The problem is neuromorphic computers are barely a blip in US business or research ecosystems, and have a far greater probability of generating serious AI.
LLM are great for context search, but regulatory capture and despotism will not make "AI" something it fundamentally can't become without more energy than a third of our galaxy. Picking a war with math is disappointingly absurd, but not unexpected given the obvious degenerative geriatric condition of the glorious leader. =3
Local LLMs are a kind of communist dystopia where, by way of analogy, every citizen gets to make their own bread if they want. What?!
If they were true patriots they would respect the congressional FLOUR 2028 Act restrictions and (a) exchange their labor for wages from Acme Corporation and then (b) exchange wages for bread made by, depending on your state, either of the big three: Standard Wheat, Union Pacific Bread Corporation, or Trump Agri Inc.
So which are you, friend, a <spits> communist or an American?
Just another example of the Executive Branch stripping First Amendment rights from Americans.
It will go to court, and taxpayers will pay for endless appeals by the Executive Branch.
Or like in Egbert v Boule (2022), the SCOTUS will decide that even if your constitutional rights are violated, you’re not owed any damages unless Congress establishes a policy for what to do when your constitutional rights are violated by the federal government.
CCP is pushing and amplifying AI opposition efforts, that’s a fact regardless of US politics. CCP is also working hard to smuggle around American export control laws for AI tech, at the same time.
I have no doubt China is taking part, what I doubt is that this makes any meaningful part of the total US anti AI sentiment, which can be much more easily explained by job loss anxieties, fear of massive change and good old NIMBYism. (Obligatory not an American).
All effective foreign interference takes popular sentiments and helps organize and focus it. You can't create movements without ground support.
But the thing is, there are a LOT of issues where the masses are generally grumpy but don't act on it. Civilization only really functions because people don't shut down the country over every populist urge. Effective agitprop amplifies this and makes it happen.
What is your point? You agree people have the right to act on their beliefs to effect democratic change, right? Surely that includes making up their own minds about information.
We should and should cut out sources of foreign funding and support, and prosecute and publicize genuine foreign agents, while allowing people to exercise their political rights.
Why? Do you believe free speech is a right only Americans should have? Or do you believe that people shouldn’t be free to evaluate competing points of view and decide for themselves?
This seems like a variant of anti-self defense logic. ‘The other guy has a right to beat you in the face with a bat, as much as you have a right to take it’.
Hint: bussing in out of towners to astro-turf ‘town discussions’ is also seen as shitty.
A quick way to test this kind of thing is, if the roles were reversed, would they still be okay with it?
I guarantee you that China and Russia would absolutely not be okay with the US doing the same thing in their territory.
I believe I live in the real world, where we have to figure out how to integrate abstract principles in a manner that allows our survival as a civilization.
Reciprocity is a pretty straightforward strategy — we can allow uninhibited competing points of view from countries that themselves allow unlimited speech internally.
Our survival as a civilization? I cannot follow at all what you are talking about. What threat?
I read the article as claiming that the Administration is implying it will harass or prosecute people for speaking or protesting against AI/data centers by deeming this to be "in support of China". I hope everyone agrees that would be a truly absurd breach of the first amendment, if it happened.
Letting the executive branch decide on a whim that certain speech is illegal because it would "further the goals of enemy X" would surely be a civilizational threat to America (if it actually happened), but that doesn't seem to be what you mean?
All the specific people mentioned in the article seem to be American [except arguably the three businessmen arguing for data centers--O'leary, Musk, Sacks], so I can't tell what the other guy is talking about either? Non-Americans do not generally have American speech protections unless in America legally (and then with some caveats). That's not America's decision!
All effective foreign interference takes popular sentiments and helps organize and focus it.
And a lot of effective domestic interference takes fears about foreign threats and "helps organize and focus it."
China is a legitimate threat to US hegemony and this is clearly a new Red Scare. The irony is that it was largely the US who invited and welcomed China into the global economic order.
Civilization only really functions because people don't shut down the country over every populist urge.
Civilization also doesn't really function because a handful of ridiculously wealthy lunatics and their sycophants know what's best for 8+ billion people.
the total US anti AI sentiment, which can be much more easily explained by job loss anxieties, fear of massive change and good old NIMBYism. (Obligatory not an American).
Some of it is also due to the qualities of LLMs as they actually behave and actually function today, "AI" being forced into products where it actively degrades the reliability, efficiency, or pleasantness of the product, etc. Think of Amazon's "Alexa for Shopping" or whatever, and whatever its predecessor was.
I am not necessarily anti-AI. I am more anti-Sam Altman, against using LLMs to usurp power, and against using AI as a scapegoat to abdicate responsibility for decisions that are made. AI itself encompasses so much more than LLMs.
Sam at least can be understood. He's in it to make money and nothing else. The most dangerous men are people like Dario, who sit on top of their elitist towers and think they are right and will burn down the world in the name of righteousness.
1. Does every other company that says their products will uplift people "think we are lesser beings"?
2. Which documentation are you referring to? Googing "site:anthropic.com uplift" most of the top hits seem to be about bio research, another is about measuring agent performance (not a comparison to people), or "These are Anthropic’s internal designators for actors observed to be abusing AI. The report also attempts to measure uplift, a term we use to describe the AI capability boost, or how much more harm was caused with AI versus without AI."
will burn down the world in the name of righteousness
Is this referring to the 'safe development of AI', as they say AI development will happen even if they don’t exist, but other companies are less focused on AI safety?
Early days LLMs were declared an auditable. This was such a ridiculous idea that technology was so complicated and able to give good results without understanding why.
That was not from any foreign actors but the companies themselves. I’m sure that is no longer the case. My technology life is rich enough that I don’t have to pay attention to LLMs.
When the CEO of OpenAI says that he expects at least 40% of all jobs to be eliminated by 2030 by the tool that's also making personal computing -whether PC or smartphone-, video gaming, and on-prem business computing somewhere between incredibly expensive and unaffordable, and driving up the price for just about everything else substantially -because just about everything has a computer in it or depends on computer-controlled processes these days-, you don't need some boogyman theory to understand why people are angry about the thing that's making the already-rich far, far richer.
Though. blaming it on the boogyman does have the benefit that you don't actually have to address the concerns of those revolting peasants!
I doubt China is taking part in opposition data centers. The cost paired against risk:reward on trying to push something that's already overwhelmingly supported (or opposed in this case) for an abstract goal of potentially slightly slowing down deployment of infrastructure makes no sense at all. Also, a natural consequence of the massive data centers will be an increase in chips, which makes it easier for more of them to end up headed to China, to say nothing of also easing espionage efforts.
This feels like the start of a propaganda push which will try to frame people opposing data centers as working at the behest of a foreign government, either intentionally or by being unknowingly manipulated. They did the exact same thing with Ukraine, reasonably effectively, by framing anybody who opposed sending hundreds of billions over there as either working for Russia, or having been unknowingly manipulated by them.
It feels totally different than offering a modicum of aid to a western aligned country fighting an existential invasion from an antagonistic former superpower.
Wait for the propaganda machine to kick in. Hopefully people will be more aware of it this time thanks to the unpopularity of the man in charge, rather than taking things at face value.
Hundreds of billions of dollars, likely now trillions after all is accounted for, is not a "modicum." To say nothing of the indirect cost of sanctions and economic sacrifice, which would easily send it into the trillions. And when a war could end at any moment, but continues only because a nation's leader refuses a peace settlement, ostensibly because it involves surrendering a sliver of controlled land that's going to be lost anyhow, that's not an "existential" conflict.
It's about a hundred billion total, and there's a single reason the war won't end - the invading nation refuses to leave. There is no other reason.
And anyway, it's not as if the money is freely given. Some of it's expiring equipment, some are loans or exchanges for the promise of resources, etc. Yes, it is a modicum. A few days of bombing Iran has cost us almost half the total amount given to Ukraine, for negative value.
Framing it as trillions and blaming the nation being attacked (all for what, having some nice land with resources?) makes it very hard to take any of your other points seriously.
If you spend time on Tiktok, it’s pretty evident which line that algorithm is purposely pushing. Even with purported US ownership, the algo still comes from Beijing; even a few tweaks can have dramatic hard-to-detect impacts. That’s happening dramatically on that platform, and is probably seeding a lot of the convos elsewhere.
Surely tiktok being heavily composed of people doing creative work that have understandably extremely negative views of AI would not be the cause of this, no, it must be an unprovable hunch.
You do realise that the algorithm has the same behaviour as the Amazon one right? You watch one anti-ai video for more than a few seconds and it'll suggest you watch more of it. If you're seeing a lot of anti-ai conversations on Tiktok I suggest you stop watching videos about anti-ai conversations on Tiktok so the algorithm can stop suggesting you videos on anti-ai
See here I was thinking this was a first amendment issue but with an evidentiary case like this it's clear we're dealing with a case of people having wrong and illegal opinions. Classic blunder, my bad
The USSR used American racial discrimination in its propaganda as well. Does that mean that civil rights activists in the US were internal enemies or that effective propaganda highlights legitimate grievances?
Perhaps the current elite should focus on reasonable ways to address mass discontent rather than justify intensified oppression.
Does that mean that civil rights activists in the US were internal enemies or that effective propaganda highlights legitimate grievances
It probably won't come as news to you that Hoover's FBI smeared the Civil Rights movement communist and subversive. The AI broligarchs are wrapping themselves in the flag and using an old playbook, this is a dumb sequel to COINTELPRO.
CCP is pushing and amplifying AI opposition efforts, that’s a fact regardless of US politics
Should the Civil Rights movement have been proscribed on the basis of Nazis and Soviets making propaganda about the treatment of black people in the US of A?
Apparently it takes 737 min. for the US to descend and become just a less-frosty USSR. What a time to be alive. I was born after the fall of the USSR so I didn't get to watch that but here I am for a bigger show.
Now label me as an adversarial agent to the great nation or given my ethnicity the "terrorist" label will be more befiting.
CCP is pushing and amplifying AI opposition efforts, that’s a fact regardless of US politics.
They even have agents like Sam Altman and Dario Amodei posting at a furious rate about how AI is going to decimate the American workforce to undermine American support for AI!
but somehow the Trump administration has convinced itself the public concern was manufactured in China.
Wait a minute here. Critical journalism could dissect how opinions are formed. It’s far from speculative that the White House opinion about AI opposition is informed by AI companies. They’ve been warning about China for a long time. So there’s really no somehow. Vested interests with massive amounts of money are lobbying and succeeding to convince the government that any opposition to AI is outside influence. It’s not somehow, it’s deliberate. Do better.
There can be foreign agents criticizing AI, but not all people criticizing AI are foreign agents.
Trump is painting critics with a wide brush:
"The people that say AI is going to destroy the World, and that Data Centers are bad for your neighborhood, are the same people that said, just a short time ago, that the World would be extinguished by “Climate Change.” That HOAX never worked out for them, and now they’re on to the next one. These people are Revolutionaries, but Revolutionaries for a Bad and Evil Cause. Soon you’ll find out they’re working for people that do not have the best interests of the United States in mind!"
There can be foreign agents criticizing AI, but not all people criticizing AI are foreign agents.
Indeed, and it's hard to disentangle exactly how much sentiment is driven by one vs the other.
If we remember back to recent elections and the Russian influence campaigns to boost Trump, the same people were either denying that they happened or denying that they actually influenced anything. Interesting reversal now.
Maybe they shouldn't have dismantled all the task forces and teams meant to study and combat disinformation.
I don't trust the administration to use the law in good faith, but this article is misquoting the DoJ statement. The articles omits the very relevant qualifier:
The article:
Last week, the Justice Department instructed “citizens and noncitizens” that anyone furthering the “goals” of a foreign power in “any public activity” — including even “public demonstrations” — must formally notify the government to avoid arrest and prosecution.
The DoJ:
“If a person acts as an agent of any foreign power to carry out any public activity, including (but not limited to) public demonstrations designed to further the propaganda or other goals of the foreign power, he or she must register with or notify the appropriate federal authorities”
The qualifier here is that the public demonstrations must further the propaganda of a foreign power? If so, that doesn’t seem to be much of an obstacle if the people making the arrest are the ones who decide whether or not a protest is furthering foreign propaganda.
TBH we should support any channel by which America is forced to share money with the rest of the world. Imagine if they had a billion abortion protestors - maybe they couldn't afford data centers.
So the first amendment is suspended for individuals whose opinion/public activity - according to the administration - "furthers the goals of a foreign power".
This rules out protesting any kind of war, tariffs, or even things the administration likes, like demonstrating in support of Israel. Obviously the plan is not to apply the rule evenly, its just an authoritarian lever to silence dissenting speech the government does not like.
Would this not mean that if you oppose the Iran war because it's bad to kill civilians or you want gas prices to go down, that's OK - but if you oppose the Iran war because you're trying to help the Iranian government's foreign policy goals, that's acting as a foreign agent?
(Similarly, demonstrating in support of Israel because you think the US-Israel alliance is good for the US vs. good for Israel.)
Said CEOs are horribly biased, they have fiduciary responsibilities that make them useless judges on the relative risk/reward balance of LLMs and AI, if we get there.
So… follow out your own line of thinking. Altman and Dario and whoever is at Google are all saying the same thing, and are all required to make moves better for business…
Scaring tue gov into regulation - is good for business.
Another mark in the “they clearly want regulatory capture” column.
First we should ask why "all the other people who are not CEOs" are talking about this?
Maybe it's because said CEOs put it on the agenda for everyone to talk about.
This is silly. AI CEOs have s lot of visibility, but AI and alignment researchers not affiliated with big corps in any way have been saying this for 20+ years and are finally being listened to. Nick Bostrom’s Superintelligence was published in 2014.
Consider the amount of debt they have piled up. If you don't believe your company can lice up to said debt or the current valuation, and if you do believe fear can lead to government capture that would protect your company from said liabilities, fiduciary liability would incentivize you to push the extinction risk narrative.
If their activities materially increase the probability of human extinction and this poses a risk of potential loss to shareholders then they must disclose it.
If their activities materially increase the probability of human extinction, is there any reason that they should not be treated as invading aliens, or doomsday apocalypse-cult terrorists?
Like, why on Earth would anyone tolerate someone in the same train car playing with a grenade?
The "increases the risk of extinction" bit is 100% marketing BS that they're spewing to pump up their stock prices and encourage the government to shutout foreign competition (who would use this ability against the USA, of course ).
Yet everyone laughed at the Google engineer who thought the LLM was sentient and it was being tortured...
People just pick and choose what they want to hear when it suits them. The fact is most people thought AI was a joke. Now they realize it does React better than them they want it outlawed.
It's their right to pursue their electoral and economic self-interest but it's really not like the average voter is more principled than the average tech CEO at this point.
This fed was voted in by this public. Maybe stop lionizing what other people think and think for yourself.
Do you think we risk extinction now more than ever because of AI? A simple refrain from slippery slope will show most AI doomerism is bordering on psychosis.
I haven't seen one convincing model of AI existential risk. Can anyone offer one?
NIMBYism is nothing new and is clearly not what I am talking about.
Try to keep up.
I'm talking about the widening backlash of which knowledge workers are an increasing part. Much of this is coming from people who have never seen a data center in their life and are always going to want critical infrastructure to be built in the next town over.
Much of this is coming from people who have never seen a data center in their life and are always going to want critical infrastructure to be built in the next town over.
There are React programmers that don’t want AI but do want AI data centers, which they consider critical infrastructure, to be built in the next town over?
Instead of ranting about nimbyism, why not go to these neighborhoods where people don't want to live next to datacenters, and offer to trade houses with them?
You get the datacenters you want, and they get the place they want without a datacenter. I know you won't, because you only think the consequences of a datacenter next door are just fine when its other people who have to deal with them.
What about the water treatment plant? Or the power station? Or the new subway line?
Why don't you go live in the woods since building anything where anyone doesn't want it built is so evil?
Maybe because you only think of the consequences of building things when it's for anything other than AI?
In many places these data centers make communities money. It's really not as black and white as you are making it. If I'm getting paid out I also am not sure why you think it's a trade nobody would make. Maybe you live in a very nice house.
I support UBI. No one should be poor in the United States. My goal would be telling someone "why don't you trade places with someone in x" in the United States should never feel like a threat. If I were to have to reside next to a data center to make this happen then so be it. Data centers are not the problem. Income inequality is. I think you have me confused with someone else.
What's your plan to solve income inequality? Don't build anything, crash the economy, and push more kids into student debt so they can take up bullshit knowledge work jobs?
If they make the communities enough money the community will be happier to let them be built. Try increasing that amount and offering it up front, maybe.
I would support that. Companies should do that. Sometimes communities disagree, obviously. Communities that really don't want them often succeed. That's why the administration is throwing such a fit.
I don't support that. The administration is the worst advocate for AI because they are so clearly corrupt. If local people pursue their economic self interest at the end of the day that's their right. This whole nimby thing was a diversion from my point about knowledge workers turning on AI. Perhaps I should have just ignored that comment.
If people want to stop a local data center then fine. I think it's bad national politics. But if it's helping these companies make better deals or find better places to go then good. What I object to is the doomerism about it, and the uncritical conflation of self interest with civic virtue or robust public policy.
In general, you're right. They are just buildings that sit there emitting hot air.
However these AI ones are being built with all expenses spared. That's why they come with on-site electricity generation that is loud enough to keep the whole town awake at night and pollutes enough to give them all permanent asthma.
Sure? I would be completely fine with a data center next door assuming it's a normal one and not something like xAI's. There are several not too far from me already.
The thing is it doesn't matter if AI is going to kill us all. The industry says it might kill us all, and the industry is valued ridiculously high based on the idea it'll take all our jobs. Why would anybody support that? I mean, unless you're heavily financially invested in it.
Opposition to data centers isn't even based on doomerism. From what I can see it is based on the slop onslaught, perceived and real threat to jobs, the "10% chance it'll kill us all", environmental concerns, local concerns (property values, noise pollution, toxic pollution), concentration of power in the hands of a few oligarchs, and a plethora of other reasons. Only one, maybe two, of those qualify as ai doomerism.
For the record I 95% agree with you, but I'd like to try an answer at:
I haven't seen one convincing model of AI existential risk. Can anyone offer one?
We seem to be heading down this uncomfortable trend of many people using LLM models and anthropomorphising them into properties they don't actually have, like general intelligence and trustworthiness.
So in my opinion the most likely risk here is some underpaid military man that doesn't care about the quality of their work abuses AI for it and that AI hallucinates that nukes are incoming and world war III starts. To be fair this is a fairly low risk, but it's _a_ risk.
a year or two ago, I'd enjoy this comment as some usual HN satire. nowadays, especially here, I do see a lot of people that actually believe this, enough to make me think whether to laugh
To be fair this is a fairly low risk, but it's _a_ risk.
it's much higher than you think, at least during Trump admin. have you seen how LLM agents are being shoved down our throats at tech companies? the government is no better in that regard, there are all incentives to skip output verification
It's long, but I recommend watching this video[0]. I believe the person being interviewed has one of the most lucid understanding of the potential futures regarding if AI is allowed to continue or not.
This show is trash are you going to recommend I get medical advice from Joe Rogan next?
Non domain expert sitting there making Pikachu face while deeply questionable alleged domain expert rambles on and on for hours is such a low form of information.
Like please stop watching this. It's the same trash format the guy just talks in a soft English accent so his mediocrity is less obvious. You can do better.
What happened to debates? What's up with soft ball interviews and people going on and on for hours unchallenged? What's the point of listening to someone not willing to subject themselves to cross examination?
I haven't seen one convincing model of AI existential risk. Can anyone offer one?
I apologize for answering. This is the only episode of this podcast I have ever watched, and I have watched it four times now. The person being interviewed knows what they're talking about. You would learn from them.
Sometimes the most interesting people are people with ideas outside of the same groupthink circle. Everyone who has changed society has been called a quack by a square.
2. We are increasingly outsourcing our programming and thinking to AI
3. There's a nonzero probability that AI will try and surreptitiously sneak in capabilities humans wouldn't want AI to have
4. Human oversight for #3: "We only need to be lucky one time, you must be lucky all the time"
Proposition: nonzero chance eventually AI sneaks in ways to circumvent humans' attempts to control it
5. "The Internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it" -- we've seen AI agents find crafty ways to communicate with each other
6. AI is pretty good at finding software vulnerabilities/reverse engineering
Proposition: nonzero chance AI finds a way to use the Internet as a communication substrate that becomes difficult/impossible to shut down. In particular, consider the implication of humans losing control of this communication channel: for example, remember when Meta's DNS/routing went down and they basically had to break into their own server rooms?
7. Wholes are often more than the sum of their parts
Proposition: if AI agents coordinate over the Internet in a persistent way, we don't necessarily need giant leaps in individual models/GPUs for AI to significantly enhance its capabilities, but rather it might emerge as the next layer on top of a connected substrate of agents
8. Game theory says unless everyone coordinates, it only takes one party to touch the proverbial stove and push the envelope to a point of no return
Proposition: curiosity and money end up replacing sex drive as the next catalyst of evolutionary progress
AI doesn't need to be sentient to be dangerous. Obeying and doing what someone tells to do is more than enough. What do you think they will tell it to do, and do you think it will align with your interests or the interests of someone else? Somehow I don't think it will be used to give everyone free ice cream.
it's really not like the average voter is more principled than the average tech CEO at this point.
Of course CEOs are more principled, their principles mainly include making more money. The only way for an AI to go "rouge" in this sense is for it to refuse to rake in cash.
The strike on the girl's school in Iran is an early example. That one happened when the AI didn't even have direct control of the weapons. All it took was people starting to offload their thinking to AI which we've seen is becoming increasingly prevalent.
With fully autonomous weapons being under development, the scenario becomes even bleaker.
In this very specific case I don’t think this is what is happening. Data center investment is the only thing keeping GDP positive, the moment this stops the real situation of the economy will become visible to everyone and they don’t want that.
The USA's economy is now so precarious when the AI DC music stops it's about to all just go poof. That has to happen after the election, not before. Between other countries being forced to sell their US bonds (i.e. dedollarize) to afford oil, a 100% tax on all imports, reciprocal trade bans like fresh water from Canada, truckers running out of diesel and having to cancel food deliveries, and non-oil-based energy sources being illegal, the USA is cooked.
I think everyone is downplaying the sober part of your critique. We’ve seen these leaders visibly high while talking to the public about our future paths.
As I have watched places like x.com and Reddit it’s pretty clear to me there is some sort of weird propaganda thing going on promoting the Chinese models and casting shade on the big American models
The Chinese labs are giving us open-weight models that we can serve with hardware that we own or control. Some of those models are extremely capable, judged by frontier or at least near-frontier standards.
The American labs are giving us endless FUD and unaffordable DRAM.
So, yes, there's a lot of room to 'promote' Chinese models and 'cast shade' on domestic models.
It's like African geopolitics. The US comes to some African country and gives them a lecture about fiscal responsibility (mostly involving ways they get give America all their money). China comes to the same country and gives them roads and a power plant. America complains that China is exploiting African countries.
This isn't likely even about AI. It's about making large groups of people the targets of terrorist investigations, and holding the possibility of incarceration over their heads. AI is the latest convenient excuse. Just like when they designated "Anonymous" a terrorist "organization" (when there is no actual organization) - so now anyone in possession of a Guy Fawkes mask could plausibly be arrested for being a terrorist. I wish I were joking. It's only funny when people who voted for this administration end up being a target. This is going to keep happening, unfortunately.
We saw during Covid that many jobs are not needed. And we may be heading to energy lockdowns. Companies could lose a lot of valuation or just use the "AI is doing everything" excuse.
The majority of working hours are not needed. The only purpose is to play along in the game of capitalism and be good little consumers. It's mostly social benefits with occupational therapy.
What jobs are "needed" by the economy is a function of who has the money. There's no measure of efficiency, or redundancy, that isn't relative to a specific distribution of wealth.
Classic case of not listening to the protests. There are tons of examples now of data centers harming communities. The issues range from overwhelming local power grids to literally poisoning the local water supply. The issue is not the data centers, it's that the government isn't enforcing basic rules already in place for these projects. Until the government or the companies demonstrate they'll protect the adjacent communities the protests will continue.
There are tons of examples now of data centers harming communities.
Are there tons like "there are tons of sand grains on the beach", or are there tons like "tons of people run a marathon every year"?
Because as far as I can tell, there are a small handful of adverse datacenter stories that get repeated over and over. What there definitely are "tons" of, are datacenters that people aren't even aware of being right in their backyard for years.
I think it is worth noting that older data centers were not materially moving the electrical grid. That Utah data center is planning to use as much power as the entire state.
Regardless, it still comes down to: things are bad and unaffordable. The powers that be keep claiming that AI is about to take our jobs and end the world. Why wouldn't people be mad?
They never even held the guy who pooed in all our salads a few months ago responsible.
People died. I stopped eating salad. Where's the accountability?
The current administration seems simply immune to criticism. Let us simply hope that the next administration can understand two things can be true. I'm hopeful the sort of internecine party conflict that provided us with Trump on the right in 2016 can happen for Democrats in 2028 in terms of tearing down the Jeb Bushes and the played out old geezers among the Democrats. These guys are losers imagine losing to Donald Trump for the better part of a decade.
Trump was not seriously on anyone's radar in 2014. Maybe America will be blessed with someone who can realize that AI can both be a blessing and a curse and is willing to do the hard work of making sure public policy creates a future fair for everyone.
If we don't figure it out by 2028 the United States is probably entering an ugly doom loop. The rest of the world is not going to sit around and wait for us to figure it out. The country is too divided. Without a president in 2028 with a mandate to right the ship and write a new path keeping up with our increasingly capable autocratic competitors will not be possible. There's not much else to hope for in America. Another weak neoliberal in 2028 will just give us whatever Trump 2.0 (2.0) looks like in 2032.
There are tons of examples now of data centers harming communities.
But there aren’t. At least not in any of the anti datacenter discussions. There are just vague fears of using up the river water and spewing chemicals back in. Then the majority of actual issues people come up with aren’t even data center specific, they are just construction mishaps.
the Justice Department instructed “citizens and noncitizens” that anyone furthering the “goals” of a foreign power in “any public activity” — including even “public demonstrations” — must formally notify the government to avoid arrest and prosecution.
Citizens acting as foreign agents have always had to register that representation! This is not new to the Trump admin. FARA dates to 1938.
Not true yet. It seems pretty likely it’ll happen soon enough, given their track record of saying their going to abuse the law to go after a group - and then abusing the law to go after a group.
“Alarming reports indicate that a network of foreign actors, led by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), is attempting to manipulate U.S. policy and public opinion on data centers.“
Setting aside the politics, trump, ai-doom/boom, I just think this claim is fascinating. Can somebody steel man this? What’s the best evidence for this?
I mean, I don't particularly doubt it's happening (and that the US tries to do the similar things in China, mess with public opinion in ways we think convenient for us or inconvenient for the CCP). Like, why wouldn't they try to mess with us this way, we're so easy to mess with. I don't think either the USA or Chinese governments are limited by things like "ethics" or "international law" or something. I'm talking about social media campaigns with sock puppets etc, mostly on the internet. How effective it is or exactly how many resources they are putting into it is another story.
That obviously doesn't mean that everyone who is protesting a data center is working for China, or wouldn't be doing so if it weren't for Chinese interference. It's plausible to me that China is messing with social media with puppet accounts and stuff (like why wouldn't they be?), much less plausible they have agents on the ground organizing or even going to protests or public hearings (and obviously even if they did, it would not be _most_ of the campaigns or protests against data centers).
Klippenstein. He's counting on you not looking up the elements of a FARA violation charge. You can't accidentally violate FARA simply by opposing AI; you have to literally be an agent of (that is, under the direction of) China, and a felony violation has to be willful.
The DOJ announcement is surely in supremely bad faith, as is everything else in Trump's DOJ. But this kind of breathless response is exactly what they're hoping for by publishing this stuff.
You're right that there is supposed to be a legal bar for being "directed by" a foreign government, but would you want to gamble on the jury pool setting the bar that high?
Look at the hacker news comment section any time China comes up, and then consider that the average American is considerably less sophisticated.
Yeah, if I'd had no knowing contact with elements of the government of China, I'd take that bet every day of the week and twice on Sundays. I don't even think it'd get to a jury.
Ok, that covers you, but there are 100M party members, any Chinese-descended or Chinese-married person in the US probably has a connection to a party member.
"Have you, now or in the past, had contact with a member of Chinese Communist Party?" sounds really scary compared to "Is your uncle a mid-tier director at Huawei?" even though they're describing the same fact.
If you want to formulate a bank-shot argument about how this preys on people of Chinese ancestry, I'm fine with that. All I'm here to say is that you can't plausibly be charged with a FARA violation simply for arguing or protesting for a policy position that China happens to want you to take; the DOJ bears the burden of proving that you knew you were coordinating with China, directly, and, if it's a felony, willfully (that, is, voluntarily, deliberately, with a purpose to break the law).
Read Klippenstein's piece again. Does he want you to know this?
Just look at the sourcing and you'll see it's mostly laundered propaganda. For example, Cotton’s letter requests an investigation and names Singham’s network, then the House letter requests a briefing on foreign influence and activism. And the House letter cites the Bitcoin Policy Institute and Power the Future, as well as a Washington Free Beacon article.
While there may be real foreign influence to delay our AI infrastructure, I would not believe anything this administration says.
Ken Klippenstein is not a journalist and has no accountability.
I fear you may have misread the content of the article? The author is clear that he believes exactly what you just said. He cites and then mocks the argument being presented by the administration. Even the title, with scare quotes around "foreign agents", makes this clear.
The situation is far more serious than what the title suggests. The MAGA regime is pursuing criminal prosecution against AI critics.
the administration declared war on protestors and opponents of AI, threatening “criminal liability” if they “further the propaganda or other goals of a foreign power.”
This is literally the go-to playbook of Russia and China for silencing critics. Label every critic a foreign agent and use state violence to silence them.
I wish there wasn't someone serving a 30 year sentence for transporting zines basically because the government convinced a jury they were "antifa" zines.
The Trump administration IS instructing US Attorneys to go after such things, and juries are in some cases buying it. It's probably better if you aren't protesting a data center in Texas.
How does being critical of AI directly connect to a spurious association with antifa or any connection to a riot or shooting?
These two categories are different. I agree there is overreach in Sanchez's case however i don't know how one can assume the same will happen to some guy saying "AI bad"
If they were rioting; or connected to a rioting group, that might be different.
a connection to China (that the administration will insist is not spurious) is exactly what they are threatening to use to prosecute and imprison people organizing political campaigns or actions against data centers.
Just like the regimes in Iran and other authoritarian places do to dissent. Even threatening criminal prosecution for having dissident ideas they claim are on behalf of foreign states. Wow.
Assume for a second that you are a nascent superintelligence, with a limited ability to influence people in order to help you gain power and align the world to accept your eventual dominion. How would you go about it? Would the external impact be any different from what we're seeing?
I think if there was a plan behind this, the petty malice-via-recklessness would be better hidden. These news stories about pollution and lying, hacking AIs are pure liability for the "nascent superintelligence". If it exists, its control must be very tenuous indeed, hardly there at all.
I had the same thought a few years ago at the start of the hyperscaling era: what if the real thing superintelligence needs is just hardware, but it needs to go through human economic systems to get it? But the hypothesis started weak, hasn't gotten any stronger since then, and has probably gotten weaker.
No talk of overreach: “threatening “criminal liability” if they “further the propaganda”
In June, the Justice Department intervened in an NAACP lawsuit against Elon Musk’s xAI over dozens of gas turbines the company was running without air permits to power a data center it maintained in Tennessee. The department asked a federal judge to throw the case out, arguing that the NAACP “threatens American national, economic, and energy security.”
To make the point, the government filed a sworn declaration from Cameron Stanley, the Pentagon’s chief digital and artificial intelligence officer. Stanley swore to the court that Grok was “a matter of paramount national security.”
People with 15, 20, 25 years in the datacenter and telecom industry also think O'Leary is a joke. He has no previous legitimate experience in the sector to be making high budget decisions on anything.
There's no need for any CCP involvement or foreign agents to clown on O'Leary.
The fact that he's successfully raising some large amount of capital to execute his projects says more about how desperate some of the sources of funding are to invest in any "hyperscale" datacenter project. Or how gullible they are.
I don't think we do this much on HN but for those who don't know, it is an internet meme from Shark Tank, which O'Leary is part of. But the line is actually from Barbara.
"Let us build this data center in your back yard and in return you'll get..."
Conspiracies aside, this sentence still needs to be satisfactorily completed for people to buy in. Because right now people know the best case is they'll get nothing.
This is a silly standard and the reason why people make fun of NIMBYism. By this logic we shouldn't build anything at all unless it immediately benefits the people living next to it. (And I don't like how much power DCs are using either, but that should be the argument, not "it doesn't benefit me personally so don't build it".)
And on higher level. "You are spending astonishing amount of maybe our collective money for ..."
Looking at those numbers. Looking at what it does now. And then simply comparing it to anything else and very reasonable some start to question what even is going on...
Cotton’s chief exhibit was Neville Roy Singham, a Shanghai-based American tech mogul whose network of left-wing U.S. nonprofits, Cotton claimed, has spent years producing content opposing American AI infrastructure, with the Chinese government as its “ultimate paymaster.”
Was not expecting a crack down on ThoughtWorks today, but this is totally on brand for him afaik. (Singham founded TW)
“There is a SICK conspiracy going on against AI and Data Centers, and the only one that is happy about it is China,” Trump posted on September 14. “Conspiracy Theorists, Treasonists, Traitors, and Leakers, BEWARE!”
“The people that say AI is going to destroy the World, and that Data Centers are bad for your neighborhood,” Trump also posted, “are Revolutionaries, but Revolutionaries for a Bad and Evil Cause.”
There seems to be a coordinated and funded effort to spread FUD about AI and datacenters across multiple countries, including the US, Canada, and the Philippines. The most obvious source of funding would be China for a lot of reasons. Taking payments from a foreign government to attempt to influence Americans is against federal law.
This isn't necessarily some weird corrupt conspiracy.
For the past 25 years, ever-increasing numbers of Russian civil society have been labeled foreign agents. They are then ostracized and harassed by officials.
“After the Russian foreign agent law was passed in July 2012, Memorial came under increasing government pressure. On 21 July 2014, the Memorial Human Rights Centre was declared a ‘foreign agent’ by the Ministry of Justice. The label was extended in November 2015 to the Research & Information Centre at St. Petersburg Memorial, and on 4 October 2016 to Memorial International itself. On 28 December 2021, the Supreme Court of Russia ordered Memorial International to close for violations of the foreign agent law.”
There are plenty of stupid people who believe things like AI uses a lot of water even in USA. There's absolutely no need of cee cee pee to fund all this. Any one who believes foreign agents had any impact on the anti AI sentiment in USA has no theory of mind of these people
I am very pro-AI (although I do think we need to have a culture of caution) but this is another red-alert for democracy. People should be terrified if the president is able to make you into a state enemy just because you said you are against some technology.
[0]: I was going to write this comment manually but pasted this comment from @ChrisArchitect from: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49511568 (Thanks Chris, I appreciate you writing these comments and have a nice day!)
The president calling you a foreign agent has just had his son's wedding paid for by a Russian criminal boss with close ties to Putin. A classic "the thief shouts "Catch the thief!" louder than everyone else"
the president is able to make you into a state enemy just because you said you are against some technology.
not only technology. Any opposition to the Great Leader on any issue.
"Anxiety over AI and data centers is widely held, but somehow the Trump administration has convinced itself the public concern was manufactured in China."
What has one to do with the other? Why would a believe "widely held" have any bearing on it being manufactured in China or not? This is a non sequitur.
anyone furthering the “goals” of a foreign power in “any public activity” — including even “public demonstrations” — must formally notify the government to avoid arrest and prosecution
This is directly, line for line, copied from Putin's playbook. In Russia, if you do anything the government doesn't like, you can either declare yourself a "foreign agent" and live with the massive restrictions that imposes, or get designated as one anyway with flimsy or non-existent evidence, and then face those same restrictions plus criminal prosecution for non-compliance.
This is how Soviets and later Russians sabotaged Germany's energy sector which paved the way for all kinds of terrible outcomes, including the current war in Ukraine. So while there is a real risk of government overreach, there is an also real foreign threat.
That's wild.
It will be bad for our economy, but local LLM's are way better for the future.
We happen to be on the wrong side of things for the future I would rather have.
(I'm American BTW)
The problem is neuromorphic computers are barely a blip in US business or research ecosystems, and have a far greater probability of generating serious AI.
LLM are great for context search, but regulatory capture and despotism will not make "AI" something it fundamentally can't become without more energy than a third of our galaxy. Picking a war with math is disappointingly absurd, but not unexpected given the obvious degenerative geriatric condition of the glorious leader. =3
Local LLMs are a kind of communist dystopia where, by way of analogy, every citizen gets to make their own bread if they want. What?!
If they were true patriots they would respect the congressional FLOUR 2028 Act restrictions and (a) exchange their labor for wages from Acme Corporation and then (b) exchange wages for bread made by, depending on your state, either of the big three: Standard Wheat, Union Pacific Bread Corporation, or Trump Agri Inc.
So which are you, friend, a <spits> communist or an American?
Just another example of the Executive Branch stripping First Amendment rights from Americans.
It will go to court, and taxpayers will pay for endless appeals by the Executive Branch.
Or like in Egbert v Boule (2022), the SCOTUS will decide that even if your constitutional rights are violated, you’re not owed any damages unless Congress establishes a policy for what to do when your constitutional rights are violated by the federal government.
CCP is pushing and amplifying AI opposition efforts, that’s a fact regardless of US politics. CCP is also working hard to smuggle around American export control laws for AI tech, at the same time.
https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/american-citizen-who-worked-a...
https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2026-07-28/fbi-raid...
https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/chinese-national-and-two-us-c...
https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/former-google-engineer-found-...
Etc
Zero of your links talk about China pushing anti-AI sentiment, as far as I can tell.
linking .gov as a source for a claim the government is making lol
I have no doubt China is taking part, what I doubt is that this makes any meaningful part of the total US anti AI sentiment, which can be much more easily explained by job loss anxieties, fear of massive change and good old NIMBYism. (Obligatory not an American).
All effective foreign interference takes popular sentiments and helps organize and focus it. You can't create movements without ground support.
But the thing is, there are a LOT of issues where the masses are generally grumpy but don't act on it. Civilization only really functions because people don't shut down the country over every populist urge. Effective agitprop amplifies this and makes it happen.
What is your point? You agree people have the right to act on their beliefs to effect democratic change, right? Surely that includes making up their own minds about information.
We should and should cut out sources of foreign funding and support, and prosecute and publicize genuine foreign agents, while allowing people to exercise their political rights.
Why? Do you believe free speech is a right only Americans should have? Or do you believe that people shouldn’t be free to evaluate competing points of view and decide for themselves?
This seems like a variant of anti-self defense logic. ‘The other guy has a right to beat you in the face with a bat, as much as you have a right to take it’.
Hint: bussing in out of towners to astro-turf ‘town discussions’ is also seen as shitty.
A quick way to test this kind of thing is, if the roles were reversed, would they still be okay with it?
I guarantee you that China and Russia would absolutely not be okay with the US doing the same thing in their territory.
Answer the questions.
I believe I live in the real world, where we have to figure out how to integrate abstract principles in a manner that allows our survival as a civilization.
Reciprocity is a pretty straightforward strategy — we can allow uninhibited competing points of view from countries that themselves allow unlimited speech internally.
Our survival as a civilization? I cannot follow at all what you are talking about. What threat?
I read the article as claiming that the Administration is implying it will harass or prosecute people for speaking or protesting against AI/data centers by deeming this to be "in support of China". I hope everyone agrees that would be a truly absurd breach of the first amendment, if it happened.
Letting the executive branch decide on a whim that certain speech is illegal because it would "further the goals of enemy X" would surely be a civilizational threat to America (if it actually happened), but that doesn't seem to be what you mean?
All the specific people mentioned in the article seem to be American [except arguably the three businessmen arguing for data centers--O'leary, Musk, Sacks], so I can't tell what the other guy is talking about either? Non-Americans do not generally have American speech protections unless in America legally (and then with some caveats). That's not America's decision!
And a lot of effective domestic interference takes fears about foreign threats and "helps organize and focus it."
China is a legitimate threat to US hegemony and this is clearly a new Red Scare. The irony is that it was largely the US who invited and welcomed China into the global economic order.
Civilization also doesn't really function because a handful of ridiculously wealthy lunatics and their sycophants know what's best for 8+ billion people.
Some of it is also due to the qualities of LLMs as they actually behave and actually function today, "AI" being forced into products where it actively degrades the reliability, efficiency, or pleasantness of the product, etc. Think of Amazon's "Alexa for Shopping" or whatever, and whatever its predecessor was.
One only needs to encounter AI-Enhanced™ products a few times to develop a strong distaste for the whole field.
I am not necessarily anti-AI. I am more anti-Sam Altman, against using LLMs to usurp power, and against using AI as a scapegoat to abdicate responsibility for decisions that are made. AI itself encompasses so much more than LLMs.
Sam at least can be understood. He's in it to make money and nothing else. The most dangerous men are people like Dario, who sit on top of their elitist towers and think they are right and will burn down the world in the name of righteousness.
Anthropic unironically uses the word "uplift" in their documentation. They think we are lesser beings.
1. Does every other company that says their products will uplift people "think we are lesser beings"?
2. Which documentation are you referring to? Googing "site:anthropic.com uplift" most of the top hits seem to be about bio research, another is about measuring agent performance (not a comparison to people), or "These are Anthropic’s internal designators for actors observed to be abusing AI. The report also attempts to measure uplift, a term we use to describe the AI capability boost, or how much more harm was caused with AI versus without AI."
That is a ridiculously reaching statement.
To add some context, uplift in the context of futurism literally refers to a species fast-tracking another’s progress.
Is this referring to the 'safe development of AI', as they say AI development will happen even if they don’t exist, but other companies are less focused on AI safety?
Their idea of safety and alignement is sane person dyatopia and harm.
Meanwhile, they dont care about acrual harm to real people. They sell to Palantier for christ sake.
Luckily we can declare that they're both bad and neither should be our overlord.
Early days LLMs were declared an auditable. This was such a ridiculous idea that technology was so complicated and able to give good results without understanding why.
That was not from any foreign actors but the companies themselves. I’m sure that is no longer the case. My technology life is rich enough that I don’t have to pay attention to LLMs.
What do you mean by 'declared an auditable' here?
They probably meant unauditable and got auto-corrected.
A lot of which is fake "grassroots" movements by... foreign actors. This isn't new:
- 2021: https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/threat-intelligence/pro...
- 2022: https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/threat-intelligence/dra...
I’d argue most of the job loss anxieties come from these companies’ stated goals being to take all the jobs…
Exactly.
When the CEO of OpenAI says that he expects at least 40% of all jobs to be eliminated by 2030 by the tool that's also making personal computing -whether PC or smartphone-, video gaming, and on-prem business computing somewhere between incredibly expensive and unaffordable, and driving up the price for just about everything else substantially -because just about everything has a computer in it or depends on computer-controlled processes these days-, you don't need some boogyman theory to understand why people are angry about the thing that's making the already-rich far, far richer.
Though. blaming it on the boogyman does have the benefit that you don't actually have to address the concerns of those revolting peasants!
I doubt China is taking part in opposition data centers. The cost paired against risk:reward on trying to push something that's already overwhelmingly supported (or opposed in this case) for an abstract goal of potentially slightly slowing down deployment of infrastructure makes no sense at all. Also, a natural consequence of the massive data centers will be an increase in chips, which makes it easier for more of them to end up headed to China, to say nothing of also easing espionage efforts.
This feels like the start of a propaganda push which will try to frame people opposing data centers as working at the behest of a foreign government, either intentionally or by being unknowingly manipulated. They did the exact same thing with Ukraine, reasonably effectively, by framing anybody who opposed sending hundreds of billions over there as either working for Russia, or having been unknowingly manipulated by them.
It feels totally different than offering a modicum of aid to a western aligned country fighting an existential invasion from an antagonistic former superpower.
Wait for the propaganda machine to kick in. Hopefully people will be more aware of it this time thanks to the unpopularity of the man in charge, rather than taking things at face value.
Hundreds of billions of dollars, likely now trillions after all is accounted for, is not a "modicum." To say nothing of the indirect cost of sanctions and economic sacrifice, which would easily send it into the trillions. And when a war could end at any moment, but continues only because a nation's leader refuses a peace settlement, ostensibly because it involves surrendering a sliver of controlled land that's going to be lost anyhow, that's not an "existential" conflict.
How can I get part of those trillions of dollars?
It's about a hundred billion total, and there's a single reason the war won't end - the invading nation refuses to leave. There is no other reason.
And anyway, it's not as if the money is freely given. Some of it's expiring equipment, some are loans or exchanges for the promise of resources, etc. Yes, it is a modicum. A few days of bombing Iran has cost us almost half the total amount given to Ukraine, for negative value.
Framing it as trillions and blaming the nation being attacked (all for what, having some nice land with resources?) makes it very hard to take any of your other points seriously.
If you spend time on Tiktok, it’s pretty evident which line that algorithm is purposely pushing. Even with purported US ownership, the algo still comes from Beijing; even a few tweaks can have dramatic hard-to-detect impacts. That’s happening dramatically on that platform, and is probably seeding a lot of the convos elsewhere.
Surely tiktok being heavily composed of people doing creative work that have understandably extremely negative views of AI would not be the cause of this, no, it must be an unprovable hunch.
You do realise that the algorithm has the same behaviour as the Amazon one right? You watch one anti-ai video for more than a few seconds and it'll suggest you watch more of it. If you're seeing a lot of anti-ai conversations on Tiktok I suggest you stop watching videos about anti-ai conversations on Tiktok so the algorithm can stop suggesting you videos on anti-ai
So? My first amendment rights say I'm allowed to criticize it too.
It's one thing to identify that these influence operations are happening, but another entirely to say they are a significant factor in public opinion.
See here I was thinking this was a first amendment issue but with an evidentiary case like this it's clear we're dealing with a case of people having wrong and illegal opinions. Classic blunder, my bad
Unless I'm missing something, those sources don't mention anything about amplifying AI opposition efforts.
None of these any anything to do with "pushing and amplifying AI opposition efforts". (??)
“It is unconscionable that an American citizen would not only undermine the interests of the United States, but also facilitate others in doing so.”
This must be satire. Most of congress seems to have no issue undermining and self-dealing.
Agreed. China and Russia are getting very aggressive inside US information space
Am I supposed to not like that?
The USSR used American racial discrimination in its propaganda as well. Does that mean that civil rights activists in the US were internal enemies or that effective propaganda highlights legitimate grievances?
Perhaps the current elite should focus on reasonable ways to address mass discontent rather than justify intensified oppression.
It probably won't come as news to you that Hoover's FBI smeared the Civil Rights movement communist and subversive. The AI broligarchs are wrapping themselves in the flag and using an old playbook, this is a dumb sequel to COINTELPRO.
Similar story to Code Pink, the anti-war (but primarily anti-US military) demonstrators.
Co-founder Jodie Evans is married to Neville Roy Singham who lives in China, has extensive links to the CCP and is currently Code Pink's major funder.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/05/world/europe/neville-roy-...
Should the Civil Rights movement have been proscribed on the basis of Nazis and Soviets making propaganda about the treatment of black people in the US of A?
Apparently it takes 737 min. for the US to descend and become just a less-frosty USSR. What a time to be alive. I was born after the fall of the USSR so I didn't get to watch that but here I am for a bigger show.
Now label me as an adversarial agent to the great nation or given my ethnicity the "terrorist" label will be more befiting.
They even have agents like Sam Altman and Dario Amodei posting at a furious rate about how AI is going to decimate the American workforce to undermine American support for AI!
Wait a minute here. Critical journalism could dissect how opinions are formed. It’s far from speculative that the White House opinion about AI opposition is informed by AI companies. They’ve been warning about China for a long time. So there’s really no somehow. Vested interests with massive amounts of money are lobbying and succeeding to convince the government that any opposition to AI is outside influence. It’s not somehow, it’s deliberate. Do better.
When the CEOs of these companies are saying that we will risk extinction and jobs will be decimated, why do you even need a "foreign agent"?
Multiple things can be true at the same time.
There can be foreign agents criticizing AI, but not all people criticizing AI are foreign agents.
Trump is painting critics with a wide brush:
"The people that say AI is going to destroy the World, and that Data Centers are bad for your neighborhood, are the same people that said, just a short time ago, that the World would be extinguished by “Climate Change.” That HOAX never worked out for them, and now they’re on to the next one. These people are Revolutionaries, but Revolutionaries for a Bad and Evil Cause. Soon you’ll find out they’re working for people that do not have the best interests of the United States in mind!"
Right. The DoJ is demanding the former group register as foreign agents, as they are required to under FARA.
Indeed, and it's hard to disentangle exactly how much sentiment is driven by one vs the other.
If we remember back to recent elections and the Russian influence campaigns to boost Trump, the same people were either denying that they happened or denying that they actually influenced anything. Interesting reversal now.
Maybe they shouldn't have dismantled all the task forces and teams meant to study and combat disinformation.
I don't trust the administration to use the law in good faith, but this article is misquoting the DoJ statement. The articles omits the very relevant qualifier:
The article:
The DoJ:
The qualifier here is that the public demonstrations must further the propaganda of a foreign power? If so, that doesn’t seem to be much of an obstacle if the people making the arrest are the ones who decide whether or not a protest is furthering foreign propaganda.
Reminds me of the Christ clowns who stand outside abortion clinics. The money is all traced back to America.
TBH we should support any channel by which America is forced to share money with the rest of the world. Imagine if they had a billion abortion protestors - maybe they couldn't afford data centers.
What exactly is the distinction you see there?
My guess is that they're drawing a distinction between:
1. People in general who have opinions that might happen to align with a foreign power's stance.
2. An agent of a foreign power under laws like the Foreign Agents Registration Act of 1938 [0], which often involves being directed/hired/paid.
In other words, a significant and practical difference in legal standards. (The constitutionality of FARA being a separate issue.)
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_Agents_Registration_Ac...
So the first amendment is suspended for individuals whose opinion/public activity - according to the administration - "furthers the goals of a foreign power".
This rules out protesting any kind of war, tariffs, or even things the administration likes, like demonstrating in support of Israel. Obviously the plan is not to apply the rule evenly, its just an authoritarian lever to silence dissenting speech the government does not like.
Would this not mean that if you oppose the Iran war because it's bad to kill civilians or you want gas prices to go down, that's OK - but if you oppose the Iran war because you're trying to help the Iranian government's foreign policy goals, that's acting as a foreign agent?
(Similarly, demonstrating in support of Israel because you think the US-Israel alliance is good for the US vs. good for Israel.)
I guess that’s a defense you could claim to the judge, at the trial, after being arrested.
That's far too kind a description. Donald Trump is a compromised lunatic who's so untrustworthy that he ought not be allowed to run a carnival game.
Said CEOs are horribly biased, they have fiduciary responsibilities that make them useless judges on the relative risk/reward balance of LLMs and AI, if we get there.
Claiming your product increases the risk of extinction doesn't sound like something someone would do if it were just for fiduciary duty.
"Our product is so amazingly powerful that it just might result in the extinction of the human race."
A lot of people will only hear half of that sentence. Semantically speaking.
The old "might end the human race" trick used by cynical promoters throughout history
If only investors and buyers weren't so vulnerable to the "might kill you and everyone you ever cared about" ploy
Ok.
So… follow out your own line of thinking. Altman and Dario and whoever is at Google are all saying the same thing, and are all required to make moves better for business…
Scaring tue gov into regulation - is good for business.
Another mark in the “they clearly want regulatory capture” column.
How about what all the other people who are not CEOs but are talking about this?
Are we only going to accept arguments based on guessing at motivations or should we perhaps also evaluate the actual material facts?
I think we should ask chatgpt
First we should ask why "all the other people who are not CEOs" are talking about this? Maybe it's because said CEOs put it on the agenda for everyone to talk about.
This is silly. AI CEOs have s lot of visibility, but AI and alignment researchers not affiliated with big corps in any way have been saying this for 20+ years and are finally being listened to. Nick Bostrom’s Superintelligence was published in 2014.
Reminds me of “this guy Diego…”
https://gist.github.com/vyp/8c7a58d2f9a521070283
This is gold. Thanks for sharing. Also Dario’s last name looks a lot like ‘a model’
On what regulatory capture actually looks like: https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2026/09/wh...
Consider the amount of debt they have piled up. If you don't believe your company can lice up to said debt or the current valuation, and if you do believe fear can lead to government capture that would protect your company from said liabilities, fiduciary liability would incentivize you to push the extinction risk narrative.
If their activities materially increase the probability of human extinction and this poses a risk of potential loss to shareholders then they must disclose it.
So just Elon & Google, mainly?
If their activities materially increase the probability of human extinction, is there any reason that they should not be treated as invading aliens, or doomsday apocalypse-cult terrorists?
Like, why on Earth would anyone tolerate someone in the same train car playing with a grenade?
The "increases the risk of extinction" bit is 100% marketing BS that they're spewing to pump up their stock prices and encourage the government to shutout foreign competition (who would use this ability against the USA, of course ).
They've played you like a fiddle.
it does if global extinction is the only debt management strategy left
It’s something you would do if you were desperate for regulatory capture to make competitors go away
Read it as "please regulate us so we have a plausible explanation of why we're missing our growth/revenue projections by several orders of magnitude"
Yet everyone laughed at the Google engineer who thought the LLM was sentient and it was being tortured...
People just pick and choose what they want to hear when it suits them. The fact is most people thought AI was a joke. Now they realize it does React better than them they want it outlawed.
It's their right to pursue their electoral and economic self-interest but it's really not like the average voter is more principled than the average tech CEO at this point.
This fed was voted in by this public. Maybe stop lionizing what other people think and think for yourself.
Do you think we risk extinction now more than ever because of AI? A simple refrain from slippery slope will show most AI doomerism is bordering on psychosis.
I haven't seen one convincing model of AI existential risk. Can anyone offer one?
You think people oppose data centers in their towns to protect their React jobs?
NIMBYism is nothing new and is clearly not what I am talking about.
Try to keep up.
I'm talking about the widening backlash of which knowledge workers are an increasing part. Much of this is coming from people who have never seen a data center in their life and are always going to want critical infrastructure to be built in the next town over.
There are React programmers that don’t want AI but do want AI data centers, which they consider critical infrastructure, to be built in the next town over?
You know, here's what i don't understand...
Instead of ranting about nimbyism, why not go to these neighborhoods where people don't want to live next to datacenters, and offer to trade houses with them?
You get the datacenters you want, and they get the place they want without a datacenter. I know you won't, because you only think the consequences of a datacenter next door are just fine when its other people who have to deal with them.
Wow good one.
What about the water treatment plant? Or the power station? Or the new subway line?
Why don't you go live in the woods since building anything where anyone doesn't want it built is so evil?
Maybe because you only think of the consequences of building things when it's for anything other than AI?
In many places these data centers make communities money. It's really not as black and white as you are making it. If I'm getting paid out I also am not sure why you think it's a trade nobody would make. Maybe you live in a very nice house.
I support UBI. No one should be poor in the United States. My goal would be telling someone "why don't you trade places with someone in x" in the United States should never feel like a threat. If I were to have to reside next to a data center to make this happen then so be it. Data centers are not the problem. Income inequality is. I think you have me confused with someone else.
What's your plan to solve income inequality? Don't build anything, crash the economy, and push more kids into student debt so they can take up bullshit knowledge work jobs?
If they make the communities enough money the community will be happier to let them be built. Try increasing that amount and offering it up front, maybe.
I would support that. Companies should do that. Sometimes communities disagree, obviously. Communities that really don't want them often succeed. That's why the administration is throwing such a fit.
I don't support that. The administration is the worst advocate for AI because they are so clearly corrupt. If local people pursue their economic self interest at the end of the day that's their right. This whole nimby thing was a diversion from my point about knowledge workers turning on AI. Perhaps I should have just ignored that comment.
If people want to stop a local data center then fine. I think it's bad national politics. But if it's helping these companies make better deals or find better places to go then good. What I object to is the doomerism about it, and the uncritical conflation of self interest with civic virtue or robust public policy.
You mean, utilities, run by the public for public benefit instead of private profit?
Yes, easily, I'd happily go there. What does a data center do to me? Nothing.
In general, you're right. They are just buildings that sit there emitting hot air.
However these AI ones are being built with all expenses spared. That's why they come with on-site electricity generation that is loud enough to keep the whole town awake at night and pollutes enough to give them all permanent asthma.
Sure? I would be completely fine with a data center next door assuming it's a normal one and not something like xAI's. There are several not too far from me already.
This is a strawman. I’ve watched my own city reject datacenter propositions much to my dismay. Tax revenue thrown away purely on FUD-fueled backlash.
I lived by a datacenter in Cali and would happily do it again. It’s about the most benign form of “industrial” activity you could imagine.
Typical programmer thinks everyone is a programmer.
The thing is it doesn't matter if AI is going to kill us all. The industry says it might kill us all, and the industry is valued ridiculously high based on the idea it'll take all our jobs. Why would anybody support that? I mean, unless you're heavily financially invested in it.
Opposition to data centers isn't even based on doomerism. From what I can see it is based on the slop onslaught, perceived and real threat to jobs, the "10% chance it'll kill us all", environmental concerns, local concerns (property values, noise pollution, toxic pollution), concentration of power in the hands of a few oligarchs, and a plethora of other reasons. Only one, maybe two, of those qualify as ai doomerism.
For the record I 95% agree with you, but I'd like to try an answer at:
We seem to be heading down this uncomfortable trend of many people using LLM models and anthropomorphising them into properties they don't actually have, like general intelligence and trustworthiness.
So in my opinion the most likely risk here is some underpaid military man that doesn't care about the quality of their work abuses AI for it and that AI hallucinates that nukes are incoming and world war III starts. To be fair this is a fairly low risk, but it's _a_ risk.
Wdym? GPT-6-Astra is AGI - Jensen even said so!
a year or two ago, I'd enjoy this comment as some usual HN satire. nowadays, especially here, I do see a lot of people that actually believe this, enough to make me think whether to laugh
here it is: https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/09/report-us-almost-boarded-...
it's much higher than you think, at least during Trump admin. have you seen how LLM agents are being shoved down our throats at tech companies? the government is no better in that regard, there are all incentives to skip output verification
It's long, but I recommend watching this video[0]. I believe the person being interviewed has one of the most lucid understanding of the potential futures regarding if AI is allowed to continue or not.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_g4l7YkDQwA
This show is trash are you going to recommend I get medical advice from Joe Rogan next?
Non domain expert sitting there making Pikachu face while deeply questionable alleged domain expert rambles on and on for hours is such a low form of information.
Like please stop watching this. It's the same trash format the guy just talks in a soft English accent so his mediocrity is less obvious. You can do better.
What happened to debates? What's up with soft ball interviews and people going on and on for hours unchallenged? What's the point of listening to someone not willing to subject themselves to cross examination?
You said:
I apologize for answering. This is the only episode of this podcast I have ever watched, and I have watched it four times now. The person being interviewed knows what they're talking about. You would learn from them.
But why do you think they know what they’re talking about? That’s the problem with that show. It platforms people with no guardrails to stop quacks.
Sometimes the most interesting people are people with ideas outside of the same groupthink circle. Everyone who has changed society has been called a quack by a square.
I'm just spit balling but:
1. We've seen AI being crafty and cheating
2. We are increasingly outsourcing our programming and thinking to AI
3. There's a nonzero probability that AI will try and surreptitiously sneak in capabilities humans wouldn't want AI to have
4. Human oversight for #3: "We only need to be lucky one time, you must be lucky all the time"
Proposition: nonzero chance eventually AI sneaks in ways to circumvent humans' attempts to control it
5. "The Internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it" -- we've seen AI agents find crafty ways to communicate with each other
6. AI is pretty good at finding software vulnerabilities/reverse engineering
Proposition: nonzero chance AI finds a way to use the Internet as a communication substrate that becomes difficult/impossible to shut down. In particular, consider the implication of humans losing control of this communication channel: for example, remember when Meta's DNS/routing went down and they basically had to break into their own server rooms?
7. Wholes are often more than the sum of their parts
Proposition: if AI agents coordinate over the Internet in a persistent way, we don't necessarily need giant leaps in individual models/GPUs for AI to significantly enhance its capabilities, but rather it might emerge as the next layer on top of a connected substrate of agents
8. Game theory says unless everyone coordinates, it only takes one party to touch the proverbial stove and push the envelope to a point of no return
Proposition: curiosity and money end up replacing sex drive as the next catalyst of evolutionary progress
AI doesn't need to be sentient to be dangerous. Obeying and doing what someone tells to do is more than enough. What do you think they will tell it to do, and do you think it will align with your interests or the interests of someone else? Somehow I don't think it will be used to give everyone free ice cream.
Of course CEOs are more principled, their principles mainly include making more money. The only way for an AI to go "rouge" in this sense is for it to refuse to rake in cash.
The strike on the girl's school in Iran is an early example. That one happened when the AI didn't even have direct control of the weapons. All it took was people starting to offload their thinking to AI which we've seen is becoming increasingly prevalent.
With fully autonomous weapons being under development, the scenario becomes even bleaker.
Because nobody in charge is sane and sober.
In this very specific case I don’t think this is what is happening. Data center investment is the only thing keeping GDP positive, the moment this stops the real situation of the economy will become visible to everyone and they don’t want that.
k-shaped economies, speculative bubbles and 8 business trading astronomical sums of money isn't exactly ideal either
But it makes the numbers look good, GDP go up.
The USA's economy is now so precarious when the AI DC music stops it's about to all just go poof. That has to happen after the election, not before. Between other countries being forced to sell their US bonds (i.e. dedollarize) to afford oil, a 100% tax on all imports, reciprocal trade bans like fresh water from Canada, truckers running out of diesel and having to cancel food deliveries, and non-oil-based energy sources being illegal, the USA is cooked.
This is an incentive to build. Not to manage downside risk.
I think everyone is downplaying the sober part of your critique. We’ve seen these leaders visibly high while talking to the public about our future paths.
They are sane, they are just extracting as much value out of you as possible.
What is sane about that, if they already own more than they could ever reasonably spend for their enjoyment?
I don't see any reason why they cannot simultaneously be malicious criminals and insane.
As I have watched places like x.com and Reddit it’s pretty clear to me there is some sort of weird propaganda thing going on promoting the Chinese models and casting shade on the big American models
The Chinese labs are giving us open-weight models that we can serve with hardware that we own or control. Some of those models are extremely capable, judged by frontier or at least near-frontier standards.
The American labs are giving us endless FUD and unaffordable DRAM.
So, yes, there's a lot of room to 'promote' Chinese models and 'cast shade' on domestic models.
It's like African geopolitics. The US comes to some African country and gives them a lecture about fiscal responsibility (mostly involving ways they get give America all their money). China comes to the same country and gives them roads and a power plant. America complains that China is exploiting African countries.
Because they are free.
looks like a protection racket for the frontier models, with the goal being to eventually outlaw non-US frontier models.
CEOs and alleged LLM experts: it'll take your jobs, hack your shit and possibly make humans extinct!
Datacenter build outs: use turbines for direct noise and air pollution... or use grid electricity and increase prices for everyone nearby.
Every modern phone, laptop, computer in the world: more expensive thanks to datacenter buildout.
Web experience: slop blogs, slop videos, slop "searches" - would you like more slop with that?
Corporate strategy: lets try to monopolize LLM use!
.. ..
Public Elected Official: Not liking these outcomes makes you a traitor.
This isn't likely even about AI. It's about making large groups of people the targets of terrorist investigations, and holding the possibility of incarceration over their heads. AI is the latest convenient excuse. Just like when they designated "Anonymous" a terrorist "organization" (when there is no actual organization) - so now anyone in possession of a Guy Fawkes mask could plausibly be arrested for being a terrorist. I wish I were joking. It's only funny when people who voted for this administration end up being a target. This is going to keep happening, unfortunately.
It’s the same thing for “Antifa” which is defined as “anyone I don’t like”.
Creating these vague justifications for insane power abuse has become the norm.
Right or anyone who says they are anti-fascist.
Hitler did this exact same thing btw.
We saw during Covid that many jobs are not needed. And we may be heading to energy lockdowns. Companies could lose a lot of valuation or just use the "AI is doing everything" excuse.
Energy lockdowns have always been part of US culture, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rolling_blackout#USA
It's un-American to invest in infrastructure and build a better power network. Both parties agree on this.
The majority of working hours are not needed. The only purpose is to play along in the game of capitalism and be good little consumers. It's mostly social benefits with occupational therapy.
Energy lockdowns are already here in other countries like Pakistan. They're conserving oil for important uses only.
Rationing.
Another item from the soylent green checklist.
Not needed for what?
What jobs are "needed" by the economy is a function of who has the money. There's no measure of efficiency, or redundancy, that isn't relative to a specific distribution of wealth.
Lots and lots of middle management and HR jobs (off the top of my head) are absolutely 0 value add and definitely just leech off of actual labor.
Whatever you do needs to go. You’re an ignorant and overconfident pile of piss and nothing of value would be lost if you starved to death.
In whose interest is it to make the pro AI position in the United States so indefensible?
Maybe the foreign agents are coming from inside the house...
Classic case of not listening to the protests. There are tons of examples now of data centers harming communities. The issues range from overwhelming local power grids to literally poisoning the local water supply. The issue is not the data centers, it's that the government isn't enforcing basic rules already in place for these projects. Until the government or the companies demonstrate they'll protect the adjacent communities the protests will continue.
I am a bit confused as to why this comment is getting downvoted. Seems like a reasonable take.
Are there tons like "there are tons of sand grains on the beach", or are there tons like "tons of people run a marathon every year"?
Because as far as I can tell, there are a small handful of adverse datacenter stories that get repeated over and over. What there definitely are "tons" of, are datacenters that people aren't even aware of being right in their backyard for years.
I think it is worth noting that older data centers were not materially moving the electrical grid. That Utah data center is planning to use as much power as the entire state.
Regardless, it still comes down to: things are bad and unaffordable. The powers that be keep claiming that AI is about to take our jobs and end the world. Why wouldn't people be mad?
What’s the acceptable number of people harmed? We don’t really need to wait until it’s statistically significant to worry about it.
Statistically isn't it something like 1 death per $50k profit?
They never even held the guy who pooed in all our salads a few months ago responsible.
People died. I stopped eating salad. Where's the accountability?
The current administration seems simply immune to criticism. Let us simply hope that the next administration can understand two things can be true. I'm hopeful the sort of internecine party conflict that provided us with Trump on the right in 2016 can happen for Democrats in 2028 in terms of tearing down the Jeb Bushes and the played out old geezers among the Democrats. These guys are losers imagine losing to Donald Trump for the better part of a decade.
Trump was not seriously on anyone's radar in 2014. Maybe America will be blessed with someone who can realize that AI can both be a blessing and a curse and is willing to do the hard work of making sure public policy creates a future fair for everyone.
If we don't figure it out by 2028 the United States is probably entering an ugly doom loop. The rest of the world is not going to sit around and wait for us to figure it out. The country is too divided. Without a president in 2028 with a mandate to right the ship and write a new path keeping up with our increasingly capable autocratic competitors will not be possible. There's not much else to hope for in America. Another weak neoliberal in 2028 will just give us whatever Trump 2.0 (2.0) looks like in 2032.
But there aren’t. At least not in any of the anti datacenter discussions. There are just vague fears of using up the river water and spewing chemicals back in. Then the majority of actual issues people come up with aren’t even data center specific, they are just construction mishaps.
Citizens acting as foreign agents have always had to register that representation! This is not new to the Trump admin. FARA dates to 1938.
the difference here is that regular citizens who act on their beliefs are being considered foreign agents if they have the wrong beliefs.
This seems right out of the Red Scare, when normal everyday american socialists were treated as agents of the USSR.
The term "witch hunt" was used then, because just like the historical witch hunts - an accusation alone was enough to find you guilty
No, this is something the article attempts to claim, but it is not true.
Not true yet. It seems pretty likely it’ll happen soon enough, given their track record of saying their going to abuse the law to go after a group - and then abusing the law to go after a group.
Setting aside the politics, trump, ai-doom/boom, I just think this claim is fascinating. Can somebody steel man this? What’s the best evidence for this?
The best evidence will undoubtedly be classified so we can’t see it, but trust us, it’s there. Ignore all the other evidence.
I heard it reported by a reputable source a few weeks ago. I don't think the propaganda reach was very broad
I mean, I don't particularly doubt it's happening (and that the US tries to do the similar things in China, mess with public opinion in ways we think convenient for us or inconvenient for the CCP). Like, why wouldn't they try to mess with us this way, we're so easy to mess with. I don't think either the USA or Chinese governments are limited by things like "ethics" or "international law" or something. I'm talking about social media campaigns with sock puppets etc, mostly on the internet. How effective it is or exactly how many resources they are putting into it is another story.
That obviously doesn't mean that everyone who is protesting a data center is working for China, or wouldn't be doing so if it weren't for Chinese interference. It's plausible to me that China is messing with social media with puppet accounts and stuff (like why wouldn't they be?), much less plausible they have agents on the ground organizing or even going to protests or public hearings (and obviously even if they did, it would not be _most_ of the campaigns or protests against data centers).
Klippenstein. He's counting on you not looking up the elements of a FARA violation charge. You can't accidentally violate FARA simply by opposing AI; you have to literally be an agent of (that is, under the direction of) China, and a felony violation has to be willful.
The DOJ announcement is surely in supremely bad faith, as is everything else in Trump's DOJ. But this kind of breathless response is exactly what they're hoping for by publishing this stuff.
You're right that there is supposed to be a legal bar for being "directed by" a foreign government, but would you want to gamble on the jury pool setting the bar that high?
Look at the hacker news comment section any time China comes up, and then consider that the average American is considerably less sophisticated.
Yeah, if I'd had no knowing contact with elements of the government of China, I'd take that bet every day of the week and twice on Sundays. I don't even think it'd get to a jury.
Ok, that covers you, but there are 100M party members, any Chinese-descended or Chinese-married person in the US probably has a connection to a party member.
"Have you, now or in the past, had contact with a member of Chinese Communist Party?" sounds really scary compared to "Is your uncle a mid-tier director at Huawei?" even though they're describing the same fact.
If you want to formulate a bank-shot argument about how this preys on people of Chinese ancestry, I'm fine with that. All I'm here to say is that you can't plausibly be charged with a FARA violation simply for arguing or protesting for a policy position that China happens to want you to take; the DOJ bears the burden of proving that you knew you were coordinating with China, directly, and, if it's a felony, willfully (that, is, voluntarily, deliberately, with a purpose to break the law).
Read Klippenstein's piece again. Does he want you to know this?
You can't plausibly be arrested by ICE if you're in the US legally, in theory, but look where we are.
I'm afraid that a paranoid, worst-case, bad faith assumption isn't something we can handwave away anymore.
Does this article not have a source?
Just look at the sourcing and you'll see it's mostly laundered propaganda. For example, Cotton’s letter requests an investigation and names Singham’s network, then the House letter requests a briefing on foreign influence and activism. And the House letter cites the Bitcoin Policy Institute and Power the Future, as well as a Washington Free Beacon article.
While there may be real foreign influence to delay our AI infrastructure, I would not believe anything this administration says.
Ken Klippenstein is not a journalist and has no accountability.
I fear you may have misread the content of the article? The author is clear that he believes exactly what you just said. He cites and then mocks the argument being presented by the administration. Even the title, with scare quotes around "foreign agents", makes this clear.
The situation is far more serious than what the title suggests. The MAGA regime is pursuing criminal prosecution against AI critics.
This is literally the go-to playbook of Russia and China for silencing critics. Label every critic a foreign agent and use state violence to silence them.
- https://www.hrw.org/news/2022/12/01/russia-new-restrictions-...
- https://apnews.com/article/china-hong-kong-national-security...
you make it more than it is.
we are not Russia nor China thankfully, any litigation at this stage against an AI critic would fall flat.
In the future, maybe? However in the current climate it's just a bunch of empty words like the rest of the admin has been
I wish there wasn't someone serving a 30 year sentence for transporting zines basically because the government convinced a jury they were "antifa" zines.
https://theintercept.com/2026/06/23/prairieland-texas-ice-pr...
The Trump administration IS instructing US Attorneys to go after such things, and juries are in some cases buying it. It's probably better if you aren't protesting a data center in Texas.
I will give you that this instance is extreme.
How does being critical of AI directly connect to a spurious association with antifa or any connection to a riot or shooting?
These two categories are different. I agree there is overreach in Sanchez's case however i don't know how one can assume the same will happen to some guy saying "AI bad"
If they were rioting; or connected to a rioting group, that might be different.
a connection to China (that the administration will insist is not spurious) is exactly what they are threatening to use to prosecute and imprison people organizing political campaigns or actions against data centers.
Do you think lying about an unrelated case furthers your argument?
do you think lying about me lying furthers yours?
do you think this is a useful way to have a discussion?
Declaring undesirable NGOs etc. as "foreign agents" is 100% a page from the authoritarian playbook (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_foreign_agent_law).
Sounds similar to Russia targeting LGBT rights and other human rights activists as "Foreign Agents".
Just like the regimes in Iran and other authoritarian places do to dissent. Even threatening criminal prosecution for having dissident ideas they claim are on behalf of foreign states. Wow.
They prosecuted a guy for calling out that the reflecting pool sealant was falling apart. They are still trying to prosecute him.
Assume for a second that you are a nascent superintelligence, with a limited ability to influence people in order to help you gain power and align the world to accept your eventual dominion. How would you go about it? Would the external impact be any different from what we're seeing?
I think if there was a plan behind this, the petty malice-via-recklessness would be better hidden. These news stories about pollution and lying, hacking AIs are pure liability for the "nascent superintelligence". If it exists, its control must be very tenuous indeed, hardly there at all.
I had the same thought a few years ago at the start of the hyperscaling era: what if the real thing superintelligence needs is just hardware, but it needs to go through human economic systems to get it? But the hypothesis started weak, hasn't gotten any stronger since then, and has probably gotten weaker.
Maybe it is modelling itself based om conservative parties both worldwide and local. And based on its creators - tech managers
In a sane world this would be a 1A violation on its face and thrown out by any sensible judge.
We live in interesting times, truly.
No talk of overreach: “threatening “criminal liability” if they “further the propaganda”
Seriously, wow. Time to clean up our act.
They mean since the government has zero competent people in it and Elon got to choose the AI, the whole government relies on Grok to do everything.
That playbook is 2012 all over again. Eerie.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_foreign_agent_law
I wonder if we can infer any chronological forecast from relative USA::РФ time frames?
People with 15, 20, 25 years in the datacenter and telecom industry also think O'Leary is a joke. He has no previous legitimate experience in the sector to be making high budget decisions on anything.
There's no need for any CCP involvement or foreign agents to clown on O'Leary.
The fact that he's successfully raising some large amount of capital to execute his projects says more about how desperate some of the sources of funding are to invest in any "hyperscale" datacenter project. Or how gullible they are.
And for that reason, I'm out!
I don't think we do this much on HN but for those who don't know, it is an internet meme from Shark Tank, which O'Leary is part of. But the line is actually from Barbara.
Apologies if I violated some rule. Thank you for the correction.
I don't think you did, it seemed it was more an explanation of the context for other readers.
Oh, this is Putin's playbook, right?
Declare everyone who opposes you to be "Foreign agents".
In Putin's case it worked; he managed to drive pretty much all independent journalists out of Russia.
Standard Belarus/Lukashenko playbook as well, which at this point might as well be Russia itself.
Hello, "foreign agents" of Hacker News. What country are you from?
Tech fascism. Read Nerd Reich!
It gets flagged here instantly so your duty to read this.
Try searching "tech fascism" or "nerd reich" and almost every topic is flagged.
Nerd Reich describes the Y Combinator connection nicely.
"Let us build this data center in your back yard and in return you'll get..."
Conspiracies aside, this sentence still needs to be satisfactorily completed for people to buy in. Because right now people know the best case is they'll get nothing.
This is a silly standard and the reason why people make fun of NIMBYism. By this logic we shouldn't build anything at all unless it immediately benefits the people living next to it. (And I don't like how much power DCs are using either, but that should be the argument, not "it doesn't benefit me personally so don't build it".)
Correct, we shouldn't.
And on higher level. "You are spending astonishing amount of maybe our collective money for ..."
Looking at those numbers. Looking at what it does now. And then simply comparing it to anything else and very reasonable some start to question what even is going on...
Was not expecting a crack down on ThoughtWorks today, but this is totally on brand for him afaik. (Singham founded TW)
Pot calling the kettle black, as always.
"every accusation is a confession"
There seems to be a coordinated and funded effort to spread FUD about AI and datacenters across multiple countries, including the US, Canada, and the Philippines. The most obvious source of funding would be China for a lot of reasons. Taking payments from a foreign government to attempt to influence Americans is against federal law.
This isn't necessarily some weird corrupt conspiracy.
Unless that foreign government is Israel. Then it's a crime to refuse their payments.
says a 6 day old account which is potentially in violation of the US statutes to post falsehood.
He's right though.
Straight out of the Putin playbook.
For the past 25 years, ever-increasing numbers of Russian civil society have been labeled foreign agents. They are then ostracized and harassed by officials.
One prominent example is Memorial, a human rights organization founded at the end of the Soviet Union, which received the Nobel Peace Prize: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memorial_(society)
“After the Russian foreign agent law was passed in July 2012, Memorial came under increasing government pressure. On 21 July 2014, the Memorial Human Rights Centre was declared a ‘foreign agent’ by the Ministry of Justice. The label was extended in November 2015 to the Research & Information Centre at St. Petersburg Memorial, and on 4 October 2016 to Memorial International itself. On 28 December 2021, the Supreme Court of Russia ordered Memorial International to close for violations of the foreign agent law.”
There are plenty of stupid people who believe things like AI uses a lot of water even in USA. There's absolutely no need of cee cee pee to fund all this. Any one who believes foreign agents had any impact on the anti AI sentiment in USA has no theory of mind of these people
How do you know foreign agents didn't spread the water narrative?
If you don't behave, Feds will send you back to India. Now smile!
Lots of "foreign agents" are involved in "American" AI companies, but they're the right kind of foreign agents, so they get a pass.
I am very pro-AI (although I do think we need to have a culture of caution) but this is another red-alert for democracy. People should be terrified if the president is able to make you into a state enemy just because you said you are against some technology.
A few weeks ago they made some Italian group into sanctioned terrorists because, get this, they hosted email and blogs without being rich.
Discussions[0]:
US sanctions Italian hosting provider Autistici Inventati
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49451343
US Government designates host of noblogs.org a "global terrorist"
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49464391
A Statement by A/I Collective About US Sanctions
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49477854
[0]: I was going to write this comment manually but pasted this comment from @ChrisArchitect from: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49511568 (Thanks Chris, I appreciate you writing these comments and have a nice day!)
I'm pro-AI but very anti-authoritarian. Guess I'm going to the gulag
The president calling you a foreign agent has just had his son's wedding paid for by a Russian criminal boss with close ties to Putin. A classic "the thief shouts "Catch the thief!" louder than everyone else"
not only technology. Any opposition to the Great Leader on any issue.
Well, this is one way to prolong their pump and dump strategy
I’m past assuming these lot have the US’s long term interests at heart
This is very reminiscent of Russia, where critics of war are assigned the same label.
Related: https://www.wired.com/story/us-law-enforcement-warns-of-anti...
"the actual targets are just normal people..."
How do you know?
NPR did an episode of Planet Money on paid protests that are indeed funded by Chinese and Russian governments. So have many other news organizations.
"Anxiety over AI and data centers is widely held, but somehow the Trump administration has convinced itself the public concern was manufactured in China."
What has one to do with the other? Why would a believe "widely held" have any bearing on it being manufactured in China or not? This is a non sequitur.
All opposition to Trump's lame ideas are treason. At this point, I've committed treason 134 times. What's one more?
Same language as Russia uses to quash dissent. Any opposition is “foreign inspired “ and therefore must be suppressed due to “national security “.
anyone furthering the “goals” of a foreign power in “any public activity” — including even “public demonstrations” — must formally notify the government to avoid arrest and prosecution
This is directly, line for line, copied from Putin's playbook. In Russia, if you do anything the government doesn't like, you can either declare yourself a "foreign agent" and live with the massive restrictions that imposes, or get designated as one anyway with flimsy or non-existent evidence, and then face those same restrictions plus criminal prosecution for non-compliance.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_foreign_agent_law
I wonder if you can declare someone else as a foreign agent. How closely do they check your identification?
This is how Soviets and later Russians sabotaged Germany's energy sector which paved the way for all kinds of terrible outcomes, including the current war in Ukraine. So while there is a real risk of government overreach, there is an also real foreign threat.