AI, doesn't feel all that different to the mechanical loom that was the impetus behind a lot of Marx's early critiques of industrial technology.

You've got a really cool invention that replaces what was previously a skilled artisan trade. The wealthy then use this invention to excoriate the artisans and render the loom operators as replaceable commodities.

Dario is essentially writing a blog post about why only he (and a few other approved elite companies) should be trusted to own the loom and then make it available for everyone else to labor at. Like the capitalists of Marx's era, he genuinely believes it is better for everyone to have this arrangement and that it is natural people like him should sit as benevolent gods at the top of the pyramid.

It's fascinating to me to see the same underlying mechanisms that gave birth to some of the greatest failed political and social experiments of the 20th century bubbling up again so clearly with AI today.

Lobbying for a completely parallel regulatory framework to restrict who is allowed to run specific types of general purpose computer programs, just because we can imagine that some of those "general purposes" might be bad, feels a lot more like an attempt by capitalists to carve out a special kingdom over this specific technology for themselves.

For example, I'd be 100% in favor of holding anthropic criminally liable any time their AI enables someone to commit a crime. But I'm opposed to banning the export of GPUs above a certain size just because Dario doesn't trust what someone like me would do with them if he couldn't snoop on my conversations.

Super intelligence (the ability to have many smarter minds than your own reporting to you) has always been available to the wealthy and powerful. They used it to invent nuclear weapons, cause climate change, mechanize warfare, and pillage the global south.

Now that this same tool is on the cusp of being available to everyone, capital is starting to panic and throw up fences. They want to pump the breaks on a revolution they know they can't control. They see what they've done with super intelligence and (perhaps not unreasonably) fear what the masses will do with that same power.

This article explicitly asks for the US government to step in and push for further restrictions on model distillation, access to open frontier weights, and access to hardware. It also pushes heavily for independent auditors to monitor and control "AI companies" and for greater observation and control over of what people use AI models for and who provides them.

1) AI is a dangerous technology that can literally end the world.

2) Only me and a handful of other [people like me] should be trusted to determine who can use it and how.

3) The state must use its coercive power to support my control of this technology to the exclusion of [people not like me].

I think that EU-Inc _could_ be an improvement, but it needs to avoid the committee laundry list of ideas/requirements/form fields that plagues the EU startup ecosystem. My worry is that the end result will require notarized declarations of honour, financial plans stretching decades into the future, 30 page business plan documents, reams of corporate governance documents, and tons of other nonsense to protect against the perceived risk that someone who failed at starting a business once fails a second time.

There needs to be UX requirements on the process from day one against which the end result is judged. (E.g. "a company should be able to register in x days", "a complete application should be no longer than y pages", "application costs should be less than z euros").

Anecdotally, I find you can tell if someone worked at a big AI provider or a small AI startup by proposing an AI project like this:

" First we'll train a custom trillion parameter LLM for HTML generation. Then we'll use it to render our homepage to our 10 million daily visitors. "

The startup people will be like "this is a bad idea because you don't have enough GPUs for training that LLM" and the AI lab folks will be like "How do you intend to scale inference if you're not Google?"

It takes children a very very long time to learn a language and they're quite bad at it for many years. I've even met some teens/young adults who are only borderline literate in their native language after years of schooling and immersion.

As a result, there's zero chance even the sensible parts of this strategy won't just end up coopted into multi-billion dollar Palantir contracts to deliver outdated llama models behind some clunky UI with the word "ontology" plastered on every button.

That's not to say it's _much_ of a benefit, but if the only thing a job gives me is a market-rational amount of dollars and health benefits in exchange for life-hours, the invisible hand ensures I can find that virtually anywhere.

The frustrating thing for people in fed jobs is that if you hit your 13 days that's it (during your first 3 years in government). It can be impossible to get PTO until you build up hours again. You have to either quit, negotiate LWOP (often seen as a performance adverse metric on your record), or work. So if you land a sweet concert ticket, see a flight deal, have a friend get married, etc. you better hope you've banked up the leave for it. Since you gain hours every 2 weeks (4, 6 or 8 depending on service) you also start out in government with virtually no leave and can't actually take a 2 week trip until you've been there almost a full year.

The federal government is an enterprise with 4 million employees (more than half in DoD as military or civilian). So the handful of people at USDS are basically only sufficient to swoop to fix the most dire of dumpster fires.

* Federal Pay (GS-12): $100,000 * Startup Pay: $150 base + $25 k bonus + equity

* Federal Health Insurance (United mid-tier plan, no family): $2,500/year * Startup Insurance (United mid-tier plan, no family): $0/year

* Federal Leave: 20 days (after 4 years in federal government) * Startup Leave: Unlimited

* Federal Sick Leave: 13 days * Startup Sick Leave: Unlimited

The pension I'm talking about actually isn't the TSP (which is fine, but slightly more expensive than comparable Vanguard funds).

All federal employees must contribute 4.4% of their salary to the FERS now which is taken out of their base pay just like their health/dental/fegli. It used to be 0.8% but congress gutted it a few years ago.

FERS takes decades before it's more than pocket change and the same money invested in the market would yield higher expected returns without requiring you to work 20 years in gov to benefit from it.

Right now if a government agency wants to do something like make a webform where you can apply for a passport, they have zero web developers on staff who can do it. Instead they must pay a team of non-technical officials and lawyers to make and adjudicate an RFP. Then pay a contracting firm to put a developer behind a government computer to do the actual work. Putting this contractor in a seat can easily cost the taxpayer $500k a year despite the contractor only receiving $130k of that money. The rest goes to the HR department, IT Department, C-Suite, lawyers, lobbyists, and shareholders at the contracting firm. The government has their own HR/Lawyers/IT too, but the contractor can't use those so the tax payer ends up double-paying overhead and missing out on economies of scale on every contract.

This is one of the many reasons government websites are always $50 million dollar boondoggles that an intern could have done better. The government ends up spending millions of dollars feeding leeching middle-men before they can hand that money to a mediocre dev deep in the bowels of Accenture's cheapest subcontractor.

If an agency just could hire a few strong web developers directly and then assign them to whatever task is needed during a particular sprint, we'd see a massive reduction in cost and increase in the quality of engineers working on our country's most important work. But most agencies are literally not allowed to spend more than $120k on an in-house engineer, while no one bats an eye on them spending 5 times that on an Accenture contract placement.