This! $1.6+ TRILLION in infra spending from the big frontier labs. The earnings needed to drive a reasonable ROI to recoup that investment is simply not going to happen in a time frame where the numbers make sense.
The other insanity in all this the smartest computer scientists in the world are asking Congress to regulate them. Come. On. Really? Do we remember “The internet is not a truck, it’s a series of tubes…”
Why can’t the big labs form a Save The World Consortium and self-regulate?
Non-democratic counties (hey there China) will not abide by any agreement that constrains their advantage. It’s naive to think so.
What this conversation lacks is enough discussion of how these models can cause us harm—we are are so worried about AI but we allow Windows in critical infrastructure; we build JS/TS apps with thousands of dependencies; we generally don’t segment networks well enough; we don’t have adequate (sometimes any) detection capabilities in our systems, and so on.
In a prisoner's dilemma the players can't rely on one another to self-regulate. This is why Mafias kill snitches, so when their members are in a prisoner's dilemma they can rely on the knowledge that if themselves or the other party snitches they have more to lose than gain.
The problem is that there can not be any outside party to regulate this on a global scale
There's plenty of precedent for specific industries self-regulating in the US, typically motivated by the shared view that it would be less disruptive than heavy handed federal regulation.
Applying game theory problems like prisoner's dilemma to the real world requires collapsing a lot of overlapping and conflicting incentives to a single dimension which doesn't always work.
In this case the goal is bringing about the singularity, basically creating a sort of godlike intelligence. That's what the arms race is all about.
So we are in a true prisoner's dilemma, if one of the companies / countries stops R&D it risks handing over godlike power to another company / country.
> Non-democratic counties (hey there China) will not abide by any agreement that constrains their advantage.
The main counterexample to this was nuclear weapons. Atom bombs have not been used to kill since the US did so. However today, the two largest nuclear powers have no legal agreement on arms control because Donald the Trump declined Russia's offer for an extension to the existing agreement. Now other countries are looking at Ukraine, Iran (attacked for wanting nukes) vs NKorea (not attacked because they have them), and Donald's own musings about the US nuclear umbrella being a bad idea (France is going to build more nukes now too)... and we now face nuclear proliferation again on a global scale, with tech that is nearly 100 years old now.
It's severely capacity limited, that's why it's possible and Wall Street wouldn't be interested in it, yet it's too complex for most retail folks without a solid math and game theory background to execute.
There are a handful of niche edges like this lying around that nobody at a quant firm would set up a trade desk around, it's not worth their time but it's meaningful money to someone in a personal capacity.
I'm not a hunter, never have. But, these big game hunts are actually good for conservation. They hunt only animals that NEED to be culled and they pay big bucks to do so which go towards keeping the animals alive and protected.
Big game hunts fund so much conservation.... so, if you truly and really care about trying to save rare species and such in Africa and other places -- these help fund those things.
If that’s true, and I sincerely hope you are right, that changes my perspective—so, thank you. Is there a good resource to learn more on that you’d recommend?
Not a direct example, although I know there are some (I just don't trust my personal knowledge on African hunts) from the US:
The Pittman-Robertson Wildlife Restoration Act of 1937 was lobbied for by hunters to self-tax (excise taxes) and reversed a long decline of wildlife in North America. The taxes raised $1.3 billion in 2025 alone, dedicated to state wildlife conservation and public access projects.
This is one pillar, there's a fishing one, duck stamps, etc.: hunters pay their own way for conservation (well, much of the P-R money is gun/ammo sales from non-hunters, but hey).
I should add that I grew up in New Mexico near Holloman AFB. They imported Ibex animals there long ago and you can draw a license to hunt them. They don't grant many per year so they are very rare to pull... but there are Ibex hunts every year. They do it to keep the population at a level to support long term stability. Since they have no natural predators they would get out of control. The hunting fees go to conservation in New Mexico. You can read a bit more about it here: https://wildlife.dgf.nm.gov/department-reduces-number-of-per...
These are considered exotic hunts. As I said, I'm not a hunter. I don't have it in me.... I guess I could do it in a survival situation but I can understand that sometimes the hunts can be beneficial long term.
Hope this helps make it a bit more understandable and palatable for some.
Well, one of the best examples is the case of a male Lion in Africa. Old, large, but too old to have offspring but still too large to be taken over by a younger male Lion. They allowed it to be hunted so that a younger male could take over the pride and create offspring which was better for the pride. There are other examples.
I can't find the story on it but I read it a long time ago.
Love this approach and use it often, usually with a Go backend. Blazing fast, simple, respects the way the web is supposed to work. Really nice touch using the CSS transitions.
Animals are smarter than we understand and give them credit for.
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