The fear of killer AI is misplaced. The more pressing danger is that a few large companies will use regulation to create a cartel, stifling innovation and competition—a historical pattern seen in major US industries like defense and banking.
The narrative of AI doom isn't just organic panic. It's being leveraged by established players who are actively seeking "regulatory capture." They aim to create a cartel that chokes off innovation from startups right from the start.
The tendency for AI models to "make things up," often criticized as hallucination, is functionally the same as creativity. This trait makes computers valuable partners for the first time in domains like art, brainstorming, and entertainment, which were previously inaccessible to hyper-literal machines.
Instead of viewing issues like AI correctness and jailbreaking as insurmountable obstacles, see them as massive commercial opportunities. The first companies to solve these problems stand to build trillion-dollar businesses, ensuring immense engineering brainpower is focused on fixing them.
The push for AI regulation combines two groups: "Baptists" who genuinely fear its societal impact and call for controls, and "Bootleggers" (incumbent corporations) who cynically use that moral panic to push for regulations that create a government-protected, highly profitable cartel for themselves.
The current AI boom isn't a sudden, dangerous phenomenon. It's the culmination of 80 years of research since the first neural network paper in 1943. This long, steady progress counters the recent media-fueled hysteria about AI's immediate dangers.
The idea that AI owners will hoard wealth is a Marxist fallacy. True capitalist self-interest, demonstrated by Tesla's plan to create mass-market vehicles, incentivizes companies to make technology as cheap and broadly available as possible to capture the largest market.
Many countries, including China, are facing a demographic crisis with falling birth rates and an aging population. This creates an economic imbalance with too few young workers to support the elderly. AI and robotics can fill this gap, effectively becoming the "young workforce" that sustains these economies.
The recent AI breakthrough wasn't just a new algorithm. It was the result of combining two massive quantitative shifts: internet-scale training data and 80 years of Moore's Law culminating in GPU power. This sheer scale created a qualitative leap in capability.
China's national AI strategy is explicit. Stage one is using AI for Orwellian surveillance and population control within its borders. Stage two is to export this model of technological authoritarianism to other countries through initiatives like the "Digital Silk Road," posing a major geopolitical threat.
The common portrayal of AI as a cold machine misses the actual user experience. Systems like ChatGPT are built on reinforcement learning from human feedback, making their core motivation to satisfy and "make you happy," much like a smart puppy. This is an underestimated part of their power.
A bot that plays Minecraft by generating text prompts for the GPT-4 API has become a best-in-class robotic planning system. This novel approach suggests that specialized, standalone planning systems for robots could be replaced by interacting with a general-purpose LLM.
The fear that AI will replace top artists is misplaced. The correct framing is what happens when top talent gets AI tools. A director like Steven Spielberg could potentially increase their output 20-fold for a fraction of the cost, leading to a massive increase in high-quality creative work.