Lawsuit says Anthropic, OpenAI and others made illegal agreement on AI slowdown

49 pointsposted 11 hours ago
by embedding-shape
(apnews.com)

18 Comments

mittensc

9 hours ago

I'm always curious why.

"we're going to slow down AI" - why?

"we care about the masses and ..." - why? why now? what changed?

I'm a bit afraid that the actual reasons are economic, they may be realizing the hole they've dug themselves in with their massive investments with a recession that seems to be brought on by their tech....

jondea

9 hours ago

To be fair, all of these 4 figures have warned of the danger of AI since before most people thought GPT3 level intelligence was possible.

I can believe they have economic incentives too. Although, if they do succeed in regulating themselves, won't that do more damage to their aggressive funding requirements? It will guarantee the delay (and possible banning) of the promised AGI that justifies the valuations.

mittensc

9 hours ago

> Although, if they do succeed in regulating themselves, won't that do more damage to their aggressive funding requirements? It will guarantee the delay (and possible banning) of the promised AGI that justifies the valuations.

If their statement is to be believed and they truly slow down, that means they are afraid of something. Otherwise some of them would just betray the rest.

If that is the case, then... why? what are they afraid of?

I would wager that failure, having their companies go bankrupt might be it.

How that would happen, I have no clue... I would assume interest rates raised because we're out of options dealing with inflation would hit their ability to raise money and once that happens they're in trouble...

drodgers

7 hours ago

> what are they afraid of?

That AI will disempower humans.

RomanKornev

7 hours ago

They are banking on spinning their flywheel internally for as long as possible to build the next gen of models without worrying about distillation attacks.

That is assuming opensource models won't catch up to them in the mean time.

CoolestBeans

4 hours ago

No matter how you feel about the situation, the law is pretty clear that colluding to limit R&D with your competitors is anticompetitive. The fact that these CEOs have called for this in public is pure arrogance enabled by horrific legal controls within the companies (OpenAI's blog post about the Apple lawsuit points to this too) or they're so confident about the degree of corruption in America they feel they can act with impunity. Either way we desperately need the rule of law to do its job and deter these antisocial behaviors.

oli5679

11 hours ago

I wonder if you could pursue an antitrust cases in eu against Claude code refusing to use fable to work on some deep learning problems and downgrading to an inferior model.

Would this ever be viewed as an abuse of dominant market position, aiming to disadvantage potential entrants.

cromka

11 hours ago

I don't think they have a dominant position. Besides that works only if you are venturing into another field while you're dominant in another.

cobolcomesback

11 hours ago

Ah, I see we’ve reached the point of “Don’t Look Up” where members of the public are actively mad that they’re being warned of the incoming meteor.

ArcHound

9 hours ago

No, the public is mad that some lads are constructing something they claim is a meteor and aiming it at earth.

AI progress is not a force of nature, there are concrete actors pushing it forward at great costs.

bulletsvshumans

7 hours ago

There’s game theoretical reasons why a single actor can’t stop it in isolation. To avoid it they need to coordinate, which is more or less what they are proposing.

anonymars

3 hours ago

This is some truly farcical shit:

> The plaintiffs don’t object to the companies individually deciding to slow their own progress in favor of safety. They instead argue in the complaint that antitrust laws forbid them from taking the “shortcut” of agreeing to “substitute collective restraint for individual accountability.” A competitive market allows for responsibility and genuine progress, the lawsuit argues.

> “AI will quickly spin out of human control and could kill us all if we allow AI safety and protocol ... to be controlled by private self-serving agreements between the world’s most powerful ‘for profit’ technology companies,” said Nick Rowley, the lead attorney for the plaintiffs.

--

I wish I had something more insightful to add, but I'm dumbstruck. May the holy market save us all (in the name of the dollar, the growth rate, and Jerome Powell, amen)

bvcp

9 hours ago

if the next decade plays out and these claims of world ending ai, given that there are many actors on this space who wont slow down or align their ai, doesnt actually eventuate will you feel kind of silly that you bought into this mass hysteria?

jondea

9 hours ago

Surely there are enough experts that think there's a risk that at least considering corrective action will not retrospectively look silly? (Except perhaps with hindsight bias.)

They may well be wrong, but I'm not sure you can dismiss them so easily.

And the fact it is a prisoner dilemma problem doesn't mean it's unsolvable, sure it makes it hard, but we have made _some_ progress on climate change and that's a prisoner dilemma problem.

DonsDiscountGas

9 hours ago

Indeed, just like those idiots who bought into ozone hole, Y2K, and climate change. People have always said we had problems but somehow humanity is still alive, therefore those problems must have been fake (/s obviously).

falaki

4 hours ago

I cannot wait to have Astra analyze the discovery documents for this lawsuit.