Comment by pjc50
14 hours ago
> Tao and others in that group have been strongly and publicly pro AI from the start
Unfortunately being "pro AI" means relinquishing any control over what the AI, or more importantly the company running it, might be doing.
How is this different from literally any other part of the economy?
We've relinquished control over just about everything we use or consume. We can't compete with larger enterprises for production of food, clothing, machinery, medicine, energy, services. Mathematics is just the latest thing to be industrialized.
What keeps large companies under control is competition with other large companies. This competition causes the surplus value they produce to flow to consumers, not be hoarded via monopoly prices. Do we see strong moats that are going to cause monopoly in AI? I don't see it, and in particular I don't see it persisting if it exists transiently.
You're right, and that's a bad thing. AI is nothing fundamentally new, but its extremity is making many people aware of the truth that's been there all along. There's no contradiction in that.
> Do we see strong moats that are going to cause monopoly in AI?
Ownership of the capital assets used to train and inference new models. Yes, we may end up with more than one firm. But as we see with big tech today, a small number of fantastically wealthy firms in "competition" does not an open market make.
Is it a bad thing? We live in a society. We depend on the work of other people. We are not autonomous. Sure, we can try to be self-sufficient, and that would lead to a subsistence lifestyle much degraded compared to what we experience.
Somehow you have to argue either that society itself is bad, or that math is somehow different from all these other human activities.
I think the obvious fact that people prefer to live in places with large commercial organizations shows they don't really care about that, at least to the point of foregoing the benefits these organizations bring.
No, it doesn’t. You can be in favor of something and opposed to a particular way of handling or implementing the thing. And the issue here isn’t what it’s being used for but who is able to use it.
The company running it should be you. The future of AI is open and local.
"AI" is largely a marketing term for a particular type of computer program that uses a statistical language model.
Computers and computer programs are tools. Humans always remain sovereign over their tools.
And incentives are sovereign over the humans. The humans leading the AI labs have every incentive in the world to move quickly without any restraint.
The second law of thermodynamics always wins.
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I am not sure how convinced I am by that argument. A gun is also a particular kind of tool, and it makes the person at the handle end sovereign, and the person at the pointy-shooty end subjugated.