Comment by a2ff6eeb0
24 days ago
I'm not sure how that changes anything -- sure, if you blocked people from using AI, it wouldn't have any effects on society, but once people have access, what they do with it matters.
There's an inevitable effect that it has, and the only lever you have as an individual is being on the right side of that.
Copy the technology and give people access without trying to financially profit from it.
Even if the US federal government refuses to act, smaller government entities can deploy their own compute clusters running strong open-weights models like Kimi K3, and provide their own citizens with free access to strong AI models. There may come a time when even Chinese providers no longer release strong model weights, but then the previous generation of strong open-weights models can be used to accelerate the development of data pipelines and training setups to build the next generation. California or Australia (or many others) could fund university-led R&D efforts to build completely open models.
Despite the angry noises that leading providers make about their model outputs being used to train competing models, that's not illegal. States can use Common Crawl, Anna's Archive, Books3, commercial model outputs, and whatever other data sources that are useful for building models. States have sovereign immunity to ignore copyright complaints, if they decide to pursue model development.
The big AI companies don't have much of a moat. Let the big companies spend a fortune figuring out what works best, then openly build imitations having 95% of the capability at 5% of the cost.
The first one to AGI with enough compute to run the AI wins it all. Humans will not be able to compete.
If Anthropic is the first to develop AGI, then everyone else becomes subordinate to Dario Amodei? And if DeepSeek is the first to get there, everyone instead becomes subordinate to Liang Wenfeng? I cannot believe that there is a threshold of intelligence where getting there first means a decisive and durable advantage. If you do believe that getting there first means ruling the world, then our viewpoints are probably too far apart for mutual understanding.
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The problem is not access to AI. The problem is the lack of antitrust, the lack of white collar crime enforcement, the tax system that allows them to accumulate wealth while avoiding payments. The problem is legal regime with winner takes all monopoly creation support.
AI is the least of the problem.
Indeed, but it does provide them with a lot of tools for those other items on your list.