Emblems of regulation and AI
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Capitalisn’t: Can AI Even Be Regulated?

Last week, Elon Musk announced a hostile bid alongside a consortium of buyers to purchase control of OpenAI for $97.4 billion. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman vehemently replied that his company is not for sale.

The artificial intelligence landscape is shifting rapidly. Two weeks prior to Musk’s bid, American tech stocks plummeted in response to claims from Chinese company DeepSeek that its AI model had matched OpenAI’s performance at a fraction of the cost. Days before that, US President Donald Trump announced that OpenAI, Oracle, and Softbank would partner on an infrastructure project to power AI in the United States with an initial $100 billion investment. Altman himself is trying to pull off a much-touted plan to convert the nonprofit OpenAI into a for-profit entity, a development at the heart of his spat with Musk, who co-founded the startup.

Capitalisn’t hosts Bethany McLean and Luigi Zingales discuss the implications of this changing landscape by reflecting on a prior Capitalisn’t conversation with Luigi’s former colleague Sendhil Mullainathan (now at MIT), who forecasted over a year ago that there would be no barriers to entry in AI. Does DeepSeek’s success prove him right? What does regulating AI in the collective interest look like, and can we escape a future where technology is consolidated in the hands of the wealthy few when billions of dollars in capital are required for its progress?

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