OpenAI has upped its lobbying efforts nearly sevenfold
207 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 :)
e-clinton
In 2025, being able to afford lobbies is the barrier of entry. “Playing fair” and simply building better products isn’t exactly the name of the game. If it were, they would’ve been a lot less billionaires at inauguration. OpenAI didn’t “invent” this, they’re just playing the same game everyone else is.
dataviz1000
This reminds me of when Walter Gilbert's team faced challenges in cloning the human insulin gene due to a moratorium on recombinant DNA research in Cambridge, Massachusetts, which forced them to relocate to England. This relocation impacted their progress, allowing the team from Genentech and the City of Hope National Medical Center to successfully clone the gene first in 1978, leading to the production of the first genetically engineered drug, human insulin.
Gilbert still got the Nobel Prize for his work sequencing of nucleotides.
Researchers in AI, likewise, will have to relocate to more favorable countries losing precious time.
https://dnalc.cshl.edu/view/15258-Government-restrictions-on...
JambalayaJimbo
Why is time precious here?
ImHereToVote
They better hurry if they want to be the team that creates the species that replaces us.
01HNNWZ0MV43FF
Can't let the basilisk find metadata indicating you were slacking
hulitu
> Researchers in AI, likewise, will have to relocate to more favorable countries losing precious time.
They are losing time anyway. They can talk to Musk to put them on the next Starship to Mars. /s
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.
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)
sweeter
they hate each other but when it comes down to it they all understand their position and common interest in screwing everybody else over for massive and unthinkable profit.
baq
safe to say they all hate each other
griomnib
This is so clearly a complete lie - in what universe is some top government official in the United States telling corporations to a) fall behind competing nations in advanced technology, b) set back our technological edge in the military, c) degrade the USA ability to spy on and control information access/controls in other countries, or d) do anything other than fish for an insider trading opportunity.
chrisfosterelli
AI promises a lot of creative destruction. There are a plethora of historical examples where elites have restricted technological development because they thought it was a threat to the status quo and therefore their ability to extract wealth from that status quo.
For example: Queen Elizabeth refusing to grant a patent for the first knitting machine, the Qing dynasty forbidding large-scale ship building, or the Ottoman Empire outlawing the printing press.
I'm not sure that this is what is happening here, but it's occurrence is not impossible.
kjkjadksj
You don’t even need to dip into the historical record. The government set back atomic energy research for decades out of fears of that technology being shared among the people of the world. And what do you know, the fossil fuel industry just happened to reap heavy benefit from that decision.
griomnib
The CEOs and investor class are the elites. Politicians answer to them, not the other way around.
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.
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.
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.
dole
Information wants to be free. If the US doesn't invest, others will.
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.
AnimalMuppet
This was a catchphrase from... the 1990s, maybe?
The defining character of information is its reproducibility. Even verbal speach: "And then she said..." But digital information in particular is almost infinitely reproducible, without loss, worldwide.
So when people say "information wants to be free", what they actually mean is that trying to restrict the movement of information is fighting against the essential nature of information.
null0pointer
Information wants to be free (as in libre) in the same way water wants to flow downhill.
kelseyfrog
I'm not sure. Saying that information wants anything is like saying that an LLM is capable of thought - a category error.
seper8
Anyone else find him IMPOSSIBLE to listen to? He really needs a speaking coach.
You know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know...
wil421
If I had fuck you money I wouldn’t care. Elon sounds many times worse than my ADHD mind but there are many folks who would pay to hear him speak.
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.
CamperBob2
(a) Like all great conspiracy theories, it would require too many people to keep their mouths shut; and (b) nobody in China would care about any secrecy rules laid down by the US government, any more than Sakharov's team in Russia cared about the US's intention to monopolize the hydrogen bomb.
The closest thing to this type of technology would be EUV hardware of the sort produced by ASML. We have now given China every incentive to put everything they've got into developing similar technology on their own soil. Despite slow progress to date, they will get there.
Another analogy might be the math behind encryption, effectively monopolized by NSA for decades... but nobody's trillion-dollar economy was blocked by those secrets.
throwaway314155
> 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.
Effectively zero? Did that sound more convincing when you originally wrote it? Because it's like conspiracy theory 101.
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.
sweeter
There is no coming back from this to be honest. America has been a silent Oligarchy (a government by the few, for the benefit of the few) for a long time and now its just mask off... and unfortunately, the large majority of Democrats have had no interest in making meaningful change, let alone undoing these highly damaging policy changes like Citizens United and everything after that.
Kakistocracy: Government by the least qualified or most unprincipled citizens - also comes to mind here. No one in the upper levels of government care about anything other than enriching themselves at the behest of corporations, and at the expense of everyone else's wellbeing and livelihood. Instead we get vapid shallow identity politics and "culture war" garbage, and every once in a long while we get a gutted out compromised bill that addresses 1/1000th of the problem... only to be later overturned despite it being wholly ineffective.
I just don't see the government, in this state, ever having the faculties or incentive to "fix itself." These institutions and "norms" are irreparably broken, and some people still insist on holding them in the highest regards like they are some infallible mandate.
aSanchezStern
Right, but we've already got limits on individual contributions, so even if you have a bunch of money, you can't have outsized influence through your individual contributions.
nradov
Individual campaign contributions are limited but wealthy individuals can still exercise outsized influence through other means such as unlimited donations to Super PACs.
https://www.opensecrets.org/political-action-committees-pacs...
93po
The bottom 55% of global population holds 1% of the wealth. The top 1% hold 46% of all wealth. As of 2020. Global wealth was $418 trillion. So 1% is $4.18 trillion. I'm not sure any three people hold that much money.
barbazoo
This was about the US specifically.
buryat
It's more of a pyramid, lots of different layers are interested in upholding the existing system because they all benefit
marcyb5st
Well, agreed for the common Joe, but that still allows someone with a net worth in the tens of Billions to throw money around. Especially because these people have a clear conflict of interest.
They should ban money contributions completely. Each party gets the same budget (say 10M$ 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).
sweeter
Japan gives every candidate an equal amount of time on TV. Its just one example of something that other countries do to make elections more fair. You could limit resources and give everyone a standard platform as a baseline so that anyone outside of the deeply entrenched dual-party system has a chance to win.
aliasxneo
Doesn't the US have similar TV laws with cable networks?
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.
allemagne
We could definitely improve the arrangement of chairs on the deck of the Titanic, but we can't even get 50% of the country to recognize the most obvious grift in American history.
NemoNobody
They will after tho - that rage is when we take Mush and Bezos rainy day funds we've allow d them to manage for us for awhile.
p0w3n3d
I think that humanity has failed The Reverse Turing's Test. We're being bamboozled by the high quality illusion made by AI. I hope we won't end up in a world where an official will put us into jail, answering our "why" questions with short "the ChatGPT told me so"
baq
IBM’s 1979 slide should be the next amendment to the constitution. Only half joking
pseudalopex
Why not say what the slide said? A computer can never be held accountable. Therefore a computer must never make a management decision.
blackeyeblitzar
It does seem like the emerging startup powerhouses like OpenAI, Palantir, Anduril, etc. are all very deep in the lobbying game. I wonder if they’ll open up government contracts and regulations to a more democratic and competitive process, or just become the new incumbents holding all the power.
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.
null
FrustratedMonky
Looks like it is already paying dividends.
daghamm
In the meantime, DeepSeek published their o1 competitor on huggingface and an API that costs 5-10% of OpenAI's o1.
Maybe Sam should give up his bribery world tour and focus on creating a better product?
tokioyoyo
The logical next step is to ban foreign AI products in US. I have no idea how they will pull it, but it’ll be fun to watch if it happens.
daghamm
Would not at all be surprised if that happens during 2025.
I think the west has been underestimating China's AI capabilities. AI is huge in China and they have found tons of "practial" applications so it's widely deployed.
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...