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This framing is hardly fair, since it treats AI as an incinerator of knowledge rather than the democratizer of knowledge that it is. Every human uses that "res

This framing is hardly fair, since it treats AI as an incinerator of knowledge rather than the democratizer of knowledge that it is. Every human uses that "resource" to train themselves, and now they use AI to supercharge that consumption. The companies are giving average lay people access to a personal PhD to help with whatever they are working on, for $20/mo, and those companies are committing an evil cardinal sin? I get the gatekeepers are pissed, LLMs are way cheaper than those expensive gate fees, and I cannot come up with a good faith argument about how giving the power of SOTA LLMs to anyone for $20/mo is somehow evil or bad. In an alternate universe these same models are $100k/mo with limited invite only access, occasionally the public gets a single demo prompt with a short reply, and $20/mo access is a utopian wet dream. If you want UBI, then the framing shouldn't be around "whoever had content on the internet circa 2024 is entitled to lifetime AI company payouts that effectively act as permanent unemployment checks."

shimman 8mo ago
It's not democracy if you can't destroy it. It's not democracy if the citizens cannot reject it. It's not democracy if it's being forced down your throat. Sick of how SV/VC absolutely ruin words for their own monetary benefit. How about you put up it up to a national vote and see what democracy gets you? I highly suspect that vast majorities of the electorate would want to nationalize this tech to benefit everyone rather than benefiting the few. Democracy means there is a politics of rejection, rejection is normal in functioning democracies; what isn't normal are small handfuls of people capturing all collective human intelligence then claiming only they are allowed to benefit from it.
- WarmWash 8mo ago
  Democratize means to make something available to everyone. I suppose the root of the word is from democracy, everyone gets a vote/equal rights, but the meaning doesn't really have anything to do with politics or government... So to reframe my argument for clarity; I have a hard time coming up with an honest critique of why giving everyone incredibly cheap access (often free!) to incredibly powerful LLMs is somehow evil. And obviously these things are ridiculously popular. Average people seem to think they are fucking awesome, and anger seems to be mostly from gatekeepers that are relentlessly screaming that their gates are being bypassed for pennies.
  - shimman 8mo ago
    [flagged]
    - abletonlive 8mo ago
      > These things are CLEARLY NOT POPULAR Time to leave whatever bubble you live in. These are some of the most popular apps on the market today. It's incredibly popular.
      - BizarroLand 8mo ago
        [flagged]
        abletonlive 8mo ago
        You're projecting so hard that Epson is going to reach out and ask you how you're accomplishing it
        BizarroLand 8mo ago
        I'll be glad to accept my normal consulting retainer from such a prestigious company
      - shimman 8mo ago
        [flagged]
        abletonlive 8mo ago
        > If they're so popular and so great, why are they struggling to make profit? Because they are optimizing for growth not for profit > Why are they struggling to show large returns Because they are growing their reach > Why are they all trying to use the strategy of securing corporate welfare to enrich themselves? "Securing corporate welfare" well this is one of those reject the premise things. They aren't doing that in any capacity that is different than any other company or sector. > These things are enabling mass surveillance and human misery, maybe instead of constantly chasing the shiny and letting SV dictate the direction of tech in the US we start introducing public alternatives to this mess? You're welcome to do that any time, you'll just find that your reality breaks when you realize people actually like LLMs and use them a lot. go ahead and do some basic research > Something tells me that if you gave $100 billion to a consortium of devs across the US they would come up with a better plan to enable technological flourishing rather than mass inequality. Yawn. You're speaking about the tech bubble but live in a bubble that doesn't match that bubble's reality. Developers love LLMs. Demand is ATH, we have less capacity to deliver LLMs than there is demand. How do you operate in the regular world when you're so unaligned with reality? Both apple and google's app store has LLMs as the #1 downloaded app "BuT thEy ArEn't PoPuLar EvErYbody HaTes Them". Maybe you should unsubscribe to your bubble subreddits or wherever you are getting information to form such a discordant understanding of reality. I don't think it's working for you.
- GrinningFool 8mo ago
  > How about you put up it up to a national vote and see what democracy gets you? I highly suspect that vast majorities of the electorate would want to nationalize this tech to benefit everyone rather than benefiting the few. You're probably right -- except for the billions in massive PR campaigns that will be spent to successfully convince enough of them that it's in their best interest to let the companies keep ownership. This is in addition to the billions in PR already being spent to make AI palatable in spite of the societal and economic costs.
  - shimman 8mo ago
    Their billions in PR isn't stopping people from rejecting data centers being built in their communities. What you have to understand about advocacy is that it's the worst form of politics and it only goes so far. Paid canvassers aren't convincing compared to actual humans organizing with one another.
- pixl97 8mo ago
  > vast majorities of the electorate would want to nationalize Lol, then you've missed how propaganda in the US has worked for the last 100 years. The wealthy have launched a continuous attack against the idea of nationalization/socialization to the point it creates a irrational Pavlovian response in huge portions of the population. Us the population have already lost a war we had no idea we were fighting to an enemy that plays a far longer game than most of us.
drooby 8mo ago
I never said AI companies are evil or that $20/mo access is bad. You're arguing against a position I don't hold. AI can be genuinely useful AND the people whose collective output made it possible can deserve a share of the wealth it generates. These aren't in conflict. Alaskans benefit from oil too. It heats their homes, paves their roads, funds their schools. That wasn't an argument against the dividend. "You're already benefiting from the resource" has never been a reason the people who generated it shouldn't share in the profits. The question was never "is AI good." It's "when something built on collective human output generates trillions, does the public have a claim to a share." Nothing you said here addresses that.
vannevar 8mo ago
>The companies are giving average lay people access to a personal PhD to help with whatever they are working on, for $20/mo, and those companies are committing an evil cardinal sin? The social media companies gave their services for free, and now it turns out they've committed quite a few sins. None of the AI companies are doing this out of the goodness of their hearts, nor will they be satisfied with subscription revenue. If they see opportunities to make more money by manipulating the population, rest assured they will take those opportunities.
filoeleven 8mo ago
But AI is absolutely an incinerator of knowledge. A helper tool that I can ask a question and which responds with relevant information gleaned from the vast collection of human-gathered knowledge and experience would be fantastic. What we have instead is something that often gets things mostly right, if you don't look too hard at it. And the poisoned output of this thing seeps back into the knowledge pool, reducing its accuracy and therefore usefulness. The problem of LLMs is the dissolution of human knowledge into a sea of slop.
jklinger410 8mo ago
> This framing is hardly fair, since it treats AI as an incinerator of knowledge rather than the democratizer of knowledge that it is Paying for access to information is not democracy
- WarmWash 8mo ago
  Plenty of free models you can run on your own hardware. I don't think those are going away either
Imustaskforhelp 8mo ago
> In an alternate universe these same models are $100k/mo with limited invite only access, occasionally the public gets a single demo prompt with a short reply, and $20/mo access is a utopian wet dream. So your understanding of the present state is that we are living in a utopian wet dream now that we have models who can generate slop faster so much so that we have a term of it called AI slop? I or many people don't want this Utopian wet dream, so I want to know, did I or other people have say it or not? A few select people decide what's the definition of a Utopian wet dream is and they then take the collective properties of everybody else to fulfill that and even putting the employment/livelihood of those same people into risks Sir, does that sound familiar? > I get the gatekeepers are pissed No, humans are pissed, humans just like how you and your family are humans too (well I sure hope so)
orphea 8mo ago
> a personal PhD Come on, spare us OpenAI's PR bullshit.

shimman 8mo ago

It's not democracy if you can't destroy it. It's not democracy if the citizens cannot reject it. It's not democracy if it's being forced down your throat. Sick of how SV/VC absolutely ruin words for their own monetary benefit. How about you put up it up to a national vote and see what democracy gets you? I highly suspect that vast majorities of the electorate would want to nationalize this tech to benefit everyone rather than benefiting the few. Democracy means there is a politics of rejection, rejection is normal in functioning democracies; what isn't normal are small handfuls of people capturing all collective human intelligence then claiming only they are allowed to benefit from it.

WarmWash 8mo ago
Democratize means to make something available to everyone. I suppose the root of the word is from democracy, everyone gets a vote/equal rights, but the meaning doesn't really have anything to do with politics or government... So to reframe my argument for clarity; I have a hard time coming up with an honest critique of why giving everyone incredibly cheap access (often free!) to incredibly powerful LLMs is somehow evil. And obviously these things are ridiculously popular. Average people seem to think they are fucking awesome, and anger seems to be mostly from gatekeepers that are relentlessly screaming that their gates are being bypassed for pennies.
- shimman 8mo ago
  [flagged]
  - abletonlive 8mo ago
    > These things are CLEARLY NOT POPULAR Time to leave whatever bubble you live in. These are some of the most popular apps on the market today. It's incredibly popular.
    - BizarroLand 8mo ago
      [flagged]
      - abletonlive 8mo ago
        You're projecting so hard that Epson is going to reach out and ask you how you're accomplishing it
        BizarroLand 8mo ago
        I'll be glad to accept my normal consulting retainer from such a prestigious company
    - shimman 8mo ago
      [flagged]
      - abletonlive 8mo ago
        > If they're so popular and so great, why are they struggling to make profit? Because they are optimizing for growth not for profit > Why are they struggling to show large returns Because they are growing their reach > Why are they all trying to use the strategy of securing corporate welfare to enrich themselves? "Securing corporate welfare" well this is one of those reject the premise things. They aren't doing that in any capacity that is different than any other company or sector. > These things are enabling mass surveillance and human misery, maybe instead of constantly chasing the shiny and letting SV dictate the direction of tech in the US we start introducing public alternatives to this mess? You're welcome to do that any time, you'll just find that your reality breaks when you realize people actually like LLMs and use them a lot. go ahead and do some basic research > Something tells me that if you gave $100 billion to a consortium of devs across the US they would come up with a better plan to enable technological flourishing rather than mass inequality. Yawn. You're speaking about the tech bubble but live in a bubble that doesn't match that bubble's reality. Developers love LLMs. Demand is ATH, we have less capacity to deliver LLMs than there is demand. How do you operate in the regular world when you're so unaligned with reality? Both apple and google's app store has LLMs as the #1 downloaded app "BuT thEy ArEn't PoPuLar EvErYbody HaTes Them". Maybe you should unsubscribe to your bubble subreddits or wherever you are getting information to form such a discordant understanding of reality. I don't think it's working for you.
GrinningFool 8mo ago
> How about you put up it up to a national vote and see what democracy gets you? I highly suspect that vast majorities of the electorate would want to nationalize this tech to benefit everyone rather than benefiting the few. You're probably right -- except for the billions in massive PR campaigns that will be spent to successfully convince enough of them that it's in their best interest to let the companies keep ownership. This is in addition to the billions in PR already being spent to make AI palatable in spite of the societal and economic costs.
- shimman 8mo ago
  Their billions in PR isn't stopping people from rejecting data centers being built in their communities. What you have to understand about advocacy is that it's the worst form of politics and it only goes so far. Paid canvassers aren't convincing compared to actual humans organizing with one another.
pixl97 8mo ago
> vast majorities of the electorate would want to nationalize Lol, then you've missed how propaganda in the US has worked for the last 100 years. The wealthy have launched a continuous attack against the idea of nationalization/socialization to the point it creates a irrational Pavlovian response in huge portions of the population. Us the population have already lost a war we had no idea we were fighting to an enemy that plays a far longer game than most of us.

drooby 8mo ago

I never said AI companies are evil or that $20/mo access is bad. You're arguing against a position I don't hold. AI can be genuinely useful AND the people whose collective output made it possible can deserve a share of the wealth it generates. These aren't in conflict. Alaskans benefit from oil too. It heats their homes, paves their roads, funds their schools. That wasn't an argument against the dividend. "You're already benefiting from the resource" has never been a reason the people who generated it shouldn't share in the profits. The question was never "is AI good." It's "when something built on collective human output generates trillions, does the public have a claim to a share." Nothing you said here addresses that.

vannevar 8mo ago

>The companies are giving average lay people access to a personal PhD to help with whatever they are working on, for $20/mo, and those companies are committing an evil cardinal sin? The social media companies gave their services for free, and now it turns out they've committed quite a few sins. None of the AI companies are doing this out of the goodness of their hearts, nor will they be satisfied with subscription revenue. If they see opportunities to make more money by manipulating the population, rest assured they will take those opportunities.

filoeleven 8mo ago

But AI is absolutely an incinerator of knowledge. A helper tool that I can ask a question and which responds with relevant information gleaned from the vast collection of human-gathered knowledge and experience would be fantastic. What we have instead is something that often gets things mostly right, if you don't look too hard at it. And the poisoned output of this thing seeps back into the knowledge pool, reducing its accuracy and therefore usefulness. The problem of LLMs is the dissolution of human knowledge into a sea of slop.

jklinger410 8mo ago

> This framing is hardly fair, since it treats AI as an incinerator of knowledge rather than the democratizer of knowledge that it is Paying for access to information is not democracy

WarmWash 8mo ago
Plenty of free models you can run on your own hardware. I don't think those are going away either

Imustaskforhelp 8mo ago

> In an alternate universe these same models are $100k/mo with limited invite only access, occasionally the public gets a single demo prompt with a short reply, and $20/mo access is a utopian wet dream. So your understanding of the present state is that we are living in a utopian wet dream now that we have models who can generate slop faster so much so that we have a term of it called AI slop? I or many people don't want this Utopian wet dream, so I want to know, did I or other people have say it or not? A few select people decide what's the definition of a Utopian wet dream is and they then take the collective properties of everybody else to fulfill that and even putting the employment/livelihood of those same people into risks Sir, does that sound familiar? > I get the gatekeepers are pissed No, humans are pissed, humans just like how you and your family are humans too (well I sure hope so)

orphea 8mo ago

> a personal PhD Come on, spare us OpenAI's PR bullshit.