For the life of me I will never understand how “oriental” became an offensive term. It literally just means ‘eastern’ in the same way that “occidental” literally just means ‘western’. I’m genuinely convinced that the people who find the term offensive are simply illiterate and have never read a damn thing in their lives more complex than a tumblr post.

Anyone serious about their data will run their own (or open source) models on their own hardware. Otherwise, too much risk that your proprietary info makes it into "training data" for everyone else. Plus the risk that some providers' model doesn't want to talk to you about your own data because it crosses some arbitrary line.

Always found the best approach is just approach the businesses even if you have zero experience in the industry - hey I'm doing some research, let me buy you lunch. Then just be quiet and nod along as they spend an hour ranting about every problem and annoyance they have.

I think a lot of people also get caught up in looking at people like you doing what you do and think that their only path forward is the same kind of 'sexy' projects that get 50k users overnight (without realising it took a decade of grinding to get there). No-one wants to work on the unsexy problems for boring industries. Vet clinics, pest care, HOA/community management, self storage, funeral homes, linen rental - boring stuff through which billions of dollars are flowing.

Dario has written that we need to “pace the frontier,” and Sam has agreed. People may be surprised by my response: go ahead. You guys are the frontier. By any reasonable metric — market share, revenue growth, model capability — the two of you have a duopoly on frontier intelligence. You’ve also claimed the lead is widening because of recursive self-improvement. I don’t see what you see in the lab. If the unreleased models are scary enough that you think you should slow down, I support your decision to be responsible. But stop pretending you need anyone else’s permission. Stop pretending antitrust law has to be suspended so you can form a cartel. Stop pretending you need a regulatory approval process that supersedes product liability. Stop pretending METR is independent when it is intertwined with Anthropic’s investors and staff. Stop pretending you need those same evaluators to police competitors who aren’t even at the frontier. Most of all, stop pretending the motivation to slow down is purely altruistic. You face massive product-liability exposure if your products enable a truly damaging cyberattack. The market already punishes models that behave in unpredictable or unauthorized ways. After the Hugging Face episode, it is simply good business for OpenAI and Anthropic to trade some raw power for reliability and predictability. Call it alignment if you want. It is also just giving customers what they want. Pacing the frontier would also create breathing room for a more intelligent conversation about regulation than Bernie Sanders’ “shut it all down.” China is very unlikely to join a global agreement, as you know, and that has to be taken into account as well. So go ahead and pace the frontier. You are the ones setting it. The easiest way not to build superintelligence is for you to agree not to build it. Demanding your preferred regulatory framework as the price of that will look like blackmail of the public and the political system. So just do it. If you do, you’ll buy goodwill for the next conversation. If you don’t, we’ll know this was just another bid for regulatory capture — or an election-season psyop.