9 ms·
I'm really struggling with seeing how this is immoral.
by hlynurd 1y ago
I'm really struggling with seeing how this is immoral.
- blitzar 1y ago10 years ago, Apple was the largest company in the world by market capitalization, its market cap was around $479.069 billion. How have we gotten to a point in just a decade where multiple companies are dropping annual numbers that are in the realm of "the market cap of the worlds biggest companies" on these things? Have we solved all (any of) the other problems out there already?
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- hlynurd 1y agoI'm still not seeing it. It's immoral because it's resources not spent on some particular problem you have in mind?
- blitzar 1y agoThe 10x from 400 billion to 4 trillion in a decade didnt come from 2% inflation. It didnt come from nowhwere, or from Silicon Valleys exceptionalism - It came from changing the value of money, labour and resources. It came from everyday people, deficits and borrowing from the next 10 generations of children.
- hlynurd 1y agoSeems like this is about something other than LLMs?
- Qwertious 1y agoLLMs don't exist in a vacuum. Someone spends money to build LLMs, builds infrastructure that the LLMs run on, extracts training data to run the LLMs on, uses LLM for various use-cases, and makes revenue from specific LLM users.
- blitzar 1y agoOf course it is, LLMSs are just the current manifestation. You can swap "LLMs" with "pointless wars over books or dirt" if you want - same same, nothing is new.
- emsign 1y agoIt is about LLMs because it's the trillions being sunk into this bubble instead of more important issues like climate crisis and a pressing need to address the transformation of the energy sector or tackling the wealth inequality gap. These are all causing real world osues that are much bigger than beating (or rather faking to beat) some LLM benchmarks to impress investor.
- adventured 1y agoWhat bubble? If anything it's 10x too small for the value it'll provide over the next century. The same exact premise was proclaimed about the Internet circa 1999-2003 (boom and bust). Then the entire global economy and nearly all electronic communication was rebuilt on top of the Internet. For the coming century AI is more important than the Internet.
- discreteevent 1y ago> the value it'll provide over the next century. The parent mentioned inequality and energy transition. But LLMs seem to be about crud apps and influence campaigns. There's more to value than just quantity. Quantity of what?
- UncleOxidant 1y agoThat's a bold claim. Which AI? The current LLMs? Something else as yet undiscovered? It's not clear that "it's 10x too small for the value it'll provide over the next century" - there's no way to know that - the statement is an article of faith.
- smohare 1y ago[dead]
- UncleOxidant 1y ago> instead of more important issues like climate crisis It's kind of worse than that: this is actually exacerbating the climate crisis as mega tech corps like Microsoft, Google and Meta are scrambling to secure more energy to power their power-hungry LLMs.
- throwawayqqq11 1y agoExploitation. Or cost externalization. The public discourse is weirdly unable to adress burning problems that had been formulated almost 150 years ago. Much like the climate change topic originating in the 1970s.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- willcipriano 1y ago> The 10x from 400 billion to 4 trillion in a decade didnt come from 2% inflation. Money printing does not cause inflation equally especially if not distrubuted so.
- BeFlatXIII 1y agoThat was before pandemic inflation and rampant money printing to bolster the fake numbers.
- ta1243 1y agoApple market cap Jan 2010: 174b Jan 2020: 1400b (23% growth per year) Today: 3200b (18% growth per year) The S&P as a whole grew about 12% a year from 2010 to 2020, and 12.5% a year from 2020 to today Meanwhile the median wage from 2010-2019 grew 3% a year, from 2019-2023 7% a year Seems whatever happened in 2020 was good for workers, in that they aren't falling behind owners as much as they were.
- Quarrelsome 1y agothey're all a bit immoral, like how Hollywood made it big by avoiding patents, how YouTube got its mammoth exit via widespread copyright infringement and now LLMs gather up the skills of people it pays nothing to and tries to sell. However we could also argue that most things in human society are less moral than moral (e.g. cars, supermarkets, etc). But we can also argue that dropping some hundreds of millions in VC capital is less immoral than other activities, such as holding that money in liquid assets. * Glares at Apple cosplaying Smaug *
- aaa_aaa 1y agoPatents and copyrigt laws are immoral.
- harimau777 1y agoI think it's a little more nuanced than that. Certainly IP is regularly abused to try to suppress competition/innovation, own our shared culture, create artificial scarcity, etc. However, there's also a need to protect artists and other creatives from having their work scooped up and profited off of by mega corps.
- thedevilslawyer 1y agoYou're taking a nuanced view of fundamental thing and completely missing the point. Copyright is bad like inheritance is bad. Arguing about good and bad industrialists is missing the point.
- amarait 1y agoI agree. Its very difficult to find people who agree with this
- TeMPOraL 1y agoWhat about compound interest? After all, inheritance is merely letting wealth continue to compound across generations. But at first glance, the same arguments against inheritance would apply against letting a single person earn interest.
- amelius 1y agoI learned this in elementary school. When 10 kids join forces to bully one kid, that is immoral. Same with companies and VC money trying to corner a market.
- MichaelZuo 1y agoIsn’t that the point of having a government with laws and regulation… to allow the majority to bully specific undesirable minority groups into submission? For some things it’s even a worldwide consensus, e.g. any groups with a desire to acquire large amounts of plutonium (who don’t belong to a preapproved list). There’s even a strong consistent push to make it ever more inescapable, comprehensive, resistant to any possible deviation, etc…
- amelius 1y agoNo, you've got that backwards. In a functioning democracy respecting the rule of law, the government with its laws and regulation are the school teachers who are putting the bullies into detention.
- MichaelZuo 1y agoBased on what argument? Just writing your opinion down doesn’t seem relevant to real life government organization. I don’t see how there could be “school teachers” above the majority of congressman or regulatory decision makers. The very existence of pork filled bills thousands of pages long and byzantine regulations suggest that couldn’t possibly be true.
- Weryj 1y agoAI will change the balance of power removing a vital counter balance against the negatives of capitalism. It will take the power away from the workers, such that there will be no power left for people to make demands. We can hope it’ll be positive, but we aren’t even involved in its creation and the incentives are there to ensure it isn’t.
- steve1977 1y agoI guess the good thing is that many workers are also consumers. If they don't have money to consume anymore, who will buy all the shiny things that AI will produce so efficiently?
- Weryj 1y agoMost influence would be through B2B channels, I'd guess.
- joshmarlow 1y agoI agree AI can change the balance of power but I think it's more nuanced. When expertise is commoditized, it becomes cheap; that reduces payroll and operational costs - which reduces the value of VC investment and thus the power of pre-existing wealth. If AI means I can compete with fewer resources, then that's an equalizing dynamic isn't it?
- Weryj 1y agooh, the real world changes will be nuanced. but they'll start happening because of the new incentive.
- fc417fc802 1y agoThat assumes you (the human element) are still required to a significant degree. Right now those with assets are compelled to transfer them to those without because they have a need for the labor. If that need evaporates then why should they give you anything?
- mattigames 1y agoJust from the environmental perspective is pretty immoral, the energy being consumed it's ridiculous and now every company is in an arms race making it all worse.
- renewiltord 1y agoIn general, modern English uses “this is immoral” to mean “I don’t like this”. It’s a language quirk. It’s good that you’re asking the whys to get somewhere but I might as well just get to it. “Immoral”, “should not exist”, “late-stage capitalism” are tribal affiliation chants intended to mark one’s identity. E.g. I go to the Emirates and sing “We’re Arrrrrsenal! We’re by far the greatest time the world has ever seen”. And the point is to signal that I’m an Arsenal fan, a gooner. If someone were to ask “why are you the greatest team?” I wouldn’t be able to answer except with another chant (just like these users) because I’m just chanting for my team. The words aren’t really meaningful on their own.
- dmbche 1y agoFairly cynicial aren't we?
- renewiltord 1y agoWhat an immoral comment.
- dmbche 1y agoAs a more substantial take, being cynical about the language a group uses to speak of their realities and wants is necessarily against dialogue, understanding or seeing the members of that group as equals. If "their" political views have the same value as ones affiliation to a sports team, but your political views are well researched and valid, could you be overlooking something? Edit0: and more importantly, what are they to you? Do they not have the same mental faculties as you? How they able to live and thrive while in total abhorrence to natural law? Or are they all naive children who don't know better? And yes, in any group you'll find loud idiots. Those are in your group too - you just ignore them and focus on the other group's idiots, while disregarding the valid views that are behind. Especially in the age of algorithmic social media, it's hard to parse what's actually being said.