Brad Carson: evaluation

Transcript context

…captured regulation, you know, to their advantage and to the detriment of of the rest of us. You know, the people who are not not the biggest players. In fact, 1 of my favorite, sci fi shows, even though it only lived for for 1 year is Firefly. And then there has this excellent quote where Shepard Book says, you know, a government is just a body of people, usually, notably, ungoverned. It is a daunting problem, but I think there are examples in government that have been less captured by the industry, and those can prove some kind of paradigm for us as well. I think having Congress have strong oversight of it, having a lot of democratic accountability. And, you know, 1 of the things we advocate for are ways that actually minimize the government while ensuring we have proper kind of public oversight. So, for example, we've been strong advocates for mandatory testing and evaluation of frontier models. It doesn't have to be done by a bureaucracy in the Department of Commerce or Department of Energy. There's lot of interesting ideas about independent verification organizations, you know, kind of the model we use in public company accounting. But that's all done by the private sector, but it's also overseen by the SEC to make sure that it's not fraudulent and you don't have an Enron, you know, Arthur Andersen situation. And I know I don't think public company accounting is seen as a captured industry, but it provides a meaningful service to the capital markets. So I think there are models like that. And I do think the problem I have often, who advocate for regulatory capture, Dean Ball and I will go back and forth on this question, is like, it's searching for a pea under a 100 mattresses. It's never falsifiable. You say, well, it's regulatory capture. Well, you know, right now, we don't have any regulations. And my view is that groups like a 16 z or people in Silicon Valley have largely captured the process because they work very informally through networks of political influence. That it's really about what the alternatives are going to be. Having an agency subject to regulatory capture, yes, is at least more accountable than the kind of informal, very moneyed networks that are controlling AI policy as we sit here in 2026. We always have to look at politics about the alternative. Like, imagine the SEC. So is the SEC captured? Well, I'm sure the industry has a lot of influence over the SEC, both informally and formally. Would we be a better world without the SEC because it's been captured? So I think if the choice is kind of nihilism versus an agency that is subject to regulatory capture, that you have to put, you know, prophylactics in to ensure that doesn't happen, it still strikes me that's a better world. Even if it's not a perfect world. And when people who usually argue for the regulatory capture side, like I see Andreessen tweet this out a lot, you know, they propose kind of a nihilistic regime that does privilege like a very few people who have kind of the informal ability to shape government policy largely because of their contributions or their public influence in some way. So I think having public agencies for all of their problems, it actually is a better system. Anthropic made a bunch of changes to kind of Claude's behavior in terms of tokens and allocation and what models were running and things. And it really frustrated a lot of the people in our in our Discord server, in machinelearningstreet.discord. They felt like, hey, we were paying for something and then it just was radically changed, you know, overnight. And and yet there's there's no clarity around what were we paying for before and what are we paying for now. And it's almost just at the whims of of the service companies. Right? There's just no transparency to it. Yeah. I mean, you could think of that as consumer protection,…

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