OpenAI has upped its lobbying efforts nearly sevenfold
94 comments
·January 22, 2025roddylindsay
wil421
Here’s a firm that lobbies for pardons from Trump.
https://www.opensecrets.org/news/2021/01/trump-tied-lobbyist...
nottorp
Ofc... it's easier to create legal barriers to entry than to offer a better product than the competition :)
gigatexal
Ahhhh the regulatory capture part of modern giant startups.
bilbo0s
Don't need regulatory capture to stop the small fries when the cost of entry is so high. Only ginormous entities can even realistically play in that game right now.
Think about it, where are you gonna get 10000 H100s?
Best you or I can hope for is to fine tune the models the big guys make "open source". None of which will be as serviceable as their closed models.
Herring
The costs won't always be that high, due to Moore's law and other advances. Anybody can train a GPT-2 right now for a couple hundred bucks. https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intell...
Also model performance follows a power law. There are strongly diminishing results, where after some point throwing twice as much money at the problem only gains you 1% accuracy. OpenAI knows this, so they're all in on regulatory capture.
gigatexal
It’s always going to be like this. Take Apple. Plucky garage started anti-establishment startup now a giant gate keeper of apps and stores using any means necessary to keep that 30% tax/tariff/whatever you call it
bmelton
AI seems to have validated Wirth's Law[1] more than it has Moore's, and they are running in direct competition
[1] - "Software is getting slower more rapidly than hardware is becoming faster"
swatcoder
Nah, training efficiency, inference efficiency, and compute availability all have enough headroom that the third-party and grassroots models will become increasingly available.
The current leaders basically need to either (1) break through the capability ceiling before everybody else catches up, or (2) construct law/regulation that keeps everybody else out of the game. #1 is uncertain, but #2 is well-understood business.
Since they all share that same interest (they'll be duking it with each other either way), the result is an "industry wide" effort to artificially close the door behind them.
nullc
One of the major approaches is to block open source models produced by parties that aren't in the business of restricting access to AI.
bko
Made me think what Mark Andreeson said in a recent interview.
> They said, look, AI is a technology basically, that the government is gonna completely control. This is not gonna be a startup thing. They, they actually said flat out to us, don't do AI startups like, don't fund AI startups. It's not something that we're gonna allow to happen. They're not gonna be allowed to exist. There's no point.
> They basically said AI is gonna be a game of two or three big companies working closely with the government. And we're gonna basically wrap them in a, you know, they, I'm paraphrasing, but we're gonna basically wrap them in a government cocoon. We're gonna protect them from competition, we're gonna control them, we're gonna dictate what they do.
>And then I said, I don't understand how you're gonna lock this down so much because like the math for you, AI is like out there and it's being taught everywhere. And you know, they literally said, well, you know, during the Cold War we, we classified entire areas of physics and took them out of the research community and like entire branches of physics basically went dark and didn't proceed. And that if we decide we need to, we're gonna do the same thing to to the math underneath ai.
> And I said, I've just learned two very important things. 'cause I wasn't aware of the former and I wasn't aware that you were, you know, even conceiving of doing it to the latter. And so they basically just said, yeah, we're gonna look, we're gonna take total control the entire thing and just don't start startups.
If this is true, makes sense for OpenAI and other to ramp up lobbying to be one of the two or three big companies. In another subsequent interivew Altman denied he was ever in such a meeting.
JumpCrisscross
> makes sense for OpenAI and other to ramp up lobbying to be one of the two or three big companies
The fact that Musk hates Altman, has the President's ear and has a competitor to Altman's main wealth engine surely also plays into the calculus.
baobabKoodaa
you can't have an oligarchy without oligarchs (plural - even if some of them hate each other)
neilv
Interesting. How would that work?
The US certainly doesn't have a monopoly on the best scientists and engineers.
How long can the US control sufficient capacity of hardware? (Without unspeakable atrocities.)
Is the US planning to overwhelmingly outspend other countries?
Or make AI-control treaties. And we'll have AI states and non-AI states?
NemoNobody
The US is the unparalleled economy and unlike it's only economic contender, the US has future growth projected out as far as the turn of the century - China has a near economic apocalypse projected for its country by the turn of the century. That's really not that far away.
What leads you to believe the US wont continue to ourselves everyone whenever it deems want or reason? Historically that has been the case.
China's future has drawn attention to the sand upon which the foundation of their economic growth sits.
So. Who will outspend the single country that accounts for 25.32% of all global economic activity?? Who is going to do that??
tokioyoyo
There’ve been two new generations of kids that have been born since the “China is doomed” headlines have dominated the news. At some point, maybe, everyone should take them a bit more seriously? If one calls current US administrations methods “course correcting”, the same person should assume that another giant can do the same.
dole
Information wants to be free. If the US doesn't invest, others will.
kelseyfrog
I'm not sure. Saying that information wants anything is like saying that an LLM is capable of thought - a category error.
random3
what does that even mean?
People want things. Information doesn't want anything. People want property rights for both physical and intellectual property.
Likely rules are ill suited for levels of scaling achieved with current technology. A single person can read a ton of stuff and retain only a fraction compared to how much a system can.
So information wants to be free is nonsense. People want access to more information, at the same time they don't want others to have accees to the same information. However having access to more information has marginal effects when capacity is limited. Hence it's the information capacity that makes all the difference and this puts a small class in disproportionate advantage.
azemetre
It usually means that the US government should give for-profit entities billions of tax dollars to benefit the elite and corpo class.
A funny anecdote I found the other day is that during the Korean War the US government wanted to break up AT&T but AT&T got the Army to argue that AT&T was instrumental in winning the war, I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader to find out if AT&T won the Korean War but one of the end results was rewarding AT&T with additional lucrative military contracts.
ata_aman
Not putting words in OP’s mouth from the comment you’re replying to. But from my understanding, the default state of information is to spread itself, it’s an inherent characteristic. You have to put effort to suppress it (example making info classified or enforcing secrecy). If you don’t actively put effort into suppressing information, it will spread.
null0pointer
Information wants to be free (as in libre) in the same way water wants to flow downhill.
davesque
Not sure how that would work exactly. The math behind transformer models is really basic. And the world is different now than it was during the cold war. There was no internet, for example. Also, given that this was during an interview in which MA was criticizing the Biden administration, I'm assuming he was telling half truths to make Democrats look like bogeymen as all Trump crazed lunatics tend to do.
bongodongobob
It won't work. Restricting hard to find and process radioactive elements vs math... Yeah good luck.
torginus
> they literally said, well, you know, during the Cold War we, we classified entire areas of physics and took them out of the research community and like entire branches of physics basically went dark and didn't proceed
What are the odds that deep within US research labs, we have some crazy breakthrough tech tucked away? Like antigravity drives or force fields or whatever - complete with brand new breakthrough physical theories to support them.
I'd guess suppressing such a breakthrough without raising suspicion wouldn't be hard - probably only a few top guys can make the intellectual jumps to derive such theories and the experimental setup to validate them could very well cost billions.
The US government could just quietly whisk away the top talent into some secret lab, put out some fake papers showing this avenue of research is not noteworthy and not fund further public research in the area.
Dig1t
This is exactly the same thought I had.
With so much talk about regulation and talk of complete control of the technology by govt, it would be very foolish for them not to be spending a lot of time and money trying to influence policy on it.
loeber
How can you expect people to take your comment seriously if you can't even spell his name?
jjulius
How can you expect people to take you seriously as a CEO if you're going to attack someone for a mistake like that?
And that's to say nothing of the fact that such an innocuous typo doesn't change the actual crux.
A little, "Hey, dunno if you know or not, but it's 'Andreessen'," goes a long way.
ryandvm
Honestly, nothing in US politics is going to get any better until we are able to completely outlaw non-individual campaign contributions.
barbazoo
Three of the individuals standing behind the president at inauguration have more wealth than the bottom 50% of people [1].
vkou
And one of them makes much of his fortune from government contracts and will literally get a personal office inside the white house.
It doesn't get any more kleptocratic than that. This sort of both sides of the buy/sell conflict of interest would get you fired from any properly ran company, but there's nothing that will be properly ran going forward.
And that's not even in the top five problems with him.
marcyb5st
Well, agreed for the common Joe, but that still allows someone with a net worth in the tens of Billions to throw money around. Especially because these people have a clear conflict of interest.
They should ban money contributions completely. Each party gets the same budget (say 10M$ and you run your campaign until you have money and that's it).
You as a citizen wants to donate? Go and collect signatures, spread the word or stuff like that, but no money (IMHO).
JumpCrisscross
> nothing in US politics is going to get any better until we are able to completely outlaw non-individual campaign contributions
Banning corporate campaign donations is a good idea. It would have no effect on this news.
bilbo0s
Even then nothing will get better.
How much can you give in relation to Kelcy Warren? Or Diane Hendricks? Or Linda McMahon?
And that's before we even get to Bezos or Musk.
seper8
Classic case of "pulling up the ladder behind oneself".
Probably AI will be a more competitive market than he and his investors had hoped for.
baxtr
Related: I didn’t see Sam Altman at the inauguration. Was he there?
CharlesW
Not in person, but his $1 million personal donation attended. https://www.foxbusiness.com/media/openai-ceo-sam-altman-dona...
latentcall
I think he was. I saw photos of him there mingling with Jake and Logan Paul. Getting selfies together.
dylan604
Would any money spent during the next four years from ClosedAI be money down the drain when Musk is whispering in Trump's ear? If Musk says no to whatever ClosedAI wants, then that's what Trump will do.
azinman2
And yet Trump just did a lot of PR for the OpenAI/Son/Oracle initiative.
Trump is simply pay to play. And they paid.
ipaddr
If I were Musk I would be worried about Larry Ellison. Trump seemed to love him in the news conference.
klipt
Was Citizens United a huge mistake?
daveguy
Yes. Yes it was. Poorly decided to the detriment of the United States. It allows unlimited money laundering into US elections from any source foreign or domestic.
accrual
> The court held 5–4 that the freedom of speech clause of the First Amendment prohibits the government from restricting independent expenditures for political campaigns by corporations including for-profits, nonprofit organizations, labor unions, and other kinds of associations.
Wow. Just one vote away from a drastically different political landscape and future for the country.
lenerdenator
How could it be? It made the number go up for the right people.
And since that number is literally all that the right people can comprehend, it's the most important measure of a society's condition.
pkaye
Companies could not lobby before Citizens United?
arrosenberg
Yes they could, but there were strict limits to it and people went to jail for violating them. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Abramoff#Scandal_and_crim...
McConnell (yes that one) v FEC and Citizens United redefined the first amendment to include financial contributions as a form of speech and extended to for-profit corporations the same rights as individuals and civic associations.
JumpCrisscross
Isn't McConnell v FEC the SCOTUS ruling that upheld McCain-Feingold? The Act that Citizens overturned?
To my understanding, this had zero effect on lobbying rules. Just campaign finance, namely, donations to candidates and donations to messaging operations.
JumpCrisscross
You're correct. This is unrelated to Citizens.
bcrosby95
The biggest continual mistake in the USA is conflating groups of people with amoral profit seeking entities that have the benefit of legal fictions that protect individuals involved from the consequences of their behavior.
If you chain together enough analogies you eventually reach a conclusion that is complete nonsense. That's about where our court system has brought us.
93po
I've been saying for years, companies can have freedom of speech when we can put them in jail for wrongdoing. I'd even take metaphorical jail - not allowed to employ anyone, operate, transact, or anything else for the duration of their sentence. I bet we'd see a complete stop of illegal activity we see every day if this was the risk.
reverendsteveii
As the old saying goes, "I'll believe corporations are people when Texas executes one."
bmelton
This feels causally backwards, as the only point to corporate personhood is so that we _can_ hold companies accountable for their misdeeds.
Without personhood, we'd have to know which persons within an opaque company structure were responsible for wrongs against us in order to sue them directly instead of just being able to sue or fine "Walmart" or whomever.
laidoffamazon
Yes. But even more than that having a president that is for sale by domestic and foreign interests.
cdme
Nothing like launching a crypto pump and dump right before you enter office.
nradov
Was the 1st Amendment a huge mistake? The trouble with focusing on Supreme Court decisions is that they have to interpret vague laws and often the decision is a toss-up. Criticizing the Court doesn't solve anything. I agree that we should limit the influence of money on politics but doing that in an effective, sustainable way will require a Constitutional amendment. Anything that depends on a Supreme Court decision can be reversed later because they aren't legally bound by precedent.
philipov
The mistake was confusing money and speech. Money is not speech. Stretching the boundaries of the first amendment to be so broad that all human activity is covered by it renders it meaningless.
Plasmoid
But what is speech if you prohibit any use of money in it? It is just standing on a street corner yelling at passers-by?
Using money to amplify your speech is just the nature of the world. Buying ads, or buying speakers are just different ends of the money axis.
svieira
> because they aren't legally bound by precedent
Good thing too, because some of their decisions over the years have been really doozy (who wants to be bound by Dred Scott v. Sandford?)
JumpCrisscross
> they aren't legally bound by precedent
No high court is. If they were, they wouldn't be the high court.
pluto_modadic
This feels like a straw-man. Money should not equal speech. Yes it should be fixed with legislation. Why on earth wouldn't it? Citizens United was an obvious, incredible, disastrous mistake.
nradov
Regardless of how you might feel, it's the furthest thing from a straw-man. We are still a nation of laws. The Constitution defines our fundamental processes and the separation of powers. Labeling the Citizens United v. FEC decision as a mistake might feel good but that accomplishes nothing. Instead of complaining online, the only possible solution is for voters to elect legislators who actually do their jobs and write clear laws instead of leaving it up to judges and bureaucrats to interpret vague statements. I do appreciate that Citizens United makes this more difficult but the Supreme Court is unlikely to reverse it so complaining about it is about as effective as complaining about gravity.
guelo
Well now we'll never get to pass an amendment to overturn Citizens United since Citizens United handed the country over to oligarchs.
reverendsteveii
Depends: are you extraordinarily wealthy?
FrustratedMonky
Looks like it is already paying dividends.
null
null
Keep in mind this is just the lobbying that requires disclosure, which is a tiny sliver of the overall policy effort. There's a whole constellation of consultants, think tanks, industry groups, "grasstops" organizers, push pollsters, etc. that are the real (undisclosed) iceberg under the surface.
For example, here's an example of an effort to persuade Congress not to update copyright laws to account for model training, which was only revealed because of metadata accidentally included in a PDF file. https://www.politico.com/news/2023/10/23/tech-lawyer-ai-lett...