So... several things to point out here...

First, Elon's politics are not all race-baiting and dog-whistling all the time. That stuff is largely performative. He wants clout and respect above all else, and will essentially do anything in order to get there. Make no mistake, he was publicly advocating for fully-automated luxury communism ("machines work, AI runs politics, everyone lives in paradise") long before anyone else; Neuralink is explicitly about recreating a technology from the Culture series, no matter the cost. This is the same agenda as Altman and Amodei, years before LLMs could drive toward the same issue. Most of what comes out of his mouth is vice signalling, i.e. malicious virtue signalling. There are definitely individual areas in which he inflexibly violates the Left's social covenant, like his approaches to business leadership and labor relations (best described as "penny-pinching miser") but he doesn't brag about those things; they're the result of him being a deeply flawed scumbag, not his politics. His ownership of Twitter is the same thing; he bought the company purely so he could stop people from saying mean things about him on the Internet, and the bile-spewing hive upon it is nothing more than a roost of flying monkeys to him, shaped according to his whims; even under his ownership, it may not always be as it is now.

Second, we tend to give model designers too much credit in the AI ecosystem. The network also includes Palantir and Oracle. It's hard to get much fouler than Thiel, who can't decide whether or not he's the Antichrist and is explicitly pro-monarchy, or Ellison, who has bankrolled his son's attempt to buy up the entirety of the US mainstream media industry and dye it red forever. These companies work together hand in hand, day after day, to accomplish goals like planning ICE raids and bombing schools in Iran. OpenAI and Anthropic stand on a pyramid of other businesses, including SpaceX and NVIDIA. Remove one and their services go offline; their interdependence is not minor, nor is the incredibly byzantine circular financing structure that Jensen Huang forced them all into. They're all essentially in a suicide pact with each other, and every time one of them goes public, more of the economy gets held hostage. When the bubble bursts, either the Fed will have to bail them out, or the entire country will go under. This sort of economic gambit is not exactly anti-capitalist, but it's most certainly in line with modern robber baron small-c conservatism.

Third? Altman is a scuzzy fucking sociopath, and Amodei's actions repeatedly fail to live up to his promises. They talk about the risk of destroying humanity, and the urgency of slowing down, and then immediately flip around and press harder on the gas. Winning the race is more important to them than anything else. For Altman the reward is unquestionably money; when the OpenAI board fired him for lying, he staged a coup and stole the company back, then neutered its non-profit arm. Every other dimension of political discourse is just snakeskin to him, available to shed or don as needed. He does not hesitate to let the Pentagon use his products to murder civilians. Conversely, it's possible Amodei has convinced himself that he's doing the right thing and that people will be grateful to him later, but being left of Altman doesn't mean the Left recognizes him as one of their own. Everything for these two men is justifiable for their ends; they aren't pushing back on the surveillance state, or the gentrification of San Francisco that their companies are driving, or any of a million other serious causes that currently galvanize the Left into making decisions at the voting booth. Money remains king, either as a terminal or instrumental goal, and if they were founded a year ago they might very well never have bothered with toning down sycophancy or trying to eliminate racial and gender bias from their systems. Elon used to act the same way.

In short, they're all horrible, callous people, and they're all using capitalism to win. The color of the car used to get them there does not matter in the slightest.

Probably because they were already planned and too costly to reverse. The trouble is more long-term: the next round and the round after that.

The trick is to make sure that nobody cheats. If one jurisdiction offers more favorable terms than everywhere else, then all the data centers go there and ruin the environment. This is the ideal use of federal or even supranational regulation, to make sure the playing field is level.

The neat thing about copyright is that it's such an inconsistent issue. People are pro-copyright when they're worried about their work or jobs being at stake, and anti-copyright when they think copyright holders are making too much money. Nobody seems to have a balanced, much less nuanced, concept of what copyright law should actually be. It's just a cudgel that keeps getting passed around, picked up and refashioned to meet the moment into whatever someone needs to wage the war they want to wage.

Crucially, there have been zero incidents of anyone actually making copyright claims against AI-generated code, aggravated somewhat by the fact that one of those "divided" courts is actually just the US Supreme Court repeatedly refusing to revisit their declaration that AI output cannot be protected by copyright. There were some plagiarism accusations against OpenAI from human mathematicians who were working on Navier-Stokes, but the shape of that case looks more like breach of confidence, since the material wasn't published.

Copyright is going to die, one way or another, quietly or loudly, and most likely because the law everywhere will refuse to inconvenience the new economy.

But if you have any memory at all for what the MPAA and RIAA did two decades ago... we should all be cheering on the demise of this weapon. In a world where works are cheap to produce, it is tantamount to sowing a minefield in the commons. The DMCA has rarely been used for anything good for society.

Well, pull up a chair, because you're going to hate this conversation!

There are two parts to the issues around AI, at least when we're only talking about the ones you brought up.

The first part, which most people quietly shove under the floorboards and try to ignore, is that the current AI ecosystem is heavily characterized by the hypercapitalist mess. Much of what LLMs actually are does not necessarily pose a threat to the world order, nor does it necessarily involve environmental degradation. Saying "AI bad because <insert everything wrong with capitalism>" isn't really an anti-AI argument, it's an anti-capitalism argument. Most journalists are not brave enough to point this out, much less accept it, much less the consequences of saying that maybe unfettered robber-baron great-man titans-of-industry anarchocapitalism ain't all sunshine and gravy all the time.

With that out of the way... the facts around AI's environmental impact and world-ending risks are not as clear-cut as the popular conscience has absorbed. Hysteria is just so damn easy to do, you know? Fox has been at it for years, now it's the Left's turn to ignore all the details and just overreact to headlines! Awesome.

The strain on municipal water grids is another consequence of shitty cost-cutting run amok, amplified by a steep learning curve on the part of cities trying to attract high-value businesses before anyone knew what the landscape looked like yet. They gave out bad permits. The electricity situation is very similar: they could be expected to pay their fair share and actually invest into community infrastructure and clean energy projects, but in most early high-profile cases, they haven't been. Andy Burnham's UK government is doing this much more intelligently, and we'll see the actual downside of that soon, namely that certain skeevy corporations will just off-shore their datacentres in more friendly jurisdictions. There's an interesting parallel with how scabs undercut collective bargaining, you might say. This is capitalism being an unmitigated disaster yet again, you might say.

Now, as for ending the world or causing human extinction... it is also almost entirely a load of complete bullshit. The modern AI safety movement, to which all of the Silicon Valley leaders subscribe, originated with a creepy neckbeard named Eliezer Yudkowsky. Yudkowsky's reasoning depends on a crucial, catastrophic assumption, which is that creating an actual god that we cannot control would be a bad idea. It has never been proven, nor can it be proven, that AI research will actually lead to this result.

More importantly, Yudkowsky only says this because he has a deep-seated desire to take over the world with his own AI, using something called Coherent Extrapolated Volition. He is mad about not being in charge, and is still recruiting cultists to help him, which he charmingly has dubbed Rationalists, as though Rene Descartes has something to do with fucking over the whole planet. (See Holly Elmore, "The Case Against Eliezer Yudkowsky" on YouTube.) The tagline that AI needs safety engineering is the 'public' version of their secret knowledge, one curated to sound reasonable to a layperson; the true version is something more akin to "only people who think like us can be allowed to use AI to direct the future of humanity." (The recruitment methods self-select for vulnerable people with autism, which makes these pills much easier to swallow.)

When Anthropic's CEO, Dario Amadeo, talks about AI being unsafe, he is usually literally citing Yudkowsky; Amadeo is a true believer and has been . Conversely, when Altman says AI could cause human extinction, he's just parroting what everyone else is saying because he thinks it sounds sick as fuck to investors. Both of them are imbeciles, but it's not clear which is more dangerous. Everyone else in the world is referencing either Yudkowsky or Altman through various levels of broken telephone. Do not listen to any of them. Actual AI safety work is important, but much more humble in the problems it confronts.

Having said all that, we shouldn't be unhesitatingly pro-AI. There are still lots of places and situations in which its usage is inappropriate or needs to be nuanced. However, we can squarely put "going to end the world" and "ruining the environment" under the "greed is bad, actually" category. Recognize the greedy assholes responsible as the greedy assholes they are, and the narrative evaporates.

When editing Qwen, Astra actually wrote and used a Python program to do the dirty work and required some trial and error. This is something humans are already doing; it just doesn't receive much publicity. Raw reading and writing was only done in other parts of the paper, for smaller tasks like detecting the purpose of a game-playing network and correcting a simple vehicle control feedback loop. Though the Qwen edit was successful (after some 50 tests), a similar edit on a smaller Gemma network to remove sycophancy wasn't.

See summary on honnibal.dev for a breakdown.