Comment by academia_hack
13 hours ago
Dario's proposed approach is a classic example of capital attempting to control technological advancement and the means of production. For the first time in human history, any member of the working class can just about afford to have a team of expert scientist/physician/lawyer/engineers working directly for them.
Super intelligence (the ability to have many smarter minds than your own reporting to you) has always been available to the wealthy and powerful. They used it to invent nuclear weapons, cause climate change, mechanize warfare, and pillage the global south.
Now that this same tool is on the cusp of being available to everyone, capital is starting to panic and throw up fences. They want to pump the breaks on a revolution they know they can't control. They see what they've done with super intelligence and (perhaps not unreasonably) fear what the masses will do with that same power.
> Super intelligence (the ability to have many smarter minds than your own reporting to you) has always been available to the wealthy and powerful
This is not what superintelligence is. Don't be like Meta and redefine existing terms for marketing purposes.
Actually, it has been historically been observed that some institutions, such as large corporations, do resemble super-powered, non-human intelligences of a kind, and that studying our history with them is instructive for our hopes of controlling superintelligent AI (i.e. not good).
This is important to realise and defend. Super intelligence is not a collection of human-level intellect smarter than you. Super intelligence is an intellect surpassing any human. That's a important distinction for AI alignment discussion now and in the future. The books 'Superintelligence' (978-0199678112) and 'The Coming Wave' (978-1529923834) are worth reading.
In many way it is, because it allows defeting many incorret arguments people in power make, or simply asking where is the cheapest product ”X” with one question. Or simply be more aware or any kind of scam people or companies try to do for you. It is pushing equal intellectuality quite hard with low effort.
No. You don't "defet" (sic) "incorret" (sic) arguments by making up new definitions for existing words. Stop doing that.
If true AGI superintelligence is invented, I don't see how it will be made available to the masses, at least not intentionally. There will be no incentive for the likes of Anthropic and OpenAI to give such immense power to anyone else. Whoever has the superintelligence will be able to race ahead of everyone else.
However, such technology may be leaked, or it may (as what happened with LLMs) be so simple to replicate that anyone can do it. That doesn't mean it will; for example, LLMs are possible thanks to the affordability of GPUs, but they're only affordable right now (and increasingly less so) because of free market economics.
We are in the honeymoon phase of some tech that's in its infancy. The "democratizing" aspect of AI won't realistically last, I think. The current non-AGI AI won't necessarily go away, but it will be rendered obsolete.
ant/openai already keep their most advanced models behind closed doors and only share previous generation to the public
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What a foolish comment, LLMs empower capital owners far more than the 'working class'
This smacks of "all information should be free" dogma. I for one prefer not to be ground into dust in service of producing more paperclips.
This seems highly optimistic to me.
What's to say current AI won't be highly power-concentrating by default?
The best models are owned by a few companies, and displacement of knowledge-workers mainly seems to benefit the capital class.
On-device / edge computing makes sense in a few very limited scenarios. And economically, price or watt/token (or watt/task completed) might always be better in large data centers.
No reason to think we are on a trajectory towards broad empowerment right now
> The best models are owned by a few companies
Whenever I see 'best model,' 'most advanced model,' etc, it just reads to me as 'roundest ball'. The new model is the most precisely round ball ever, models next year are going to be even rounder, etc.
The difference in utility between the latest, most round ball and last year's frontier balls (which are now freely available to the public) is pretty debatable, imo.
Making balls ever rounder clearly has diminishing returns, as there's a limit to roundness.
Is there a similar limit to intelligence though?
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> The best models are owned by a few companies
In terms of cost per task, the open weight Chinese models are winning by a long shot. So it depends on what you mean by the best model.
This is only correct if you ignore subscriptions. I ran the numbers on what you get for your subscriptions last week: https://blog.brokk.ai/a-coding-subscription-tier-list/
Don't you think open weight Chinese models will be the first thing they start banning once the regulation of this industry starts to kick in?
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Are you sure about that?
when I checked a few weeks ago I did not really find anything competing per value with a 20x Codex subscription.
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That’s only one metric. It doesn’t matter how cheap it is, if it continually fails to solve a problem.
Yes they’re getting better. No, I don’t think this will be a panacea. If only for the fact that this is China (more specifically the CCP) after all - they’ve got their own plan, and altruism is not part of it.
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I'm not terribly optimistic. I don't think humans have really figured out what to do about historical materialism. More just remarking that this is a blog post that almost literally reads "fellow elites, let us ensure only we control the means of production. It is our duty to humanity to control the masses."
I’m trying to hear what you’re saying, but using these Marxist cliches makes your statements a little off putting to me.
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This feels a bit hyperbolic to me. AI seems to me to be similar in "revolutionary" terms as the web, which made information widely available for free if you had an internet connection.
There's a big difference from just having access to information, and also having access to the kind of intelligence that would previously have cost hundreds of dollars per hour to hire.
What? This is capital, on the cusp of total victory, about to cut itself free from the necessity of human labor for productive activity, to elevate itself into pseudo-godhood suddenly panicking and begging its mortal enemy, _the state_ to rein it in and kneecap it. Capital is not stupid: there's no use in being rich if you're dead.
Sorry boss but this ain’t it.
I don’t think the answer to nuclear proliferation is to let everybody have all the nukes they want.
You’re framing this like it’s 1917, or 1945. But it is not - and likely has very little to do with capital at all.
Any “revolution” here (assuming there is some truth in the doomerism which I believe there is given the state of AI) will really look more like an extinction or a genocide, regardless of who holds the keys.
Sorry boss we live in a physical world, unplug it. Don’t grant information monopolies.
Ok - but the post I was responding to was suggesting we do the opposite and provide the intelligence to the people so I’m not sure how your reply rebuts my suggestions.
unexpected marx/acc. Still lazy Marxist rhetoric (capital, means of production, revolution, masses)
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