no thank you but we will buy twitter for $9.74 billion if you want
— Sam Altman (@sama) February 10, 2025
Musk and Trump are systematically defanging the institutions from where the professional managerial class operates (universities, government bureaucracies, corporate HR). That’s good. The Dem base needs to be broken apart.
— Matt Stoller (@matthewstoller) February 12, 2025
The AI Race reminds me of both American postwar eras.
In this case, Vance’s speech at the Paris AI Summit reminds me of the Space Race with the USSR with China and DeepSeek echoing the launch of Sputnik in 1957.
“Vice President JD Vance told European and Asian leaders in Paris on Tuesday that the Trump Administration was adopting an aggressive, America First approach to the race to dominate all the building blocks of artificial intelligence, and warned Europeans to dismantle regulations and get aboard with Washington.
On his first foreign trip since taking office, Mr. Vance used his opening address at an A.I. summit meeting hosted by France and India to describe his vision of a coming era of American technological domination. Europe, he said, would be forced to chose between using American-designed and manufactured technology or siding with authoritarian competitors — a not-very-veiled reference to China — who would exploit the technology to their detriment.
“The Trump administration will ensure that the most powerful A.I. systems are built in the U.S. with American design and manufactured chips,” he said, quickly adding that “just because we are the leader doesn’t mean we want to or need to go it alone.” …”
Meanwhile, Elon’s bid to acquire Open AI and crush his rival Sam Altman would make Commodore Vanderbilt proud. It is a throwback to the age of the railroads.
“Elon Musk has offered to buy the operating assets of OpenAI for $97.4 billion, Axios has learned from multiple sources, in a move that could turn the burgeoning AI industry on its head.
Why it matters: Musk is putting pressure on OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, who’s trying to restructure the company by separating its nonprofit board control from its for-profit business. …”
Altman isn’t surrendering to Musk who shit on the Stargate announcement.
“OpenAI is not for sale — and particularly not to Elon Musk, CEO Sam Altman told Axios on the sidelines of the AI Action Summit in Paris.
Why it matters: Altman’s comments come one day after his increasingly heated rival Musk made a shock $97.4 billion offer for OpenAI’s assets, potentially changing the narrative around the technology’s future.
What he’s saying: “There’s been like versions of Elon trying to, you know, somehow take control of OpenAI for a long time, so, it’s like, okay, here’s this week’s episode,” Altman told Axios. …”
In related news, John Ganz believes the tech bros are working on the AI superintelligence, which I like to call the Wizard of Oz, as their atomic bomb to drop on the professional managerial class.
“Elon Musk looks longingly at the authoritarian techniques of Chinese tech capitalists who brutally work their engineers from morning to night. They allied with the online mob, their bastard offspring. Now they’d sack the politically unreliable managerial layer. And they’d would work furiously on the development of their Manhattan Project, their atomic bomb to drop on the professional-managerial class and replace them permanently with robots. They’d also pump up their bribe system for the lumpen elements: cryptocurrency. They’ve taken their model from the C-Suite to Capital Hill and are trying to do the Twitter-to-X model in the federal government. …”
Imagine a world where AI, for example, has replaced the teachers unions and other progressive-leaning professionals like lawyers who overwhelmingly support the Democratic Party.
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