This is a golden age of machine learning in a lot of ways: Karpathy and others like him will teach you how to do magical things every bit as well as the most el

This is a golden age of machine learning in a lot of ways: Karpathy and others like him will teach you how to do magical things every bit as well as the most elite experts via YouTube, Lambda Labs and others will rent you the same kinds of clusters used by the most elite experts if not quite at brute force money furnace scale, Meta will give you the same code and weights they use in production, Huggingface has 10 trillion token datasets of the highest quality hosted, Anyscale and others have open sourced infrastructure that will empower staggering scale for even moderately well-resourced builders. This should represent a Cambrian Explosion of delightful innovation on par with anything that followed the emergence of the personal computer, or the web, or the smartphone. And there is in fact a ton of amazingly cool stuff happening under the tidal wave of shitty monetization and financialization. But the robber barons and the hustlers and the opportunists have gone for the jugular on how quickly and completely this event can be politicized (the lobbying and laws and the speed and ruthlessness around them are an embarrassment), how quickly it can be “monetized” via LLM spam and pump-and-dump Mag7 cap manipulation, and how directly it can be converted into a minimum cost offshore customer servicing model-style aspirations where consumers get a broken chat bot instead of a person while simultaneously facing pressure, real or perceived, that their job is about to be replaced by some inferior “agent” that isn’t done. Machine learning is an amazing technology that should be strictly delightful in the hands of people who live to build awesome things that make people happy and prosperous and safe. “AI” has come to mean LLM spam, Thiel/Altman-style TESCREAL fascist politics, a massive surge in ubiquitous digital surveillance (which somehow still had headroom), and the next turn of the crank on the enshitification of modern life courtesy of the Battery Club. The socially useful and technically exciting future of AI is just waiting on the fall of the “AI” people. It’s so close.