anthropoic is the one calling for it, they are deep in the surveillance for trump, and other countries, they want to get ahead of that. they dont want cheaper AI companies to overtake them thats the real reason, and of course the bubble is going to burst eventually. they want government to buy htier "AI usage for surveillance before it gets popped"

I very openly believe and evangelize that OpenAI prepping to go public is what triggered the wave of calls to pause R&D. They are in a hole so big that they'll take a 1/3rd of the economy with them when they go belly up. The other big tech firms are probably all in the same boat. However, none of them can afford the public perception of being the first to flinch and cut back on AI research. So, they are angling for the government to step in and force everyone to cut their R&D budget all at the same time, so no one has to save face.

My theory at the moment is that they want to keep the money rolling in without making any progress. They want AI to be seen as this uncontrollable and forever growing industry without ever showing their proof.

Elron Musk tried to get the government to restrict AI development a year or two ago also. His motivation seemed to be to give his stupid ai company time to catch up with OpenAI.

LLM technology has hit a logarithmic wall, and only marginally improves from more compute and bigger training sets. Such improvement as we see currently is from improved harness / framework, which can only go so far. It's not getting to self improvement or AGI, and certainly not getting to wholesale replacement of (non bullshit) jobs, which is what they bet the farm on. If they get the pause this will be less egregiously obvious and they'll have a chance to IPO and raid everyone's retirement funds. Otherwise, they'll crash and burn before IPO (SpaceX had actually valuable tech and still got dragged down by xAI and X) likely taking out Oracle and Softbank along with them (sob :). Either way China will be supplying the majority of the world market for LLMs much cheaper and on renewables in the next year or two. Soon after it'll be a mostly local technology after all the moat building market cornering bullshit with (V)RAM goes away.

Of course what you say must surely be true. The entire industry is vaporware.

This is an interesting thing because a lot of people, even people somewhat educated on the issue, still can't see that they've been played. In reality, we get bait and switch scams constantly from these companies. They promise massive amounts of self-driving cars by 3 years ago and those don't turn up. They promise AI that's going to be self-learning by last year but it didn't happen. Terminator 2 was talking about things that would have happened 10 years ago. Heck, generative AI can't even write good sports columns for online newspapers... But if we point out all of these failures, all of these promises that weren't kept, the salesman will point to new statistical methods. That pivot, from the promises that they will never keep, to traditional improvements in computer science, that of course keep on happening, that's the scam.

But if you can't see it, then you'll keep falling for it, and the worst part is that even if you can see it, your investment holdings are probably tied up in companies that have their money tied up in AI. So you're still f***** when the bubble bursts.

They're trying to build up the barrier to entry so that other competetors aren't able to enter the space and take their market share. They're just cornering the market

If it is to do with ai, it is dodgy.

But why would AI companies bother with that?

I think it's a PR move to start selling security plans along with their AI, just like antivirus subscriptions back in the day

... Preaching to the choir

Here is a pretty good rundown on the incident that started this AI apocalypse PR push and why:

https://youtu.be/luXnftoxCaM

Or if you don't mind it from a semi-pro AI source: https://youtu.be/kHW3Y0gObU8