6 ms·

How do you decouple it when the people who own it and are building it seem to be driven on increasing inequality?

by tedivm 6mo ago

zozbot234 6mo ago
AI is actually a mass decrease in inequality, as much as the Gutenberg printing press was. It takes something that used to be the foremost example of pure bourgeois and intellectual privilege - the culture contained within millions of books and other instances of human creativity - and provides it to everyone for the cost of a few thousand bucks in hardware and a few watts of electricity.
- trolleski 6mo ago
  And is controlled by a handful of mega corporations? How is that equitable?
- Der_Einzige 6mo ago
  [flagged]
  - jdiff 6mo ago
    Swartz died in 2002, decades before LLMs. It is distasteful to put words in the mouths of the dead by invoking him here. Even local AI concentrates power in the hands of a few, the few who can afford the hardware to run it, and the few who have the luxury of enough time and energy to devote to engaging with the intricate, technical rabbit hole of local models.
    - jacquesm 6mo ago
      You should read that comment again, they're not putting any words in Swartz's mouth, they are lauding his accomplishments.
      - jdiff 6mo ago
        It is lauding his accomplishments, yes. Why bring him up in specific if there is no relation intended? There are many broad shouldered giants in this space.
- aleph_minus_one 6mo ago
  > AI is actually a mass decrease in inequality, as much as the Gutenberg printing press was. It takes something that used to be the foremost example of pure bourgeois and intellectual privilege - the culture contained within millions of books and other instances of human creativity[.] I would rather claim that this is a proper description of shadow libraries [1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadow_library https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadow_library
- tedivm 6mo ago
  This is only true if productivity gains tied to general well being, but instead it's being concentrated in the hands of a few.
  - falcor84 6mo ago
    I can't think of any period in time where it was so easy to go into business yourself and to generally have access to the same "means of production" as the biggest companies have. If you want to use LLMs, you can either use cloud resources at what I think are really reasonable per-token prices compared to the value, or to set up your own server with an open-weights model at a comparable level of quality (though generally significantly slower tokens/s). In any case, you absolutely don't have to pay OpenAI/Anthropic/Google if you don't want to.
    - tedivm 6mo ago
      I'm well aware of this: I bought a pretty beefy (consumer grade beefy) GPU machine and run all sorts of open weight models. I do think there is potential. But are you expecting 360m Americans to start their own businesses? That is a solution that doesn't scale. Consumer grade GPUs aren't going to scale all that much either, and the cost of the models are going up rather than down as vendors start seeking profits. We already see the memory and storage markets exploding in cost due to the rise in demand as well.
      - ryandrake 6mo ago
        Also: A handful more of already well-off people going into business for themselves is not going to move the needle on inequality. When people say "It's never been a better time to start your own business" they still mean "the people who already have their needs met and have the capital to live off for a while while their business becomes viable: In other words, the people who have always started businesses: Already-Rich people. It's never been a worse time for the poor or middle class to think about starting their own business. Prices on everything are rising, it's getting to be a struggle for even the middle class to continue to afford their homes. Healthcare is even more fraught than ever before, and if you're lucky enough to have a decent plan from your employer, aint no way you're going to give it up to go start a business.
- elevatortrim 6mo ago
  No. Because success is individual, inequality is statistical. It ia true that AI gives ordinary people a lot more chance to be successful. But do not forget that success depends on lots of factors that are not in one’s control: knowing the right people, time being right for what you are doing, and lots of others. So while the mechanics of success is a lot different to lottery, it does not work much differently: 1 in 1M attempts are successful. Yes, AI gives everyone more lottery tickets, but it gives rich people a lot more tickets.
Avicebron 6mo ago
If I had the answer to that I would probably be a politician instead of a systems eng, but off the top of the mind build out a parallel economies at the state level where people in the US actually live, ensuring QoL standards, then gradually renegotiate up back to the Federal level. It would require, united..states eventually, but the general thrust is to shed corporate capture so that people see their government actually benefiting and providing them with tangible life improvements in real time.
mimentum 6mo ago
The people say "tax the rich". Tax AI is the answer.
- wincy 6mo ago
  This is interesting to see since on another HN post everyone is bemoaning how expensive it’s getting to use frontier models because Anthropic is massively throttling Pro Max Claude plans. That’s certainly not going to become more accessible to us normal folk through taxation.
  - CodeShmode 6mo ago
    The tax dollars can go to programs that support normal folk, when the vast majority of tax collected will not come from normal folk.
- NeutralCrane 6mo ago
  This might be a solution if there wasn’t staggering wealth inequality prior to AI.
Lerc 6mo ago
How can you hope for anything better if you consider it an us versus them situation? When they say "We don't want to increase inequality" and the response is "We don't believe you". Where do you go from there? It seems like a lot of people want a revolution so that they can rotate who will be able to take advantage of the vulnerable. What are the suggestions for something better? I don't see a lot. I'd like to see more suggestions of how things could work. For example: The Government could legislate that any increase in profits that are attributable to the use of AI are taxed at 75%. It's still an advantage for a company to do it, but most of the gains go to the people. Most often, aggressive taxation like this is criticised on the basis that it will stifle growth, but this is an area where pretty much everyone is saying it's moving too quickly, that's just yet another positive effect.
- UncleMeat 6mo ago
  We can look at their actions, in particular their efforts to influence public policy.
  - Lerc 6mo ago
    You can, but then what? Do you judge what they say as if their perspective is the same as yours, and then conclude from that context that what they suggest could only come from an evil person. That seems to be what a lot of people do. What if they actually think what they are suggesting is the best thing for the world? How can you tell what is in their minds? Alternately you could criticise their arguments instead of the people, and suggest an alternative. I'm also not entirely certain that influencing public policy is something that is inherently bad. I know if I were deaf, I would like to have some influence on public policy about deafness issues.
    - UncleMeat 6mo ago
      The idea that we cannot possibly use people's actions to judge them is ridiculous. Musk thinks that the world would be a better place if the races were separated and if all charitable giving was ended. I think that's monstrous. Why is OpenAI not a nonprofit anymore?
colinator 6mo ago
Here's an idea for how to do that: treat frontier AI as a sort of 'common carrier'. The only business that frontier AI labs are allowed to conduct is selling raw tokens - no UI. Thus, 'claude code' would have to come from some other company. This would segment the AI industry, and, maybe, prevent a single entity (or small number of entities) from capturing all value. Just a thought, what do you think?
- davemp 6mo ago
  Sounds promising honestly. One of the scariest parts of the big AI labs is all of the exclusive training data they get through their UIs. (It’s unclear whether distillation is a feasible way to close the gap). If there were another party involved, that would (hopefully) diversify power that (potentially) comes with those streams of data. It’s a bit ironic that the USA has mostly abandoned interoperability after being one of the pioneers with the American manufacturing method. [0] [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_system_of_manufacturing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_system_of_manufacturi...

How do you decouple it when the people who own it and are building it seem to be driven on increasing inequality?

by tedivm 6mo ago

How do you decouple it when the people who own it and are building it seem to be driven on increasing inequality?

AI is actually a mass decrease in inequality, as much as the Gutenberg printing press was. It takes something that used to be the foremost example of pure bourgeois and intellectual privilege - the culture contained within millions of books and other instances of human creativity - and provides it to everyone for the cost of a few thousand bucks in hardware and a few watts of electricity.

trolleski 6mo ago
And is controlled by a handful of mega corporations? How is that equitable?
Der_Einzige 6mo ago
[flagged]
- jdiff 6mo ago
  Swartz died in 2002, decades before LLMs. It is distasteful to put words in the mouths of the dead by invoking him here. Even local AI concentrates power in the hands of a few, the few who can afford the hardware to run it, and the few who have the luxury of enough time and energy to devote to engaging with the intricate, technical rabbit hole of local models.
  - jacquesm 6mo ago
    You should read that comment again, they're not putting any words in Swartz's mouth, they are lauding his accomplishments.
    - jdiff 6mo ago
      It is lauding his accomplishments, yes. Why bring him up in specific if there is no relation intended? There are many broad shouldered giants in this space.
aleph_minus_one 6mo ago
> AI is actually a mass decrease in inequality, as much as the Gutenberg printing press was. It takes something that used to be the foremost example of pure bourgeois and intellectual privilege - the culture contained within millions of books and other instances of human creativity[.] I would rather claim that this is a proper description of shadow libraries [1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadow_library https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadow_library
tedivm 6mo ago
This is only true if productivity gains tied to general well being, but instead it's being concentrated in the hands of a few.
- falcor84 6mo ago
  I can't think of any period in time where it was so easy to go into business yourself and to generally have access to the same "means of production" as the biggest companies have. If you want to use LLMs, you can either use cloud resources at what I think are really reasonable per-token prices compared to the value, or to set up your own server with an open-weights model at a comparable level of quality (though generally significantly slower tokens/s). In any case, you absolutely don't have to pay OpenAI/Anthropic/Google if you don't want to.
  - tedivm 6mo ago
    I'm well aware of this: I bought a pretty beefy (consumer grade beefy) GPU machine and run all sorts of open weight models. I do think there is potential. But are you expecting 360m Americans to start their own businesses? That is a solution that doesn't scale. Consumer grade GPUs aren't going to scale all that much either, and the cost of the models are going up rather than down as vendors start seeking profits. We already see the memory and storage markets exploding in cost due to the rise in demand as well.
    - ryandrake 6mo ago
      Also: A handful more of already well-off people going into business for themselves is not going to move the needle on inequality. When people say "It's never been a better time to start your own business" they still mean "the people who already have their needs met and have the capital to live off for a while while their business becomes viable: In other words, the people who have always started businesses: Already-Rich people. It's never been a worse time for the poor or middle class to think about starting their own business. Prices on everything are rising, it's getting to be a struggle for even the middle class to continue to afford their homes. Healthcare is even more fraught than ever before, and if you're lucky enough to have a decent plan from your employer, aint no way you're going to give it up to go start a business.
elevatortrim 6mo ago
No. Because success is individual, inequality is statistical. It ia true that AI gives ordinary people a lot more chance to be successful. But do not forget that success depends on lots of factors that are not in one’s control: knowing the right people, time being right for what you are doing, and lots of others. So while the mechanics of success is a lot different to lottery, it does not work much differently: 1 in 1M attempts are successful. Yes, AI gives everyone more lottery tickets, but it gives rich people a lot more tickets.

Avicebron 6mo ago

If I had the answer to that I would probably be a politician instead of a systems eng, but off the top of the mind build out a parallel economies at the state level where people in the US actually live, ensuring QoL standards, then gradually renegotiate up back to the Federal level. It would require, united..states eventually, but the general thrust is to shed corporate capture so that people see their government actually benefiting and providing them with tangible life improvements in real time.

mimentum 6mo ago

The people say "tax the rich". Tax AI is the answer.

wincy 6mo ago
This is interesting to see since on another HN post everyone is bemoaning how expensive it’s getting to use frontier models because Anthropic is massively throttling Pro Max Claude plans. That’s certainly not going to become more accessible to us normal folk through taxation.
- CodeShmode 6mo ago
  The tax dollars can go to programs that support normal folk, when the vast majority of tax collected will not come from normal folk.
NeutralCrane 6mo ago
This might be a solution if there wasn’t staggering wealth inequality prior to AI.

Lerc 6mo ago

How can you hope for anything better if you consider it an us versus them situation? When they say "We don't want to increase inequality" and the response is "We don't believe you". Where do you go from there? It seems like a lot of people want a revolution so that they can rotate who will be able to take advantage of the vulnerable. What are the suggestions for something better? I don't see a lot. I'd like to see more suggestions of how things could work. For example: The Government could legislate that any increase in profits that are attributable to the use of AI are taxed at 75%. It's still an advantage for a company to do it, but most of the gains go to the people. Most often, aggressive taxation like this is criticised on the basis that it will stifle growth, but this is an area where pretty much everyone is saying it's moving too quickly, that's just yet another positive effect.

UncleMeat 6mo ago
We can look at their actions, in particular their efforts to influence public policy.
- Lerc 6mo ago
  You can, but then what? Do you judge what they say as if their perspective is the same as yours, and then conclude from that context that what they suggest could only come from an evil person. That seems to be what a lot of people do. What if they actually think what they are suggesting is the best thing for the world? How can you tell what is in their minds? Alternately you could criticise their arguments instead of the people, and suggest an alternative. I'm also not entirely certain that influencing public policy is something that is inherently bad. I know if I were deaf, I would like to have some influence on public policy about deafness issues.
  - UncleMeat 6mo ago
    The idea that we cannot possibly use people's actions to judge them is ridiculous. Musk thinks that the world would be a better place if the races were separated and if all charitable giving was ended. I think that's monstrous. Why is OpenAI not a nonprofit anymore?

colinator 6mo ago

Here's an idea for how to do that: treat frontier AI as a sort of 'common carrier'. The only business that frontier AI labs are allowed to conduct is selling raw tokens - no UI. Thus, 'claude code' would have to come from some other company. This would segment the AI industry, and, maybe, prevent a single entity (or small number of entities) from capturing all value. Just a thought, what do you think?

davemp 6mo ago
Sounds promising honestly. One of the scariest parts of the big AI labs is all of the exclusive training data they get through their UIs. (It’s unclear whether distillation is a feasible way to close the gap). If there were another party involved, that would (hopefully) diversify power that (potentially) comes with those streams of data. It’s a bit ironic that the USA has mostly abandoned interoperability after being one of the pioneers with the American manufacturing method. [0] [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_system_of_manufacturing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_system_of_manufacturi...