But the "Anthropic fight" is mostly fake. Palantir was using Claude as base model. Anthropic allegedly took issue with unsupervised kills because the technology wasn't ready (or something along the lines).
Also, I remember reading this guy has close ties to Anthropic. Also, I find it suspicious how he came to prominence out of nowhere. Like Big Tech and the establishment are propping podcasts of controlled narrative/opposition. I don't buy any of it.
It is literally impossible to prove a negative, that’s how conspiracy thinking operates and it’s why fortunately the justice system operates on the opposite principle and requires proof of guilt.
It’s true that in some circumstances we require avoiding even the appearance of impropriety or a conflict of interest, but that’s simply too large a burden to impose on everyone all of the time, especially for allegedly dire sins like “having a roommate who works for a Google”
In my view, this guy's podcast didn't get big talking about AI, it's best known for cold war history and foreign policy discussions with Sarah Paine of the U.S. Naval War College.
Dwarkesh definitely got big in Silicon Valley from his AI podcasts. He's one of the few people who can get famous researchers on and also have them say something genuinely new.
After that, he become well-known to the general public through his Sarah Paine podcasts (which are excellent).
It's entirely fake, sure Palantir uses Claude, but it takes about 10 minutes to pull all their federal contracts and realize the little involvement they have in the kill chain is preliminary
> I flew to the Bahamas to interview Sam Bankman-Fried, the CEO of FTX! He talks about FTX’s plan to infiltrate traditional finance, giving $100m this year to AI + pandemic risk, scaling slowly + hiring A-players, and much more.
And that was right in the middle of FTX being accused by many prominent people .
Not sure what you mean, but I’d never heard of Sarah Paine before that. I thought she gave a very concise yet nuanced view of the modern world order in her lectures for Dwarkesh.
I'm assuming he's in some sort of high-end communal housing, a trend that began emerging in SF ~15 years back ... ie. where multi-millionaire startup founders and the like choose it on purpose for the synergistic benefits.
It doesn't matter what you know so much as who you know. Networking is the most precious currency. He met the right people, got the right guests, and surfed a wave of fortunate occurrences. He was roommates with Dylan Patel of TheIjnformation, and John Y of Asionometry, and has since developed a wide range of high level industry contacts.
Sometimes people succeed without earning it, and what matters is what they do with the success afterwards. I'd say Dwarkesh earned it, but got lucky and caught the right waves, and has surfed the hell out of his success. He's had consistently well informed, level headed takes, and has engaged the field with insight and honest curiousity.
When I see people surf like that, I applaud it. There's nothing grifty or shady, he's just had a great series of excellent opportunities and has played them for everything they're worth. Once he had a few billionaires on, that was all the social cache he needed to continue attracting guests and high level researchers and other figures in AI.
I might be old, but he strikes me as a shallow valley Bro. His CV has nothing of significance. But he had a lot of Big Tech guests and even that Navy intelligence woman. He got a boost by being endorsed by Bezos. It smells of BS to me. Again, maybe I'm just a grumpy greybeard and this is a Gen Z thing.
When it comes to the acumen of running a podcast, he excels beyond his peers. He hosts interesting guests. He researches their area of expertise meticulously and asks erudite questions. The show is well edited.
It is not unusual that a young person would succeed at performance occupations. A huge portion of the Top 40 pop songs are performed by people under 27.
I'm also a grumpy greybeard - but I've got nothing but respect for him grinding out some good podcasts and then being in the right place and right time to capitalize on connections. I see a lot of skepticism directed his way, but I view it as a lot like early dotcom winners. Catch the right wave and it's like winning the lottery, success far beyond what you'd normally be able to reach, and then you get the opportunity to show whether you can keep it or not. I appreciate a good success story, and it's awesome to see people win by catching a wave, and then hold on to it, showing that they can keep doing it at a higher level.
The algorithm rewards those guests who follow the trends, he rose the wave to be at the top very fast and now possibly has the leverage where the who's who in AI have to be on his podcast to broadcast their views
> The whole background of this AI conversation is that we’re in a race with China, and we have to win. But what is the reason we want America to win the AI race? It’s because we want to make sure free open societies can defend themselves. We don’t want the winner of the AI race to be a government which operates on the principle that there is no such thing as a truly private company or a private citizen.
In the US currently, there are private citizens, and there are 'not-the-1%' citizens, where a Kavanaugh stop is legal, your voter information may be (or may have already been) seized by the DoJ or FBI, you may be tracked by out of state or federal agents on ALPRs with no warrant, for any reason, and where attending a legal protest may have your biometrics added to a database of potential domestic terrorists.
Or maybe your tax money will just be used to blow up unidentified boaters or bomb girls' schools and homes, and you'll get no say in whether that's the case because the elected body that is there to issue a declaration of war (or not) as representatives of you, has abdicated that power to a cabinet of unelected white nationalists.
But go off about how we're such a better country that believes in freedom and goodness.
Great take. If the past year has taught us anything, it’s that the US can’t really be seen as the “good guys” in such a simple way. Many of these things have been happening for years, but war crimes, disregard for international law, blackmailing allies, killing their own citizens without accountability, and allowing foreign governments to heavily influence policy are all troubling signs.
It’s easy to point to China as a place where freedom of speech isn’t present, but try asking members of the current administration or even Supreme Court judges who won the 2020 election and see what kind of responses you get. That alone says a lot about the current state of things.
>It’s easy to point to China as a place where freedom of speech isn’t present, but try asking members of the current administration or even Supreme Court judges who won the 2020 election and see what kind of responses you get.
Freedom of speech and regard for the facts are independent concerns. People absolutely have the right to call out lies about the 2020 election and have repeatedly done so.
An American and a Soviet Russian were on a plane chatting. The American says "I'm very impressed with the quality of Soviet propaganda". The Soviet says thanks, but it's nothing compared to American propaganda.
The American says "But we don't have propaganda", the Soviet says "Exactly".
If a majority of the Americans believed America was not generally the "good guys" it would be a sign of a failed democracy.
Similarly normal for the population of any country that has net negative externalities from America to view them as the "bad guys".
The current and growing anti-US sentiment is an expected result of an increasing gap between the US and the rest of the first world on economy and defense. The existence of a superpower is precluded on being viewed negatively by the rest of the world
To be fair, almost every society portrays itself as the defender of whatever is right/good.
And, to be equally as fair, the only genuinely good guys are the ones that are too small to enforce their will upon others directly - small countries without arms who are forced to find other ways to engage with others in order to achieve whatever goals they have (resource acquisition)
The Americans have been extremely adept at dominating the discourse via non-government pathways (Hollywood)
Even if more illegal wars are started in the Middle East, even if inequality gets more obscene, VCs on HN are still going to insist that We The Good Guys are the champions of freedom, equality, justice, all the good stuff that we don’t practice (but we have great ideas about).
> VCs on HN are still going to insist that We The Good Guys are the champions of freedom, equality, justice, all the good stuff that we don’t practice (but we have great ideas about)
They might. I’m not. There is an analogy here to perfect being the enemy of good. Or, at the very least, the pragmatic better.
It’s the usual feigned comparison. America is a republic and if you don’t agree well, go to Reddit and argue about it; meanwhile China is just a dictatorship. American “crimes“ are dismissed with some rhetorical non-response like “hmmph, no one claimed we are perfect”, or immediately contrasted with some arbitrary Chinese “crime”, then dropped just as fast; even someone bringing up contemporary killing of Iranian schoolchildren gets contrasted with the “Indian Removal Act stuff” as if, you know, someone didn’t just now bring up something that America did last week. You bring up the ideal of “the American experiment”, then when someone brings up inconvenient facts the Tiananmen Square Massacre makes an appearance.
But to your credit you brought up the Pretti shooting. I have to analyze how that demonstrates why the “AI values” should reflect American ones.
Judge my enemies by their actions. Judge me by my words. About myself...
At no point have any of your arguers said they approve of the crimes perpetrated by the United States government. You repeatedly talk past them while only tangentially addressing their points. Your comments assume bad faith and make liberal use of pejoratives. My recommendation is to self-reflect.
This is both (1) not necessarily true -- there's no first-principles reason why being powerful implies being unethical -- and (2) deeply pessimistic and defeatist. You can apply whataboutism and say that everyone's equally bad, but I assure you that there's a pretty big difference, even down to your quality life, between the types of systems you choose to participate in.
It's not pessimistic or defeatist; you first have to recognize the limitations and failure modes of your system before you can think about changing it.
Is it possible to live in a world where powerful entities have gotten there through ethical means? Sure. We don't live in that world, though.
And yes, if I said "name me one powerful person/entity that got there through ethical means", I'm sure you could give me a name. But that name would surely be an outlier.
> real lie here is that there's an ethical superpower
It’s a lie in the way cats are round is a lie—actually a lie, but one nobody brought up.
I don’t think Dwarkesh is arguing for global American hegemony. Just that if AI becomes dominant, having AIs embedded with American cultural values, broadly, is probably better than having ones seeded with Xi Jinping thought.
> China and the US can both be bad, and they're both going to use AI for mass internal and external surveillance and weapon targeting
Agree. But I don’t think any Chinese AI companies get to sue the CCP over it.
>AIs embedded with American cultural values, broadly, is probably better than having ones seeded with Xi Jinping thought.
I'd really rather have a choice of both rather than be forced to accept "AI that downplays a 2 year old genocide" over "AI that covers up a 40 year massacre".
> republic without the rule of law is not a republic anymore
An observation one can make when comparing a republic with the rule of law to one that ain’t, whether across time or geography. There is a real benefit to having the American experiment prominent and continuing.
Is there actually a benefit? Or are we just watching the slow motion collapse of another empire convinced of its own immortality? History is a graveyard of experiments that thought they were the exception to the rule.
> Is there actually a benefit? Or are we just watching the slow motion collapse of another empire convinced of its own immortality?
These aren’t mutually exclusive. The world is better off for Athens and the Roman and Harrapan and Haudenosaunee republics. (Book request: history of the republic. I’ve struggled to find one.)
The CCP with internal elections was interesting and a genuine riposte to broadly-enfranchised republics. Xi as a dictator is not, not.
> in this subthread we are talking about republics which you are keen to mention china isn't
This subthread is part of the broader discussion. There are lots of Reddit corners for debating whether America is a republic. I haven’t seen any novel arguments in a while. The argument for whether an American AI is useful out of an American republic, its dying republic or even its embers is the germane one here, and I think it speaks decisively in favor against the one that’s proudly autocratic without organized dissent.
> There is a real benefit to having the American experiment prominent and continuing.
The American 'experiment' is one long history of the US doing really horrible things, but giving ourselves a pass because we dress it up in the name of freedom and self-determination.
If you ignore our slavery and the genocide of Native Americans, it's easy to paint China's slavery and genocide as evils that are unique somehow.
The real experiment of America is in seeing how self-deluded we can become if we continuously reinforce the false premise that our institutions are intrinsically good (or at least, nebulously "better").
The difference is that China's slavery and genocide is happening today, within its own borders.
Is that true of the US? Is there state-sanctioned/supported slavery in the US? Is the US committing genocide within its own borders? Arguably not?
This doesn't make the US perfect or wonderful. We've been politically and militarily supporting a genocide in Gaza, as a stark example.
But "the US did slavery and genocide in the past" and "China is doing slavery and genocide now" doesn't make the US and China equivalent today.
And on top of that, I can go out and protest my country supporting Israel's garbage in Gaza. If I were a Chinese citizen and tried to do something like that in China, I'd be jailed.
Is Trump really not a dictator? Meanwhile, China has been focusing on domestic development and investing in underdeveloped regions, including across Africa. China hasn't bombed girls' schools and then lied that it's their own country thrown the bomb.
What the governments have done is different from what the cultural values of the two countries are. Chinese values and American values are different, and people can argue for one or the other. We, westerner, want our values to prevail. Dwarkesh wants to preserve our values of freedom.
This comes to the core of the issue, and is where I think the disagreement comes from. Many Westerners in fact do not want "Western" values to prevail.
Why? For me those values have led to outcomes so horrendously antithetical to _my_ values, that I would not wish them for the rest of the world. Even worse, this Western centrism has led to jingoist conclusions for at least 400 years.
SCOTUS rules 90%+ for Trump (lower courts are 90%+ against). They've given him freedom from investigation and criminal prosecution. They aren't much of a bulwark.
Add to that all the military posturing over Taiwan and it's clear that it's not "China doesn't do what the US does", it's "China hasn't done it...yet."
The idea that anyone would be better off with China supplanting the US is asinine. This is the same government that committed the Tiananmen square massacre and still doesn't acknowledge that anything happened.
I don't see anyone arguing that we'd be better off with China, but I am arguing that neither the US or China can be trusted with this, so the author positing "US AI dominance good to keep China at bay" is bad.
> The whole background of this AI conversation is that we’re in a race with China, and we have to win. But what is the reason we want America to win the AI race?
Right now there are two contenders for first in the AI race. The US, and China.
You spent the rest of your comment making the case that it is not good for the US to win. Implying, though not directly saying, we would be better off with China.
You can say "oh wouldn't it be nice if Europe won instead" but they don't have anything in the race right now. We're stuck with the US or China.
> You spent the rest of your comment making the case that it is not good for the US to win. Implying, though not directly saying, we would be better off with China.
This is you putting words in my mouth. It's bad if either wins.
You seem to be operating under an unspoken personal belief that an AI race "win" inevitably spills out into global dominance.
I don't know that it won't, but you likewise don't know that it will, and I'm not beholden to debate things from your chosen premise.
I think AI will be bad for whoever is being targeted by it's controllers, but I don't think it will intrinsically disrupt the military spheres that exist now as a result of nuclear weaponry.
China will use its AI to hurt the people it's hurting now.
The US will use its AI to hurt the people it's hurting now.
Imho, the idea of an AI arms race "winner" is just the new face of the securitization rhetoric that we used to justify our military excursionism during the Cold War.
> the author positing "US AI dominance good to keep China at bay" is bad
My read is they’re saying we need an alternative to Chinese AI. Because with its industrial might, the default future is Chinese technological dominance.
I know people IRL that are so fed up with the US's bullshit that they do sometimes look at China and think their dominance might be better for the world. "Well, when's the last time China started a war or even deployed military forces in another country?", they ask... and I don't know how to respond to that (because they haven't, for at least 30 years that I can think of). And saying something like "well, they've been expanding their territory through extralegal means, and use coercion and grey-area tactics to get what they want" feels like an unsatisfying retort.
China invaded and annexed Tibet in 1959. To the degree we had a classical definition of intent-based genocide, Beijing continues to commit it in Tibet and Xinjiang.
America’s conscious is stained. But it’s downright nonsense to go off about surveillance when the comparison is China.
1800 people detained at "alligator Alcatraz" had their records purged from ICE databases, and are completely unaccounted for. Literally disappeared, and the only people whose word we have they're alive are the same people who disappeared them.
Yes, the Uyghur genocide and paramilitary suppression and settler-colonialism of Tibet and Xinjiang is horrific, and will (hopefully) be recognized in the future as a genocide on par with others that 'enjoy' historical notoriety, but let's not pretend we're not well on our way to doing that here.
The rhetoric of ethnic superiority and nationalism and birthright that exists in our government is the exact same rhetoric that exists in Xi Jinping's "Imperial Han" nationalism.
I’m surveilled across pretty much every aspect of my life between basic Snowden level scooping of my data and public tracking like flock cameras. Democracy is increasingly becoming a joke as the richest in our society explicitly are trying to break it and we look more and more like mid 90s Russia.
I want the US to win because I live in the US and it will probably benefit me, but we’ve largely stopped pretending to value the republic so I don’t think we can claim a moral standing on these topics anymore.
To reference your other comment, the common American man has as much de facto ability to sue our government and/or leaders as the common Chinese man
People who buy the USA-vs-China race to a specific goal - do they really believe if China gets "AGI" first, they will immediately try to conquer the USA? How exactly will that go?
It's more likely they will continue expansionist policy in Asia which counters several American diplomatic goals:
1. Democracy and freedom worldwide
2. Economic access+prosperity with Asia
3. Pro-American sentiment
(Not in order of importance, which shifts constantly)
I think assuming China would beat the US in conventional war if they reach 'AGI' first is a stretch, even if this actually grants them a force advantage it's not like the US can no longer reach AGI. The risk is really more that if they reach 'AGI' and subsequently a force advantage, that they would no longer be deterred and more decisively move on Taiwan next year. Taiwan is key to [1] and [2] above.
There is nothing unconstitutional about the first paragraph of your criticism. What is unconstitutional is restricting your ability to write this criticism, which is not breached.
You _could_ argue that this is a flaw in the constitution, and that none of the above should be legal, and that people who support those things should be restricted in their speech or ability to hold office. This was the status quo in politics for a while! These things have all existed for a long time but this seems particularly targeted at Trump, who was famously banned from most social media platforms for years.
There are a lot of democracies (most of the EU for example) that take this stance on freedoms and will even overturn elections to prevent those who support those policies. The question is really 'does doing that protect freedom and democracy or infringe it?'
As for the second paragraph, this is just a lie, Congress has not abdicated any type of war powers to the Cabinet. There has not been any type of declaration of war, and if Congress wanted to stop the DoD, they very much could and in fact came very close to doing so. If your Congress representative did not represent your interests (in this case voted nay), you can call email etc. them and their office or vote them out.
> better country that believes in freedom and goodness
I think you're letting your strong feelings here cloud your judgement, you can hold all of these opinions above without needing to fellate China, which is objectively worse on freedoms than the US. It's also important not to conflate "believes in freedom" with "perfectly meets my line of freedom."
You're being disingenuous, but yes, if you believe the US is not inherently better than China you are fellating the most well documented modern authoritarian state, which was borne from the largest genocide in history, and has decades of examples of breaching freedoms and silencing dissidents, and is viewed negatively even by a large portion of communists. If the two are even comparable in your eyes, you are fellating China.
I love that you are allowed to go off about how we are a worse country without fear of jail or shunning or anything like that. You are using your rights properly!
You are assuming that they are American and that the account is tied to their real identity and that they are not willing to take risks to state the truth. The Trump administration is already attempting to persecute critics[1], including some for random comments posted online[2]. If "freedom of speech" is your metric for what makes you a better country, you are in fact literally proving their point.
People have also been detained with intention to be deported for their views about Palestine, with online comments being part of how they're chosen for targeting:
There was also someone jailed for a month for quoting Trump's own words about a school shooting, "we have to get over it", in the context of Charlie Kirk's death, along with many other noted instances of retaliation against online comments around that incident:
ICE asking for a list of social media profiles of its detractors doesn't sound like "without fear of jail or shunning or anything like that." to me. Through data mining and 3rd parties, the local PD has a dossier on me based on what I write here that would come up if I did something to get their attention. That has a chilling effect on what say on here in public.
> But within 20 years, 99% of the workforce in the military, the government, and the private sector will be AIs. This includes the soldiers (by which I mean the robot armies), the superhumanly intelligent advisors and engineers, the police, you name it.
Frankly, I find that less 'naive' than I do 'dangerously possible'.
Autonomous weaponry is one of the few ways that a fascist state could reasonably maintain violent control over a large and hostile populace.
I guarantee Trump would rather have perfectly obedient killbots than critically thinking soldiers, or even just the 5 murderous assholes required to oversee tasking for 1000 semi-autonomous police drones.
The least plausible part is the private sector, which just doesn't work that way.
"Within 20 years 99% of the military will be AIs"
That smells like such a baseless speculation that from the get go I'm not convinced of the author's rigor.
> So what’s the Pentagon’s plan — to coerce and threaten to destroy every single company that won’t give them what they want on exactly their terms?
I mean... isn't that pretty much the way the current administration behaves in general? If the answer to this question is "yes", and the US executive does not in fact share the values of the author about free and open society, then the rest of the article is kinda moot (except the point that we should be talking about these things now, and encouraging congress to act).
The administration believes that rights, in this case the right of corporate existence, are granted by the state. This is opposed to the liberal conception that rights are a product of natural existence - an essential feature of being.
The right of corporate existence is granted (or at least regulated, heavily) by the state.
This administration believes that they don't need to treat all businesses equally under the law, and can use strong-arm intimidation tactics to get what they want. That is the problem.
As much as I dislike Trump, I can't imagine that the military, under ANY administration, would hesitate to seize any technology that they thought was critical and was being withheld from them, especially if they can claim we're at war when special provisions apply.
I remember thinking about this - basically AGI - decades ago, and it was always obvious to me that if you created such a thing there'd come a day when the MIB would be ringing the doorbell.
One thing I’ve never heard a good answer to: If Anthropic is a supplier not to the Department of Defense itself, but to Palantir, why isn’t supply chain risk the proper designation (assuming the government’s concerns with Anthropic having authority over military missions is valid)?
As for whether code written with Claude Code should be so considered - if it’s just code that is subject to human review, I would argue that this use shouldn’t be a supply chain risk. But with Claude Code PR Review and similar products, the chance that an AI product (not limiting to Anthropic here) could own a load-bearing part of the lifecycle of a critical piece of code becomes much larger, and deserves scrutiny.
I'm not sure that "supply chain risk" is even the right term to be discussing.
What Hegseth/Trump want to do is not just stop Anthropic models from being used by any military supplier pursuant to goods/services they are providing to the military, but rather say that if you do business with the military then you must not use Anthropic at all, even if that usage is entirely unrelated to your military contracts.
This is explicitly not what they have done, not how government contractors ever interpret this designation, nor something they could do even if they wanted to do.
It is also common corporate doctrine to use a subsidiary for government contracting to avoid having to evidence that a commercial vendor is utilized for government, so this won't even be 'annoying' for contractors.
ITAR and compliance frameworks (e.g. FedRAMP and CMMC) already mandate this for any non-US company, yet AWS commercial still has offerings in other countries and from non-US vendors, Palantir still has an IG business, etc.
>What we’re learning from this episode is that the government actually has way more leverage over private companies than we realized.
Who is learning this for the first time only now? Even just restricting ourselves to the current administration, look at how many times Trump has directed punitive actions against private entities! Look at his actions against law firms like Perkins Coie or Covington & Burling. This is not something that just arose out of nowhere with Anthropic.
This stood out to me too - there's an underlying assumption that private entities _can_ say no to governments, but that's only true to a point. If the government decides it needs AI-powered killbots as a matter of national security, it can and will nationalize whatever entities it needs to build them.
My attitude towards democracy has worsened since AI.
The problem with democracy is that it can easily become a revolving door wherein capital holders can choose which candidates are allowed to approach the door.
I think democracy works well when the monetary system is constrained; for example on gold or other scarce asset because that creates a better separation between money and state because then there would be less of an incentive for big companies to corrupt the revolving door to gain a financial advantage.
In a monetary system where the government can create an unlimited amount of money, the incentive to corrupt the government and political process keeps increasing.
I think democracy with a soft fiat money system is probably the most dangerous system because any moral objection can be filtered out of the running as we saw happen with Anthropic and the Department of War. It's because clearly it's the weapon manufacturers running that department behind the scenes; they have a huge financial interest to do so. The Department of War is the bread and butter of weapon manufacturers and defense contractors.
> But within 20 years, 99% of the workforce in the military, the government, and the private sector will be AIs.
I haven't seen this much hype and hopium since the dot com boom. The whole open AI -> Anthropic saga just reeks of the same evolution of Viant/Scient.
Look we have an amazing tool, but it has some fundamental shortcomings that the industry seems to want to burry its head in the sand about. The moment the hype dies and we get to engineering and practical implementations a lot is going to change. Does it have the potential to displace a lot of our current industry: why yes it does. Agents can force the web open (have you ever tried to get all your amazon purchase history?) can kill dark patterns (go cancel this service for me), and crush wedge services (how many things are shimmed into sales force that should really be stand alone apps). And the valuable engagement is going to be by PEOPLE, good UI, good user experiences are gonna be what sells (this will hit internet advertising hard for the middle men like google and Facebook).
> I haven't seen this much hype and hopium since the dot com boom.
The notion that 99% of the workforce and military will be AIs isn't "copium", it's grounds for absolute terror. One of two things will be true:
1. The AIs will be controlled by the Epstein class, who will then have no use for most of humanity, either as workers or soldiers.
2. Or the AIs will be controlled by the AIs themselves, which also seems worrisome.
Really, any situation where 99% of the workforce and military are AIs should be deeply concerning, for reasons that should be obvious to any student of history or evolution.
And, sure, maybe we won't get there in our lifetimes. But if we did, I wouldn't expect an automatic utopia.
I think a lot of Dwarkesh's mentality about AI being inevitable / ubiquitous comes from the same part of him that thinks that artificial things are "good enough", e.g. the way he allows his production team to use fake plastic plants on set. Is he correct? I'm not sure, but I know there are at least a few people who notice the difference.
I always listened to the podcast and forget they even have videos. Have a hard time imagining myself sitting and watching a 2 hour interview when I could listen while exercising or doing chores. Am I missing anything?
Imagine if 5 years ago people said that 99% of the world's software would be written, designed, and tested by AI within 10 years. That would be insane hype and hopium and... oh wait..
Lots of wank about muh democratic vs authoritarian values, at the end of the day, US DoD/DoW affiliated AI will 100% kill people, sooner than later and US AI researchers will have to grasp with that. I want to charitably say eventually, but as events show, inevitably, within the calendar year... current quarter, 100s children will die because of US AI in actions most of US do not support. One can argue AI will enable more selective targets, or there will simply be more targets, and given US behavior there will always be targets. Meanwhile PRC AI researcher's work might end up murdering children... someday, and even then most likely in a war / reunification / rejuvenation project that most of Chinese support. Until then, the side not blowing up kids is going to sleep more soundly.
But this isn’t a fight about Anthropic, or mass surveillance, or even AI. This is a fight about lawfare, constitutional rights, and corruption.
The lawfare part of it is that to coerce an individual or a company, governments are willing to abuse their power. The Biden administration did it when pressuring social media companies to censor content. The Trump administration is doing it to a much greater extent with things like ordering every government agency to stop using Anthropic and by labeling them a supply chain risk.
The ideological part of it is when Defense Sec Hegseth and Trump and AI Czar / PayPal Mafia member David Sacks repeatedly attack Anthropic as “woke”, and it is clear they’re undermining this company from their government positions based on Anthropic’s speech (first amendment violation). This obviously is part of why they attacked Anthropic in such a public way.
And the corruption part of it is OpenAI’s leaders being big supporters of the MAGA movement and the Trump administration. Greg Brockman, president of OpenAI, is the biggest donor ever to the MAGA PAC. Why did Hegseth grant a contract to OpenAI after banning Anthropic, even though OpenAI has the same red lines in their agreement (what Sam Altman claimed)? It’s because of the corruption - give Trump and his family/friends money, and you’ll get something back.
The fight against these types of government abuse have ALWAYS been happening. But the abuse is much more in the open today, and much larger in scale than ever before. Scandals like Watergate would not even make the news today. And that is what the public should be waking up to and focusing on. We need to rethink our political system significantly and add a lot more protections against the kind of things the Trump 2.0 administration has done.
> Our future civilization will run on AI labor. And as much as the government’s actions here piss me off, in a way I’m glad this episode happened - because it gives us the opportunity to think through some extremely important questions about who this future workforce will be accountable and aligned to, and who gets to determine that.
I stopped reading there because this is a pointless exercise.[1]
This isn’t a roundtable. You are not even at the table. There isn’t some “thankfully time to discuss this...”—you are just out.
The Machine doesn’t need your labor? You are out. No norms. No discussions.
You either try to forcefully take control of the situation or you see yourself get discarded.
(I am here just assuming all the AI Maximalist (doom maximalist in this context, Trump and all) premises for the sake of the argument.)
[1] I did read the last paragraphs and the tenor is the same. “We must make laws and norms through our political system”… just like with nuclear bombs, of all things.
LLMs are AI. Markov text generators from the 1970s/80s are AI. Face recognition software like FaceID is AI. Many people behind LLMs got degrees under departments that have AI in their title.
AI is just computers doing things we typically associate with human intelligence, and having a conversation with a computer that effectively passes the Turing test, is definitely AI. If LLMs aren't AI, then AI isn't a useful term. (though agreed that LLMs aren't AGI, which I assume is what you're thinking of)
This is called the AI effect: we stop calling it AI when it works. Its goal post moving to keep the sci-fi term sci-fi.
There’s a similar thing with transhumanist “enhancement” or “life extension” stuff. When it actually works we call it medicine. Statistically one of the most powerful life extension techs ever developed was the cardiac bypass, which would have been sci-fi in 1900.
I’ve been using stuff like Claude Code and personally feel comfortable calling this stuff AI. Is it AGI? I don’t think so, but then again I’m not totally sure what that is. Am I AGI? I’m not universally able to handle all forms of cognition well and I can’t self modify much, so I’m not sure either. I’m not even sure if AGI is a well formed concept.
Intelligence is a pretty broad concept too. My pet rabbit is intelligent. Plants are intelligent. Bacteria are intelligent. Anything that can run an OODA loop, learn, adapt, and move toward a goal function is intelligent. By that definition some computer systems have been AI for decades. They’re just getting better.
I think there’s intelligence all around us. We just don’t get the wow factor from it unless it talks.
I’m also as pedantic as you and use “LLM” even talking about these systems but you need to be flexible and accept that “AI” is already in everyone’s head when referring to GPT variants.
I think that when some people talk about "AI" they have "AGI" in mind, and when others talk about "AI" they have "latest computer does the smarts" in mind.
I personally would prefer "AI" to be "AGI" but there's no point fighting the way people use language (see: every damned pedantic comment about English usage ever!! :-)
I think many people interpet AI to mean AGI, but the common use of AI has been consistent since the famous 1956 Dartmouth workshop that coined and popularized the term. Back then, just getting computers to do symbolic math and calculus was considered AI. It's not just a recent phenomenon that people use AI to refer to "computers that narrowly do smart human-like things", like LLMs. The confusion is that people think AI means AGI. And I think it's useful that way, otherwise we don't have a general term for it.
Dwarkesh is even more astroturfed than Lex Fridman. The interviews they do are just ads. No challenges, no hard questions. All seem staged and prepared.
More than that the questions about space based solar vs land solar for data center calculations seemed hollow as they are easily verifiable. He let Elon get away with this admin does not like Solar as an answer instead of what he is doing to convince them otherwise
The argument is permitting and weather proofing are harder than lifting at certain values of scale for each. We’re not there right now. But if Starship pans out we’re at least damn close, particularly if solar-panel fabrication can be done from out-of-well silicates.
I actually do. The math is more strained than anything present. But a lot of people are rejecting it out of hand without doing anything back of the envelope. Truth is, barring a seismic shift in how we permit data centers on the ground, it takes a within-the-envelope decreases in launch costs to make space-based data centers profitable. Which is then just a cheat code for building a Dyson sphere.
> Didnt startship exploded like 10 times by now?
They all explode all the time. Starship has also been consistently improving its suborbital flight characteristics. I don’t see a good argument for a fundamental design fuckup in the data we have.
> But in 30 months they'll be launchign 1 per hour?
This is nonsense. But within ten years? I think so. At least, we don’t have a good reason to reject that with current data. And that would make the cost equation flip to favoring space-based infrastructure. Which, honestly, is not the answer I expected. (I’ve done aerospace stuff for a while. Most of the back-of-the-envelope math fails. It failed for space-based solar power. It failed for asteroid mining. And it currently fails for space-based data centers. But let launch costs dip a bit, or permitting delays and risks rise a bit, and the equation balances sooner than one would think.)
> Changing permits sounds to me a lot easier than building anything in space
Having done a little bit of both, the latter around data centers, I’ll say they’re different kinds of hard.
> Alright, show me
Fair question. But no, I’m still refining my math and making bets on this. But I’ll start working on an HN comment in a few weeks and try to remember to post it back to this thread.
My basic argument is to try pinning out current datacenter costs, pin out lifted costs, and then work out what cost/kg you need to balance the two. Hint: approval time and interest rates are meaningful variables.
There's definitely something to be said for giving interesting people a platform to express their views unconditionally. Unfortunately, that can also be a very dangerous thing. I have been less and less impressed over the years with Lex's approach here.
I'm personally very glad that Dwarkesh isn't like that. He's not perfect, but I think he's doing a way better job than other podcasters in the field right now.
I'm a random dude on the Internet, but my partner completed her PhD at MIT. While there I knew and knew of a few PhD grads who worked at MIT in some non-tenure-track role (postdoc, staff researcher, etc). Typically for a couple years and then they get a better-paying or more permanent job. But several remained "affiliated" in some way. They kept their MIT website/email, some in academia continued to collaborate to some extent. Things like that. But AFAIK they weren't getting a paycheck from MIT. And it's somewhere between neat and genuinely professionally valuable to be affiliated w/ a prestigious university, so I don't blame them for claiming affiliation. My best guess is he's "affiliated" in a similar way.
But the "Anthropic fight" is mostly fake. Palantir was using Claude as base model. Anthropic allegedly took issue with unsupervised kills because the technology wasn't ready (or something along the lines).
Also, I remember reading this guy has close ties to Anthropic. Also, I find it suspicious how he came to prominence out of nowhere. Like Big Tech and the establishment are propping podcasts of controlled narrative/opposition. I don't buy any of it.
He's roommates with an Anthropic researcher, I was roommates with a Google product manager I don't think I'm really bought out by Google.
Why does a Google Product Manager need to have room mates?
You would assume someone with that role, that stature, is able to afford their own place.
I would question your relationship.
Product managers aren't management. They manage the trajectory of a software initiative. They can be hired straight out of college.
Rents in the San Francisco Bay area are too high to live a practical distance from job centers as a junior without roommates.
What? Plenty of people prefer to live with roommates, especially in the bay.
Bought out, bought in. Is the distinction important?
You don't think that. But I do. Prove you aren't.
It is literally impossible to prove a negative, that’s how conspiracy thinking operates and it’s why fortunately the justice system operates on the opposite principle and requires proof of guilt.
It’s true that in some circumstances we require avoiding even the appearance of impropriety or a conflict of interest, but that’s simply too large a burden to impose on everyone all of the time, especially for allegedly dire sins like “having a roommate who works for a Google”
Also Anthropic has made very clear they align closely with the DoW.
Really Anthropic doesn't seem to be fighting for anyone but a narrow subset of people.
So who cares, none of the but AI providers are particularly ethical. Pick your poison as your conscious and needs allow.
In my view, this guy's podcast didn't get big talking about AI, it's best known for cold war history and foreign policy discussions with Sarah Paine of the U.S. Naval War College.
Dwarkesh definitely got big in Silicon Valley from his AI podcasts. He's one of the few people who can get famous researchers on and also have them say something genuinely new.
After that, he become well-known to the general public through his Sarah Paine podcasts (which are excellent).
It's entirely fake, sure Palantir uses Claude, but it takes about 10 minutes to pull all their federal contracts and realize the little involvement they have in the kill chain is preliminary
>I find it suspicious how he came to prominence out of nowhere
He was first funded by FTX
Holy rabbit hole.
SBF was in Patel's previous podcast in July 2022 and FTX unraveled in November 2022. Hmm.
https://www.dwarkesh.com/p/sbf
> I flew to the Bahamas to interview Sam Bankman-Fried, the CEO of FTX! He talks about FTX’s plan to infiltrate traditional finance, giving $100m this year to AI + pandemic risk, scaling slowly + hiring A-players, and much more.
And that was right in the middle of FTX being accused by many prominent people .
April 29, 2022 https://x.com/AlderLaneEggs/status/1520023221294145536
June 20, 2022 https://x.com/MartyBent/status/1538645746655936519
Grifters gonna grift, and this one is well-connected.
Yes he is room-mates with.
Love the interviews Dwarkesh sponsored with Sarah Paine from the Naval War College.
Also, somewhat spitefully, find it funny that he has multiple roommates.
Those ones were a bit on the nose, no?
Not sure what you mean, but I’d never heard of Sarah Paine before that. I thought she gave a very concise yet nuanced view of the modern world order in her lectures for Dwarkesh.
How so? I enjoyed them, keeping in mind that the lecturer was a professor at a US naval war college.
Would you like to know MORE?
You are pattern matching to something that doesn't really fit, I think.
I'm assuming he's in some sort of high-end communal housing, a trend that began emerging in SF ~15 years back ... ie. where multi-millionaire startup founders and the like choose it on purpose for the synergistic benefits.
It doesn't matter what you know so much as who you know. Networking is the most precious currency. He met the right people, got the right guests, and surfed a wave of fortunate occurrences. He was roommates with Dylan Patel of TheIjnformation, and John Y of Asionometry, and has since developed a wide range of high level industry contacts.
Sometimes people succeed without earning it, and what matters is what they do with the success afterwards. I'd say Dwarkesh earned it, but got lucky and caught the right waves, and has surfed the hell out of his success. He's had consistently well informed, level headed takes, and has engaged the field with insight and honest curiousity.
When I see people surf like that, I applaud it. There's nothing grifty or shady, he's just had a great series of excellent opportunities and has played them for everything they're worth. Once he had a few billionaires on, that was all the social cache he needed to continue attracting guests and high level researchers and other figures in AI.
> Dylan Patel of TheIjnformation
SemiAnalysis
Sorry, my bad. Getting hard to keep track, there are so many adjacent sources, lol.
I might be old, but he strikes me as a shallow valley Bro. His CV has nothing of significance. But he had a lot of Big Tech guests and even that Navy intelligence woman. He got a boost by being endorsed by Bezos. It smells of BS to me. Again, maybe I'm just a grumpy greybeard and this is a Gen Z thing.
When it comes to the acumen of running a podcast, he excels beyond his peers. He hosts interesting guests. He researches their area of expertise meticulously and asks erudite questions. The show is well edited.
It is not unusual that a young person would succeed at performance occupations. A huge portion of the Top 40 pop songs are performed by people under 27.
I'm also a grumpy greybeard - but I've got nothing but respect for him grinding out some good podcasts and then being in the right place and right time to capitalize on connections. I see a lot of skepticism directed his way, but I view it as a lot like early dotcom winners. Catch the right wave and it's like winning the lottery, success far beyond what you'd normally be able to reach, and then you get the opportunity to show whether you can keep it or not. I appreciate a good success story, and it's awesome to see people win by catching a wave, and then hold on to it, showing that they can keep doing it at a higher level.
The algorithm rewards those guests who follow the trends, he rose the wave to be at the top very fast and now possibly has the leverage where the who's who in AI have to be on his podcast to broadcast their views
The author is naive.
> The whole background of this AI conversation is that we’re in a race with China, and we have to win. But what is the reason we want America to win the AI race? It’s because we want to make sure free open societies can defend themselves. We don’t want the winner of the AI race to be a government which operates on the principle that there is no such thing as a truly private company or a private citizen.
In the US currently, there are private citizens, and there are 'not-the-1%' citizens, where a Kavanaugh stop is legal, your voter information may be (or may have already been) seized by the DoJ or FBI, you may be tracked by out of state or federal agents on ALPRs with no warrant, for any reason, and where attending a legal protest may have your biometrics added to a database of potential domestic terrorists.
Or maybe your tax money will just be used to blow up unidentified boaters or bomb girls' schools and homes, and you'll get no say in whether that's the case because the elected body that is there to issue a declaration of war (or not) as representatives of you, has abdicated that power to a cabinet of unelected white nationalists.
But go off about how we're such a better country that believes in freedom and goodness.
Great take. If the past year has taught us anything, it’s that the US can’t really be seen as the “good guys” in such a simple way. Many of these things have been happening for years, but war crimes, disregard for international law, blackmailing allies, killing their own citizens without accountability, and allowing foreign governments to heavily influence policy are all troubling signs.
It’s easy to point to China as a place where freedom of speech isn’t present, but try asking members of the current administration or even Supreme Court judges who won the 2020 election and see what kind of responses you get. That alone says a lot about the current state of things.
>It’s easy to point to China as a place where freedom of speech isn’t present, but try asking members of the current administration or even Supreme Court judges who won the 2020 election and see what kind of responses you get.
Freedom of speech and regard for the facts are independent concerns. People absolutely have the right to call out lies about the 2020 election and have repeatedly done so.
> People absolutely have the right to call out lies about the 2020 election and have repeatedly done so.
Some at the cost of their careers and a few now face the threat of prosecution.
China is a low bar. We shouldn't accept any of this as normal.
> If the past year has taught us anything, it’s that the US can’t really be seen as the “good guys” in such a simple way.
More like the past 200 years. America have never been the "good guys", and it is only Americans who seem to think they ever were.
An American and a Soviet Russian were on a plane chatting. The American says "I'm very impressed with the quality of Soviet propaganda". The Soviet says thanks, but it's nothing compared to American propaganda.
The American says "But we don't have propaganda", the Soviet says "Exactly".
If a majority of the Americans believed America was not generally the "good guys" it would be a sign of a failed democracy.
Similarly normal for the population of any country that has net negative externalities from America to view them as the "bad guys".
The current and growing anti-US sentiment is an expected result of an increasing gap between the US and the rest of the first world on economy and defense. The existence of a superpower is precluded on being viewed negatively by the rest of the world
To be fair, almost every society portrays itself as the defender of whatever is right/good.
And, to be equally as fair, the only genuinely good guys are the ones that are too small to enforce their will upon others directly - small countries without arms who are forced to find other ways to engage with others in order to achieve whatever goals they have (resource acquisition)
The Americans have been extremely adept at dominating the discourse via non-government pathways (Hollywood)
> go off about how we're such a better country that believes in freedom and goodness
Better than China as a global model? Still, yes, probably. Potentially. Depends on how the next few years ago.
Even if America fails, I’d argue a global republic is a brighter potential future than a global dictatorship.
Even if more illegal wars are started in the Middle East, even if inequality gets more obscene, VCs on HN are still going to insist that We The Good Guys are the champions of freedom, equality, justice, all the good stuff that we don’t practice (but we have great ideas about).
> VCs on HN are still going to insist that We The Good Guys are the champions of freedom, equality, justice, all the good stuff that we don’t practice (but we have great ideas about)
They might. I’m not. There is an analogy here to perfect being the enemy of good. Or, at the very least, the pragmatic better.
It’s the usual feigned comparison. America is a republic and if you don’t agree well, go to Reddit and argue about it; meanwhile China is just a dictatorship. American “crimes“ are dismissed with some rhetorical non-response like “hmmph, no one claimed we are perfect”, or immediately contrasted with some arbitrary Chinese “crime”, then dropped just as fast; even someone bringing up contemporary killing of Iranian schoolchildren gets contrasted with the “Indian Removal Act stuff” as if, you know, someone didn’t just now bring up something that America did last week. You bring up the ideal of “the American experiment”, then when someone brings up inconvenient facts the Tiananmen Square Massacre makes an appearance.
But to your credit you brought up the Pretti shooting. I have to analyze how that demonstrates why the “AI values” should reflect American ones.
Judge my enemies by their actions. Judge me by my words. About myself...
At no point have any of your arguers said they approve of the crimes perpetrated by the United States government. You repeatedly talk past them while only tangentially addressing their points. Your comments assume bad faith and make liberal use of pejoratives. My recommendation is to self-reflect.
The real lie here is that there's an ethical superpower.
Just like being a billionaire (or, super-wealther, if you will), you don't get to be a superpower by doing good things.
China and the US can both be bad, and they're both going to use AI for mass internal and external surveillance and weapon targeting.
This is both (1) not necessarily true -- there's no first-principles reason why being powerful implies being unethical -- and (2) deeply pessimistic and defeatist. You can apply whataboutism and say that everyone's equally bad, but I assure you that there's a pretty big difference, even down to your quality life, between the types of systems you choose to participate in.
It's not pessimistic or defeatist; you first have to recognize the limitations and failure modes of your system before you can think about changing it.
Is it possible to live in a world where powerful entities have gotten there through ethical means? Sure. We don't live in that world, though.
And yes, if I said "name me one powerful person/entity that got there through ethical means", I'm sure you could give me a name. But that name would surely be an outlier.
Help me through the practical implications of this logic. We should concede to Chinese AI dominance because we can’t do it perfectly?
> real lie here is that there's an ethical superpower
It’s a lie in the way cats are round is a lie—actually a lie, but one nobody brought up.
I don’t think Dwarkesh is arguing for global American hegemony. Just that if AI becomes dominant, having AIs embedded with American cultural values, broadly, is probably better than having ones seeded with Xi Jinping thought.
> China and the US can both be bad, and they're both going to use AI for mass internal and external surveillance and weapon targeting
Agree. But I don’t think any Chinese AI companies get to sue the CCP over it.
>AIs embedded with American cultural values, broadly, is probably better than having ones seeded with Xi Jinping thought.
I'd really rather have a choice of both rather than be forced to accept "AI that downplays a 2 year old genocide" over "AI that covers up a 40 year massacre".
> rather have a choice of both
You do. So do I. If American AI goes by the wayside, we cease to have that choice anymore.
A republic without the rule of law is not a republic anymore.
> republic without the rule of law is not a republic anymore
An observation one can make when comparing a republic with the rule of law to one that ain’t, whether across time or geography. There is a real benefit to having the American experiment prominent and continuing.
Is there actually a benefit? Or are we just watching the slow motion collapse of another empire convinced of its own immortality? History is a graveyard of experiments that thought they were the exception to the rule.
> Is there actually a benefit? Or are we just watching the slow motion collapse of another empire convinced of its own immortality?
These aren’t mutually exclusive. The world is better off for Athens and the Roman and Harrapan and Haudenosaunee republics. (Book request: history of the republic. I’ve struggled to find one.)
The CCP with internal elections was interesting and a genuine riposte to broadly-enfranchised republics. Xi as a dictator is not, not.
But we are not talking about china.
> But we are not talking about china
Author literally is.
And in this subthread we are talking about republics which you are keen to mention china isn't.
> in this subthread we are talking about republics which you are keen to mention china isn't
This subthread is part of the broader discussion. There are lots of Reddit corners for debating whether America is a republic. I haven’t seen any novel arguments in a while. The argument for whether an American AI is useful out of an American republic, its dying republic or even its embers is the germane one here, and I think it speaks decisively in favor against the one that’s proudly autocratic without organized dissent.
> There is a real benefit to having the American experiment prominent and continuing.
The American 'experiment' is one long history of the US doing really horrible things, but giving ourselves a pass because we dress it up in the name of freedom and self-determination.
If you ignore our slavery and the genocide of Native Americans, it's easy to paint China's slavery and genocide as evils that are unique somehow.
The real experiment of America is in seeing how self-deluded we can become if we continuously reinforce the false premise that our institutions are intrinsically good (or at least, nebulously "better").
The difference is that China's slavery and genocide is happening today, within its own borders.
Is that true of the US? Is there state-sanctioned/supported slavery in the US? Is the US committing genocide within its own borders? Arguably not?
This doesn't make the US perfect or wonderful. We've been politically and militarily supporting a genocide in Gaza, as a stark example.
But "the US did slavery and genocide in the past" and "China is doing slavery and genocide now" doesn't make the US and China equivalent today.
And on top of that, I can go out and protest my country supporting Israel's garbage in Gaza. If I were a Chinese citizen and tried to do something like that in China, I'd be jailed.
> real experiment of America is in seeing how self-deluded we can become
How would you contrast the responses to the Tiananmen Square Massacre [1] and that of Pretti’s shooting?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1989_Tiananmen_Square_protests...
As much a republic as Rome was under Caligula.
Is Trump really not a dictator? Meanwhile, China has been focusing on domestic development and investing in underdeveloped regions, including across Africa. China hasn't bombed girls' schools and then lied that it's their own country thrown the bomb.
What the governments have done is different from what the cultural values of the two countries are. Chinese values and American values are different, and people can argue for one or the other. We, westerner, want our values to prevail. Dwarkesh wants to preserve our values of freedom.
> We, westerner, want our values to prevail.
This comes to the core of the issue, and is where I think the disagreement comes from. Many Westerners in fact do not want "Western" values to prevail.
Why? For me those values have led to outcomes so horrendously antithetical to _my_ values, that I would not wish them for the rest of the world. Even worse, this Western centrism has led to jingoist conclusions for at least 400 years.
> Is Trump really not a dictator?
No. There is no court in Beijing that can tell Xi to knock it off.
> China hasn't bombed girls' schools
Read up on the treatment of Uyghur girls in the Chinese schools. It’s Indian Removal Act stuff, except right now.
Again, nobody is arguing America is a beacon of anything right now. But between America and China, one is an explicit and proud autocracy.
What's the difference between a court whose orders you can ignore and a court that doesn't exist? Sounds like a question for the philosophers.
> What's the difference between a court whose orders you can ignore and a court that doesn't exist?
SCOTUS isn’t being ignored.
> Sounds like a question for the philosophers
And lawyers. It’s an interesting series of hypotheticals.
> SCOTUS isn’t being ignored.
SCOTUS rules 90%+ for Trump (lower courts are 90%+ against). They've given him freedom from investigation and criminal prosecution. They aren't much of a bulwark.
Add to that all the military posturing over Taiwan and it's clear that it's not "China doesn't do what the US does", it's "China hasn't done it...yet."
The idea that anyone would be better off with China supplanting the US is asinine. This is the same government that committed the Tiananmen square massacre and still doesn't acknowledge that anything happened.
I don't see anyone arguing that we'd be better off with China, but I am arguing that neither the US or China can be trusted with this, so the author positing "US AI dominance good to keep China at bay" is bad.
You quoted the article:
> The whole background of this AI conversation is that we’re in a race with China, and we have to win. But what is the reason we want America to win the AI race?
Right now there are two contenders for first in the AI race. The US, and China.
You spent the rest of your comment making the case that it is not good for the US to win. Implying, though not directly saying, we would be better off with China.
You can say "oh wouldn't it be nice if Europe won instead" but they don't have anything in the race right now. We're stuck with the US or China.
> You spent the rest of your comment making the case that it is not good for the US to win. Implying, though not directly saying, we would be better off with China.
This is you putting words in my mouth. It's bad if either wins.
You seem to be operating under an unspoken personal belief that an AI race "win" inevitably spills out into global dominance.
I don't know that it won't, but you likewise don't know that it will, and I'm not beholden to debate things from your chosen premise.
I think AI will be bad for whoever is being targeted by it's controllers, but I don't think it will intrinsically disrupt the military spheres that exist now as a result of nuclear weaponry.
China will use its AI to hurt the people it's hurting now.
The US will use its AI to hurt the people it's hurting now.
Imho, the idea of an AI arms race "winner" is just the new face of the securitization rhetoric that we used to justify our military excursionism during the Cold War.
I'm not putting words in your mouth, and in fact pointed out in my comment you never said this.
Read up on what it means to "imply" something.
Speaking of putting words in people's mouths:
> You seem to be operating under an unspoken personal belief that an AI race "win" inevitably spills out into global dominance.
This is the belief of the article we're all commenting on. Intelligent people are able to discuss concepts without endorsing them.
> the author positing "US AI dominance good to keep China at bay" is bad
My read is they’re saying we need an alternative to Chinese AI. Because with its industrial might, the default future is Chinese technological dominance.
People are certainly arguing this, and it's something I've come to believe as well.
I know people IRL that are so fed up with the US's bullshit that they do sometimes look at China and think their dominance might be better for the world. "Well, when's the last time China started a war or even deployed military forces in another country?", they ask... and I don't know how to respond to that (because they haven't, for at least 30 years that I can think of). And saying something like "well, they've been expanding their territory through extralegal means, and use coercion and grey-area tactics to get what they want" feels like an unsatisfying retort.
> it's "China hasn't done it...yet.”
China invaded and annexed Tibet in 1959. To the degree we had a classical definition of intent-based genocide, Beijing continues to commit it in Tibet and Xinjiang.
America’s conscious is stained. But it’s downright nonsense to go off about surveillance when the comparison is China.
1800 people detained at "alligator Alcatraz" had their records purged from ICE databases, and are completely unaccounted for. Literally disappeared, and the only people whose word we have they're alive are the same people who disappeared them.
Yes, the Uyghur genocide and paramilitary suppression and settler-colonialism of Tibet and Xinjiang is horrific, and will (hopefully) be recognized in the future as a genocide on par with others that 'enjoy' historical notoriety, but let's not pretend we're not well on our way to doing that here.
The rhetoric of ethnic superiority and nationalism and birthright that exists in our government is the exact same rhetoric that exists in Xi Jinping's "Imperial Han" nationalism.
I’m surveilled across pretty much every aspect of my life between basic Snowden level scooping of my data and public tracking like flock cameras. Democracy is increasingly becoming a joke as the richest in our society explicitly are trying to break it and we look more and more like mid 90s Russia.
I want the US to win because I live in the US and it will probably benefit me, but we’ve largely stopped pretending to value the republic so I don’t think we can claim a moral standing on these topics anymore.
To reference your other comment, the common American man has as much de facto ability to sue our government and/or leaders as the common Chinese man
People who buy the USA-vs-China race to a specific goal - do they really believe if China gets "AGI" first, they will immediately try to conquer the USA? How exactly will that go?
It's more likely they will continue expansionist policy in Asia which counters several American diplomatic goals:
1. Democracy and freedom worldwide
2. Economic access+prosperity with Asia
3. Pro-American sentiment
(Not in order of importance, which shifts constantly)
I think assuming China would beat the US in conventional war if they reach 'AGI' first is a stretch, even if this actually grants them a force advantage it's not like the US can no longer reach AGI. The risk is really more that if they reach 'AGI' and subsequently a force advantage, that they would no longer be deterred and more decisively move on Taiwan next year. Taiwan is key to [1] and [2] above.
There is nothing unconstitutional about the first paragraph of your criticism. What is unconstitutional is restricting your ability to write this criticism, which is not breached.
You _could_ argue that this is a flaw in the constitution, and that none of the above should be legal, and that people who support those things should be restricted in their speech or ability to hold office. This was the status quo in politics for a while! These things have all existed for a long time but this seems particularly targeted at Trump, who was famously banned from most social media platforms for years.
There are a lot of democracies (most of the EU for example) that take this stance on freedoms and will even overturn elections to prevent those who support those policies. The question is really 'does doing that protect freedom and democracy or infringe it?'
As for the second paragraph, this is just a lie, Congress has not abdicated any type of war powers to the Cabinet. There has not been any type of declaration of war, and if Congress wanted to stop the DoD, they very much could and in fact came very close to doing so. If your Congress representative did not represent your interests (in this case voted nay), you can call email etc. them and their office or vote them out.
> better country that believes in freedom and goodness
I think you're letting your strong feelings here cloud your judgement, you can hold all of these opinions above without needing to fellate China, which is objectively worse on freedoms than the US. It's also important not to conflate "believes in freedom" with "perfectly meets my line of freedom."
Please point out where I "fellated" China.
Saying the US is not a better country on terms of freedom and goodness?
"US not inherently better" is tantamount to fellatio to you?
You have some low standards of praise.
You're being disingenuous, but yes, if you believe the US is not inherently better than China you are fellating the most well documented modern authoritarian state, which was borne from the largest genocide in history, and has decades of examples of breaching freedoms and silencing dissidents, and is viewed negatively even by a large portion of communists. If the two are even comparable in your eyes, you are fellating China.
I love that you are allowed to go off about how we are a worse country without fear of jail or shunning or anything like that. You are using your rights properly!
You are assuming that they are American and that the account is tied to their real identity and that they are not willing to take risks to state the truth. The Trump administration is already attempting to persecute critics[1], including some for random comments posted online[2]. If "freedom of speech" is your metric for what makes you a better country, you are in fact literally proving their point.
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2026/02/13/...
[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/13/technology/dhs-anti-ice-s...
People have also been detained with intention to be deported for their views about Palestine, with online comments being part of how they're chosen for targeting:
[3] https://www.columbiaspectator.com/news/2026/01/28/federal-go...
There was also someone jailed for a month for quoting Trump's own words about a school shooting, "we have to get over it", in the context of Charlie Kirk's death, along with many other noted instances of retaliation against online comments around that incident:
[4] https://www.cnn.com/2025/12/17/politics/retired-cop-jailed-o...
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/13/technology/dhs-anti-ice-s...
ICE asking for a list of social media profiles of its detractors doesn't sound like "without fear of jail or shunning or anything like that." to me. Through data mining and 3rd parties, the local PD has a dossier on me based on what I write here that would come up if I did something to get their attention. That has a chilling effect on what say on here in public.
You didn’t find this part naive?
> But within 20 years, 99% of the workforce in the military, the government, and the private sector will be AIs. This includes the soldiers (by which I mean the robot armies), the superhumanly intelligent advisors and engineers, the police, you name it.
Frankly, I find that less 'naive' than I do 'dangerously possible'.
Autonomous weaponry is one of the few ways that a fascist state could reasonably maintain violent control over a large and hostile populace.
I guarantee Trump would rather have perfectly obedient killbots than critically thinking soldiers, or even just the 5 murderous assholes required to oversee tasking for 1000 semi-autonomous police drones.
The least plausible part is the private sector, which just doesn't work that way.
"Within 20 years 99% of the military will be AIs" That smells like such a baseless speculation that from the get go I'm not convinced of the author's rigor.
It’s also just a category error. It’s like saying that 99% of farm workers are tractors or 99% of textile workers are looms.
Do you not think a change in knowledge work similar in scale to the industrialization of agriculture would be significant?
I went a bit further and then gave up on the piece. Unfortunate, as the premise seemed interesting.
It's just... immensely self-aggrandizing nonsense. The subhed
> “Preface to the highest stakes negotiations in history.”
Like come on. The cuban missile crisis, for starters? Bro needs to calm tf down.
> So what’s the Pentagon’s plan...?
The part of the Pentagon that did this is, to put it politely, not the part that's good at planning.
> So what’s the Pentagon’s plan — to coerce and threaten to destroy every single company that won’t give them what they want on exactly their terms?
I mean... isn't that pretty much the way the current administration behaves in general? If the answer to this question is "yes", and the US executive does not in fact share the values of the author about free and open society, then the rest of the article is kinda moot (except the point that we should be talking about these things now, and encouraging congress to act).
The administration believes that rights, in this case the right of corporate existence, are granted by the state. This is opposed to the liberal conception that rights are a product of natural existence - an essential feature of being.
The right of corporate existence is granted (or at least regulated, heavily) by the state.
This administration believes that they don't need to treat all businesses equally under the law, and can use strong-arm intimidation tactics to get what they want. That is the problem.
Rights are natural. We had a whole enlightenment about it.
As much as I dislike Trump, I can't imagine that the military, under ANY administration, would hesitate to seize any technology that they thought was critical and was being withheld from them, especially if they can claim we're at war when special provisions apply.
I remember thinking about this - basically AGI - decades ago, and it was always obvious to me that if you created such a thing there'd come a day when the MIB would be ringing the doorbell.
One thing I’ve never heard a good answer to: If Anthropic is a supplier not to the Department of Defense itself, but to Palantir, why isn’t supply chain risk the proper designation (assuming the government’s concerns with Anthropic having authority over military missions is valid)?
As for whether code written with Claude Code should be so considered - if it’s just code that is subject to human review, I would argue that this use shouldn’t be a supply chain risk. But with Claude Code PR Review and similar products, the chance that an AI product (not limiting to Anthropic here) could own a load-bearing part of the lifecycle of a critical piece of code becomes much larger, and deserves scrutiny.
I'm not sure that "supply chain risk" is even the right term to be discussing.
What Hegseth/Trump want to do is not just stop Anthropic models from being used by any military supplier pursuant to goods/services they are providing to the military, but rather say that if you do business with the military then you must not use Anthropic at all, even if that usage is entirely unrelated to your military contracts.
This is explicitly not what they have done, not how government contractors ever interpret this designation, nor something they could do even if they wanted to do.
It is also common corporate doctrine to use a subsidiary for government contracting to avoid having to evidence that a commercial vendor is utilized for government, so this won't even be 'annoying' for contractors.
ITAR and compliance frameworks (e.g. FedRAMP and CMMC) already mandate this for any non-US company, yet AWS commercial still has offerings in other countries and from non-US vendors, Palantir still has an IG business, etc.
> why isn’t supply chain risk the proper designation
Because you can't designate a company a SCR because you don't like the contract you signed with them.
But the DoD signed a contract with Palantir.
>What we’re learning from this episode is that the government actually has way more leverage over private companies than we realized.
Who is learning this for the first time only now? Even just restricting ourselves to the current administration, look at how many times Trump has directed punitive actions against private entities! Look at his actions against law firms like Perkins Coie or Covington & Burling. This is not something that just arose out of nowhere with Anthropic.
This stood out to me too - there's an underlying assumption that private entities _can_ say no to governments, but that's only true to a point. If the government decides it needs AI-powered killbots as a matter of national security, it can and will nationalize whatever entities it needs to build them.
> Who is learning this for the first time only now?
A teenager, probably. Not everyone is 100 years old.
Private AI's and searchable personal data troves are the only way to go if you care about privacy.
I speculate we'll discover there's very few unambiguously ethical uses of AI, much less for military applications. Them's the breaks.
My attitude towards democracy has worsened since AI.
The problem with democracy is that it can easily become a revolving door wherein capital holders can choose which candidates are allowed to approach the door.
I think democracy works well when the monetary system is constrained; for example on gold or other scarce asset because that creates a better separation between money and state because then there would be less of an incentive for big companies to corrupt the revolving door to gain a financial advantage.
In a monetary system where the government can create an unlimited amount of money, the incentive to corrupt the government and political process keeps increasing.
I think democracy with a soft fiat money system is probably the most dangerous system because any moral objection can be filtered out of the running as we saw happen with Anthropic and the Department of War. It's because clearly it's the weapon manufacturers running that department behind the scenes; they have a huge financial interest to do so. The Department of War is the bread and butter of weapon manufacturers and defense contractors.
> But within 20 years, 99% of the workforce in the military, the government, and the private sector will be AIs.
I haven't seen this much hype and hopium since the dot com boom. The whole open AI -> Anthropic saga just reeks of the same evolution of Viant/Scient.
Look we have an amazing tool, but it has some fundamental shortcomings that the industry seems to want to burry its head in the sand about. The moment the hype dies and we get to engineering and practical implementations a lot is going to change. Does it have the potential to displace a lot of our current industry: why yes it does. Agents can force the web open (have you ever tried to get all your amazon purchase history?) can kill dark patterns (go cancel this service for me), and crush wedge services (how many things are shimmed into sales force that should really be stand alone apps). And the valuable engagement is going to be by PEOPLE, good UI, good user experiences are gonna be what sells (this will hit internet advertising hard for the middle men like google and Facebook).
> I haven't seen this much hype and hopium since the dot com boom.
The notion that 99% of the workforce and military will be AIs isn't "copium", it's grounds for absolute terror. One of two things will be true:
1. The AIs will be controlled by the Epstein class, who will then have no use for most of humanity, either as workers or soldiers.
2. Or the AIs will be controlled by the AIs themselves, which also seems worrisome.
Really, any situation where 99% of the workforce and military are AIs should be deeply concerning, for reasons that should be obvious to any student of history or evolution.
And, sure, maybe we won't get there in our lifetimes. But if we did, I wouldn't expect an automatic utopia.
The GP does not believe that AI is going to end up running 99% of everything. Ever.
The GP is saying that it’s a major over-extrapolation of the current progress.
You seem to be assuming we will get there instead of expecting the cracks will become more and more obvious.
I think a lot of Dwarkesh's mentality about AI being inevitable / ubiquitous comes from the same part of him that thinks that artificial things are "good enough", e.g. the way he allows his production team to use fake plastic plants on set. Is he correct? I'm not sure, but I know there are at least a few people who notice the difference.
I always listened to the podcast and forget they even have videos. Have a hard time imagining myself sitting and watching a 2 hour interview when I could listen while exercising or doing chores. Am I missing anything?
Imagine if 5 years ago people said that 99% of the world's software would be written, designed, and tested by AI within 10 years. That would be insane hype and hopium and... oh wait..
Lots of wank about muh democratic vs authoritarian values, at the end of the day, US DoD/DoW affiliated AI will 100% kill people, sooner than later and US AI researchers will have to grasp with that. I want to charitably say eventually, but as events show, inevitably, within the calendar year... current quarter, 100s children will die because of US AI in actions most of US do not support. One can argue AI will enable more selective targets, or there will simply be more targets, and given US behavior there will always be targets. Meanwhile PRC AI researcher's work might end up murdering children... someday, and even then most likely in a war / reunification / rejuvenation project that most of Chinese support. Until then, the side not blowing up kids is going to sleep more soundly.
But this isn’t a fight about Anthropic, or mass surveillance, or even AI. This is a fight about lawfare, constitutional rights, and corruption.
The lawfare part of it is that to coerce an individual or a company, governments are willing to abuse their power. The Biden administration did it when pressuring social media companies to censor content. The Trump administration is doing it to a much greater extent with things like ordering every government agency to stop using Anthropic and by labeling them a supply chain risk.
The ideological part of it is when Defense Sec Hegseth and Trump and AI Czar / PayPal Mafia member David Sacks repeatedly attack Anthropic as “woke”, and it is clear they’re undermining this company from their government positions based on Anthropic’s speech (first amendment violation). This obviously is part of why they attacked Anthropic in such a public way.
And the corruption part of it is OpenAI’s leaders being big supporters of the MAGA movement and the Trump administration. Greg Brockman, president of OpenAI, is the biggest donor ever to the MAGA PAC. Why did Hegseth grant a contract to OpenAI after banning Anthropic, even though OpenAI has the same red lines in their agreement (what Sam Altman claimed)? It’s because of the corruption - give Trump and his family/friends money, and you’ll get something back.
The fight against these types of government abuse have ALWAYS been happening. But the abuse is much more in the open today, and much larger in scale than ever before. Scandals like Watergate would not even make the news today. And that is what the public should be waking up to and focusing on. We need to rethink our political system significantly and add a lot more protections against the kind of things the Trump 2.0 administration has done.
> [99% AI soon]...
> Our future civilization will run on AI labor. And as much as the government’s actions here piss me off, in a way I’m glad this episode happened - because it gives us the opportunity to think through some extremely important questions about who this future workforce will be accountable and aligned to, and who gets to determine that.
I stopped reading there because this is a pointless exercise.[1]
This isn’t a roundtable. You are not even at the table. There isn’t some “thankfully time to discuss this...”—you are just out.
The Machine doesn’t need your labor? You are out. No norms. No discussions.
You either try to forcefully take control of the situation or you see yourself get discarded.
(I am here just assuming all the AI Maximalist (doom maximalist in this context, Trump and all) premises for the sake of the argument.)
[1] I did read the last paragraphs and the tenor is the same. “We must make laws and norms through our political system”… just like with nuclear bombs, of all things.
I really hate how people think LLMs == AI. An LLM can’t/shouldn’t be doing anything other than generating text.
LLMs are AI. Markov text generators from the 1970s/80s are AI. Face recognition software like FaceID is AI. Many people behind LLMs got degrees under departments that have AI in their title.
AI is just computers doing things we typically associate with human intelligence, and having a conversation with a computer that effectively passes the Turing test, is definitely AI. If LLMs aren't AI, then AI isn't a useful term. (though agreed that LLMs aren't AGI, which I assume is what you're thinking of)
Wikipedia's list of AI applications: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_intelligence#Applic...
This is called the AI effect: we stop calling it AI when it works. Its goal post moving to keep the sci-fi term sci-fi.
There’s a similar thing with transhumanist “enhancement” or “life extension” stuff. When it actually works we call it medicine. Statistically one of the most powerful life extension techs ever developed was the cardiac bypass, which would have been sci-fi in 1900.
I’ve been using stuff like Claude Code and personally feel comfortable calling this stuff AI. Is it AGI? I don’t think so, but then again I’m not totally sure what that is. Am I AGI? I’m not universally able to handle all forms of cognition well and I can’t self modify much, so I’m not sure either. I’m not even sure if AGI is a well formed concept.
Intelligence is a pretty broad concept too. My pet rabbit is intelligent. Plants are intelligent. Bacteria are intelligent. Anything that can run an OODA loop, learn, adapt, and move toward a goal function is intelligent. By that definition some computer systems have been AI for decades. They’re just getting better.
I think there’s intelligence all around us. We just don’t get the wow factor from it unless it talks.
I’m also as pedantic as you and use “LLM” even talking about these systems but you need to be flexible and accept that “AI” is already in everyone’s head when referring to GPT variants.
How is this related to the current discussion at hand?
I think that when some people talk about "AI" they have "AGI" in mind, and when others talk about "AI" they have "latest computer does the smarts" in mind.
I personally would prefer "AI" to be "AGI" but there's no point fighting the way people use language (see: every damned pedantic comment about English usage ever!! :-)
I think many people interpet AI to mean AGI, but the common use of AI has been consistent since the famous 1956 Dartmouth workshop that coined and popularized the term. Back then, just getting computers to do symbolic math and calculus was considered AI. It's not just a recent phenomenon that people use AI to refer to "computers that narrowly do smart human-like things", like LLMs. The confusion is that people think AI means AGI. And I think it's useful that way, otherwise we don't have a general term for it.
Military orders are text.
This is pedantic. AI has many definitions. There was "AI" powering enemies in 80s and 90s video games
I like Dwarkesh's style better than Lex Fridman, because unlike Fridman he's not a propagandist for Russia and doesn't have that "love" bullshit vibe.
But on the substance they're equally vapid. Dwarkesh's interview with Richard Sutton was especially cringe.
Dwarkesh is even more astroturfed than Lex Fridman. The interviews they do are just ads. No challenges, no hard questions. All seem staged and prepared.
Dwarkesh was ready to whitewash Elon the day after his Epstein emails came out. None of them should be taken seriously.
More than that the questions about space based solar vs land solar for data center calculations seemed hollow as they are easily verifiable. He let Elon get away with this admin does not like Solar as an answer instead of what he is doing to convince them otherwise
Link please!
The day after the emails came out he posted a video where they had beers while Elon LARPed as a human
Link please!
Elon Musk – "In 36 months, the cheapest place to put AI will be space”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BYXbuik3dgA
Thanks for the link because I can't stomach 3 hours of this.
First phrase: "you're saving on energy by putting data centers in space". What?
2:08 "It's harder to scale on the ground than it is in space" what?
The argument is permitting and weather proofing are harder than lifting at certain values of scale for each. We’re not there right now. But if Starship pans out we’re at least damn close, particularly if solar-panel fabrication can be done from out-of-well silicates.
You don't buy any of this right?
Didnt startship exploded like 10 times by now? But in 30 months they'll be launchign 1 per hour? What?
> You don't buy any of this right?
I actually do. The math is more strained than anything present. But a lot of people are rejecting it out of hand without doing anything back of the envelope. Truth is, barring a seismic shift in how we permit data centers on the ground, it takes a within-the-envelope decreases in launch costs to make space-based data centers profitable. Which is then just a cheat code for building a Dyson sphere.
> Didnt startship exploded like 10 times by now?
They all explode all the time. Starship has also been consistently improving its suborbital flight characteristics. I don’t see a good argument for a fundamental design fuckup in the data we have.
> But in 30 months they'll be launchign 1 per hour?
This is nonsense. But within ten years? I think so. At least, we don’t have a good reason to reject that with current data. And that would make the cost equation flip to favoring space-based infrastructure. Which, honestly, is not the answer I expected. (I’ve done aerospace stuff for a while. Most of the back-of-the-envelope math fails. It failed for space-based solar power. It failed for asteroid mining. And it currently fails for space-based data centers. But let launch costs dip a bit, or permitting delays and risks rise a bit, and the equation balances sooner than one would think.)
Changing permits sounds to me a lot easier than building anything in space. What has ever been built in space? The ISS, that's it.
Alright, show me the back of the envelope maths.
> Changing permits sounds to me a lot easier than building anything in space
Having done a little bit of both, the latter around data centers, I’ll say they’re different kinds of hard.
> Alright, show me
Fair question. But no, I’m still refining my math and making bets on this. But I’ll start working on an HN comment in a few weeks and try to remember to post it back to this thread.
My basic argument is to try pinning out current datacenter costs, pin out lifted costs, and then work out what cost/kg you need to balance the two. Hint: approval time and interest rates are meaningful variables.
Dwarkesh is your run-of-the-mill vapid influencer idiot. Fridman on the other hand, when in the presence of greatness, knows to STFU and listen.
There's definitely something to be said for giving interesting people a platform to express their views unconditionally. Unfortunately, that can also be a very dangerous thing. I have been less and less impressed over the years with Lex's approach here.
I'm personally very glad that Dwarkesh isn't like that. He's not perfect, but I think he's doing a way better job than other podcasters in the field right now.
“The presence of greatness” - ugh.
I have been told the Fridmans association with MIT is mostly a lie.
Not sure if this is true, maybe someone who went to MIT around the same time can shed some light on this?
I'm a random dude on the Internet, but my partner completed her PhD at MIT. While there I knew and knew of a few PhD grads who worked at MIT in some non-tenure-track role (postdoc, staff researcher, etc). Typically for a couple years and then they get a better-paying or more permanent job. But several remained "affiliated" in some way. They kept their MIT website/email, some in academia continued to collaborate to some extent. Things like that. But AFAIK they weren't getting a paycheck from MIT. And it's somewhere between neat and genuinely professionally valuable to be affiliated w/ a prestigious university, so I don't blame them for claiming affiliation. My best guess is he's "affiliated" in a similar way.
His Zelensky interview suggests otherwise
It's interesting that's the only interview when he challenged someone.