1:10:22
.. And fundamentally, we need lawmakers to actually be educated on how technology works. And I don’t mean just, oh, we need to make sure they know what LLM can do. They need real understanding and also a financial understanding. And fundamentally across the board, this is not just legislation wise. We need a better understanding and clarity into the actual financials of these companies. We need to reform private company valuations. And this is a really specific one, but I have a point. We need to make it illegal for private companies to disclose something called annualized run rate. This is when a company says we annualize a period, usually a month, but they never define it. And they say this* 12 equals this. Anthropic said they have $65 billion in annualized run rate. They don’t say what period or how that’s calculated. That should be illegal. That should no longer be illegal. You shouldn’t be able to do it. We need to stop thinking of kill switches and big sexy ideas. And we need to think of the practical ways to stop this industry doing the most harmful things. What I am discussing would be more effective than any AI slowdown. It would actually immediately stop these companies from acting in ways that are malevolent. It wouldn’t be perfect, but these would be changes that would quickly rein them in. And I do overall think we need to massively change how private companies disclose stuff. The public relations industry has through the AI industry allowed genuine what I think will eventually be seen as bordering on financial crimes to happen.investors to be misled. All because we have a media ecosystem that fails its readers, fails its listeners, and fails the average person. Ed Zitron is the CEO of Easy Primary Research and writer of the newsletter I read all the time. Where is your ed at? We will link to it in our show notes. Also, thanks to Matt Stler of the American Economic Liberties Project, whose recent piece that we just republished at the lever, you can see it at levernews.com. Ed, thanks so much for taking time today. Thanks for having me. Thanks for listening to another episode of Lever time. [music] Lever time is a production of The Lever. This episode was produced by Natalie Bondorf. Our theme music is by Nick Byron Campbell.
QUESTIONS
Do you agree that an AI “slowdown” is desirable?
This seems like nabbing Al Capone for tax fraud. How often is the “solution” to a problem found in a round about way like this?
Are there other accounting “solutions” to American problems?