[cute_boi]

Yep. That said, unlike cheetahs, there’s plenty of evidence of leopards attacking humans. And these days, it’s the leopards, the closed-AI types and misanthropes -- telling everyone, “AI will take your job and there’s nothing you can do about it.”

[ctoth]

I keep seeing this and I want to speak to it.

When Dario and others say things like "this is happening and we should probably figure out what to do about it" what ends up happening is people hear "this is happening," see that the person warning them is the person doing the thing, and then short-circuit. "Why can't you just stop then?"

Dario's point, and the point of the people actually trying to solve the problem, is that AI is not just Anthropic and OpenAI. It's the knowledge that you can put more compute in, and get more capability out.

It is a technology now. It exists, in the world. Wishing will not make it go away. Being angry at it will not make it go away. Lying about how much water it uses will not make it go away. If Anthropic and OpenAI Shut down tomorrow, Accenture will not say "oh guess that llm thing won't work, let's go back to hiring humans!"

It is a truth that you can multiply matrices and get something that is economically useful. We cannot un-know this.

Physics allows it, so it will happen. So we should probably figure out what the heck to do about it. If your answer is something along the lines of "restrict it" then 1. let me know how that goes when other people don't, and 2. I really would rather prefer a world where we have the machines do the work the machines can do, not a world where we have human makework. If this means we need to figure out redistribution, let's talk about redistribution!

[mbgerring]

Physics allows this, and actually taking advantage of it requires billions of dollars of unprecedented infrastructure buildout that is already destabilizing the power grid.

The only reason that infrastructure buildout is happening at all is the ideological capture of a small handful of obscenely wealthy people, who are fueling this buildout by spreading the extreme paranoia you’re echoing here.

I do not understand why no one else can see the circularity of this reasoning. There is nothing inevitable about tying up all of this productive capital in the pursuit of AI. There are many, many other projects requiring similar capital and human effort, with much more obvious payoffs, such as decarbonizing the world’s energy systems.

“It’s physically possible to provide abundant electricity without burning fossil fuels” is more provably true than any of the insane science fiction bullshit that undergirds the AI buildout, and yet, the entire clean energy industry is still having to build insane financial Rube Goldberg contraptions to make incremental progress.

“Inevitability” is a lie, period. This entire thing is extremely historically contingent, and we could easily stop this train tomorrow.

[ctoth]

> This entire thing is extremely historically contingent, and we could easily stop this train tomorrow.

So, the Baruch Plan?

The Manhattan Project was $~2B in 1945 dollars, and a national-scale industrial mobilization. Now North Korea has the bomb. That's with nuclear material, which doesn't get easier and easier and easier to work with every year.

Compare to the price to train GPT-2 in 2019 ($43,000), and in 2026 ($73) [0].

[0]: https://x.com/karpathy/status/2017703360393318587

[YeGoblynQueenne]

Since nobody uses GPT-2 any more it's more informative to compare the price to train GPT-2 in 2019 and the price to train GPT 5.5 in 2026. Unfortunately that cost is not disclosed but it's probably in the billions.

The point being: the price to train frontier models isn't coming down, nor is it going to come down because for models to remain on the frontier they have to keep getting bigger and bigger (and trained on more and more data).

[antonvs]

> There is nothing inevitable about tying up all of this productive capital in the pursuit of AI.

In the US capitalist context, it's certainly inevitable, because AI is the biggest and most attractive source of profit and power out there right now. In that context, the broad strokes of what's happening currently, including the financial bubble, are predictable and inevitable.

What are the concrete steps which would allow us to "easily stop this train"? And why haven't we used steps like that to stop other cases where obscenely wealthy people have screwed everyone else over to increase their wealth? Is public control of the means of production involved, perhaps? If so, your definition of "easily" and mine are incompatible.

[mbgerring]

- Legislation

- Labor organizing

I grew up in a union household, and my dad and my grandfather fighting for better wages, healthcare and working conditions are the reason why I got a good education and work in Silicon Valley surrounded by Stanford assholes.

All of us who work for a paycheck can get together and say, “no, we will not allow you to record keystrokes and mouse movements to train our replacements. No, we will not have our performance or future employment based on an AI leaderboard.”

Previous generations fought and died for our right to do that, but in 2026 we just sit on our hands and complain on this forum. We can and should do better.

The U.S. is absolutely on fire right now with opposition to data centers. We, collectively, can extract concessions or ban their construction altogether.

These things aren’t “easy”. They are also eminently possible.

[antonvs]

I think you're in denial about the reality of the situation.

The reality is that the US has been a story of increasing concentration of wealth and power. The people who "fought and died" bought some important (from a human rights perspective) but ultimately minor (from a capitalist perspective) concessions from the capital class. The battle you describe is one of defense of rights, not of gaining control.

The overall system of capitalist control remains unaffected, and it's why the buildout of AI is, in fact, inevitable under the current system.

You're essentially saying no, you want public control of the means of production instead. That might be great, if even a sizable fraction of the US population agreed with you. But due in no small part to decades of propaganda, they don't.

[mbgerring]

So your position is, “yes, workers have fought back against power in the past and won, but now it’s just too hard :(“

Ok, good luck

[somesortofthing]

A US-China AGI ban treaty could prevent superintelligence indefinitely. Data centers are hard to hide. Have fun buying GPUs when you're cut off from all global payments. America would have to make some unpleasant concessions but that seems like a solid trade for preventing a wide variety of nightmare futures.

[leonidasv]

Is very difficult (not to say impossible) to ban a ill-defined thing.

[aidenn0]

I don't think we can stop it, but the people saying "this is happening and we should probably figure out what to do about it" are doing their best to accelerate it, which gives us less time to figure out what to do about it.

[fragmede]

The people saying this is happening are competing with each other for resources, so there's no way for one of them to hold back without losing out to the others. We see this with people dropping Claude subscriptions in favor of ChatGPT because codex 5.5 > Claude Opus 4.6/7/8. Anthropic is losing money by not releasing Mythos.

[aidenn0]

You are proposing that going from N companies chasing AGI to N-1 companies chasing AGI will have zero effect on when AGI happens?

[fragmede]

Aidenn0 said they're doing their best to accelerate it, and I'm saying "they're" isn't a single monolithic entity and that they're in competition with each other so they're incentivized to go as fast as possible, so it would be hard to hold them back.

[aidenn0]

This is a good point, but my point is that they chose to get into this business.

1. Some people have no ethical problems making bombs.

2. Some people have an ethical problem with making bombs so do something else.

3. Some people have an ethical problem with making bombs, but say "well someone else will make it if I don't" so they make bombs.

I think it is reasonable to argue against #3 as a reasonable position.

[palmotea]

> Aidenn0 said they're doing their best to accelerate it, and I'm saying "they're" isn't a single monolithic entity and that they're in competition with each other so they're incentivized to go as fast as possible, so it would be hard to hold them back.

Maybe it would run afoul of antitrust regulations, but it's totally realistic for all those competitors to get together and say "hey, we could really fuck up society in our race to get rich with this tech, lets all slow down." And if these companies are run my mature people who don't subordinate every consideration to greed, they'd to it.

[My_Name]

I would propose that it is very likely to have zero effect. Your argument supposes they are all working together, like many connected computers calculating primes.

It only takes one of them to do it and they are not sharing information. If the 1 you remove from N is the one that will discover it, then it will dramatically affect when AGI happens. If it is not, then it will have zero effect.

The latter is far more likely if N>2

[JumpCrisscross]

> When Dario and others say things like "this is happening and we should probably figure out what to do about it" what ends up happening is people hear "this is happening," see that the person warning them is the person doing the thing, and then short-circuit. "Why can't you just stop then?"

I still believe Dario asks these questions in good faith. Nobody believes that about e.g. Sam Altman or Elon Musk. They compared themselves to Oppenheimer because it helped them get attention. When it started an actual regulatory conversation, they were suddenly less worried.

[ksk23]

Hot take, but concentration camps were invented in the past. No need to use them, though