aditya_rs

Yep, that's what I think and wrote on my blog. My hope is that the inference providers should provide a managed service like it. It's also in their best interest to do so, because if they don't and these provider hosted agents become the norm, demand for independent inference would drop.

Possibly so for now. But do you think the providers are interested in making interoperability easy?

Even in the future if they are required by law to provide it, I wouldn't bet against the craftiness of the providers to invent some sort of network effect dark pattern to make it painful, if not outright impossible.

Just as an example, with Muse I can already see that the way they are thinking of making money is via taking a transaction cut, so it's not that hard to imagine that Meta can negotiate deals for txns that happens through Muse which won't be available elsewhere.

The series is also cancelled, so no point wasting time watching it either.

Indeed, after thinking about this, prediction markets was one of the things that came to my mind, this is something I hopefully will research a bit more on. I was primarily interested in the general pattern of using the negative outcomes to align incentives and also potentially use it actually solve the problem. Prediction markets are possibly a pretty good place to experiment this.

> Also, wouldn't this lead to weird incentives for the market participants? Like in an extreme case, murder?

Yep, this is the reason why I think we should continue to have a regulatory stopgap to provide a floor for acceptable behavior

> but I think it's too central to the whole idea to leave as a handwave

haha yeah, you're right I could have been more clear on why I thought there was a need for it.

One way to look at it (though might not be a strong argument) is even with the current regulatory framework, the incentives are not aligned. So I don't think regulation is a way to align incentives rather it acts as a floor of what should be acceptable behavior.

The reason why I think a regulatory stop gap is needed is, when a problem doesn't have enough momentum towards it, it's much easier to make a problem worse than to make it better and regulation acts as a valve by indicating the directional progress we want to make and prevent making it worse at least until there is sufficient momentum that progress from the problem is clearly much better than the alternative.

That said, I think for the problems I used as examples in the article the current mechanisms and the current framework we have are sufficient, and possibly no new regulation needs to be taken. (i.e, for the case of doctors, we already have pretty good mechanisms to prevent doctors from creating actual harm, for climate change we already have limits on carbon emissions, etc.)

> Someone needs to actually issue the futures, and I'm not sure who would do it; these 'futures' contracts seem more like straight bets than actual futures.

You're right I didn't mention specifics of on who would create these. A naive answer would have been "why not anyone?", but you bring up an interesting point on who would actually hold the bet for a long duration of time and be guaranteed for pay-offs.

I disagree with the problem of enforceability of the paying out in case someone looses a long position, since it's also a current problem with the standard futures for stocks/commodities, where the brokerage firm would be liable for paying up in case of defaulting on a margin call, so similar structure might be imagined for these cases.

With regards who might create these futures, the government seems like a good candidate, but really if we do have a solid clearinghouse with similar structure for handling margin calls etc. I don't see why not anyone can create these.

The regulatory concerns for implementing these is very valid, but I was primarily just interested in exploring the idea.