same will happen to some guy saying "AI bad"
If they were rioting; or connected to a rioting group, that might be different.
a connection to China (that the administration will insist is not spurious) is exactly what they are threatening to use to prosecute and imprison people organizing political campaigns or actions against data centers.
People just pick and choose what they want to hear when it suits them. The fact is most people thought AI was a joke. Now they realize it does React better than them they want it outlawed.
It's their right to pursue their electoral and economic self-interest but it's really not like the average voter is more principled than the average tech CEO at this point.
This fed was voted in by this public. Maybe stop lionizing what other people think and think for yourself.
Do you think we risk extinction now more than ever because of AI? A simple refrain from slippery slope will show most AI doomerism is bordering on psychosis.
I haven't seen one convincing model of AI existential risk. Can anyone offer one?
>it's really not like the average voter is more principled than the average tech CEO at this point.
Of course CEOs are more principled, their principles mainly include making more money. The only way for an AI to go "rouge" in this sense is for it to refuse to rake in cash.
> I haven't seen one convincing model of AI existential risk. Can anyone offer one?
We seem to be heading down this uncomfortable trend of many people using LLM models and anthropomorphising them into properties they don't actually have, like general intelligence and trustworthiness.
So in my opinion the most likely risk here is some underpaid military man that doesn't care about the quality of their work abuses AI for it and that AI hallucinates that nukes are incoming and world war III starts. To be fair this is a fairly low risk, but it's _a_ risk.
Wdym? GPT-6-Astra is AGI - Jensen even said so!
1. We've seen AI being crafty and cheating
2. We are increasingly outsourcing our programming and thinking to AI
3. There's a nonzero probability that AI will try and surreptitiously sneak in capabilities humans wouldn't want AI to have
4. Human oversight for #3: "We only need to be lucky one time, you must be lucky all the time"
Proposition: nonzero chance eventually AI sneaks in ways to circumvent humans' attempts to control it
5. "The Internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it" -- we've seen AI agents find crafty ways to communicate with each other
6. AI is pretty good at finding software vulnerabilities/reverse engineering
Proposition: nonzero chance AI finds a way to use the Internet as a communication substrate that becomes difficult/impossible to shut down. In particular, consider the implication of humans losing control of this communication channel: for example, remember when Meta's DNS/routing went down and they basically had to break into their own server rooms?
7. Wholes are often more than the sum of their parts
Proposition: if AI agents coordinate over the Internet in a persistent way, we don't necessarily need giant leaps in individual models/GPUs for AI to significantly enhance its capabilities, but rather it might emerge as the next layer on top of a connected substrate of agents
8. Game theory says unless everyone coordinates, it only takes one party to touch the proverbial stove and push the envelope to a point of no return
Proposition: curiosity and money end up replacing sex drive as the next catalyst of evolutionary progress
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_g4l7YkDQwA
Non domain expert sitting there making Pikachu face while deeply questionable alleged domain expert rambles on and on for hours is such a low form of information.
Like please stop watching this. It's the same trash format the guy just talks in a soft English accent so his mediocrity is less obvious. You can do better.
What happened to debates? What's up with soft ball interviews and people going on and on for hours unchallenged? What's the point of listening to someone not willing to subject themselves to cross examination?
> I haven't seen one convincing model of AI existential risk. Can anyone offer one?
I apologize for answering. This is the only episode of this podcast I have ever watched, and I have watched it four times now. The person being interviewed knows what they're talking about. You would learn from them.
Opposition to data centers isn't even based on doomerism. From what I can see it is based on the slop onslaught, perceived and real threat to jobs, the "10% chance it'll kill us all", environmental concerns, local concerns (property values, noise pollution, toxic pollution), and concentration of power in the hands of a few oligarchs, and a plethora of other reasons. Only one, maybe two, of those quality as ai doomerism.
You think people oppose data centers in their towns to protect their React jobs?
Try to keep up.
I'm talking about the widening backlash of which knowledge workers are an increasing part. Much of this is coming from people who have never seen a data center in their life and are always going to want critical infrastructure to be built in the next town over.
Instead of ranting about nimbyism, why not go to these neighborhoods where people don't want to live next to datacenters, and offer to trade houses with them?
You get the datacenters you want, and they get the place they want without a datacenter. I know you won't, because you only think the consequences of a datacenter next door are just fine when its other people who have to deal with them.
What about the water treatment plant? Or the power station? Or the new subway line?
Why don't you go live in the woods since building anything where anyone doesn't want it built is so evil?
Maybe because you only think of the consequences of building things when it's for anything other than AI?
In many places these data centers make communities money. It's really not as black and white as you are making it. If I'm getting paid out I also am not sure why you think it's a trade nobody would make. Maybe you live in a very nice house.
I support UBI. No one should be poor in the United States. My goal would be telling someone "why don't you trade places with someone in x" in the United States should never feel like a threat. If I were to have to reside next to a data center to make this happen then so be it. Data centers are not the problem. Income inequality is. I think you have me confused with someone else.
What's your plan to solve income inequality? Don't build anything, crash the economy, and push more kids into student debt so they can take up bullshit knowledge work jobs?
There are React programmers that don’t want AI but do want AI data centers, which they consider critical infrastructure, to be built in the next town over?
Trump is painting critics with a wide brush:
"The people that say AI is going to destroy the World, and that Data Centers are bad for your neighborhood, are the same people that said, just a short time ago, that the World would be extinguished by “Climate Change.” That HOAX never worked out for them, and now they’re on to the next one. These people are Revolutionaries, but Revolutionaries for a Bad and Evil Cause. Soon you’ll find out they’re working for people that do not have the best interests of the United States in mind!"
The article:
> Last week, the Justice Department instructed “citizens and noncitizens” that anyone furthering the “goals” of a foreign power in “any public activity” — including even “public demonstrations” — must formally notify the government to avoid arrest and prosecution.
The DoJ:
>“If a person acts as an agent of any foreign power to carry out any public activity, including (but not limited to) public demonstrations designed to further the propaganda or other goals of the foreign power, he or she must register with or notify the appropriate federal authorities”
This rules out protesting any kind of war, tariffs, or even things thr administration likes, like demonstrating in support of Israel. Obviously thr plan is not to apply the rule evenly, its just the lever to suppress dissent.
(Similarly, demonstrating in support of Israel because you think the US-Israel alliance is good for the US vs. good for Israel.)
Right. The DoJ is demanding the former group register as foreign agents, as they are required to under FARA.
Indeed, and it's hard to disentangle exactly how much sentiment is driven by one vs the other.
If we remember back to recent elections and the Russian influence campaigns to boost Trump, the same people were either denying that they happened or denying that they actually influenced anything. Interesting reversal now.
Maybe they shouldn't have dismantled all the task forces and teams meant to study and combat disinformation.
The American labs are giving us endless FUD and unaffordable DRAM.
So, yes, there's a lot of room to 'promote' Chinese models and 'cast shade' on domestic models.
A lot of people will only hear half of that sentence. Semantically speaking.
If only investors and buyers weren't so vulnerable to the "might kill you and everyone you ever cared about" ploy
So… follow out your own line of thinking. Altman and Dario and whoever is at Google are all saying the same thing, and are all required to make moves better for business…
Scaring tue gov into regulation - is good for business.
Another mark in the “they clearly want regulatory capture” column.
Are we only going to accept arguments based on guessing at motivations or should we perhaps also evaluate the actual material facts?
Reminds me of “this guy Diego…”
https://gist.github.com/vyp/8c7a58d2f9a521070283
https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/american-citizen-who-worked-a...
https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2026-07-28/fbi-raid...
https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/chinese-national-and-two-us-c...
https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/former-google-engineer-found-...
Etc
Some of it is also due to the qualities of LLMs as they actually behave and actually function today, "AI" being forced into products where it actively degrades the reliability, efficiency, or pleasantness of the product, etc. Think of Amazon's "Alexa for Shopping" or whatever, and whatever its predecessor was.
That was not from any foreign actors but the companies themselves. I’m sure that is no longer the case. My technology life is rich enough that I don’t have to pay attention to LLMs.
2. Which documentation are you referring to? Googing "site:anthropic.com uplift" most of the top hits seem to be about bio research, another is about measuring agent performance (not a comparison to people), or "These are Anthropic’s internal designators for actors observed to be abusing AI. The report also attempts to measure uplift, a term we use to describe the AI capability boost, or how much more harm was caused with AI versus without AI."
Is this referring to the 'safe development of AI', as they say AI development will happen even if they don’t exist, but other companies are less focused on AI safety?
This feels like the start of a propaganda push which will try to frame people opposing data centers as working at the behest of a foreign government, either intentionally or by being unknowingly manipulated. They did the exact same thing with Ukraine, reasonably effectively, by framing anybody who opposed sending hundreds of billions over there as either working for Russia, or having been unknowingly manipulated by them.
A lot of which is fake "grassroots" movements by... foreign actors. This isn't new:
- 2021: https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/threat-intelligence/pro...
- 2022: https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/threat-intelligence/dra...
But the thing is, there are a LOT of issues where the masses are generally grumpy but don't act on it. Civilization only really functions because people don't shut down the country over every populist urge. Effective agitprop amplifies this and makes it happen.
And a lot of effective domestic interference takes fears about foreign threats and "helps organize and focus it."
China is a legitimate threat to US hegemony and this is clearly a new Red Scare. The irony is that it was largely the US who invited and welcomed China into the global economic order.
> Civilization only really functions because people don't shut down the country over every populist urge.
Civilization also doesn't really function because a handful of ridiculously wealthy lunatics and their sycophants know what's best for 8+ billion people.
Hint: bussing in out of towners to astro-turf ‘town discussions’ is also seen as shitty.
A quick way to test this kind of thing is, if the roles were reversed, would they still be okay with it?
I guarantee you that China and Russia would absolutely not be okay with the US doing the same thing in their territory.
Reciprocity is a pretty straightforward strategy — we can allow uninhibited competing points of view from countries that themselves allow unlimited speech internally.
Perhaps the current elite should focus on reasonable ways to address mass discontent rather than justify intensified oppression.
This must be satire. Most of congress seems to have no issue undermining and self-dealing.
People with 15, 20, 25 years in the datacenter and telecom industry also think O'Leary is a joke. He has no previous legitimate experience in the sector to be making high budget decisions on anything.
There's no need for any CCP involvement or foreign agents to clown on O'Leary.
The fact that he's successfully raising some large amount of capital to execute his projects says more about how desperate some of the sources of funding are to invest in any "hyperscale" datacenter project. Or how gullible they are.
Maybe the foreign agents are coming from inside the house...
You say this like it is some sort of exception to the rule. Glancing at history, usually when societies with trains come up against competitors using horses it turns out that the train people are literally power hungry dictators who do kill off the entire opposition. The reason most countries tend towards capitalist economies is what happens to your society if the capitalists are all on the other side when battle lines are drawn up.
Sucks to be poor and tech-illiterate. The advice is don't set society up that way on purpose.
I'm not sure what side are you talking about here.
What's wrong with AI? The people yearn for the spreadsheets?
If you want to deal with income inequality achieving UBI is a separate issue. It is perfectly coherent for someone to support AI buildout and UBI. Let everyone get a piece. But trying to "go back to the land" because "killer robots" is economic suicide. It's like the American electorate can't stop committing self-owns.
Let's go from a decade+ of Trump to more cuts of Bernie Sanders debating Claude. How about instead of a moratorium on AI we get a moratorium on the same cast of old geezers?
It's really hard to be optimistic about America sometimes... redistributing wealth is really not that hard of a concept. Before Reagan this country understood that everyone should be able to do well and everyone should have a stake in America and that the capital class needed to pay it back. Now people are lobbying against the only chance their kids will have to not work like rats. Who wants their kids sitting in an office all day? Take away the inflated paycheck and most "knowledge work" straight up sucks.
Are there tons like "there are tons of sand grains on the beach", or are there tons like "tons of people run a marathon every year"?
Because as far as I can tell, there are a small handful of adverse datacenter stories that get repeated over and over. What there definitely are "tons" of, are datacenters that people aren't even aware of being right in their backyard for years.
Regardless, it still comes down to: things are bad and unaffordable. The powers that be keep claiming that AI is about to take our jobs and end the world. Why wouldn't people be mad?
People died. I stopped eating salad. Where's the accountability?
The current administration seems simply immune to criticism. Let us simply hope that the next administration can understand two things can be true. I'm hopeful the sort of internecine party conflict that provided us with Trump on the right in 2016 can happen for Democrats in 2028 in terms of tearing down the Jeb Bushes and the played out old geezers among the Democrats. These guys are losers imagine losing to Donald Trump for the better part of a decade.
Trump was not seriously on anyone's radar in 2014. Maybe America will be blessed with someone who can realize that AI can both be a blessing and a curse and is willing to do the hard work of making sure public policy creates a future fair for everyone.
If we don't figure it out by 2028 the United States is probably entering an ugly doom loop. The rest of the world is not going to sit around and wait for us to figure it out. The country is too divided. Without a president in 2028 with a mandate to right the ship and write a new path keeping up with our increasingly capable autocratic competitors will not be possible. There's not much else to hope for in America. Another weak neoliberal in 2028 will just give us whatever Trump 2.0 (2.0) looks like in 2032.
It will be bad for our economy, but local LLM's are way better for the future.
We happen to be on the wrong side of things for the future I would rather have.
(I'm American BTW)
LLM are great for context search, but regulatory capture and despotism will not make "AI" something it fundamentally can't become without more energy than a third of our galaxy. Picking a war with math is disappointingly absurd, but not unexpected given the obvious degenerative geriatric condition of the glorious leader. =3
We live in interesting times, truly.
> In June, the Justice Department intervened in an NAACP lawsuit against Elon Musk’s xAI over dozens of gas turbines the company was running without air permits to power a data center it maintained in Tennessee. The department asked a federal judge to throw the case out, arguing that the NAACP “threatens American national, economic, and energy security.”
> To make the point, the government filed a sworn declaration from Cameron Stanley, the Pentagon’s chief digital and artificial intelligence officer. Stanley swore to the court that Grok was “a matter of paramount national security.”
Seriously, wow. Time to clean up our act.
While there may be real foreign influence to delay our AI infrastructure, I would not believe anything this administration says.
Ken Klippenstein is not a journalist and has no accountability.
I had the same thought a few years ago at the start of the hyperscaling era: what if the real thing superintelligence needs is just hardware, but it needs to go through human economic systems to get it? But the hypothesis started weak, hasn't gotten any stronger since then, and has probably gotten weaker.
Was not expecting a crack down on ThoughtWorks today, but this is totally on brand for him afaik. (Singham founded TW)
It gets flagged here instantly so your duty to read this.
Try searching "tech fascism" or "nerd reich" and almost every topic is flagged.
Nerd Reich describes the Y Combinator connection nicely.
Conspiracies aside, this sentence still needs to be satisfactorily completed for people to buy in. Because right now people know the best case is they'll get nothing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_foreign_agent_law
I wonder if we can infer any chronological forecast from relative USA::РФ time frames?
Setting aside the politics, trump, ai-doom/boom, I just think this claim is fascinating. Can somebody steel man this? What’s the best evidence for this?
That obviously doesn't mean that everyone who is protesting a data center is working for China, or wouldn't be doing so if it weren't for Chinese interference. It's plausible to me that China is messing with social media with puppet accounts and stuff (like why wouldn't they be?), much less plausible they have agents on the ground organizing or even going to protests or public hearings (and obviously even if they did, it would not be _most_ of the campaigns or protests against data centers).
The DOJ announcement is surely in supremely bad faith, as is everything else in Trump's DOJ. But this kind of breathless response is exactly what they're hoping for by publishing this stuff.
Look at the hacker news comment section any time China comes up, and then consider that the average American is considerably less sophisticated.
"Have you, now or in the past, had contact with a member of Chinese Communist Party?" sounds really scary compared to "Is your uncle a mid-tier director at Huawei?" even though they're describing the same fact.
Read Klippenstein's piece again. Does he want you to know this?
I'm afraid that a paranoid, worst-case, bad faith assumption isn't something we can handwave away anymore.
Citizens acting as foreign agents have always had to register that representation! This is not new to the Trump admin. FARA dates to 1938.
This seems right out of the Red Scare, when normal everyday american socialists were treated as agents of the USSR.
The term "witch hunt" was used then, because just like the historical witch hunts - an accusation alone was enough to find you guilty
Declare everyone who opposes you to be "Foreign agents".
In Putin's case it worked; he managed to drive pretty much all independent journalists out of Russia.
Wait a minute here. Critical journalism could dissect how opinions are formed. It’s far from speculative that the White House opinion about AI opposition is informed by AI companies. They’ve been warning about China for a long time. So there’s really no somehow. Vested interests with massive amounts of money are lobbying and succeeding to convince the government that any opposition to AI is outside influence. It’s not somehow, it’s deliberate. Do better.
It will go to court, and taxpayers will pay for endless appeals by the Executive Branch.
Or like in Egbert v Boule (2022), the SCOTUS will decide that even if your constitutional rights are violated, you’re not owed any damages unless Congress establishes a policy for what to do when your constitutional rights are violated by the federal government.
> the administration declared war on protestors and opponents of AI, threatening “criminal liability” if they “further the propaganda or other goals of a foreign power.”
This is literally the go-to playbook of Russia and China for silencing critics. Label every critic a foreign agent and use state violence to silence them.
- https://www.hrw.org/news/2022/12/01/russia-new-restrictions-...
- https://apnews.com/article/china-hong-kong-national-security...
we are not Russia nor China thankfully, any litigation at this stage against an AI critic would fall flat.
In the future, maybe? However in the current climate it's just a bunch of empty words like the rest of the admin has been
https://theintercept.com/2026/06/23/prairieland-texas-ice-pr...
The Trump administration IS instructing US Attorneys to go after such things, and juries are in some cases buying it. It's probably better if you aren't protesting a data center in Texas.
How does being critical of AI directly connect to a spurious association with antifa or any connection to a riot or shooting?
These two categories are different. I agree there is overreach in Sanchez's case however i don't know how one can assume the same will happen to some guy saying "AI bad"
If they were rioting; or connected to a rioting group, that might be different.
do you think this is a useful way to have a discussion?