The Machine That Decides What You Know. By Robert Malone.

AI is rapidly becoming the gatekeeper to the world’s information. Increasingly, people will not search through ten websites and decide for themselves what they believe. They will ask a machine a question and receive an answer. That makes the rules governing those machines enormously important. …

Behind the increasingly urgent campaign to regulate AI is a surprisingly small and interconnected world of billionaires, foundations, nonprofits, researchers, policy organizations and technology companies. Many are connected through a movement most Americans have never heard of: Effective Altruism. Its money helped build the field of AI safety. Its institutions helped define the threat. Its researchers and policy organizations are helping define the solutions. And one of the world’s most powerful AI companies, Anthropic, emerged from this same intellectual ecosystem while spending tens of millions of dollars to influence the rules under which it and its competitors will operate.

Now Barack Obama wants Democrats to make AI regulation a major political priority.

That is where this story stops being about obscure arguments among computer scientists. The people who write the rules for artificial intelligence may ultimately help determine what the machine is allowed to tell you. …

How money builds a consensus (exactly what was done with the carbon dioxide theory of global warming):

Ideas require money before they acquire institutions, experts and political power. EA had plenty of it. …

But look at what the money actually buys. It doesn’t simply fund research. It builds a field.

Fund the researchers who define the threat. Fund the university centers that study it. Fund the organizations that evaluate the machines. Fund the fellowships that train the next generation of experts. Fund the policy shops that turn the research into proposed regulation. Fund journalism programs that explain the threat to the public. Then move those trained people into technology companies, think tanks, lobbying organizations, and government. …

None of this requires a conspiracy. That is what makes the structure more interesting. People can sincerely believe the same thing while being funded, trained, employed and credentialed inside institutions built around that belief. Eventually the institutions begin citing one another. The researchers become the experts. The experts advise government. And what began as a philosophical argument starts looking like an independent scientific consensus. And the public is told that they need to trust “the experts”, that science is dictating policy. In reality, it is money that is dictating the policy.

Here’s a quick review of the current AI landscape I found helpful to can keep up with the conversation, excerpted from a conversation with ChatGPT.

A frontier AI model is one of the most capable general-purpose AI models at the current performance frontier — especially models competitive in reasoning, coding, science, multimodal work and autonomous/agentic tasks. There isn’t an official membership list, and it changes quickly.

 

Company	Model	Ownership
OpenAI	GPT family	OpenAI is privately held. Outside investors include Microsoft.
Anthropic	Claude family	Anthropic is privately held. Major investors/partners include Amazon and Google.
Google DeepMind	Gemini	Alphabet (Google)
SpaceXAI / xAI	Grok	Musk-controlled SpaceXAI.
Meta	Llama	Meta Platforms, the listed company controlled through Mark Zuckerberg’s high-vote shares
Mistral AI	Mistral	Privately held French company Mistral AI

 

A useful way of thinking about the landscape is that there are really only about four unequivocal giant frontier labs in the US at present:

OpenAI — Anthropic — Google DeepMind — xAI/SpaceXAI

with Meta somewhat different because its strategy emphasizes open-weight models, and Mistral a smaller European competitor.

There are also Chinese frontier labs that deserve to be included if you’re asking globally rather than just about the US/European ecosystem — notably DeepSeek, Alibaba/Qwen, Zhipu AI/GLM, ByteDance/Doubao, and others. Their strongest models can be competitive with the Western frontier on at least some benchmarks. DeepSeek is the big Chinese disruptive entrant: very capable reasoning/coding models with unusually aggressive cost efficiency.

hat-tip Scott of the Pacific