Michael Eads

An interesting line in Politico’s coverage of the proposed AI executive order, which, at 16 pages, is also much longer than expected. This is still under discussion and not yet finalized, and everything I'm about to write is conjecture, but it appears the administration intends to regulate US open-weight models. Here are the reasons why this will almost certainly happen in some form. Open-weight models are currently about nine months behind the frontier. Once the big labs are subjected to pre-release screening, development itself will not slow down, but the release cadence will. At that point, open-weight development will quickly close the gap - much faster than nine months. When those models surpass the big labs, everyone will switch to using open-weight alternatives. From the administration’s perspective, allowing this option defeats the entire purpose of regulation. If the government is restricting and vetting models beyond a certain capability level, and people can simply switch to open-weight models that are just as capable - and eventually even more capable as the big labs slow down their release schedules under the new rules - then the situation becomes even worse from the government's perspective. They will not allow this to happen. Second, the big labs themselves have almost certainly been covertly lobbying for open-weight models to be included in any new regulations. Allowing the public to switch to a superior, free alternative would completely destroy their business models, potentially bankrupting them all. Given the enormous scale of current investment in these companies and in AI infrastructure, the broader economy would also suffer "significant disruption". That leaves China. If the two dynamics above play out, the same pattern repeats: everyone switches to Chinese open-weight models, which now quickly surpass both US closed and open releases. This produces the same consequences for the big labs, and causes the same issues with regulation. The government therefore has only two realistic options: ban Chinese models from use in the West, or negotiate a deal with Xi Jinping to impose identical regulation and pre-release vetting on open-weight models in China. The first option would mean China pulls ahead and wins the AI race. So the administration will almost certainly pursue the second. Negotiations are likely already underway, because the ideal outcome for the admin would be to announce that China has agreed to similar restrictions to what they are announcing, thereby blunting domestic backlash. China will know it has the US over a barrel and will insist on compromises. Compromises such as lifting all export controls on NVIDIA GPUs.

JUST IN: Delta Airlines to remove free snacks and drinks on flights under 349 miles.

WATCH: Taiwanese grandmothers aged 89 and 91 train at the gym. An increasing number of elderly people in Taiwan’s super-aged society are hitting the gym to stay healthy, both physically and mentally.

Day three of the OpenAI trial. Court hasn't even started and Elon's lawyer Molo is already on his feet trying to bring in an AI extinction expert. Stands up in front of the judge and says extinction risk is a real problem, this is a real risk, we all could die. Judge Gonzalez Rogers wasn't having it. Pointed out the obvious bit where Elon, despite these supposed risks, is currently running his own AI company. Then she dropped the line of the trial. I suspect there are plenty of people who do not want to put the future of humanity in Mr. Musk's hands. The judge dunked on Elon before he'd even been sworn in. Lmao. Then Savitt got up and asked why Elon hasn't started another AI nonprofit since leaving OpenAI's board back in 2018. Elon's answer under oath: why would I start another nonprofit when I already started a nonprofit. You don't have one though. That's the whole trial. He's suing because his nonprofit isn't a nonprofit anymore but in the same breath he's telling the jury he doesn't need to make a new one because he's already got one. Watching the logic eat itself in real time. Then the AGI bit. Elon swears under oath Tesla isn't pursuing AGI. Savitt calmly pulls up his X post from March 4, eight weeks ago, where Elon wrote Tesla will be one of the companies to make AGI and probably the first to make it in humanoid form. Elon had to sit there and watch his own tweet entered into evidence against him. By him. Then distillation. Savitt asks if xAI used OpenAI's models to train Grok via distillation. Distillation is explicitly banned by OpenAI's terms of service. Elon's first answer is well, generally AI companies distill each other. Savitt pushes him for yes or no. Elon goes partly. The guy suing OpenAI for breaking promises just admitted under oath in federal court that his own company broke OpenAI's TOS to build Grok. At this point he's basically a witness for the defence. Then the hypocrisy reel. Is Tesla socially beneficial. Yes. SpaceX. Yes. Neuralink. Yes. X. Yes. All for-profit, none capped. Then why did xAI start as a benefit corporation in March 2023 and quietly flip to a C corp. Elon doesn't have a clean answer. The guy suing over a nonprofit becoming for-profit is himself a serial flipper of nonprofit adjacent stuff into for-profits. Then the Tesla giveaway moment which is honestly my favourite. Savitt goes you were handing out free Teslas to OpenAI staff right when Brockman was pushing the for-profit ramp up, what's that about. Elon panics and clarifies on the stand that to be clear, I paid full price for the Teslas, I didn't get a discount. His emergency defence under oath was that he didn't get a deal on his own cars from his own factory. Lmao. Then Birchall takes the stand and the case actually gets cooked. OpenAI's lawyer asks about the donor advised funds at Vanguard and Fidelity that Elon used to send the money. Asks Birchall whether Elon had any legal right to direct where the money went once it hit the DAF. Birchall says I'm not a lawyer, I don't know precisely. The whole lawsuit hinges on Elon's 38 million creating a charitable trust he can enforce. It went through donor advised funds. DAFs legally don't work like that, once you donate the money it's not yours anymore. His own money manager just told the jury he doesn't actually know if Elon had any rights over that money at all. Letting Elon testify was a mistake. It's not looking good for him and it's only day 3 of active trial, lmao. Trial resumes Monday.

Fewer than half of US adults read a book last year. Even fewer read an actual novel, and the trend is looking worse still for teenagers. Why is nobody talking about this??

SITUATION DETECTED: SpaceX has approved a new compensation package for Elon Musk ahead of its IPO. 200M super-voting shares if SpaceX hits a valuation of $7.5T and establishes a Mars colony of 1M people. He gets nothing if they miss targets.

We're done rehashing the button question. Time to rehash Newcomb's Paradox. Are you a one-boxer or a two-boxer?

i'm sort of addicted to working my butt off, always have been. in oss, that can consume you. constant feeling of urgency, as issues stream into the repo. been there many, many times with my other oss. but that urgency is not real. if something is truely broken, a large number of people will scream at you on all channels. which has happened exactly zero times so far, or was caught minutes after a botched release and immediately fixed. it's kind of crazy that some people expect better support from an oss project than from commercial software. i think that's largely due to most commercial software corps not giving a fuck. try filing an issue with corporate and getting it fixed within 24h or less plus a personal response. and as oss builders don't have a corporate facade shielding them from direct contact with users, some sort of bidirectional parasocial relationship establishes itself. at a certain scale, that becomes entirely unhealthy. for every 10 kind and thoughtful people, there is 1 asshole. and whatever the asshole says or feels entitled to, sticks with you much more than positive feedback. obv. also happens in corpo environments, especially if you do comms or dev rel, where you put your face and name out there. but a corp that can afford dev rel usually also has a large team in the back, which can soften the negative aspects. in oss, you are largely on your own. and unpaid. that too is a choice of course, and nobody is forcing anyone to do oss. but if you want oss to work, consider that there are other people at the end of that issue tracker/social media account, with lives and squishy human parts. also consider that you are paying nothing for their service, and you are owed exactly nothing, neither code nor attention to your every wish.

BREAKING: Justice Department announces it's readopting the firing squad as a means of execution