This is exactly how the DSA is supposed to work: Once a platform reaches sufficient scale and societal impact, it faces higher transparency and accountability requirements regardless of whether it’s social media, gaming, or AI. If anything, it would be more surprising if major AI platforms weren’t eventually included.

These are purely paper profits.

Unfortunately, it is highly likely to take decades before Meta loses its relevance: the network effects are enormous, and the vast majority of people over 35 will probably only leave Instagram and (from the age of 60) Facebook completely in exceptional circumstances. And I don’t even want to get started on WhatsApp…

Meta can absolutely pivot to renting compute for whatever model wins, but calling that an automatic death spiral feels premature: Companies with billions of users can survive technical setbacks for years. Betting against distribution has humbled plenty of investors before.

What strikes me as particularly risky at Meta is the sheer amount of power Zuckerberg wields: ultimately, it’s the same problem as with Musk, even though Zuck has behaved much more moderately so far.

Interesting that Microsoft is effectively running a portfolio strategy instead of betting on a single lab. Anthropic is already paying off on paper while OpenAI looks much more volatile. That alone suggests the AI race is far less settled than the headlines usually imply, even for the company funding both sides. And now the Chinese Open Weight AI models are coming onto the scene too, offering almost the same quality.

Pragmatic, but revealing. If Meta truly believed Llama would stay ahead, it would not be preparing for a future where competitors power its products. It also makes business sense for Meta because it already rents out compute capacity instead of using it for its own models: supporting multiple leading models could attract more customers to its infrastructure.

That’s a more realistic ask than hoping everyone slows down: If alignment methods can be made accessible to engineers without deep math, more people can stress test, critique and improve them. Knowledge spreads far more easily than voluntary restraint, especially when geopolitical incentives point the other way.

Interestingly, China doesn’t need this computing power, yet Kimi has now unveiled a competitive model all the same. I wonder how this will pan out?

So have they been getting better and better?

How much more effective have the large models become for you over the last three years? Do you think development might come to a halt in China, for example, if US providers were indeed to stop developing or releasing them?

Absolutely. At the very least, everything of relevance, that is, anything that has been catalogued in libraries, for example, should be almost entirely digitised. We may well find out soon whether AI companies can still uncover anything of relevance amongst the other books, i.e. those that have not been widely published or catalogued. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_scanning

True. I suppose I’m being a bit too hopeful there.

To be honest, what surprises me most of all is that, after three decades of intensive digitisation of analogue media, there are still purely analogue copies in existence at all!? In that respect, I see this more as a benefit than a threat, as some people here are suggesting.

Hehe… 🤣

Exactly. In my view, this serves no other purpose than to avoid having to engage with an unpopular opinion. It’s a cheap way of dressing up a personal attack as a supposed argument.

Unfortunately, even with very long texts, this is no longer reliably possible, which is why some universities have recently stopped using such tests.

Reposted in the correct thread…

It’s funny that you still believe some tool could tell, with such short texts, whether they were written by an AI or a human. (And unfortunately, even with very long texts, this is no longer reliably possible, which is why some universities have recently stopped using such tests.)

It’s not about who deserves to win, it’s about incentives. If one side unilaterally slows development while others don’t, the likely outcome is a shift in technological leadership, not a slower pace overall. Whether that’s the US, China, or anyone else is a separate political question from whether voluntary restraint is an effective strategy.

»Slow down AI« sounds noble until you ask who actually slows down: Democracies and companies that comply simply hand the advantage to rivals that don’t. History suggests voluntary technological restraint rarely wins against geopolitical competition. The race doesn’t stop: it just changes leaders.