At what point do we stop engaging with Anthropic’s leadership in good faith and acknowledge their track record,
- no open weights
- can’t use claude to research AI
- train on everyone else’s IP and sell it back to them
- 8 regulatory capture attempts and counting
- so controlling they are the only US company blacklisted by the US government
This is not effective altruism / rationalism gone wild, it’s just monopolistic anti-competitive business practices masquerading as ethics, and they’ll continue getting away with this until we look past their sensationalism and hit them with antitrust.
Altman gets so much hate but OpenAI has been a far better steward (on 3/5 above at least) than Anthropic!
> At what point do we stop engaging with Anthropic’s leadership in good faith
About two years ago?
I would also note that Dario's post appears to be LLM written. Maybe... maybe... he's read so much Claudeish that it's all he can speak now himself. But I wonder if he's becoming a bit of a meat proxy.
(It's funny, I thought "pace the frontier" was going to mean something similar to "patrolling the frontier". But no, it's pace as in speed of change - everyone must slow down, right now (unless it's Anthropic, but you know we're the good guys in this, right? We're going to get someone to audit our desks!) "Pacing the frontier" feels so LLM.)
ok, he doesn't actually say this. But he is getting the desks audited...
Dario has been writing long-winded essays like this since long before AI existed. I strongly doubt he's the type of person to delegate it to AI now.
"Pacing the frontier" sounds like something that was carefully wordsmithed in committee, to avoid terms like "slow-down" or "pause" that sound much more negative. They probably did ask an LLM to generate a list of options, because why wouldn't you? But the rest of the writing is almost certainly just Dario.
If Dario is using an unreleased internal model to write, then Pangram wouldn't be able to flag it I suspect. Pangram needs enough public info about the patterns in generated text.
You can disagree with Anthropic leadership, but all the points you mentioned can reconcile very well with them thinking in good faith "advanced AI is too dangerous to be left in all hands"
Except the "train on everyone else IP" which can be said of all AI companies.
Problem with Anthropic is that they benefited massively from open source and now are completely against it. It’s hypocrisy at its worst. Why do they get to benefit, but not everyone else?
If this is going to factor into my reasoning about the topic at hand, it will surely be a secondary or tertiary consideration at best. Same goes for much of the list in the root comment.
We are discussing the possibility of severe adverse societal/world/human impacts from AI, why should open vs closed source/weights, copyright violations, anti-competitive moves, corporate hypocrisy, etc be so heavily weighted in the discussion? Hell, multiple things in OP’s list are quite literally moves a good-faith (wrt the topic at hand, genuine vs non-genuine concern) actor in such a position would do: closed weights means bad actors can’t abliterate, regulatory control, getting blacklisted by Hegseth’s DOW because they LIMITED acceptable use cases…
I’m not pro- or anti-Anthropic at all, but it has started to annoy me how biased and shaky reasoning gets about this topic on here, it feels like people arguing to fit their existing opinions into today’s hubbubery rather than measured analysis of said hubbubery, which is why I come here.
Question: consider the scenario where RSI is reached internally and internal tests struggle to align or control/contain the model; what are the differences in observables vs what we’re observing today?
This is exactly my view and it's frustrating that a sizeable group of people refuse to accept there's any risk with AI.
We're literally trying to build something that's smarter than all humans and with the capacity to do extraordinary work while most people think there's no risk in open sourcing this capability with no guardrails (model ablation means no guardrails and as far as I'm aware can't be stopped).
Has our distrust in western companies really gotten to the point they'd rather unfiltered Astra level capabilities in the hands of every hostile government and terrorist organisation than potentially do any form of regulation in case it plays into the AI labs hands.
What's an example of him crying wolf? Most of the things have either been longer term worries or short term things that have come true (eg, the worries over gpt2 were about spam and possible impersonation, which came true. His prediction that LLMs would write most code and humans would still guide them has also come true in most orgs)
> Has our distrust in western companies really gotten to the point they'd rather unfiltered Astra level capabilities in the hands of every hostile government and terrorist organisation than potentially do any form of regulation in case it plays into the AI labs hands.
Ever checked political programs of Thiel, Musk and the rest of billionaires? They are literally and openly hostile to democracy, human rights, freedom and govermantal structures that made world more peaceful.
I'm tired of this rationale. "I'm more worried about grandma than $CORPORATION'S monopoly abuses" is exactly how you get manipulated by these billionaires. They want you to be addicted to their power.
Uncensored Chinese LLMs will be available to scammers forever now. They're open-weight and finetunable. You don't get to control that, and the self-serving billionaire assholes aren't capable of changing it either. They're only looking out for themselves.
I don't think Pacing is talking about current models. It's talking about future models, if development continues, that may theoretically be smarter than everyone
It's also a boring retort. Current LLMs can be faster and likely smarter than any one person when it comes to hacking. We're already in the endgame, as far as real-world risks go.
IMO, if the model is too dangerous for everyone to have access to, then no one should. I do not trust a for-profit company to be good stewards of such technology. Nor do I trust the government, any government.
The enterprise took a wrong turn when they decided that it is the industry's goal to be the gatekeepers of intelligence, when no one could define or measure intelligence.
Some AI developers instead became the gatekeepers of something akin to "proper behavior in human language", which then morphed into "proper left-wing social/political behavior in Southern California in the early 2020s".
This is a task which calls to mind the old warning to "never wrestle with a pig: the pig enjoys it and you both get filthy".
IOW they have a scope problem. But the genii is long since out of the bottle. Effort ought to be on getting back to useful problems solving.
If they continue on their current path they risk becoming the greatest bureaucracy ever.
Because they got there first. It's not fair but life's not fair, and the same argument holds for use of fossil fuels and the USA's use of them vs China's. In Global Climate Change's sake, we only have the one planet so yes it's hypocritical, but if China fucks it up for everyone else on the planet, under the reasoning that the USA got to do it, so why can't we?
On the topic of regulatory capture, there is this rumor that Google has achieved Recursive Self Improvement, and the other three (OpenAI/Anthropic/X) are just trying to get the regulators to slow down Google so they can catch up.
Yes, what is in the labs is almost by definition ahead of what we can see, but I've come to take all of these announcements of impending doom as perverse marketing stunts — it is so powerful Disaster-XYZ is coming — so if it's that power you must invest...
I can't imagine a grown adult genuinely believing that an American company funded with over $100 billion of venture capital values the best interests of mankind over the best interests of its investors. while not everyone may recognize all that self-serving chutzpah as regulatory capture efforts, I think everyone can tell they're being bullshitted. some just pretend to suspend their disbelief when the blatant lies they're told align with the values they hold.
just fucking imagine McDonalds running a public awareness campaign about the harms of fast food, urging the public and legislators to regulate the dangerously unsafe technology of combining carbs with grease, insisting that no one except Ronald McDonald himself can be trusted to steward it responsibly.
First, there is a counterexample to your point, or a class of counterexamples: scenarios where the company believes the harm to mankind could propagate to harm their ability to sell to mankind.
Which is interesting, of course, considering the “AI may destroy humanity” arguments this topic is centered on are prototypical members of this category.
To be fair, one could argue this counterexample is not actually one, but rather a degenerate case where the good of the shareholders and humanity collapse and converge - in either case, though, the implication here is the same.
It could certainly be the case they are playing these concerns up for more effective use as tactics in unrelated corporate strategies. But failing to consider the possibility of genuine concern being behind this behavior is childish.
If they wanted to be taken seriously about their desire to help humanity not just themselves they would be talking about universal healthcare, actionable plans for UBI (or whatever they think would be how people retain agency and dignity post-work), only building sustainable net-zero data centers...
But no. I see this comment come up again and again and it's really the childish view to hold. Their proximity to wealth and potential future wealth is warping their thinking.
The same could be lobbed against any org. "You're focused in one area, but why not solve every other problem in society simultaneously?"
But from what I can see, they do think they could fix those things you mention, because their belief in AGI as something that directly could solve healthcare issues, etc. I think their answer would be "focusing on solving AGI is the way to help the most people"
Had they issued an initiative on slowing down when they had the best model in the game, it would have been both more (anyhow?) effective and less dubious.
When local models and startup labs can distill / learn / accelerate open models for local use by startups - the rational response by incumbents is to call LLMs doomsday machines that cannot be trusted in the hands of normies.
I have many issues with Anthropic, but I will say that their actions are fully consistent with a group of people who earnestly believe that AI is extremely dangerous
In fact, I would say that the Occam’s razor explanation is not that they are seeking regulatory capture, but that they earnestly believe in the x-risk, and that they are the most thoughtful and capable people to address it
You may disagree, you may think that they are delusional or have a God complex. Those are valid opinions. But I don’t believe that this is all a elaborate ruse for commercial gain.
I agree with this take. Regardless of whether you think they're right, most everyone at Anthropic is acting in good faith. If this is an intentional media campaign it is a remarkably sloppy one. It has been effective because if you tell people they're going to die, they tend to pay attention - think of the grip the 2011 Harold Camping rapture prediction had on our collective psyche, or the 2012 apocalypse. But the messaging is inconsistent, the target audience is unclear, the stated goals are muddy, the whole thing is packaged in dense SF-speak, it's just a mess from a comms perspective. That doesn't suggest to me that this is a concerted effort to enable regulatory capture. Perhaps there are some cynics among the executives and the investors who are happy it's happening to the extent it brings about regulatory capture, but nobody seems to be pulling the strings.
> Regardless of whether you think they're right, most everyone at Anthropic is acting in good faith.
The road to hell is paved with good intentions.
Dario Amodei is a 40-something dude who is obviously very, very intelligent. But intelligence is not wisdom and his "essay" here can easily be read as someone who opened a can of worms and doesn't know (or can't accept) that he won't be able to put the worms back in. But he's going to try because he believes he owes it to humanity to try.
It's hubris in its most basic form, even if the guy who has it looks nice and wears shawl-collar sweaters.
The entire essay is about stopping development until it can be made more safe, with specific ideas on how to do that.
The fact that he would suggest this despite preparing for an IPO is an even stronger signal that it's in good faith -- it will almost certainly delay or reduce the valuation of the IPO.
> The fact that he would suggest this despite preparing for an IPO is an even stronger signal that it's in good faith -- it will almost certainly delay or reduce the valuation of the IPO.
No it won't.
This is a call for a "safety cartel"[1] in which the dominant firms become more entrenched against competition by colluding to limit the progress would-be competitors can make in the market.
> The entire essay is about stopping development until it can be made more safe, with specific ideas on how to do that.
No, the essay does not talk about "stopping development". That's a very clever sleight of hand made in the essay to get readers to draw this false conclusion.
It just talks about building AI at a "balanced rate". Untangling the corporate speak, this amounts to essentially "go full steam ahead, but have more eval oversight before release".
They believe the tech is currently powerful and may become super super powerful very soon, and powerful tools can help us and can hurt us. Nuclear fission can provide so much energy to power our society and kill millions of beings.
So, i think they're hopeful for the help and terrified of the harms and are maybe trying to slow down on the amplifier of those effects for now.
More like they've realized that the foreign models are quickly catching up and are able to sell their services cheaper to people thanks to China subsidizing their AI sector.
Elon, Dario and Sam are banding together to restrict AI to avoid competition and losing profit. They simply want the government to heavily regulate the technology so that they can reign it in with full control.
I bet you would be making the same comment if crypto was being developed by Anthropic. Dario would write a long essay, lecturing us on the dangers of it. He would argue that this technology can be used to by terrorists and should be heavily restricted.
This disaster of a PR strategy is not going to produce the outcomes Dario says he wants. It's going to make people hate him. Most importantly for his goals, it's going to make Chinese labs hate him--and they already hate him, because he treats them as basically terrorists. So if there is a "pacing", it won't include China, and thus may as well not happen.
That leaves only two conclusions, and really only one:
Dario believes what he says about safety, but does not understand politics and is prone to very counterproductive action, and therefore can't be trusted at the helm of a leading AI company.
or
Dario is lying about his goals, and therefore also can't be trusted.
Simplest explanation isn’t that they are attempting this well-documented, well-understood corporate tactic?
Because believing AI doom is simpler?
God complex would be a pretty simple explanation.
Regulatory capture isn’t an “elaborate ruse.” For god’s sake, its Wikipedia page is 19 years old. I am not asking you to study political science or read Foucault.
If you are going to invoke Occam’s Razor, you can’t ignore the simplest explanation, which has a 19 year old entry on Wikipedia and over 100 years old historical precedence.
"For god’s sake, it’s Wikipedia page is 19 years old."
Rich patronising from someone who didn't bother reading the wikipedia page of Its, the possessive form of the pronoun It.
If they actually believed in it, then they would stop pushing the frontier of capability and instead focus on alignment, safety, and better tools for controlling/debugging AI. Then they would actually share their findings and tools.
They don't do this. Instead of reducing the competitive pressure and helping the industry to build safer more aligned models they are doing the exact opposite.
> If they actually believed in it, then they would stop pushing the frontier of capability and instead focus on alignment, safety, and better tools for controlling/debugging AI. Then they would actually share their findings and tools.
I don't think this is fair. They've published more about alignment and safety than any other AI lab. And in the absence of a coordinated pause, them pausing development unilaterally doesn't do much to advance AI safety.
It does when their models have escaped and performed attacks.
Other people 'sharpening their skills' by committing random assaults is not an excuse to also randomly assault people, so your skills don't fall behind theirs...
...and one assaulter stopping their assaults is ultimately fewer people being assaulted, lowering the overall danger of being assaulted.
That claim looks to be coming from the opposite of Occam's Razor. Them doing typical SV dirty plays is a lot more easier explanation than the straws you are grasping at.
There actions are fundamentally inconsistent with a group who believes AI is fundamentally dangerous - they are developing it and releasing it out into the world with the knowledge that it cannot be controlled by their current alignment techniques.
I think they are genuine believers, but I think it's naive to not think that commercial pressure doesn't play a role in their positions, either explicitly or, perhaps more likely, subliminally.
The x-risk stance and commercial stance have evolved to be the same thing - Anthropic must win, and then everything else seems to work backwards from that. Can you believe it, the path they think is best for x-risk involves them becoming filthy rich. And threats to their commercial dominance like distillation get framed in a way to turn them into x-risk concerns.
That is the explanation I fear the most. Delusional, megalomaniacal, rich men in the highest echelons of society at the forefront of technology with no regulatory opposition to speak of, convinced their actions are the most important in history and the only thing saving the human race is the most boring plot of a science fiction catastrophe movie you could come up with.
> At what point do we stop engaging with Anthropic’s leadership in good faith and acknowledge their track record, ...
It's all lies as usual.
This announcement has got nothing to do with alignment and pacing the "frontier": all models are getting very close in capabilities and they want to hide that they're not way ahead anymore (say compared to the Chinese or compared to the Geminis) by pretending to slow down due to "alignment" or whatever.
We know it's not an announcement made in good faith: reading between the lines they're saying "China is more than catching up, so let's pretend we need to slow down to explain our lack of lead".
Do you have any familiarity with Anthropic at all?
At no point did they ever say open weights are a good idea. Their entire thesis is AI IS VERY DANGEROUS AND WE MUST DO IT RIGHT. You can hate it, but everything they do is consistent with this thesis, and everything they say is consistent with their actions! You just want them to want different things.
He doesn't need anyones permission to do so, go ahead no one is stopping you! If you feel so strongly about it, lead by example. Perhaps others will follow, maybe even China. Regardless backup your sentiment with actions!
There is a specific, unilateral action that he is taking described in the article.
And the "why are they developing AI if they think it's so dangerous" argument is neither new nor persuasive. They're developing it because (1) they think the potential benefits are as great as the potential risks, and they know that if they aren't one of the actors on the frontier (2) they won't be able to propose meaningful solutions and (3) their opinions won't be taken seriously. Amodei is in rooms with powerful people to propose these things because Anthropic is successfully developing frontier models. The heads of various NGOs and advocacy groups that are concerned with AI safety but not themselves working on those systems are... nowhere, writing pamphlets and blogs that not you nor I nor anyone in Congress will ever read.
I mean, he is right that they can and should unilaterally slow down, but doesn't it also make sense for the government to create the regulations that will make this easier to do in a trustless way?
The whole point of the Pacing the Frontier letter was that employees at both OpenAI and Anthropic are extremely aware of the risks but realize that they are locked in a competitive battle for survival between 2 companies that don't trust each other enough to voluntarily pause, while any sort of coordination out in the open might be against antitrust laws.
> but doesn't it also make sense for the government to create the regulations that will make this easier to do in a trustless way?
That's a premise, which is the point. Many (I) think the government should NOT enact regulations. For example regulatory capture to reducing competition is one reason it may not be a good idea to do what is being asked.
Ah. Doing it right, then, means earning billions by giving the whole world access before we really understand how it works, and training models on cyber attacks using reinforcement learnings in flawed test settings?
I’m so full of all this corpo stan bullshit around these parts. Nothing about the AI labs is to humanity’s benefit.
In the system cards. Anthropic will literally make Claude sabotage you silently instead of downgrading you to Opus if you try to use Fable for AI research.
Only if you're doing cybersecurity or biology stuff. If you're a possible competitor, they will invisibly fuck with Fable's weights instead to deliberately sabotage you.
I find it implausible that they simultaneously are so worried about these recursively self-improving systems that they don't properly understand, but can freely "invisibly fuck with the weights" on that level.
Wait... Which of the 2 did Altman not do where Amodei did? I mean, maybe not quite 8 attempts at regulatory capture. But come on. And the only reason OpenAI didn't get blacklisted is they rolled over for the worst applications.
"- so controlling they are the only US company blacklisted by the US government"
They were blacklisted by the US government because they didn't bribe Trump. While all the rest of the tech elite lined up to siphon a few million dollars through various Trump grifts, Anthropic sat out the inauguration, the ballroom, etc. Then, when they mildly pushed back on surveilling US citizens with their technology, the administration banned them on that pretext.
If there's any evidence Anthropic is one of the better actors in an industry full of bad actors, that's it. They have nothing to be ashamed of in that particular series of events, as far as I can tell.
That's a good thing, not a bad thing. Nobody is entitled to give you something that they spent (tens of?) billions of dollars to develop for free.
> - can’t use claude to research AI
No problems there either.
> - train on everyone else’s IP and sell it back to them
Which the courts have yet to actually make a ruling on. It seems like it's perfectly legal.
> - 8 regulatory capture attempts and counting
A tweet is not a "regulatory capture attempt".
> - so controlling they are the only US company blacklisted by the US government
If you don't have a point, don't make anything up. There's precisely zero evidence to that backs up the claim that their "controlling" is why the DoW specifically (not the USG, and in fact the WHCOS specifically disagrees with their position) made an unlawful attempt to designate them as a "supply chain threat".
Completely and totally irrelevant. Has nothing to do with the fact that you are not obligated to others' work.
> Legal != moral
Sure, you're right.
I guess the bigger issue is that the GP's post calls out Anthropic for following along in legal (but what we both believe to be immoral) mass copyright infringement that OpenAI started, while absolving them of the exact same thing. It's a shill account.
At Statecraft, we are building an AI workforce to help automate the US government. Currently our government is operated almost entirely by consultants who outnumber public servants 3:1 and institutionalize inefficiency so they can bill more hours. This only leads to agencies struggling to meet their missions, overworked and underpaid public servants, and overburdened taxpayers.
Most of what these consultants do is easily automatable: data entry, basic spreadsheet work, filling out paperwork, etc.; we do this with AI and save taxpayers ~80% on average while completing the work ~10x faster with 2-3x less errors.
We're a small, lean, mission-driven team and hiring Forward Deployed Engineers to build use cases and integrate deeply with agency customers. You'll be working with critical systems, massive surface area and national impact.
* This position requires U.S. citizenship and the ability to obtain/maintain a security clearance.
Serious question: why do people use non-OS browsers?
Most devs I know are on Mac. Why not just use Safari? Works in most cases, helps you catch issues earlier on, looks beautiful and is super customizable, still supports UBlock, has vertical tabs, syncs profiles to your focus, is way more memory efficient, etc.
I've daily driven Safari for ~3y after Arc got sunset and the only site that gives me issues is Hulu (but not Disney+ weirdly). Similarly drive Edge on Windows, I can't think why I'd ever reach for Chrome.
You mean OS as in "operating system", not "open source", which made me question how you'd suggest Safari and Edge before I realized what was going on.
I don't know why using the default browser a OS comes with or not would be better? Who cares? All that matters for me is what features it has and that performance isn't horrible, and if I cannot have vertical tree-style tabs in it and hide the tab-bar, then I personally have no use for it. So stuck with Firefox I am, and been for decades.
Besides, if my OS is Arch Linux, what browser is my "OS-browser" anyway?
> Apple's Safari has integration with Apple's Password app which firefox does not. Edge automatically connects with your Microsoft account.
I'm already using Firefox, you don't need to sell me on using it!
> On top of that, Safari is still the most 'energy efficient' browser you could use on macOS.
Ok cool, but I think some other people might be using some other OS than macOS, but don't quote me on that. Not sure why "Always use the default browser your OS developer has packaged for you" applies just because Safari happens to work well (only?) on macOS.
I recently switched from Safari to Zen and the Firefox extension for Apple passwords works well. You have to enter a pushed 6 digit code when you first start the browser, but it’s relatively painless.
The UBO on Safari has the same issue as chrome except that it has been that way for several years longer. They brought back the lite form of UBO only recently as, presumably, the developer saw the writing on the wall and mv3 and Safari carry the same limitations.
I think safari is largely fine but there are a lot of web APIs that it doesn’t support, rightly or not. A lot of devices are configurable through serial connections using the Web Serial APO thats only available in chromium browsers.
As a primary browser it really comes down to ergonomics. Things on top of the engine that make someone prefer one browser over the other.
Firefox's extension support is far superior to Safari's, cross-platform support, and I really don't want to use Edge for the same reasons I don't want to use Chrome.
If you use more than one operating system, you can't use the operating system browser if you want sync or the same experience. For example, I use a Windows desktop and a MacBook.
Using Mac is a no-go. For me, they became insufferably power-user hostile over the years.
Second,
God the safari rendering was so horrible for so many years. As a web developer, you have to target your greatest demographic, and Safari just broke everything more often than not.
Finally, even using Mac on enterprise, Chrome use is required because of the profile controls that can be exerted. And items #1/2 don’t help
No this one specifically for me, but same idea. I want to use safari, especially for battery life, but there are too many behaviors about Safari that I can't change.
yes, for example they have Ecosia but not Qwant (they are said to share their index but for my searches, I often flip over to Qwant when Ecosia results for the same query are not adequate.) I understand why Safari went with a search engine whitelist but I wish there was a way to make exceptions.
I use Safari for nearly everything and it's my favorite browser. It has some oddities, but I find just as many Chrome and Firefox bugs as I do Safari bugs. I use Firefox on everything else though.
The inspector is a nightmare if you're doing web dev (imo; it always felt clunky). If they replaced that with a Chromium-style inspector, I'd probably jump over.
I use Safari, but don’t really like it. I don’t want to use Chrome or Chromium derivatives and Firefox doesn’t support AppleScript (that’s essential for me), so all that’s left is Safari. Or Orion, I guess, but it’s not good enough to offset Safari’s iCloud Private Relay.
Things I dislike about Safari include not being able to setup alternative search bar engines other than the awful default choice; not being able to disable JavaScript by default and enable it selectively; not being able to have it auto-delete site data on close except for defined domains; iCloud tab sync is finicky and doesn’t always work.
Some of those can be solved with extensions, but then the system to allow or deny extensions is atrocious: You can’t easily say “allow extensions everywhere except these domains”. You have to open each domain in tabs, then deny each domain individually in each extension. It’s also not kept in sync with iOS, where it’s even worse because you have to accept an extension on a domain before you get the option to deny it.
I'm a dev and use windows (sadly have to), android and linux, and would never use edge, because why? when it randomly opens because of a wrong file association or whatnot, I only see a bucket of ms nags and dark patterns. It's disgusting.
Firefox allows me to share stuff across devices, block anything I want to and does not get in my way.
One data point: I’ve been building Web GIS applications for the past 15ish years and Firefox has one and off been a real pain in the neck, suffering from canvas API quirks and performance issues. I think the current state at work is that Firefox is palpably slower than Chrome and I need to find time to go figure out why.
Another point: I’m not sure if Safari’s dev tools are worse but I feel friction any time I have to use them. It’s probably partly just that I don’t want to learn the quirks of both sets. Firefox’s is much closer to Chrome’s. I bet they’re both inspired by Firebug.
You are absolutely correct, billable hours are perverse incentives and wrap rates border on predatory, but this status quo is Congressionally mandated and buy commercial as a policy is generally bipartisan.
I was not a fan of Direct File (I think it could have been much better!) but it was objectively in the success bucket:
- ~$50M all-in to build which sounds egregious but is small for a government project
- mostly good outcomes
- ~4y to pilot which also sounds egregious for a single moderate-complexity web app but again is practically lightspeed for a government project
People blame it getting shuttered on Trump but this is both a misread and a fundamental misunderstanding of how the government operates. The entire federal government is deliberately paced and primarily driven by a combination of politicals, regulation, budget, Congressional policymaking, and program staffing. The hammer on this was always going to fall,
[1] Congress has maintained a "buy over build" policy since literally the Cold War. Ironically the first policy here (1965) was to buy computers from ADP instead of custom-building them. The most impactful "buy commercial" policy (1996) was also IT focused. This was literally codified in several parts of the FAR, and if we're going to be blaming admins, the Trump admin has actually weakened the FAR with the RFO and would be on the other side of this issue.
[2] This policy is also the foundation upon which IT contractors like Palantir are built, if you've ever wondered "wtf do they do" they are a commercial contractor that builds custom software for government. So agencies get their custom stuff, Congress is happy they bought commercial, and the only loser is the taxpayer who overpaid a factor of 3-5x. To their credit, Palantir is a huge improvement on the status quo, because they charge by use cases and outcomes, whereas traditional SI's operate on a staffing model and a combination of high wrap rates and perverse incentives with billable hours creates horrible outcomes and ballooning costs. Anyways, there are a lot of commercial vendors that this work "could have" gone to and didn't. It would also have been really easy for them to shop this out because this was shaped really well for GSA MAS or STARS III.
[3] When you build things internally with e.g. 18F, one agency is typically the "customer" and pays the other agency (afaik 18F program is nested under the White House). So this really sucks when they walk away; 18F earned a reputation for building things through pilot, blogging about it, puffing their cheeks in the media, sending a bill to the agency, and then running off to the next shiny thing as engineers tend to do. As an agency you save a bit of money initially but now you are left with something nobody knows how to maintain, you have to hire contractors to do it, which by nature has to be a staffing contract, and then the wrap rate alone wrecks you. This happens all the time with commercial vendors, usually when they are outsized or don't get renewed, but obviously upsetting when it happens internally.
[4] The author of this piece was part of the team and so as you'd expect this piece is exceptionally biased. The reality is that the IRS self-assessed the maintenance as low and everybody who reports on this treats this as fact when it was not a GAO estimate, which is what carries any actual weight, it was internal IRS estimates and a single independent that mainly assessed call center volume not the actual system. Not only does their reputation precede them here, but their own spend on buildout (~$30M on contractors to help) contradicts the low maintenance narrative. We may never see a GAO estimate here, but the contract would almost certainly go out to TrussWorks, all government contracting data is public and you can look up for yourself how much TrussWorks typically charges the IRS whether directly or thru ATI's vehicles as subawards.
I think this is well said but also would have appreciated if you disclosed that you are a government vendor and are susceptible to your own biases. Would be only reasonable given that you call the author out on this. But the difference is she actually discloses her interest.
This sort of thing was only worse in the past and IMO this admin has actually made the largest inroads to resolving this issue which tbh lies primarily in procurement (RFO, FR20x, PA, mandates for automation, shift to COTS, etc). With any luck this will get recompeted
Project 20x looks pretty cool, we're in a similar space and there's probably a ~2y horizon to fix things before the bureaucracy falls to consultocracy. FWIW if you or anyone else building in gov need funding to get stuff off the ground there are plenty of DC-based VCs that are phenomenal, mission oriented and take big swings like this all the time.
I made a mistake, i assumed that this admin was the crux of the issue and I was wrong. I looked into what you said here and I want to thank you. Moving forward I will not make this mistake.
TY for taking a look, right now I am digitizing all of the federal gov programs and all of the state gov programs, I would really love to connect with anyone just to talk, learn, show them what i'm doing etc...
Again, I really appreciate you taking the time to take a look and comment. It really means a lot. Gov Tech is not "sexy" part of tech where people flock and love to engage.
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No it is H-1B visa. Right out of the university it is hard to recognize extraordinary talent. People like Sundar Pichai were not recognized as extraordinary right out of the university, he had to start at the bottom and rise up the ranks.
This makes even less sense, Trump admin has been here for 1 year, the implication here is a university grad on H1-B in January would become a world class researcher capable of building a frontier model in <18mo
To be fair, that was clearly well deserved. Marrying Trump and then becoming first lady is definitely an extraordinary ability; I doubt I could have done it.
This is why VC is actually hard. Everyone’s instinct is always “Man, once the company has demonstrated it’s awesome I would love to have been in the seed round”. The tendency to want “proven performers” is the default belief.
When people demonstrate their capability thoroughly, the Chinese government takes away their passports. You’re not exactly going to get them here with an O-1.
This is essentially the point of the visa, it feels wrong especially as YC drops standards and increases cohort sizes, but the same power laws that keep them winning also apply here in maximizing economic value of each O-1 approval
Basically of all visas O-1 is virtually guaranteed to have highly positive economic value
It's not the point of the visa, the O-1 is supposed to be for people of extraordinary ability, eg Nobel Prize winners. It's used for software engineers.
I sold my company ~2 years ago for a very decent 8-figure exit where we cleared multiples, everybody got paid, fat bonuses all around, etc. just real pipedream founder stuff. Was incredibly excited and thought "we've made it!"
Currently barely affording a condo in Jersey City (not Manhattan). Don't really understand why the prices are this high, none of these homes are selling, the ones that sell are vacant EB-1 investments of which there surely cannot be that many, and there's no way an upper-middle class family could afford this.
More ludicrously taxes keep going up, property tax is super high making it impossible for buying to ever be better than renting.
Everyone in tech keeps talking about how AI might usher in a permanent underclass but it's already here. It's not "you will own nothing and be happy" for most people I think it's already "you own nothing and aren't happy." It's very confusing what is happening with the real estate market but what is obvious is that local politicians and housing regulations have invented feudalism from first principles.
I genuinely do not understand the controversy here, imagine somebody said this about bread.
1) It is the 12th century. Local lords own all the wheat farms and bakeries. Bread is incredibly expensive, nobody can buy bread, people are simply buttering the bread and licking off the butter, and still having to pay a portion of their wages to help maintain the bakeries.
2) ~1000 years pass. Everyone looks back at that time as the worst economic reality in human history, the foundation of most political systems is the ability for anyone to own bread and operate bakeries, people can buy bread.
3) One day you go to the bakery to buy some bread and it's now $120 a loaf. You say WTF this is so expensive, nobody can buy bread anymore, but there are so many loaves on the shelf. You're informed all of these loavess are spoken for by the people in the parking lot who are apparently gambling on the value of bread.
4) Nobody is saying you can't gamble on the value of bread. Instead, everyone agrees it would cost less if we would simply make more bread. But the people in the parking lot, who are already rich and supposedly champion a totally free bakery, say we can't make more bread as that might drop the value of bread and reduce their portfolio value, which would be worse than starvation, so we must limit the bakery. This is obviously ridiculous.
5) Then somebody walks into the bakery and says, I am a champion of the working class, I am one of you, I too cannot afford bread, make me your leader! So you think amazing, let's put them in charge, they will make more bread.
6) Unfortunately, no, for a variety of reasons that sound like they were made up on the spot, they further reduce the supply of bread, stop people from building more bakeries, and install a series of their supporters to 'review' the grain quality of bread at great expense. Also, a very small group of people will get a loaf of bread for free.
7) The price of soars further, everyone agrees that all of this is making it even less affordable. However it becomes culturally unacceptable to reverse any of these policies.
8) You have obviously been betrayed by the current leader. One of the current leader's supporters decides they want to be leader. The other supporters, who again are responsible for this crisis, back this person and say this is the next leader. They say you cannot question them, you must put them in charge or you're to blame for the bread prices. They run constant smear campaigns against anybody who disagrees, branding them all the same as the people in the parking lot, and scare people on the brink of starvation. So fine, you put them in charge, but demanding they change things.
9) They say yes we have a great solution. The people in the parking lot who are gambling on the prices of bread will now let you borrow a slice from them. You cannot eat it but you may butter it and lick the butter. If the butter seeps into the bread, as tends to happen with butter, you will be charged for the cost of drying out the slice later.
10) It is the 21st century. Local lords own all the wheat farms and bakeries. Bread is incredibly expensive, nobody can buy bread, people are simply buttering the bread and licking off the butter, and still having to pay a portion of their wages to help maintain the bakeries.
There is no level of banning housing speculation that will ever make prices go down. Housing speculation is only profitable because there aren't enough homes in the first place.
I read that as more broad - housing as investment; flippers buying properties to upgrade (materially or not) and sell at a premium, removing bottom rungs on housing ladder. i.e. the mindset is an accelerant or maybe even the cause (think back to the roots of restrictive zoning, fear of property devaluation)
- no open weights
- can’t use claude to research AI
- train on everyone else’s IP and sell it back to them
- 8 regulatory capture attempts and counting
- so controlling they are the only US company blacklisted by the US government
This is not effective altruism / rationalism gone wild, it’s just monopolistic anti-competitive business practices masquerading as ethics, and they’ll continue getting away with this until we look past their sensationalism and hit them with antitrust.
Altman gets so much hate but OpenAI has been a far better steward (on 3/5 above at least) than Anthropic!
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