Daron Acemoglu: prediction

Transcript context

…Why isn’t that 95 percent, say? Open source is there. It’s quite cheap, especially with the yanking of Fable 5. Everyone’s so obsessed now with diversifying their reliance. The knowledge is centralized in the sense everyone wants to draw on all the knowledge, but that’s hardly a bad thing. It’s like having more data in your model. It’s mostly a good thing. Again, I think that’s definitely a possible path, but all of the winner-take-all dynamics, both between companies and between China and US, is going in the opposite direction. If you’re right, then China and US should collaborate on everything because there is no winner-take-all dynamics. You should take up that to the Trump administration. There shouldn’t be much of a competition between OpenAI and Anthropic because neither of them are going to dominate the market. If you look at the valuations or the investments of these companies, I think there is a significant winner-take-all. That’s why I’m undecided. But it’s a very good question that you’re posing here. If I take a step back, and this relates to both Hayek and to some of the themes that I try to develop in What Happened to Liberal Democracy?, I believe that liberalism and the kinds of society that we want to build that supports freedom does need decentralization. Excessive centralization of many sorts is inimical to that agenda. I worry that the current AI approach has a centralizing element. Perhaps that’s excessive worry that market dynamics and other aspects of AI is going to take care of it, but I still worry about that. I think true decentralization would be much better served with more domain-specific models of AI and other approaches that really use high-quality data for specific things, which I think is the more promising thing. By the way, there’s more of that in China than in the US. That’s an interesting observation. You’ve called repeatedly for what you call pro-worker AI. Just specifically, what does that mean in terms of regulation? Because current AI, by definition, the knowledge or the abilities are fairly general, but they’re implemented in a decentralized fashion. Mercatus has accounts. We use AI. Companies use AI on their own. Is the regulator supposed to look at what Stripe, Mercatus, all these different institutions are doing with their AIs, and ask if it helps the workers and approve it or not? What does that regulation look like for you?…

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