Exactly people have owned and deployed animals in the world for millennia and actually a huge chunk of common law was developed precisely to deal with the various unpredictable events that resulted and harms caused to others. Like has anyone heard of horses?
The idea that AI can’t possibly be addressed because it could autonomously break free and ruin something is fucking ridiculous.
> it would utterly destroy the American movie industry
I don't understand, if Oracle etc. has financial problems, why would movie-making bits be destroyed as opposed to sold to new owners?
If the American movie industry got "destroyed", what would that look like, and how would it lead to long-term malaise? Offhand, I can't imagine the same kind of supply-chain/infrastructure rot-problem as, say, the "destruction" of the automotive industry.
Consolidation into one company with a huge amount of market power ruins the market, destroys innovation, and destroys infrastructure and capacity within the vertical.
Oh, I see, I thought you were saying that Oracle's financial woes would have a ripple-effect that's negative for everyone else, as opposed to the mergers being a bad thing regardless of Oracle's financial situation.
Yeah, America is way overdue for some trust-busting.
Because David Ellison’s explicit plan is to run Warner Bros. Discovery (owners of CNN) and Paramount (owners of CBS) as two divisions within Skydance Media. He committed to keeping a 20-odd film slate at WBD as part of antitrust negotiations with the U.S. and other countries. So he has to keep the studio running while figuring out how to pay off the investors with depreciating Oracle assets.
An airline has a weather radar which shows the same thing for the same thing of weather event ahead. So, for similar weather phenomena, radar shows a similar thing.
For that thing, procedures and regulations are built. So regulations fit into a well understood phenomena, incl. "return back because that thing is way powerful for us".
For the same prompt, an AI model can return two completely different outputs, incl. but not limited to content, length, formatting and tiny details. What you get is a single instance. So, regulating an AI model for safety or any other property is not as easy as regulating air travel. Moreover, you have much stronger motivations for regulating airlines. Otherwise people die in a visible and gruesome way.
With AI, it's easy to whitewash problems. Somebody committed suicide? "They were already unstable". AI told something wrong and created problems? "The tech can’t guarantee truth because it's not alive, it can't understand right and wrong". It did something good? "It's probably a sentient being, we shall respect them".
I'm for regulating these things. They are dangerous as they are useful (sometimes), but the forces and motivations for regulating it is not the same.
Of course, it's the same. It's computer software. It's an incredibly powerful business automation tool. It's a lot of things.
What it's not is God or an independently conscious entity that somehow trumps a thousand years of common law that's built up until now about torts and liability.
Of course, there are some novel issues here that'll pop up here and there, but the idea that this is fundamentally different is propaganda on the part of these AI labs because the more boring, obvious situation doesn't favor them.
> What it's not is God or an independently conscious entity that somehow trumps a thousand years of common law that's built up until now about torts and liability.
Agreed, the tendency of people on tech to assume that whatever the most recent thing we've come up with is unprecedented and shouldn't have to follow all of the established patterns we've built up in society for making things safe is wild. I don't know what the next Big Thing will be but I'm pretty confident there will be people claiming it's so different from everything before that we have no choice but to throw out all of the rules for it in the name of progress.
> Is AI less deterministic than an airline dealing with weather?
Yes, obviously? The responses of an airline to inclemement weather fit in a reasonably small set of responses, mostly involving rescheduling and/or rerouting flights.
The current AI predictability would be like if some airlines decided to do 9/11 when it was raining.
The current so-called scandals about AI hacking into other companies were because a bunch of human beings intentionally configured the software to go and do exactly that thing.
There's nothing deterministic about weather, so hopefully you're not just being disingenuous.
It's obvious that the global transportation system, or financial markets, or any number of other things are complex adaptive dynamic systems that are on par with AI in terms of their emergent properties.
Check my username. It's a concept I spent a lot of my life paying attention to.
Just because something has elements of autonomy or is adaptive doesn't make it particularly novel. We've dealt with those kinds of systems for centuries. The solution is to make rules and enforce those rules by whatever means are needed to meet the specifics of the case.
The rules, of course, are enforced against human beings.
I see - I think I overfixated on your specific point, and thought you meant that the current predictability of LLMs was on-par with the current predictability of airlines. The range of LLMs with current harnesses is "anything somebody with access to a computer can do," probably precisely because we aren't enforcing rules against the humans building these systems. Whereas in comparison, an airline has a range of reasonable outcomes despite unpredictable weather input.
> an airline has a range of reasonable outcomes despite unpredictable weather input
I mean one of the outcomes of an airline was 9/11.
That's sort of my point. Complex systems have emergent behavior. That's always been true. The combination of AI and humans and packet switched networks is a complex system and we've seen most of the issues created by this already and have tools for dealing with them. Obviously with some genuine novel issues likely to come, much in the way that 9/11 would have been less possible using ocean liners.
I'll stick to my original point though. AI absolutely IS deterministic. If you run an AI algorithm on a microchip, literally nothing of note will happen in the human world. Some transistors will change state. It's ONLY when it is integrated into a complex human system that it gets interesting.
>There's nothing deterministic about weather, so hopefully you're not just being disingenuous.
You're the one being disingenuous. Look at what you wrote.
> Is AI less deterministic than an airline dealing with weather?
You didn't talk about how deterministic the weather is. You talked about how an airline responds to a weather event in comparison to AI, which means that it's about responding to presented information by making a decision.
The state of the weather does affect your micro decisions, but the rules you follow are the same every time and the rules are as deterministic as possible even if they rely on pilot intuition.
> rules are as deterministic as possible even if they rely on pilot intuition
I think you are profoundly confused.
An airplane, and an AI algorithm encoded into silicon, are inert physical objects.
Every evaluation we are doing here is of a complex system that involves the interaction of people and machines and physical connections and so on.
An aviation system connected to every country and region with millions of people and machines involved is no less complex than what’s under discussion here and no more deterministic.
We don’t regulate airplanes because they aren’t people. We regulate pilots and mechanics and leaders of the companies that make and own them.
The task at hand is to regulate the people involved in AI to get the outcomes we want.
Though somewhat of a digression I'd just like to jump in so the world doesn't forget that OpenAI was not a company with a valuation at all, it was a charity for the public benefit and is now in private hands, having been basically stolen by any reasonable definition of the word.
You’re not wrong, but I think the alternative future is sama loses control, goes and raises a quick $100M, and hires all the profit-motivated staff to make something that looks like today’s OpenAI.
Dario already showed there was an appetite for this.
Right. Much like the alternative future is that someone considering stealing a public museum could instead build a building, hire away the staff, and fill it with art he acquired, instead of just stealing a museum that was created via charitable donations.
It's because his behavior pattern is instantly recognizable as what happens when people get out of control on prescription stimulants and since those are an epidemic in the field at this point most people have seen it and know the trajectory and find it utterly exhausting.
I wouldn't rule out that it might also be that, though, this too sounds like "he's mentally ill" but phrased differently.
I honestly do not see what you're saying there, but I also have no people in my life that would be using prescription stimulants. So it's not impossible that I have an experience gap there.
The whole fucking Valley has been out of their mind on prescription amphetamines for at least a decade. The most visible people like Matt and Elon and a few others have the most visible effects but breakdowns like this are happening hourly with less fanfare.
See if you can think of any other interesting historical events that happened when the whole leadership and rank and file were on prescription amphetamines.
Well, and good old cocaine of course. Never in my life have I been so often jacked up on coke as when I got dragged into a multi-day "retreat" involving executives from multiple SV companies.
I do wonder if they are actually on the same level as was used in WW2 (which is what I'm assuming you are referring to and the routine use (by both sides but especially the Axis side/Germany)).
SV has always had it's weird outliers but they do seem more for want of a better word - manic lately and much less outliers.
There's a long tradition of amphetamine use within the British establishment, too. Most obviously, Anthony Eden's reliance on Drinamyl was responsible in large part for the spectacularly poor decision making which led to the Suez crisis.
People in power absolutely do have an incentive to over-medicate themselves, and I'd be shocked if that didn't extend to SV tech leaders.
I love that "over-medicate" language (really). I will add that to my list of "things that are classy when rich people do them".
I always forget how geeked out these folks probably are and so I appreciate the reminder here.
About two days a month of my time is spent handing out bubbles and points to folks to get them to better manage their habits (in addition to other street medicine stuff). Stimulant culture is very foreign to my own chemistry, but yeah, the idea that most of these folks are just gakd up all the time certainly lines up with my experiences debraiding hobo feet.
I'm similarly not personally familiar with ketamine, but i've been doing first aid at festivals this year and understanding that most of the folks running the stuff in the US are on some spectrum of chemical impairment has been very helpful.
I don't miss drinking, but it was helpful in understanding the mindset at least.
If folks are interested in an ivy league business education but can't afford the tuition and life changes, I suggest that they can learn much of what it's like to be around a bunch of folks with poor impulse control and who are on a bunch of stimulants by volunteering with their local street medic group. The aesthetics are different but the general decision making processes seem very similar to me.
I think the implication here is that these drugs while adding focus also alter other personality traits and can lead to dark places. Stopping amphetamines is regularly painted as a traumatic experience. Here's some examples:
- An old roommate of mine talking about the agressive mental state as side effects of her ADHD meds.
- Regular use in the military, likely providing some buffer for the remorse and trauma of taking life or losing comrades, or precluding moral objection to bombing the civilian target etc.
Well I am talking doctor proscribed doses here not abusive doses. It seems like an incredible stretch to say taking a moderate amount of Adderall is going to make you care less about bombing civilians. I have never heard of people being traumatized because they couldn’t get their adhd medicine renewed.
This whole thing seems like baseless fear-mongering against adhd meds because they are chemically similar to meth. If you can show me some actual strong evidence I would be willing to look at it. All I am seeing so far in this comment chain is some wild false equivalents between natzi’s meth use and prescription adhd meds along with vague claims of harm.
A quick search showed me Adderal reduces narcissitic traits and increases empathy (yay) and roughly the same search but for meth shows lower empathy and increases aggression. I'm sure there are vast differences in the compounds and the dosing size. There's also a gulf between science committed to "adderall is good" and science asking "why meth bad?" Maybe when cartels fund open science we'll have more balance!?!
I'd say this thread is groping for a reason C suite can trend towards being narcissistic or psychotic. I'm sure there's a lot of pressure, and having to make a decision to reduce staff, or build a technology that will make jobs across industries redundant, and the broad effects that has on people's lives could lead to a numbness to those branches of empathy. I've personally known people that moderate their state multiple times a day, stratigizing what street or pharmaceutical drug to take to help them get something done, or to chill out, or be trippy up down or sideways, and they have the bladder issues that go with some of those drug choices to boot. I've known some who take ketamine all day and make code that looks like art and runs like a dream. I don't endorse the method, but I've seen it entwined with logic and beauty!
I'm shocked to read that Paul Graham is only 61. His writings lately sound more like late 70s in terms of age and worldview.
References to record labels? How much do record labels have to do with people discovering and catching on to music artists in 2026? What does a multi-billion-dollar 17 year old tech conglomerate like Stripe have to do with startups at this point?
I maintain that one of the hardest things for people to really internalize is when the group that they are in goes from being an insurgent to being the establishment. I can think of very few examples of people successfully adapting their worldview to that fundamental change in their identity.
The next class of YC founders is no less a product of the financial/tech ruling elite than the next batch of Goldman Sachs summer interns.
The top three record companies still take 71% of the revenue from digital and physical music sales. You may think they are not relevant but they still grab most of the money leading PG to calling them mafia. They are notorious for destroying music startups with legal action.
IIRC the record labels made a deal with Spotify to own a percentage of the company in exchange for a lower royalty rate. This is a mathematically diabolical way to shut artists out of profits. Sure, the record label also takes a lower percent of the pie, but they also own part of Spotify's pie.
In the context of the post-AI economic environment where we are casually talking about our TVs wiretapping our homes even when they don't have Internet access, the whole article reads so gross. How to make your startups more powerful:
1. Get your customers signed up and locked in ASAP
2. Make your product its own little feudal kingdom with walls, moats, and gates
3. Maximize the amount you slurp up customer data in disgusting ways your customers can't even comprehend
Steve Jobs was no saint but compare how he talked about products to how Paul G is talking about them, it's not even the same basic concept of business. For the former, it was about increasing profits by building the best product experience possible. People will spend more on a Mac or an iPod because it's better than the competition. Yes, there were plenty of forms of ecosystem and lock-in, but the way you locked customers in was by providing the best experience.
In the case of the latter, it's all about flexing your leverage and holding power over your customers. You don't even hold basic respect your customers in the system that Paul and the rest of Silicon Valley champions these days.
That's a really interesting point. I hadn't drawn that connection before.
And if anyone's reading this and hasn't read Hofstadter, you're making a mistake, it's utterly perspective-changing stuff. Well, it was for me, at least.
And don’t feel you need to go straight to GEB, either. I think his collection of Scientific American columns, Metamagical Themas, is also great and much more accessible.
I read it when I was about 9 or 10, I didn't understand any of it at all but I used to pick it up and look at the pictures of the Escher drawings, which were amazing.
Then, after I graduated from college, a friend of mine who was finishing his physics degree mentioned that he had just finished it and that it was life-changing. I read it again and deeply regretted having put it down for those 12 intervening years.
One of my elementary school classmates brought printouts of Escher's Waterfall to share. I accepted one, took it home, and taped it to my bedroom wall. My father saw it and loaned me his copy of Gödel, Escher, Bach.
At first, I flipped through the book looking at the Escher prints. My second time through, I read the dialogues. Next I had a go at reading the chapters and got lost. Maybe on my fifth read-through (years later) I actually attained an understanding of Gödel's Theorem (at least for a brief moment before it vanished again).
I credit GEB (and its dialogues like Little Harmonic Labyrinth) for helping prepare me to deal with the kind of multi-level abstraction involved in developing a language interpreter or machine simulator. Especially that time I had to debug a crash that only occurred when running my simulator inside a simulated instance of itself (i.e. when three levels deep, but not two).
The idea that AI can’t possibly be addressed because it could autonomously break free and ruin something is fucking ridiculous.
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