July 17 2026
- Demis Hassabis AI article
- Proposal for regulations/rules
- Widely acclaimed by industry folks (Elon, Sam Altman, Jack Clark from Anthropic, Satya, Sundar, etc)
- Form a self regulatory organization (SRO, like FINRA, etc)
- Higher chance of industry getting regulation right because it can stay more current vs govt regulation which can lag - especially relevant to AI which is moving so fast
- Sacks spoke to Demis and likes the proposal with some notes
- The SRO has to have diverse enough group of industry participants to address regulatory capture problem (can’t have just 3 labs, etc)
- The regulations should apply to the frontier models - if the model is is behind, why regulate it - if there is a step change, only then there might be catastrophic risk
- It should be for truly catastrophic risk - nuclear, chemical warfare etc not speech
- Should be a substitute, not in addition to lot of random regulations that are already there
- Opt in to begin with to prove the agency works
- Dario keeps asking for FAA for AI
- Its extreme
- FAA regulates aircraft design too - 5-9 years for new design - so super slow - even modifications of designs take 3-5 years
- This is permission based regulation which will slow everything down
- Remember even FINRA reports into the government like SEC - software industry doesn’t report in yet - we have to be careful, there will be a big fight over this
- Anthropic is using a strategy of 1-upmanship going state by state to increase level of regulation over time - Sacks called this out last year
- This is working because no one in the government refuses Anthropic’s offer of asking for more regulation
- Stripe offers $53B for Paypal
- Apparently joint offer with Advent and Block
- Are these 3 creating a competitor to Visa and Mastercard?
- Seems similar to Ryan Cohen’s bid for EBay
- Are AI Native businesses going after 1st generation Digital Native businesses?
- Could Elon make a play for this too?
- Bending Spoons is doing an interesting play acquiring famous brands like Evernote, etc
- Lot of deals happening now in this new administration which would never have happened in the past with the wrath of Lina Khan
- People are therefore believing in venture again
- Apple sues OpenAI
- Energy
- By 2050 US will be 2.5 CAs short of energy
- Sunrun launching some distributed compute product apparently
- Elon Musk bought a gas turbine company
- Maybe for SpaceX data center
- NY becomes first state to impose data-center moratorium
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Sacks debunks it
- Let the AI companies become power companies so they don’t need to compete with retail
- Noise pollution is largely made up
- Water consumption is largely a hoax - modern data centers recirculate the water - a typical one uses 2.5 InNOut burger restaurants’ worth of power so its not much
- They have create a blue collar construction boom and drives up tax revenue
- These are powered by clean natural gas
- They are just the scapegoat for all the angst against AI
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Amazing amount of NY state is under developed - so this regulation is silly
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Chris Wright traced data center protesters back to fracking protesters - these are just professional operations
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Dario gave his first public seven figure contribution to Public First which advocates for this kind of regulation - makes no sense?
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Same forces are advocating for data center moratoriums internationally too in US allied countries
- They are also forcing export controls on chips
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Friedberg gives example of how Russia Today being in US coincided with anti-GMO sentiment
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Like KGB influence campaign designed in the 60s called Directed Measures
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Its a parallel to the anti-data center movement - seems its a psyop
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OpenAI published a blog post recently showing how PRC influencing AI debates in the US
- Clearly its in China’s interest
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Seems Dario strategy is
- Brand yourself as safe AI company
- Ban unsafe AI
- Profit
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- AIS 2026
- Science Corner - new data on reverse aging
- Glycation - binding of sugar and fat in between the cells - so as you get older body is unable to clean and repair this
- Can cause wrinkles, inflammation, etc
- CML is the main molecule here
- Scientists created an enzyme to degrade CML
- Started with AlphaFold
- They were able to get rid of 52-97% of the CML
- Shows everyone can benefit from AI
- This could be a trillion dollar market cap + opportunity - say a cream to clear wrinkles, fix joint pain, etc
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