Elon Musk Tried to Block Sam Altman’s Big AI Deal in the Middle East \ stacker news ~Politics_And

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Musk warned that Trump wouldn’t bless OpenAI data-center project unless his xAI company was added

After Musk’s complaints, Trump and U.S. officials reviewed the deal terms and decided to move forward. The White House officials said Musk didn’t want a deal that seemed to benefit Altman. Aides discussed how to best calm Musk down, one of the officials said, because Trump and David Sacks, the president’s AI and crypto adviser, wanted to announce the deal before the end of the president’s trip to the Middle East.

The question I think of when I read stuff like this is why does the President or government have ANY say in whether a company does business in another country. The articles about this type of thing never seem to ask this question. They focus on someone is using their political influence to block or hinder competitors. To me this is obvious and should be expected if you centralize power in the state. Those that hate this sort of permission requirement might ignore the politics for a while but they do so to their demise. Those that have no moral problem with it will just do it to everyone else. This happened with Microsoft back in the day. Its happening with the bitcoin ecosystem now. Rent seekers are the problem. Not those paying them off.

There's a VERY common dumb take that people put forward. The take is that Trump and Musk are corrupt and we must vote for someone to replace Trump. This ignores that what they are doing while it may be slightly worse (I kinda doubt this btw) than the norm is basically how things have worked with the relationship of private companies and the state for a very long time. Remember the campaign finance reform movement? Yeah, that really went somewhere. So what is the solution?

I guess we really just need a John Galt type approach to break the system. But the types that would be the John Galt are simply trying to use the system to their advantage or best case in a defensive way. I can't say that I blame them.

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165 sats \ 6 replies \ @optimism 29 May

I think the worst case (but potentially realistic) I've seen expressed for AI right now was in Harari's "21 lessons for the 21st century" that basically says AI will make human labor obsolete to a very large extent because we're being beaten on both manual and cognitive labor now. It also - to my memory - predicts that there will be irrelevant plebs and gazillionaires. I think that it's amazing that this was written in 2018 and that we can recognize some of the patterns described play out in real time.

Unless you are Sam A or Elon behind your SN nym, you may need to harness your own AI tech, so that you don't become irrelevant. In the past I've personally always prided myself in relentless focus and productivity but if I want to keep up, I'm going to need help now. I won't be able to challenge companies that move 10000x faster than me using open source tools. But if I can combine a 100x speedup on my end with the existing relentlessness, I may be able to still beat them sometimes.

I had an interesting conversation over dinner last night related to this: how can we provide contra power to us, the plebs. We don't need a data center full of GPUs each: a Mac mini or equivalent should be plenty. And for specific tasks we can instruct / retrain smaller but modern models that may run on inference tuned hardware - hopefully devices like iMX-8 get better and cheaper rapidly. I'm considering setting something up to test this. Probably in software development first, because low hanging fruit, like re-train an AI on a single repo and see what can be done.

Bottom line, if that worst case scenario plays out, I think that the problem isn't politics in general, or any figurehead. Soon no one will care about a bunch of unemployed people. The real issue is closed source AIs. Luckily we have Zuck (lol) and technically Google too (double lol) disrupting all the other overlords with opened up models we can sovereignly run. I hope that there will be many more open source models released; then each of us has a shot at remaining relevant.

200 sats \ 5 replies \ @kepford OP 29 May

Do you feel like you have a good grasp on how LLM's work? If not I'd highly recommend you check out this video. Its not magic and I think its not going to happen as quickly as many think but yes plenty of jobs will be obsoleted. This has happened in the past and the transition periods are rough.

I agree with you about open source software (AI included). I actually think the Chinese are probably gonna break the closed source stuff wide open. We started to see this with DeepSeek. Not for any morally good reason but because they do not believe in IP. I don't either.

Widespread unemployment leads to increased crime and violence. Its a pretty bleak future if that happens. That said, I don't think advanced tech that obsoletes jobs is a bad thing in principle. I believe humans will find things to do as we have in the past.

Personally I have been getting my head around LLMs for a while now and the more I learn the less magical they seem. The biggest question I have for them now is how soon can they actually become sustainable. They are losing money like crazy currently and if the fiat money / debt / venture capital dries up we have another dot.com level crash on our hands. That would be my bet to happen before there is any AI revolution that leads to widespread job loses.

LLMs have improved a lot since I first tried them out but they still have a long way to go. You need experts that actually know things because they just make stuff up. They are remarkably good at guessing and get things correct a lot but they can't be trusted. The thing is, neither can humans. This is why you need to have multiple humans to really do work that is bullet proof.

I'll end with this. Be proactive but don't take the black pill. Its seductive as it allows one to just pretend that you don't have agency and you can just be lazy because working doesn't matter. Work still matters and we have so much more control over our destiny than we realize.

59 sats \ 4 replies \ @optimism 29 May

Disclaimer: I don't think that the "21 lessons" outcome is the most likely, it's just the most reasonable dystopia I've come across, so I'm building this narrative on the off-chance that it comes true.

Do you feel like you have a good grasp on how LLM's work?

Pretty much. The chatbots are basically forward text prediction as once upon a time invented for google's search autocomplete. You can see it happen when you query a more ancient version that isn't consumer-tuned greatly, like the original llama, or one of Google's -it versions of Gemma. Most of the stuff that brings these "great leaps" in chatbot experience is people writing system prompts and filters. Or did you think Google did a whole training from scratch to stop search assistant from literally quoting reddit trolling? They just tuned some weights, and if you look at the recent claude system prompt (#990468) you see that this is still where the "magic" lives: text instruct, lol.

Widespread unemployment leads to increased crime and violence. Its a pretty bleak future if that happens.

Which is what - if I remember correctly - moved Elon before he was flirting with Trump to actually never shut up about Bernie-style UBI as a solution in case AI had a real breakthrough. But I don't really think that will work past the initial phase, even though that may happen. "Tax the AI, they took our jobs". They should get to their Elysium before the guns come out - SpaceX better hurry them ups.

Personally I have been getting my head around LLMs for a while now and the more I learn the less magical they seem.

There's no magic, just emulation. But try running a small reasoning model like qwen3:8b or, if your laptop is more modern than mine, :32b locally and see how rapidly the emulation has evolved post-deepseek v3. It may still loop or get stuck on saying what relates to technically nothing with the small models sometimes, but this is like a 10x vs llama2, which is a year old.

They are losing money like crazy currently and if the fiat money / debt / venture capital dries up we have another dot com level crash on our hands.

Yes. This used to worry me, but not anymore. Their loss is our gain at this point because closed platforms like OpenAI are the ultimate data-hoarding enemy: they ingest tons of society's data without compensation but in return don't share back. So yeah, I'd recommend anyone to be careful when buying more of those nvidia stonks because some of this dystopian outcome is priced in and there's a good chance that it won't materialize.

LLMs have improved a lot since I first tried them out but they still have a long way to go.

Did you try pipelines, either between generic LLMs, retrained "experts", or even with NLP like spaCy? My "hobby" is making AI reason with AI and see who convinces who - I'll publish a demo today or tomorrow.

The LLMs will never be sentient though; they don't have feelings, no inner drive, no morality. The dystopia isn't SkyNet, it's me using one of these massive datacenters and paying Sam my seed money for the AI credz for my next startup, instead of paying 10 people salary. Because that's me making Sam richer and society as a whole poorer.

Be proactive but don't take the black pill.

Agreed. The idea is about empowering people to harness the 100x, and not sit and wait for UBI because that isn't going to end well. I'm pro-work: work smarter and harder, and the world will be yours. The challenge is how do we enable that without creating a dystopia, and I feel that the answer sits with accessibility of the same tools that may cause the imbalance. I don't mind being an enablement-commie; it beats UBI.

100 sats \ 3 replies \ @kepford OP 29 May

Did you try pipelines, either between generic LLMs, retrained "experts", or even with NLP like spaCy? My "hobby" is making AI reason with AI and see who convinces who - I'll publish a demo today or tomorrow.

I haven't.

I think we are in very tight alignment. I don't think machines can be sentient, at least I've seen zero evidence that this is possible. What seems to be the case when people disagree on this is their definitions. People are the threat as you say. Same is true of most tech.

I'm a firm believer in history being a great tool to understand what will happen in the future. It does repeat but it rhymes.

The other thing that you likely get but I find a ton of people do not seem to get is this. Sam Altman and those like him are incentivized to over sell their stuff. He's a pitchman. That doesn't mean everything he says is a lie but most people that fear AI seem to just take this for granted.

46 sats \ 2 replies \ @optimism 29 May

Yes we're aligned, I 100% agree on all points you make here.

The scary-ish part? I think that after a year or so of intense lmao at people trying to do pull requests with AI-coded crap, I may be giving the ACK on the first AI-written contribution ever to one of the o/s repos I maintain today (not written by me, I'm just reviewing it, and testing it 20x to make absolutely sure.) The caveat is that the repo in question is a python module and although it could use a follow-up pull req to do a little more cleanup, the job was done, because it was a small change. Wouldn't fly on c++ or even golang, but for python, it seems LLM starts to be tuned enough to the point it can actually deliver really small things (that would have taken me an hour to fix manually or so, but still)

0 sats \ 1 reply \ @kepford OP 29 May

This is my experience as well.

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