Note: This started as a quick take, but it got too long so I made it a full post. It's still kind of a rant; a stronger post would include sources and would have gotten feedback from people more knowledgeable than I. But in the spirit of Draft Amnesty Week, I'm writing this in one sitting and smashing that Submit button.
Many people continue to refer to companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google DeepMind as "frontier AI labs". I think we should drop "labs" entirely when discussing these companies, calling them "AI companies"[1] instead. While these companies may have once been primarily research laboratories, they are no longer so. Continuing to call them labs makes them sound like harmless groups focused on pushing the frontier of human knowledge, when in reality they are profit-seeking corporations focused on building products and capturing value in the marketplace.
Laboratories do not directly publish software products that attract hundreds of millions of users and billions in revenue. Laboratories do not hire armies of lobbyists to control the regulation of their work. Laboratories do not compete for tens of billions in external investments or announce many-billion-dollar capital expenditures in partnership with governments both foreign and domestic.
People call these companies labs due to some combination of marketing and historical accident. To my knowledge no one ever called Facebook, Amazon, Apple, or Netflix "labs", despite each of them employing many researchers and pushing a lot of genuine innovation in many fields of technology.
To be clear, there are labs inside many AI companies, especially the big ones mentioned above. There are groups of researchers doing research at the cutting edge of various fields of knowledge, in AI capabilities, safety, governance, etc. Many individuals (perhaps some readers of this very post!) would be correct in saying they work at a lab inside a frontier AI company. It's just not the case that any of these companies as
This doesn't really answer your question in a qualitative way but could be useful data(?) anyway.
For me, it goes the opposite way–it's easier to not eat meat right now when I tell myself I'm not giving it up forever, just until there is an ethically acceptable source.
Also, I expect that if an alternative to factory farming becomes commonplace, the next generation's view of factory farming will shift to something like "how could this ever have been accepted", and I kind of don't want to be on the wrong side of that.
These are two pretty idiosyncratic potential cultured meat-based reasons to not eat meat now. But on the other hand I'm someone for whom your interlocutor's argument doesn't have an impact, which might help you decide how prevalent people for whom it does have an impact are.