5 ms·

The difference is that now only the owner of a machine profits where before lots of individuals profited. More power to the owners, I guess.

pbhjpbhj 3y ago
The trajectory of ML appears to point towards massive transfer of wealth to capital owners and impoverishment of the working classes. We need to find a way to distribute the benefits of such developments.
- aloisdg 3y ago
  Maybe there is something to do about workers owning their own means of production.
  - dontlaugh 3y ago
    All road lead to revolution, but it takes time to build. Until then, some sabotage may be in order.
  - TeMPOraL 3y ago
    [always has been.jpg] Seriously though, I used to think this was mostly a done deal that's being occasionally brought up by people fascinated with socialism or something. But the longer I live, the more I realize that the issue has not meaningfully improved at all - we've only been distracted from it. And it's much, much older than Marx and co. too. This, and not some general fear of technology, was the whole point of the Luddite movement (very relevant in context of AI). And you can probably find examples stretching back way before industrial revolution too.
  - satvikpendem 3y ago
    What workers own the means of production in the case of an AI? Democratization via open source works, but it actually extends beyond workers to end users. If all the workers at OpenAI were equal shareholders and owned the means of their production, this would not change anything about them profiting from the company and all of their users. Stallman was and continues to be right, open source and freedom for end users is really the only way.
  - WalterBright 3y ago
    Start your own business and you'll own that means of production.
    - pbhjpbhj 3y ago
      Why don't poor people just buy a factory to work in??? /s
      - WalterBright 3y ago
        Your computer is a means of production.
        ben_w 3y ago
        Yeeaasss, but so is a lathe or a kiln or a chainsaw. I don't know if OpenAI has actually confirmed what hardware they use or if the press and bloggers did citeogenesis on each other, but the claim is they're using A100 GPUs, and the bigger models have to use several in parallel. I've seen detached houses in Eastern Europe going for the price of two of those cards. The DGX-2 is (was?) priced more like a detached house in Western Europe; the GH200 they just announced appears to be "if you have to ask, you can't afford it". This is similar to how, despite that lathes, kilns, and chainsaws can be bought in supermarkets as impulse purchases, industrial versions of each are rather more expensive.
- wnkrshm 3y ago
  Imo it's only right to have something that is made of public goods (i.e. everyone's data and human historic record) to become a public good in itself.
  - e12e 3y ago
    I agree, but I'm not sure it's all that different from oil, iron ore ore drinking water?
    - AnthonyMouse 3y ago
      If you train a model and publish it, anyone can copy it for free. How do you make free copies of iron ore?
- dragonwriter 3y ago
  > The trajectory of ML appears to point towards massive transfer of wealth to capital owners and impoverishment of the working classes. That’s the natural end of capitalism, as has been noted literally since the word “capitalism” waa coined for it (largely, for that reason.) It is end to which every tool and technology is put under that system, and has nothing to do with the particular technology and everything to do with the system.
  - WalterBright 3y ago
    > That’s the natural end of capitalism No evidence of that.
  - s1artibartfast 3y ago
    The capitalist system doesn't preclude workers from acquiring capital or capitalist from working. It also doesn't dictate the relative return on capital investment versus worker labor. The rate of return on capital is what dictates the concentration of wealth, or conversely, the dispersal of wealth. The conceptual systems introduced by Marx and others is that only workers can own capital and are based on a set of assumptions about Capital returns versus labor power.
    - dragonwriter 3y ago
      > The capitalist system doesn't preclude workers from acquiring capital or capitalist from working. In the same sense that the US electoral system doesn’t preclude more than two viable parties. The system of property rights that defines capitalism doesn’t specify any limit, but the structure it creates promotes it in function. > The conceptual systems introduced by Marx and others is that only workers can own capital No, the conceptual system introduced by Marx rejects the concept of ownership as applied to capital [0], though it favors workers exercising control of the capital to which their labor is applied. Different variants derived from this and related ideas have different specific mechanism for this exercise of control. [0] When Marxists talk about rejecting/abolishing “private property”, it refers to this, because in the Marxists terminology “private property” refers not to property of non-state individuals and entities in general as it does in current common use, but specifically to property rights in the means of production, i.e., capital.
- veave 3y ago
  [flagged]
- tourmalinetaco 3y ago
  > We need to find a way to distribute the benefits of such developments. It’s called free software and making models at various ‘weight classes’ to support many GPUs. Basically don’t let companies like OpenAI/Google/Microsoft run the show and, ironically, support companies like Facebook who open source their models. And yes, I know OpenAI has open sourced models in the past, but the fact that they won’t open source ChatGPT, GPT-4, and select other models like DALL-E 1/2 make me wary of them.
- gwright 3y ago
  I don't know how to easily quantify these things but your analysis ignores the other part of the transaction. The consumer of the photos (or ML generated text) benefits through the lower cost, easier access, increased project velocity, etc. Market disruption due to technology/innovation/progress is nothing new. There have always been winners and losers but the aggregate wealth/value continues to climb. Devising ways to mitigate the loses seems like a more feasible approach than pretending that we can prevent these sorts of changes through regulation or legislation.
- jachee 3y ago
  That’s been the trajectory of capitalism for centuries. This is just an accentuation and further acceleration thereof.
ksaj 3y ago
There are fungi that only barely kill their insect host and then use mind control to drive their bodies around to eventually reproduce. So there is precedence for this scenario.
satvikpendem 3y ago
I'm using Stable Diffusion and I'm profiting. The difference is open vs closed source, not AI in general.
prepend 3y ago
All the users of that machine profit. And I guess there are orders of magnitude greater users.
- pessimizer 3y ago
  All the users are that machine are renting time from the machine's owner.
  - AnthonyMouse 3y ago
    You can run Stable Diffusion on any PC. A $50 desktop PC which is ten years old will generate an image in about 6 minutes. A more modern PC will do it in 2 minutes. That's the CPU. A $300 GPU is dramatically faster. And in a few years the same GPU will be $50. You can rent the hardware from someone else, but that's a matter of convenience, not affordability.
e12e 3y ago
> The difference is that now only the owner of a machine profits where before lots of individuals profited. Hello post-industrial/ai/ml capitalism. This development will do to designers, programmers, support what the industrial revolution did to cobblers and weavers ...
- WalterBright 3y ago
  > support what the industrial revolution did to cobblers and weavers Which made cheap shoes and clothes available to everybody. If you want to buy a tailor made shirt, it'll cost you at least $500. And that's still with machine made cloth. What do you think it would cost if the cloth was made by hand by a weaver?
  - e12e 3y ago
    > Which made cheap shoes and clothes available to everybody. I'd argue the efficiency in production led to lower prices - while the concentration in wealth mostly kept buying power/living standards lower for the workers (or; capitalist class reaped an unfair share of productivity gains). I believe commodisation of "knowledge" work will lead to lower prices (and unfair distribution) too.
    - WalterBright 3y ago
      The standard of living of the poor in America went up all through the 19th century. Things like average height and longevity are strong markers of that. Also, average clothing sizes increased dramatically. Go take a look at Fort Williams, and at the clothes in it they preserved. They look like kids' clothes. The same for Civil War uniforms. Larger than the FW clothes, but still looking like kid clothes. I flipped through a high school history book a few years ago, and it insisted that the middle class in America didn't emerge until FDR. This is laughably wrong. It was there from the beginning.
mym1990 3y ago
What? Do photographers not need a camera, at times costing thousands or tens of thousands of dollars when including lenses…to make that stock photography?

pbhjpbhj 3y ago

The trajectory of ML appears to point towards massive transfer of wealth to capital owners and impoverishment of the working classes. We need to find a way to distribute the benefits of such developments.

aloisdg 3y ago
Maybe there is something to do about workers owning their own means of production.
- dontlaugh 3y ago
  All road lead to revolution, but it takes time to build. Until then, some sabotage may be in order.
- TeMPOraL 3y ago
  [always has been.jpg] Seriously though, I used to think this was mostly a done deal that's being occasionally brought up by people fascinated with socialism or something. But the longer I live, the more I realize that the issue has not meaningfully improved at all - we've only been distracted from it. And it's much, much older than Marx and co. too. This, and not some general fear of technology, was the whole point of the Luddite movement (very relevant in context of AI). And you can probably find examples stretching back way before industrial revolution too.
- satvikpendem 3y ago
  What workers own the means of production in the case of an AI? Democratization via open source works, but it actually extends beyond workers to end users. If all the workers at OpenAI were equal shareholders and owned the means of their production, this would not change anything about them profiting from the company and all of their users. Stallman was and continues to be right, open source and freedom for end users is really the only way.
- WalterBright 3y ago
  Start your own business and you'll own that means of production.
  - pbhjpbhj 3y ago
    Why don't poor people just buy a factory to work in??? /s
    - WalterBright 3y ago
      Your computer is a means of production.
      - ben_w 3y ago
        Yeeaasss, but so is a lathe or a kiln or a chainsaw. I don't know if OpenAI has actually confirmed what hardware they use or if the press and bloggers did citeogenesis on each other, but the claim is they're using A100 GPUs, and the bigger models have to use several in parallel. I've seen detached houses in Eastern Europe going for the price of two of those cards. The DGX-2 is (was?) priced more like a detached house in Western Europe; the GH200 they just announced appears to be "if you have to ask, you can't afford it". This is similar to how, despite that lathes, kilns, and chainsaws can be bought in supermarkets as impulse purchases, industrial versions of each are rather more expensive.
wnkrshm 3y ago
Imo it's only right to have something that is made of public goods (i.e. everyone's data and human historic record) to become a public good in itself.
- e12e 3y ago
  I agree, but I'm not sure it's all that different from oil, iron ore ore drinking water?
  - AnthonyMouse 3y ago
    If you train a model and publish it, anyone can copy it for free. How do you make free copies of iron ore?
dragonwriter 3y ago
> The trajectory of ML appears to point towards massive transfer of wealth to capital owners and impoverishment of the working classes. That’s the natural end of capitalism, as has been noted literally since the word “capitalism” waa coined for it (largely, for that reason.) It is end to which every tool and technology is put under that system, and has nothing to do with the particular technology and everything to do with the system.
- WalterBright 3y ago
  > That’s the natural end of capitalism No evidence of that.
- s1artibartfast 3y ago
  The capitalist system doesn't preclude workers from acquiring capital or capitalist from working. It also doesn't dictate the relative return on capital investment versus worker labor. The rate of return on capital is what dictates the concentration of wealth, or conversely, the dispersal of wealth. The conceptual systems introduced by Marx and others is that only workers can own capital and are based on a set of assumptions about Capital returns versus labor power.
  - dragonwriter 3y ago
    > The capitalist system doesn't preclude workers from acquiring capital or capitalist from working. In the same sense that the US electoral system doesn’t preclude more than two viable parties. The system of property rights that defines capitalism doesn’t specify any limit, but the structure it creates promotes it in function. > The conceptual systems introduced by Marx and others is that only workers can own capital No, the conceptual system introduced by Marx rejects the concept of ownership as applied to capital [0], though it favors workers exercising control of the capital to which their labor is applied. Different variants derived from this and related ideas have different specific mechanism for this exercise of control. [0] When Marxists talk about rejecting/abolishing “private property”, it refers to this, because in the Marxists terminology “private property” refers not to property of non-state individuals and entities in general as it does in current common use, but specifically to property rights in the means of production, i.e., capital.
veave 3y ago
[flagged]
tourmalinetaco 3y ago
> We need to find a way to distribute the benefits of such developments. It’s called free software and making models at various ‘weight classes’ to support many GPUs. Basically don’t let companies like OpenAI/Google/Microsoft run the show and, ironically, support companies like Facebook who open source their models. And yes, I know OpenAI has open sourced models in the past, but the fact that they won’t open source ChatGPT, GPT-4, and select other models like DALL-E 1/2 make me wary of them.
gwright 3y ago
I don't know how to easily quantify these things but your analysis ignores the other part of the transaction. The consumer of the photos (or ML generated text) benefits through the lower cost, easier access, increased project velocity, etc. Market disruption due to technology/innovation/progress is nothing new. There have always been winners and losers but the aggregate wealth/value continues to climb. Devising ways to mitigate the loses seems like a more feasible approach than pretending that we can prevent these sorts of changes through regulation or legislation.
jachee 3y ago
That’s been the trajectory of capitalism for centuries. This is just an accentuation and further acceleration thereof.

ksaj 3y ago

There are fungi that only barely kill their insect host and then use mind control to drive their bodies around to eventually reproduce. So there is precedence for this scenario.

satvikpendem 3y ago

I'm using Stable Diffusion and I'm profiting. The difference is open vs closed source, not AI in general.

prepend 3y ago

All the users of that machine profit. And I guess there are orders of magnitude greater users.

pessimizer 3y ago
All the users are that machine are renting time from the machine's owner.
- AnthonyMouse 3y ago
  You can run Stable Diffusion on any PC. A $50 desktop PC which is ten years old will generate an image in about 6 minutes. A more modern PC will do it in 2 minutes. That's the CPU. A $300 GPU is dramatically faster. And in a few years the same GPU will be $50. You can rent the hardware from someone else, but that's a matter of convenience, not affordability.

e12e 3y ago

> The difference is that now only the owner of a machine profits where before lots of individuals profited. Hello post-industrial/ai/ml capitalism. This development will do to designers, programmers, support what the industrial revolution did to cobblers and weavers ...

WalterBright 3y ago
> support what the industrial revolution did to cobblers and weavers Which made cheap shoes and clothes available to everybody. If you want to buy a tailor made shirt, it'll cost you at least $500. And that's still with machine made cloth. What do you think it would cost if the cloth was made by hand by a weaver?
- e12e 3y ago
  > Which made cheap shoes and clothes available to everybody. I'd argue the efficiency in production led to lower prices - while the concentration in wealth mostly kept buying power/living standards lower for the workers (or; capitalist class reaped an unfair share of productivity gains). I believe commodisation of "knowledge" work will lead to lower prices (and unfair distribution) too.
  - WalterBright 3y ago
    The standard of living of the poor in America went up all through the 19th century. Things like average height and longevity are strong markers of that. Also, average clothing sizes increased dramatically. Go take a look at Fort Williams, and at the clothes in it they preserved. They look like kids' clothes. The same for Civil War uniforms. Larger than the FW clothes, but still looking like kid clothes. I flipped through a high school history book a few years ago, and it insisted that the middle class in America didn't emerge until FDR. This is laughably wrong. It was there from the beginning.

mym1990 3y ago

What? Do photographers not need a camera, at times costing thousands or tens of thousands of dollars when including lenses…to make that stock photography?