Sam Altman ❤️s a Regulatory Moat
Open AI's anti-open-AI CEO gives the performance of a lifetime in front of Congress to score what every tech titan who's ever secured a crushing dominant market position dreams of: regulatory moat.
One thing I do quite enjoy about Reddit is their bullshit detection ratio.
While legacy news dutifully runs headline after headline that frames the 38-year-old CEO of OpenAI as nothing short of Mother Teresa, if she too were a Stanford comp-sci dropout (“Sam Altman has an idea for regulating AI,” “CEO of OpenAI calls for US to regulate artificial intelligence,” “OpenAI’s Sam Altman tells senators: regulate us”), Reddit is having none of it.
Nor should they.
We’ve been through this before. Facebook. Google. Apple. Tesla. Microsoft. Paypal. Snap. Tech giants using government regulation (and plenty of lobbyists) to ensure a “regulatory moat,” that is encouraging and in effect using the government to place suffocating regulations on the industry they are currently dominating that will in effect crush smaller and open-source competitors from being able to adhere to the increasing sprawl of regulation.
You know how you can tell Sam Altman is being insincere?
He never once asked for these regulations when his company was working on earlier AI models. Nor does he have any intent whatsoever to shut down his own wildly viral, wildly profitable company OpenAI and its hit product ChatGPT while all that regulation gets worked out.
On the contrary—Altman instead just released a blockbuster new set of features that users have been salivating with desire over for months now.
So…what the hell is really happening?