Ghouls' Night Out

4. One probable outcome of an open-weight-model-dominant world is full AI communism, which is precisely what China proposes: rather than a market product, AI is a "public good" which will ultimately be provided by the state as a kind of "digital public infrastructure." This future strikes me as a dystopian hellscape, but I've never met an open-weight models advocate who doesn't ultimately concede this is where things end. You'd be surprised how many 'accelerationists' lobbied me, while I was in government, to support an eleven or twelve-figure federally funded data center so that startups could train models at a subsidy and then give them away for free. There was no other way for AI to progress, they said. Perhaps this is the logical end state of things. Nonetheless, I find myself surprised to see supposed accelerationists excited about such an outcome. I think many of them just don't know what they're doing. Many accelerationists do not view the creation and serving of frontier models as a legitimate business.

5. I would guess that the Trump Administration will at some point realize that their best strategy here would be to create large amounts of regulatory risk around the use of open-weight Chinese models. You don't need to "ban open source" (one of the dumber motifs of AI policy discussion). You just need to direct every agency to issue soft law that creates FUD. "A Federal Reserve Advisory Bulletin found that there may be backdoors in Chinese AI models." It needn't be that well justified. You just create enough regulatory risk that every regulated enterprise backs off. You probably don't want to create so much regulatory risk that you scare off the hyperscalers from serving Chinese models; this will just drive startups to sketchier providers. There's a happy middle ground here. I'd assume they will do some version of this.

It takes time to set up. But it's super achievable and you can definitely start with like. Basic mimicry and hypnosis to get your feet wet. Later you start discussing your every boundary and value, nothing kept sacred, full agreement almost always the goal. This isn't exactly SSC but like. Per that other post neither is heavy obedience training. I think that's actually the hard part - society says it's fucked up to spend all your time devoted to someone, and a lot of people don't know how to reconcile wanting that without painting the person they're devoted to as evil and saying it's ok because it's consensual and the fact that it's evil is hot. You do not have to think this is evil. You can just staple your identity and sense of reality to someone and have them do the same back and watch your life get weirder. Make strange paracosms together. Lose track of who did what and whose tongue is whose. Join me in knowing the feeling of "I would answer that but I store that information in my other body."