I suspect the "EA" label is author having an ax to grind or throwing red meat at people who already hate EA. Sam Altman is on record lobbying for "AI safety laws" which would have a similar effect of raising the bar of entry incredibly high using legal peril, and he was reportedly ousted from the board by EA-aligned folk.

With all due respect, the people on HN are _weirdly_ in favor of a group whose unstated “zeroth” tenet is basically “be born into wealth, get extremely lucky, disregard common criticism of capitalism, reframe libertarianism if you need. Then and only then can you begin your righteous mission of donating your money “effectively”.

Could you at least consider that the group’s entire premise seems like nothing more than the post hoc rationalization of a bunch of wealthy educated elites with low social and emotional intelligence? The levels of tone deaf I perceive as someone who doesn’t have, can’t have that much wealth to even begin my journey in their little club are enormous.

There’s very little that is subtle about it and it’s frankly offensive and _clearly_ used as a justification for insecure Bay Area “liberals” who find themselves with lots of money and a political identity that makes them insecure about that fact.

The answer? You’re actually saving mankind with your money! It’s just simple Bayesian logic! The same thing that got you here! (Spoiler alert: it was more to do with luck than skill).

If you’re on board, I guess it’s not as offensive? But for me and others, it’s like elites trying to brag about how great they are while the rest of us fight for scraps.

So when you see someone with an axe to grind, maybe consider that EA’s messaging is not as universally appealing as you think, and may even be outright tone deaf enough to cause one to reasonably find it disgusting.

> and he was reportedly ousted from the board by EA-aligned folk.

It seems naive to me to assume that members of EA in positions of power don’t secretly have their own motivations. Furthermore it’s not very “Bayesian” to assume that a implies b here with so many hidden variables at play.

> With all due respect, the people on HN are _weirdly_ in favor of a group whose unstated “zeroth” tenet is basically “be born into wealth

I'm not sure if this was directed at my comment, but I'll clarify that my comment wasn't in defense of EA. My position is: setting up a regulatory moat is not a strategy exclusive to EA. Many incumbents - including sama - are overtly (and likely coverly) attempting regulatory capture, regardless of their 'politics'

> At a glance it looks like it's not going to affect AI projects that are basically consumers of existing models, which is most projects.

If it affects the base projects (especially the open source ones like Llama) then it affects the consumers. And it certainly looks like it's planning to affect the base projects, in a lot of negative ways.

If this bill passed in any way remotely similar to what it is now, Meta would have to entirely stop releasing open source Llama updates.

Which is perhaps the intent of the legislation.

I mean I was just going off the second sentence of the article, my bad:

> SB 1047 creates an unaccountable Frontier Model Division that will be staffed by EAs with police powers, and which can throw model developers in jail for the thoughtcrime of doing AI research

If the bill says nothing about who will be staffing this agency, and there are indeed no ties to EA (which seems unlikely to me if EA is behind the bill), then the author of the article is doing us a disservice by misrepresenting it.