By any metric imaginable, it's making the information more accessible, not less. First, it's taking a single copy of a 10k physical print and it's making it digital. Is it "locked"? Yes, by copyright laws, if you don't like that lobby to have them changed. But it's _closer_ to being widely available, not farther.

Plus having the info part of a LLM makes it immediately available to literally billions.

I happen to actually actively shop second hand bookstores, so I am potentially affected by this - as opposed to most people complaining because they don't like the idea. And I still absolutely support it.

Current deal is pretty clean and a win for both parties. US gov won't be drawn into a lengthy trial, RWE gets their money back, US gets a similar value investment, RWE gets a safer investment and a likely friendly government. US made some 40mil from the deal, or more likely 1-200 mil considering inflation; on the other hand RWE didn't lose their whole investment.

A much simpler summary:

- open models good.

- smart models _can_ be bad

- smart open models that can do biotech work are dangerous. worth the hassle of certification _if_ we can get everybody on board with minimalist certification.

- banning open models just in US is neither good or bad: is stupid.

Anthropic should take it from its marketing/strategic budget. It just bought itself a 1.5B moat at exactly the time it can afford it.

I wonder if anybody is keeping track of everything a mid size business needs to take care of. Each particular report probably sounds like a reasonable request, but by now they're probably well into hundreds, and they're all outside the actual scope of the business (e.g. it may seem manageable for the bureaucrats designing them, because that's what they deal with all day, but not for a small organization doing... something else).

This is the wrong question. Having free opinions and emotions is such a basic and fundamental good, that any restriction needs to be a lot more than "a good idea" - it needs to clear a lot of thresholds. So it's more like "is it such an undoubtedly good idea with such a large margin that we want to take the risk?"

What helps most is probably having more antibodies "in the water supply". If we spread concepts like this widely, they'll help once they're common ground for enough people. And I think it helps a lot that PG didn't give examples in his essay. Giving examples would immediately get him coded as x-ist, and color the article as political. And politics is the mind killer...

That's not how you optimize an important metric. At all. You look a how exactly those 60 people die and make targeted interventions with numbers backing them up. Otherwise best case you're doing security theatre, and most likely fuck things up with second order effects. Like things beeping all the time and distracting people - I already can't tell why my car is beeping at me.

Problem is, this creates systemic effects. If you look longer term, a society that does this will end up a lot poorer than one that doesn't. Even for the bottom 51% you were optimizing. Because there are two variables to control: the redistribution, and the actual productivity. If you just focus on splitting wealth, you stop growing wealth.

Growing wealth on the other hand will make everybody richer, including the botton 51%. Simply participating in a richer economy has advantages. Plus the smaller redistribution percentage will actually end up bigger in absolute terms.

Same shock, different direction, much nicer.

Orders of magnitude matter.

I'm not as bitter as I could be. I'm actually quite surprised at the sanity of not avoiding the health topic completely - I think only OpenAI had a few months where ChatGPT was tip toeing in any health related conversation. Otherwise it's been almost completely ungated, and it saved and helped countless lives.

I really wish they'd find a way to ungate health and legitimate research topics.

My answer to the trolley problem is that you're allowed to not kill... unless you're the railway manager. If you're in a position of authority you pull the shit out of that switch, and then drink yourself to sleep at night. This is what authority means, not choosing the "feel good, ignore the people that could have been saved" path.