4 ms·

I'm not sure how LLMs/AI couldn't consolidate power. By design, it will move power from the individual to those running the AI systems.

smeeger 2y ago
bingo. and everyone is fine with it as long as the consolidation is benefiting their own tribe.
- tartoran 2y ago
  A spark can start a fire, it doesn't seem wise to ignore history. Things can always get out of control even for the ones up there on top of the pyramid of power.
- throwaway657656 2y ago
  Definitely not everyone. For many of us, checks and balances are a feature not a bug.
tartoran 2y ago
I'm not sure people will just take it though. In the short term it looks like the situation is on a horrible course but eventually people will have had enough. I'm hoping it would take less time for that to happen and the damage will not be too great. Let's remember that we could use the same technology if not a better one to fight against all this.
- xenodium 2y ago
  > but eventually people will have had enough As a Venezuelan, I thought so too. 25 years on...
  - bloopernova 2y ago
    A lot of US citizens are living incredibly comfortable lives. If that is threatened, for instance by food shortages caused by lack of people willing to work on farms for very low wages, then protests may happen. But the reality distortion field around the current administration is very powerful. Fox and CNN are owned by supporters of the republicans, NYTimes and Washington Post don't appear to be reporting certain aspects of the government restructuring. Multiple social media sites are owned and ran by people who support the current admin. I am personally worried that we're going to see the gradual yet continual escalation of rhetoric, more actions that undermine rule of law, and continued lack of critical thinking in so many people. That path appears to lead to extremism. I have a horrible feeling that whoever "wins" in a couple of decades or so will have no time to savour their utopia as the climate catastrophe really starts to bite hard.
    - Gothmog69 2y ago
      So you are a leftist who believes the economy can't operate without basically third world slaves working in your fields?
      - _heimdall 2y ago
        We enslaved the planet with industrialization and we are about to enslave AI, if we haven't already. Humans aren't on the losing end of that, but if your concern is with slavery itself that wouldn't matter.
- _heimdall 2y ago
  When a potential power imbalance is created, those willing to use it for selfish means will almost always win in the end. Anyone with morals driving their use of a new tech will be limited, and unless those people massively outnumber the few selfish ones they will lose eventually.
  - tartoran 2y ago
    Losing a battle is painful but no win is final until things fall into a balance and even that doesn't last forever or it even reverse. The worst case scenario is not going to matter for anyone in the grand scheme of things because there will not be anyone around.
llm_trw 2y ago
Because the difference between a model that costs 10 million to train and a model that costs 10 billion to train is 6 months. Deepseek R1 is something that you can run in a garage on hardware that the average software engineer can buy with a months salary and when it came out last month it was better than _every_ other model.
- cedws 2y ago
  What about third world programmers? They can’t necessarily afford a $5000 GPU. If it weren’t for the “generosity” of tech companies like GitHub granting free LLM usage, they might be locked out entirely. This would put them at a disadvantage, we can argue to what degree but it’s still a disadvantage. Depending on the curve we’re on, LLMs may grow more resource hungry while becoming closer to human performance in software engineering tasks. It’s not unimaginable this would concentrate productivity in the upper class of software engineers that can afford the hardware and/or licenses.
  - llm_trw 2y ago
    $5000 monthly salary? My heart goes out to all the oppressed programmers in the EU.
    - ben_w 2y ago
      EU isn't "third world". Kenya is, and at current exchange rates the range in this citation is $558-$1876/month: https://www.glassdoor.com/Salaries/kenya-software-engineer-salary-SRCH_IL.0,5_IN130_KO6,23.htm?countryRedirect=true https://www.glassdoor.com/Salaries/kenya-software-engineer-s...
      - llm_trw 2y ago
        With salaries like that it's not first world either. If op is trying to catch up to frontier models locally on a budget 1/5th of what you can get in the west then I can see why she would feel the way she does about Ai.
ryandrake 2y ago
I'm not sure I understand how a hallucinating plagiarism machine that people mostly just use to write their term papers translates into "power" (presumably political power? I don't understand what kind of power we're talking about either).
- psb217 2y ago
  The ability to inject your preferred biases into the system that people use for finding or generating nearly all information they consume on a day-to-day basis is extremely powerful. Eg, if all "term papers" produced by this plagiarism machine are now 20% more favourable to the machine's owner than they would otherwise be, that can have significant, compounding long-term effects. Of course, similar things could be said about controlling information flow through: social networks, newspapers, printed books, or whatever the town crier shouts in town square. But, each advancement in information dissemination tends to be power concentrating relative to the older tech, and I don't see any reason why this most recent advance won't follow that trend.

smeeger 2y ago

bingo. and everyone is fine with it as long as the consolidation is benefiting their own tribe.

tartoran 2y ago
A spark can start a fire, it doesn't seem wise to ignore history. Things can always get out of control even for the ones up there on top of the pyramid of power.
throwaway657656 2y ago
Definitely not everyone. For many of us, checks and balances are a feature not a bug.

tartoran 2y ago

I'm not sure people will just take it though. In the short term it looks like the situation is on a horrible course but eventually people will have had enough. I'm hoping it would take less time for that to happen and the damage will not be too great. Let's remember that we could use the same technology if not a better one to fight against all this.

xenodium 2y ago
> but eventually people will have had enough As a Venezuelan, I thought so too. 25 years on...
- bloopernova 2y ago
  A lot of US citizens are living incredibly comfortable lives. If that is threatened, for instance by food shortages caused by lack of people willing to work on farms for very low wages, then protests may happen. But the reality distortion field around the current administration is very powerful. Fox and CNN are owned by supporters of the republicans, NYTimes and Washington Post don't appear to be reporting certain aspects of the government restructuring. Multiple social media sites are owned and ran by people who support the current admin. I am personally worried that we're going to see the gradual yet continual escalation of rhetoric, more actions that undermine rule of law, and continued lack of critical thinking in so many people. That path appears to lead to extremism. I have a horrible feeling that whoever "wins" in a couple of decades or so will have no time to savour their utopia as the climate catastrophe really starts to bite hard.
  - Gothmog69 2y ago
    So you are a leftist who believes the economy can't operate without basically third world slaves working in your fields?
    - _heimdall 2y ago
      We enslaved the planet with industrialization and we are about to enslave AI, if we haven't already. Humans aren't on the losing end of that, but if your concern is with slavery itself that wouldn't matter.
_heimdall 2y ago
When a potential power imbalance is created, those willing to use it for selfish means will almost always win in the end. Anyone with morals driving their use of a new tech will be limited, and unless those people massively outnumber the few selfish ones they will lose eventually.
- tartoran 2y ago
  Losing a battle is painful but no win is final until things fall into a balance and even that doesn't last forever or it even reverse. The worst case scenario is not going to matter for anyone in the grand scheme of things because there will not be anyone around.

llm_trw 2y ago

Because the difference between a model that costs 10 million to train and a model that costs 10 billion to train is 6 months. Deepseek R1 is something that you can run in a garage on hardware that the average software engineer can buy with a months salary and when it came out last month it was better than _every_ other model.

cedws 2y ago
What about third world programmers? They can’t necessarily afford a $5000 GPU. If it weren’t for the “generosity” of tech companies like GitHub granting free LLM usage, they might be locked out entirely. This would put them at a disadvantage, we can argue to what degree but it’s still a disadvantage. Depending on the curve we’re on, LLMs may grow more resource hungry while becoming closer to human performance in software engineering tasks. It’s not unimaginable this would concentrate productivity in the upper class of software engineers that can afford the hardware and/or licenses.
- llm_trw 2y ago
  $5000 monthly salary? My heart goes out to all the oppressed programmers in the EU.
  - ben_w 2y ago
    EU isn't "third world". Kenya is, and at current exchange rates the range in this citation is $558-$1876/month: https://www.glassdoor.com/Salaries/kenya-software-engineer-salary-SRCH_IL.0,5_IN130_KO6,23.htm?countryRedirect=true https://www.glassdoor.com/Salaries/kenya-software-engineer-s...
    - llm_trw 2y ago
      With salaries like that it's not first world either. If op is trying to catch up to frontier models locally on a budget 1/5th of what you can get in the west then I can see why she would feel the way she does about Ai.

ryandrake 2y ago

I'm not sure I understand how a hallucinating plagiarism machine that people mostly just use to write their term papers translates into "power" (presumably political power? I don't understand what kind of power we're talking about either).

psb217 2y ago
The ability to inject your preferred biases into the system that people use for finding or generating nearly all information they consume on a day-to-day basis is extremely powerful. Eg, if all "term papers" produced by this plagiarism machine are now 20% more favourable to the machine's owner than they would otherwise be, that can have significant, compounding long-term effects. Of course, similar things could be said about controlling information flow through: social networks, newspapers, printed books, or whatever the town crier shouts in town square. But, each advancement in information dissemination tends to be power concentrating relative to the older tech, and I don't see any reason why this most recent advance won't follow that trend.