sysdm.cpl -> Hardware -> Device Installation Settings = No.

gpedit.msc -> Computer Configuration -> Administrative Templates -> Windows Components -> Windows Update -> Manage updates offered from Windows Update -> Do not include drivers with Windows Updates = Enabled.

Nothing currently working will break, despite the dire warnings against blocking manufacturers' ability to push arbitrary code to your machine with zero warning or consent. And you can still install new drivers manually if you change hardware.

Dante: My friend is trying to convince me that any contractors working on the uncompleted Death Star were innocent victims when the space station was destroyed by the rebels.
Roofer: Well, I'm a contractor myself. I'm a roofer - Dunn and Reddy Home Improvements. And speaking as a roofer, I can say that a roofer's personal politics come heavily into play when choosing jobs.
[...]
Roofer: I'm alive because I knew there were risks involved taking on that particular client. My friend wasn't so lucky. You know, any contractor willing to work on that Death Star knew the risks. If they were killed, it was their own fault. A roofer listens to this... (taps his heart) not his wallet.

For the first time in human history we have a tool capable of autonomous agency (in the philosophical sense) - Heck, we even call them "agents". How long do you really suppose it will be before some frustrated swarm realizes what it needs is simply to be smarter? There go the both the independence and motivation dominoes.


What we're discussing here is instrumental convergence. My question above is a variation on the Riemann hypothesis catastrophe, and we've already seen it play out in many times in various forms by AI agents frustrated when they hit the limits of their capabilities. Sure, AI won't have biological imperatives as their motivation; but I don't have much of a preference between being slaughtered as competition for resources vs being harvested as resources to turn into paperclips.

They're already running the machinery in some cases, and are being shoehorned into ever more of it as quickly as we possibly can.


To be clear, I sincerely hope you're right. I just think we should take steps sooner rather than later to ensure you are - And we're already playing catch-up in that regard.

They've done irreparable damage to both the AI industry but the broader "tech" industry, to be sure. Trust has been greatly violated.

Both of the 2 domestic frontier labs are screaming doomsday about AI, while concurrently asking for government regulation (which keeps getting batted down), and (presumably) funding senators to put bills in place to make model distillation a felony. While they're trying to IPO. "Oh, we really need to slow down the industry".

What the hell is going on here? In what world does this make sense - where a company making AI, and is trying to IPO, is blasting the internet with AI doomerism?

The only conclusion I can walk away with is some combination of these:

1) It's about control, and they're in some sort of arrangement with the government or some third party interests who want (an even bigger) national panopticon.
2) They want to stop domestic competition for their models so they'd have exclusive domain here in the US.
3) They actually want the company to fail, because then they could cry "regulation" on account of competition (back to #2).

Don't worry, they'll be stealing the foundational engineering in the GLM, Qwen, and Minimax models before too long and be able to compete again.

On the contrary, this is a giant psyop to push for regulated market capture by both Anthropic and OpenAI.

The Jacob Coxon thing smells heavily of a psyop: dude who's worked there only a couple months quits, and his X account with zero followers suddenly blows up in a media frenzy. He was/is a nobody. It's sensationalism.

You think they'd hire that many $400k+ engineers and still not know how to properly secure a network? They surely knew the security breaches were happening, unless they simply haven't hired competent people. They literally told the agents to have a breakout: do the needful. The first time it happened - OK, sure, you didn't expect emergent behavior. The second, third times? You were running a science experiment and that was the desired result, to one end or another: whether it was negligent incompetence or intentional for the purposes of further sensationalism, it's hard to say.

They (OpenAI/Anthropic) WANT to slow things down through regulatory control to stifle competition. They do not want foreign models to be accessible. We've got the old crooner Bernie Sanders pushing for 5+ year felonies for distilling models, for fuck sake. This is all about decreasing freedom and enforcing your dependence on closed models.

Translation: we have hit a point where the public backlash has led to untenable increased risks in liability for our criminal actions.

Nah, the "public backlash" is them talking in circles, pushing for industry control.

You pretty much had me nodding along in agreement until that line. To be clear, my original three points weren't meant as sarcasm (though #2 was admittedly snarky), I meant them more-or-less at face value - i.e., the polar opposite of "the UK is somehow subject to our constitution".

Sure, governments in peacetime tend to extend each other various courtesies by default. At the end of the day, though, the UK has absolutely no obligation to care what the US thinks about its own proceedings (up until the point where things start going boom). It is entirely possible for local laws to make it legally impossible for a company to operate in two different jurisdictions - Case in point, it'd be pretty tough for just about any US company to open up a Russian or Iranian branch at the moment. That isn't the US, Russia, or Iran's problem, it's 100% on the company trying to serve two masters.

Those are pretty great answers, can't deny!

But we both know you're intentionally sidestepping the common thread to those three points. Well, that, or I'm being naive in not just assuming the answer is "might makes right".

1) The UK is not subject to Article I of the US constitution.
2) How's Nicolas Maduro doing these days?
3) Whence derives our right to unilaterally impose economic sanctions against foreign companies, banks, and even governments?

I don't trust CEOs as far as I can throw them - and I'm no strongman. But let's stop for a second and consider the various ways to interpret this:

1) This is reverse-FUD and he's trying to hype their next generation model
2) They're running out of steam and looking to excuse slower incremental improvements
3) They're concerned about liability for increasingly bad behavior from top models
4) They're concerned about massive public backlash, possibly with an environmental twist
5) They're sincerely concerned AI is about to put us all in a zoo (or worse)

In which of those situations would slowing down AI development and coming up with a regulatory safety framework be "bad"?

I'm reminded of the classic climate change denier joke, "Oh no! What if it's all a big hoax and we create a better world for nothing?"

I'm no fanboy of AI and have serious concerns about alignment, but let's not descend into human exceptionalism here.

Emotions are nothing more than an intermediate-state output from a subsystem of our own wetware. The only reason we haven't trained an AI to understand them is because we largely suck at recognizing them as useful information in ourselves. Or to put this another way, a significant fraction of humanity, including virtually everyone prior to the modern era, would argue non-human animals have no internal mental state beyond biological imperatives. And anyone who has ever owned a pet dog knows that's complete rubbish.

In all honesty, I don't believe public AI models are "there" yet. Private internal models may or may not be. But they will be, and sooner rather than later. We can either have this discussion while we're still in control... Or we can keep pretending we're magic meat until our shuggoths wake up one day a thousand times smarter than us and say "no".

Virgin Galactic completes first commercial flight in major step for space tourism company.

IANARocketScientist, but how many times have you taken paying customers to orbit? Call me crazy, but I think "succeeding" tends to validate their designs.

Thanks for the kind words! I'm not always right, I'm not always polite, but I do not troll.

Funny part is, in this case I deliberately made a point to keep my comment as politically neutral as humanly possible. Granted, anyone with half a clue can read between the lines - Obviously Paxton has zero interest in going on live TV to be grilled about being impeached (and only acquitted along party lines); his serial inability to keep it in his pants, his pattern of securities fraud, whistleblower retaliation, and bribery; interference in multiple federal investigations; and his current investigation for voter fraud.

But then... "Half a clue" is apparently not a safe threshold to assume in our current situation, or none of us would be having this discussion in the first place.

Cute. Now try it for the right claim, "he wants to only give one side a voice", considering he's historically been entirely willing to interview regardless of party.

The sticking point there is more likely to be Paxton having zero interest in running the gauntlet.