Now, I should really keep my mouth shut, since I lost my job because of artificial intelligence and I’ve taken to the mountains. Look how beautiful it is.
But this whole story of the Americans - the AI Big Tech companies - coming out with these statements. Sam Altman says “AI is too dangerous, artificial intelligence should follow the same regulatory path as commercial airliners”. What does that have to do with anything? And then OpenAI comes out too: “it’s too dangerous, it’s moving too fast, we need to slow down”.
What’s really going on
We’re not exactly fools around here. So what’s happening? A few things.
One: they’re in debt up to their necks.
Two: they don’t have enough infrastructure to serve all the traffic they’d like to serve, and they’re serving it below cost, so they’re losing money on it.
Three: the Chinese have taken a giant slice of the market, because they publish open models, and when you pay for them as a service they cost much less.
Who pays
So what’s happening? OpenAI, Anthropic and the whole gang want to bring the State into the deal: co-regulate, self-regulate on their own terms, and possibly shift part of the debt onto the shoulders of dear American taxpayers. Which means it ends up directly on the dollar, so we pay for it too.
And you know where that leaves us. Right in the backside.
