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Fable Ban Reversed + Dr. Dana Suskind on Parenting With A.I. + Prediction Market Drama
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De Facto Licensing: The Hypocrisy of the Tech Right
At 10:40 · chapter starts 9:50
Casey Newton lays out the central irony: the same tech-right voices who made opposition to AI licensing their entire brand under Biden — warning of a 'Soviet-style' government picking winners and losers — have now presided over precisely that system. Marc Andreessen, whose alleged meeting with Biden officials about picking AI favorites Kevin Roose says he could not verify with any source, joined the Defense Policy Board the same week. David Sacks's famous 'let the private sector cook' stance is now embarrassingly inverted. [1] — Casey Newton "The same figures who spent years warning that the Biden administration would create an AI licensing regime to pick winners and losers have …" 09:49 Kevin coins the episode's defining phrase: 'AI is now being regulated by vibes.' He then articulates the structural shift he sees as most consequential: the industry has moved from default-yes (build a good model, release it) to default-no (assume the government won't let you ship), and every frontier lab is still processing what that means. [2] — Kevin Roose "The AI industry has fundamentally shifted from a default-yes environment, where training a powerful model meant you could release it, to a …" 14:18 Casey adds that OpenAI's Sam Altman appears to have gotten little benefit from a reported $25 million donation to Trump-aligned causes.
The AI industry has fundamentally shifted from a default-yes environment, where training a powerful model meant you could release it, to a default-no environment, where labs must assume the US government will block releases of highly capable models. This shift happened more or less overnight, and every frontier lab is still processing what it means.
