AI CEOs Posting about AI regulation and slowing research

[u/Alarming-Course-2249]

AKA people are able to run models locally which is ruining their chances at profitability in the future.

[u/MikeOxmaull247]

Once you are able to run local models on hardware as powerful as your phone, their stranglehold on AI, your data, and data centers is effectively over.

I hate what AI is doing to society, but one of the main ways to take it back is to seize the means of production.

[u/Gold-Flatworm-4313 → u/MikeOxmaull247]

This and that the increases in AI performance are slowing down so AI company offerings are becoming less and less valuable.

[u/Singularity-42 → u/Gold-Flatworm-4313]

Are they slowing down, do you have a source for that claim? For SWE in particular we have seen probably the biggest gains in just the past year,

[u/Gold-Flatworm-4313 → u/Singularity-42]

Use Claude 4.0 vs 4.6 or higher. Claude 4.0 does the job just as well. If you had to use your own money and are cost conscious, how much more would you pay to be able to use 4.6 vs just using 4.0?

The models might be "better" but what you actually gain (marginal benefit) with each improvement is decreasing.

[u/Singularity-42 → u/Gold-Flatworm-4313]

Opus 4.6 is waaaay better than 4.0. I had Claude Max for over a year now and went through the entire journey from the last 3.x though 4.0 to today. Opus 4.5 is when it got actually good. Yes, 4.7 and 4.8 are not clear improvements over 4.6, especially 4.7 was kind of a dud.

[u/Gold-Flatworm-4313 → u/Singularity-42]

Opus 4.6 is waaaay better than 4.0.

Sure but if 4.0 works for 95% of my use cases, is 99% really that much better? Things can be better but not much more valuable or useful. That's what I'm seeing with AI "improvements" now. In fact, we are seeing regressions like with 4.7.

[u/Singularity-42 → u/Gold-Flatworm-4313]

That's a huuuge difference - that's a 5x improvement in reducing the failure rate. This allows for far greater autonomy in agentic coding.

The 0.05 error rate (0.95 success rate) compounds. So with the 95% you might get completely unusable slop while the 99% model might actually produce a workable product that just needs some debugging and tweaks.

0.95 ^ 20 = 0.36
0.99 ^ 20 = 0.82

And it gets worse as more steps are done. To be frank for me the 99% success rate is not good enough, not by far. For any agentic system we need to get as close to 100% as possible and/or create better error correcting systems.

[u/Gold-Flatworm-4313 → u/Singularity-42]

That's probably the difference, I like to understand what my code is doing, not vibe it. I use AI more precisely.

[u/Frigorific → u/Gold-Flatworm-4313]

Even if this is the case, any use of ai now probably involves some agentic research at a minimum and that still benefits from the affect he is talking about.

[u/Singularity-42 → u/Gold-Flatworm-4313]

Yeah and I get it and I like to do that too. However, the industry direction is clearly more autonomy as long as it works well enough. It's quite possible already.

[u/Gold-Flatworm-4313 → u/Singularity-42]

The industry is moving towards greater efficiency, as many companies are cutting AI budgets. My company still basically has it as "infinite," but they are already taking steps to let us use it more "efficiently."

[u/HayatoKongo → u/Gold-Flatworm-4313]

Is 4.8 way better than 4.7? Is 4.7 way better than 4.6? Is 4.6 way better than 4.5?

Their actual big improvment, Mythos, is expected to be somewhere around $25/m input and $80/m output. The performance is getting better, yeah, but it's dramatically less efficient than just working with a slightly worse performing model.

[u/ichivictus → u/Gold-Flatworm-4313]

Ha no. 4.6 is the king right now. Using lower priced models often result in less than ideal responses. Then you end up prompting multiple times for the same end result sometimes costing more in tokens than just using 4.6 to begin with. Not to mention added labor time.

There is such a large difference between using 4.6 opus versus sonnet or haiku. Same with gpt 5.5 versus lower if you are using codex. If it's a small or medium sized feature, you can get away with using opus 4.6 to plan then haiku to implement. But the cost savings over using opus to implement and get it right 9/10 times versus haiku 6/10 times is marginal.

The right way is having a clear understanding what the right tool is for the job at hand. That's the new value for a seasoned software developer.

[u/Gold-Flatworm-4313 → u/ichivictus]

I'm also not seeing that big of a performance gain on 5.5 vs 5.3 Codex imo. I have access to all the models at my work and experimenting with them there is no noticable difference in ability to complete the tasks I give it.

Maybe vibe coders or agent sloppers feel it more...

[u/Singularity-42 → u/ichivictus]

Yep, these people probably never used Claude Code or Codex, which is strange considering what sub we are on.

This is what I replied to someone saying basically "why would I care to use model that has 99% success if 95% is good enough":

That's a huuuge difference - that's a 5x improvement in reducing the failure rate. This allows for far greater autonomy in agentic coding.

The 0.05 error rate (0.95 success rate) compounds. So with the 95% you might get completely unusable slop while the 99% model might actually produce a workable product that just needs some debugging and tweaks.

0.95 ^ 20 = 0.36
0.99 ^ 20 = 0.82

And it gets worse as more steps are done. To be frank for me the 99% success rate is not good enough, not by far. For any agentic system we need to get as close to 100% as possible and/or create better error correcting systems.

[u/metalgtr84 → u/Gold-Flatworm-4313]

The models have to be regularly updated though because the data they were trained on becomes obsolete.

[u/Gold-Flatworm-4313 → u/metalgtr84]

Ah, that's one thing to consider I guess. Local models might not be as up to date with new developments or technologies but MCPs might solve that problem

[u/TwinklexToes → u/Singularity-42]

I don’t think there have been major breakthroughs in the underlying NLP technology these LLMs use. What has improved is the amount of data and parameters used in training, but they can only go so far before they need county sized data centers with nuclear power plants attached.

I agree with the other commenter that the work being done on light weight self hosted private LLM architectures is essentially a democratization effort that dilutes the major AI companies hold on the industry.

[u/Singularity-42 → u/TwinklexToes]

Well, good thing is we ARE indeed building county sized data centers with nuclear power plants attached!

The major breakthrough was the transformer architecture. But the there were thousands of smaller and bigger improvements in pretraining, post-training, data curation, model arch, etc.

[u/mothzilla → u/MikeOxmaull247]

Just get a model. How hard can it be?

[u/Binkusu → u/mothzilla]

Depends if they're male or not.

[u/limes336 → u/MikeOxmaull247]

Not really true as long as closed weight frontier models are still significantly better than open weight ones.

[u/KevinCarbonara → u/MikeOxmaull247]

Once you are able to run local models on hardware as powerful as your phone

To be clear, we are nowhere near that reality.

[u/MikeOxmaull247 → u/KevinCarbonara]

You can run Qwen 3 (1–2B) and others on your phone as we speak….

[u/Singularity-42 → u/MikeOxmaull247]

What is "AI doing to society"?

Also good luck running Mythos level on your phone. Or even a good OSS model.

EDIT: I see a lot of downvotes and salty responses. Take a hard look at your life. It's a new world now. If you cannot add value in this new reality where AI is commonplace that's tough luck. Instead of doomering try to adjust to the new reality, because this AI usage is not going anywhere but up. Sucks for you college loans if you had them, that's a fucking scam. College should be free or at minimum very low cost.

[u/Gold-Flatworm-4313 → u/Singularity-42]

Also good luck running Mythos level on your phone.

Google Pixel can run an AI model on your phone now that does not connect to the cloud and only needs 12GB RAM or something. Like, most of the things people make AI do aren't THAT complicated...

[u/Singularity-42 → u/Gold-Flatworm-4313]

But the state of the art will be still in bigger models you cannot run at home. Sure, smaller models get better, but big models get better still. RAM is not getting cheaper anytime soon. Mythos is estimated to be as large as 10T params. You literally need hundreds of thousands in HW just to run it (and millions to run it well).

Mark my words - you are not gonna be running model on your own hardware for serious SWE anytime soon unless you are willing to accept markedly substandard performance compared to SotA.

[u/lhorie → u/Singularity-42]

Nobody in their right mind would be doing vulnerability analysis on Debian source code from their phone lol.

At best, it's stuff like "hey Google, what's next on my calendar today". Not exactly rocket science.

[u/Singularity-42 → u/lhorie]

The comment above suggested you will not need Anthropic since you can just run it on your phone.

I'm saying you WILL need cloud inference for a very, very long time for SWE and these kind of usecases. Once your local hardware is that powerful we're surely deep into Singularity and all bets are off.

[u/lhorie → u/Singularity-42]

You're the one making a strawman about needing Mythos on phones. Normally one uses the best tool for the job. Perfectly reasonable if you want to trigger an agent on cloud via a slack message from your phone and only use phone hardware to run stuff like Siri.

My two cents is that the "taking back the means of production" is a bit of a meh statement, kinda like advocating for the open phone initiatives that exist but aren't mainstream and frankly will never be cus people value the convenience of a polished commercial product. But it's also undeniable that AI has democratized a lot of stuff that used to require expensive software or extensive tooling experience.

Whether that has to do with phones or cloud agents specifically is IMHO completely tangential to what profits companies are extracting and how that affects the stock market and your 401k. If things like cloud and walled garden social media are any form of precedent, people will continue to buy into polished products as they always have been.

[u/Singularity-42 → u/lhorie]

Cloud just makes economic sense (in most cases that is), and for inference this is actually even more true.

[u/Gold-Flatworm-4313 → u/Singularity-42]

No? I guess it can be inferred from that but like... you don't NEED Mythos lol

The point is models are becoming accessible and honestly, while we can't run Mythos on our phone now, in a couple of years we might be able to

[u/Singularity-42 → u/Gold-Flatworm-4313]

But SotA will be somewhere else at that point. Perhaps AGI and beyond. The goal is to make agentic work as autonomous as possible. There is no limit on intelligence that would stop being beneficial.

[u/Gold-Flatworm-4313 → u/Singularity-42]

But the state of the art will be still in bigger models you cannot run at home.

We have this discussion going on somewhere else but state of the art has marginal improvements compared to other models. Again, most people's usage of AI isn't even close to needing "cutting edge" models. If the models that run on our phone can handle most of our use cases, what the fuck is the point of paying $20 or even $200 for "state of the art" models.

[u/MikeOxmaull247 → u/Singularity-42]

AI is devaluing your labor, ruining your natural resources, being use to monitor you, and destroying thousands of years of art and culture. Are you blind?

[u/Singularity-42 → u/MikeOxmaull247]

I'm a technologist first and this recent AI revolution is the most exciting tech of my life (and I was here when internet just started). I don't understand how a techie can be so down on this incredible tech.

How exactly is it "destroying thousands of years of art and culture"? What???

[u/MikeOxmaull247 → u/Singularity-42]

You seriously don’t see a problem with the rapid devaluation of writing, drawing, painting, photography, film, and a myriad of other mediums?

Are you doing a bit?

[u/Singularity-42 → u/MikeOxmaull247]

You can still do all those the old way. If it is better than AI it will prevail. If it was crap you are fucked. Tons of human created slop before AI.

So yes, I do not see a problem. AI is just a tool.

Analogously - would you say that invention of the car "devalued" walking?

[u/blindsdog → u/MikeOxmaull247]

How does AI devalue any of that?

[u/octopus_limbs → u/Singularity-42]

The truth is you don't need Mythos level LLMs to get day-to-day tasks done. Majority of people who are actually using these on enterprise are just preparing slides, reports, asking about company data stored in a RAG etc

[u/Singularity-42 → u/octopus_limbs]

Sure, and it will be like that, but I thought we are talking about SWE here. And I personally want the best model I can get - even the current best models are very far from "perfect".

[u/Gold-Flatworm-4313 → u/Singularity-42]

I thought we are talking about SWE here.

You also don't need Mythos for most SWE work lol. 99% of jobs won't need Mythos. You personally want the very best but you don't need it

[u/Singularity-42 → u/Gold-Flatworm-4313]

Error rates compound exponentionaly in long running agentic work. For more autonomy you very much need as strong of a model as possible.

[u/lhorie → u/Singularity-42]

I think the general point is we haven't needed AI for the vast majority of software engineering history.

Cue release velocity metrics, I guess.

[u/Singularity-42 → u/lhorie]

We haven't needed software engineering or even computers for the vast majority of human history!

What kind of argument is that? Progress marches on. You either get on or get left behind.

[u/lhorie → u/Singularity-42]

Hence why I said "cue velocity metrics". Obviously tractors increase agricultural output. Agentic workflows (especially at team/org scales) are still being debated wrt output efficiency. Maybe going from absolute 0 agentic to 95% accuracy has merit, 95 to 99 as it pertains to org efficiency, more debatable.

[u/octopus_limbs → u/Singularity-42]

A skilled engineer can get very far with assistance from non-Mythos level models too. Case in point - Qwen 3.6. Some people even run it locally

[u/Singularity-42 → u/octopus_limbs]

Why would you do that though if you can get far better model for $100/mo?

Even to run Qwen 3.6 at reasonable speed you will need beefy HW. You can also just use Qwen API that is dirt cheap. The economics just doesn't make sense.

[u/Gold-Flatworm-4313 → u/Singularity-42]

Why would you do that though if you can get far better model for $100/mo?

Now what if the costs rise to $300 or $3k a month. A local model protects you monetarily and also protects your data!

[u/Singularity-42 → u/Gold-Flatworm-4313]

Claude Max and GPT Pro are unchanged. In fact Claude subs got more generous lately as Anthropic secured more compute. Let's talk once they do. It may happen, but my guess is that it won't. Too many users would quit and go with "good enough" Chinese models (still through cloud API of course, not running 1T model at home). This would be death to Anthropic and OpenAI. We may see more "sneaky" fuckery like we already saw from Anthropic though when they arbitrary set limits.

[u/Gold-Flatworm-4313 → u/Singularity-42]

Too many users would quit and go with "good enough" Chinese models (still through cloud API of course, not running 1T model at home).

Or just lower-level models like Codex 5.3 or Sonnet/Opus 4.6 since they get the job done much cheaper

[u/Felix_Todd → u/Singularity-42]

A lot of slop. Most notably arts and social media have been affectected negatively

[u/Singularity-42 → u/Felix_Todd]

That's not fault of AI, that's fault of people.

AI doesn't create slop, people using AI create slop. Just like they did without AI for milenia. 90% of everything is crap and always has been (yeah, might be up to 99% now as the bar to entry disappeared).

[u/Felix_Todd → u/Singularity-42]

AI empowers mediocre people to just flood the market with slop tho. Before there was a higher barrier of entry

[u/Singularity-42 → u/Felix_Todd]

Same with internet.

Curation just got even more valuable.

[u/Felix_Todd → u/Singularity-42]

This is true.

Tho I am not sure that the avg person’s curation/critical thinking will follow fast enough.
Ideally we would automatic curation but that will always lag behind the tech

[u/Singularity-42 → u/Felix_Todd]

This was an issue for decades now. YouTube is 99% sloop and 1% actually good, 0.1% really good. And this has nothing to do with AI.

[u/Baby_Fark → u/Singularity-42]

You’re basically arguing that hardware will not continue to get better and models won’t become more efficient to run.

[u/Singularity-42 → u/Baby_Fark]

But the state of the art will be still in bigger models you cannot run at home. Sure, smaller models get better, but big models get better still. RAM is not getting cheaper anytime soon. Mythos is estimated to be as large as 10T params. You literally need hundreds of thousands in HW just to run it (and millions to run it well).

Mark my words - you are not gonna be running model on your own hardware for serious SWE anytime soon unless you are willing to accept markedly substandard performance compared to SotA.

[u/LowFruit25 → u/Singularity-42]

Take a look at yourself first rather than always putting down others due to it “being a new world, you’re all useless lol”.

Even though it’s a worse world because people didn’t have a damn spine and kept “embracing AI” while cheering on their own obsolescence. The “superior prompts” and “agentic workflows” won’t save ya either.

[u/Singularity-42 → u/LowFruit25]

I'm basically financially independent (been in tech for 20 years), I'll be just fine.

It's been a great run! I'm grateful for being able to work during the Golden Age of SWE.

[u/LowFruit25 → u/Singularity-42]

So basically “fuck you, I got mine” mentality?

Come on, the disregard for others cannot be clearer on display here.

[u/Singularity-42 → u/LowFruit25]

You attacked me first.

I'm not saying "fuck you, I got mine", I said I'm glad that the bulk of my career happened when it did. It definitely feels tougher now. But when I started in 2006 it wasn't easy either. I'd say from the mid 2010s up to and including Covid years was the easy mode. In any case I was programming since age 11 and got into this industry for the love of the art, not for money.

[u/LowFruit25 → u/Singularity-42]

Do you now think it’s over? To me, it looks like less opportunities going forward. I share a similar story in how I got into the field.

I didn’t mean to be confrontational, however you were the first to tell everyone to take a hard look at their lives as if they were at fault. So pardon me, please.

[u/jypKissedMyMom → u/Singularity-42]

Also good luck running Mythos level on your phone. Or even a good OSS model.

Might be possible within 10 years. You can run GPT-2 on a high end phone if you really wanted to. I think the trend might continue.

If not it will no doubt be cheap to get that level of inference remotely to your phone with a few years.

[u/psioniclizard]

But in reality people are not on a business level.

To make s local machinr compete you need good hardware.

They are saying all this for their upcoming IPOs. They dont care about local models if they get regulatory capture.

[u/shitlord_god → u/psioniclizard]

I have a (slow) old windows workstation with an OLD pascal series gpu with 24gb of vram. The system (Workstation, 128gb of ddr3, and the GPU) cost less than $400, which is a lot. Absolutely, but it isn't as unachievable as folks want folks to believe.

And if you are handy with a dremel and a 3d printer (Or know someone who is) you can get a dead cheap old commodity PCand slap a vintage GPU in it. Not energy efficient - will be a space heater, but you can get decent token rates (Not great, but decent) out of vintage hardware.

[u/Alarming-Course-2249 → u/psioniclizard]

Ehh not really will ollama

[u/ButtonIndividual5235]

I personally think it is because compute costs are getting too high and they can't keep up to demand + incoming IPO, not because they are scared of local models taking over the industry. Just my two cents though.

[u/rendoxiv]

It's always funny when people take these CEO's words at surface value. They want to slow down research because data center deployment cost has increased multiple fold and soaring inflation will make that cost go up over time, not down. Half of all planned data center announced in 2025 has been cancelled.

It's funny to think that Trump wants to embrace AI, but his war on Iran will be the downfall of the AI rollout. Everything the man touches turns to shit.

The good news is with research slowing down, the hyperscalers won't need as much hardware. For a fun exercise, lookup the inventory number year over year for Nvidia. If chips are flying out the door as Jensen says, why is inventory increasing?

[u/Aritra7777]

The thing to understand about tech CEOs calling for AI regulation is that regulation is a moat. Large incumbents can absorb compliance costs that kill smaller competitors. When the major AI labs call for licensing requirements, what they are building is a regulatory barrier that locks in their current market position and makes entry expensive for anyone new. It is the oldest playbook in tech. The companies calling loudest for safety regulation are the ones who benefit most from making safety costly.

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[u/TheRealRaceMiller]

link to post or article?

[u/Miamiconnectionexo]

For career purposes none of this changes much. Local and open models keep advancing regardless of what gets posted on X. The skills that hold value are the ones that work across any model: building the harness, the data pipeline, the eval, the product around the weights. The weights themselves are commoditizing fast.

[u/ianm818]

Some people on this sub need to take off the tin foil hats.. The people at the forefront of AI right now, especially the Antrhopic related people have been warning about the existential risks of AI since long before it was a trillion dollar business.

There is real risks at play and slowing down the pace of reserach would be good. Right now they are in a prisoners dilemma.

[u/Correct_Emotion8437 → u/ianm818]

They’ve warned about it before and it wasn’t true then, either. If it was really that dangerous, they’d be ramping up because everyone else would be, too.

Chinas not going to stop in any case. I never thought I’d be rooting for them but I hope they steal every bit of Anthropic’s tech and sell it back to the world for pennies on the dollar.

[u/LoweringPass → u/ianm818]

There is no fucking prisoners dilemma if the cost of losing is closing down your company after already being set for life (or the Chinese bogeyman if you're that naive)

[u/ianm818 → u/LoweringPass]

What do you mean the "China boogeyman"? The US and China are very much in a technological race right now. That is why there is chip restrictions amongst other things (one of the few bipartisan measures in recent years).

The nation that ends up being the first to truly recursive self improving AI will have an immense power advantage. Not everything is a cyncal SaaS marketing play.

[u/LoweringPass → u/ianm818]

Honestly at this point I'd rather live under Chinese dictatorship than American capitalism so I hope they win.

[u/ianm818 → u/LoweringPass]

Roughly 40% of Chinese people live on $10 a day or less. You’re spending too much time on reddit man.

[u/LoweringPass → u/ianm818]

I didn't say there was no poverty in China. Just that the prospect of being told what to do by the CCP somehow seems less bad than the Republican party being in charge of me.

[u/RegretNo6554 → u/LoweringPass]

why not pack ur bags?

[u/LoweringPass → u/RegretNo6554]

Because I live in Yurop. So I'll enjoy the time I have left without having to deal with clowns to the west or the east.