Comment by palmotea
5 hours ago
> Why is it always these supremely weak arguments and rationalizations against LLMs that come from people that have been intelligent, at least based on their comment histories, for so many years. It’s radicalizing me. I want a data center everywhere and I want tokens to be so cheap they’re like electricity or water.
What do you think the impact of "tokens to be so cheap they’re like electricity or water" will be? I think people who are intelligent and don't have their heads stuck in the sand see the implications of that. Why should people with money pay people to for intelligence, when they can buy machine intelligence very cheaply?
I guess it will free up smart people to finally take jobs that don't use their intelligence, or sit around scraping by on minimum-wage-like UBI (if we're so lucky).
> sit around scraping by on minimum-wage-like UBI (if we're so lucky).
If every cognitive task currently done by humans could be done for ~free, our global material abundance would be truly unprecedented, nigh unlimited.
I have many worries about a world where people aren't needed, but "scraping by" does not describe that world in any sense.
The big problem with this argument is that the current owners of frontier models are actively working against these ideals.
Many people, including myself, would feel very differently if models were open(and not just open weights), compute/resources were cheap enough to enable local access and ownership.
Unfortunately, despite what they may say in press releases, a lot of people in the space are banking on holding a stranglehold over the market and building a regulatory and resource moat to protect their investment.
Of course there is the argument that they deserve some return on the investment in training but lets not forget that it is our work, the work of the commons, that enabled it in the first place. People are frustrated that a small group of people endeavour to control the use of a tool that was created using the work, thoughts and content of us all, often using questionably legal means.