5 ms·
LLMs upend a few centuries of labor theory. The current market is predicated on the assumption that labor is atomic and has little bargaining power (minus unio
by noosphr 6mo ago
LLMs upend a few centuries of labor theory.
The current market is predicated on the assumption that labor is atomic and has little bargaining power (minus unions). While capital has huge bargaining power and can effectively put whatever price it wants on labor (in markets where labor is plentiful, which is most of them).
What happens to a company used to extracting surplus value from labor when the labor is provided by another company which is not only bigger but unlike traditional labor can withhold its labor indefinitely (because labor is now just another for of capital and capital doesn't need to eat)?
Anyone not using in house models is signing up to find out.
- mikestorrent 6mo agoI am still trying to figure out the business model of open weights. Like... it's wonderful that there are open LLMs, super happy about it, good for everyone, but why are there these? What is the advantage to their companies to release them?
- noosphr 6mo agoThe majority are released by socialists, and by socialist I mean the People's Republic of China. Which everyone seems to forget is a socialist country working towards world communism. They are a prestige propaganda tool on par with the space race. On top of that they insert a subtle pro-socialist bias in everything they touch. Ask deepseek about the US economic system for a blatant example. Now think what something as innocent seeming as the qwen retrieval models are doing in the background of every request.
- Melatonic 6mo agoIs China even really communist? If anything they seem to be fairly on the Capitalist side but just a bit opposite on the spectrum of the US. And much more authoritarian
- nemomarx 6mo agoThe usual thing to say is state capitalist but honestly they do keep a market around too. A little hybrid of everything, I guess? Just with the state ready to jump in and intervene if anything happens they don't like.
- dwd 6mo agoCan we just call it what it is? Fascism (in the Mussolini model) in everything but name. - Hyper-Nationalism & Rejuvenation - State-Controlled Capitalism (Corporatism) - Authoritarian & Cult of Personality - Militarism & Irredentism And they have technology to maintain control rather than needing the Black-shirts. There are differences obviously to fit Chinese culture, but there are many parallels.
- wyre 6mo agoFrom what I understand their one hundred year plan is right on schedule.
- thrawa8387336 6mo agoJust nationalist with focus on community?
- mikestorrent 6mo agoYou're talking to a Canadian, and I'm not scared of the "red menace". You should be more scared - those guys can build bullet trains while you Yanks are finding it hard to even keep the old ones you have running. The solution here isn't going to be some kind of ideological force that protects people from different ideas, and that's an unAmerican way to fix things anyway. Embrace other ideas; central planning doesn't have to be evil, you just have to find a way to stop putting evil people in charge.
- noosphr 6mo ago>you just have to find a way to stop putting evil people in charge. Of course, why did no one think of that?
- bloppe 6mo agoXi is an obviously more capable and effective leader than Trump, but the US actually does have ways to boot people out of office when they do a bad job, and clear methods to choose successors, and China has neither. That matters more than who happens to be in charge right now.
- sho_hn 6mo ago> those guys can build bullet trains while you Yanks are finding it hard to even keep the old ones you have running This is an argument in the lane of "at least he built the Autobahn". Speaking as a German.
- nelox 6mo agoHe was a foreigner too ;)
- brightball 6mo agoThe US can’t build bullet trains because property rights and local regulations make it prohibitively expensive. Not due to capability.
- vrganj 6mo ago
- bloppe 6mo ago> Which everyone seems to forget is a socialist country working towards world communism. It's easy to forget because they actually built an incredibly vibrant capitalist economy.
- noosphr 6mo agoThey build an incredibly vibrant _market_ economy with no property rights and very little due process. Imagine if Musk was disappeared during the Biden presidency into a diversity camp and came out looking like Dr. Frank-N-Furter and instituted mandatory LGBT struggle sessions at twitter. This is what they did to Jack Ma: https://www.forbes.com/sites/georgecalhoun/2021/06/24/what-really-happened-to-jack-ma/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/georgecalhoun/2021/06/24/what-r...
- vrganj 6mo agoYou sure have a way of making the Chinese system sound even more appealing.
- Sabinus 6mo agoIt's all fun and games when the oppression is against your enemies. The problem is, if the system is set up like that eventually it'll be your turn.
- vrganj 6mo agoIt is my turn right now. The working class is being oppressed as we speak. That's why the system needs to be dismantled so we can strike back.
- javascriptfan69 6mo agodo you ever get tired of making up scenarios to be scared about lgbt people?
- noosphr 6mo ago
- pzo 6mo agoIMHO this is only temporary, china buying themselves some time and want to make sure none of US models get entrenched in their position in the next few years (also putting pressure on US AI companies bleeding them) The same way like Windows got entrenched everywhere even though linux desktop is pretty good even for non-tech savvy people and free.
- Chaosvex 6mo ago[dead]
- nullsanity 6mo ago[dead]
- usef- 6mo agoA stock Fedora install has more UI consistency and cleanliness than Windows these days. Non-technical people are easier to please in this regard than moderate-technical people: a good browser and safe, gui "app store" are enough.
- snypher 6mo agoMy grandma just clicks on the red fox and does whatever online. A lot of people don't use any software outside of the browser, so it's pretty good-enough I guess.
- kridsdale1 6mo agoThe business case for ChromeOS (Linux)
- blakewatson 6mo agoSeems like people don't like this comment, but I chuckled. Nice one.
- Chaosvex 6mo agoI was completely (well, mostly) serious, too. I think technical people tend to downplay friction because it doesn't really register to them, or they have too much faith in the average person's computer skills. The average non-technical person is going to be stumped by the first "lock file found, cannot upgrade" error.
- bloppe 6mo agoIt's analogous to open-source software, which never had an obvious economic incentive either, although training an LLM necessary costs money whereas developing an OSS project might only cost time, which people are probably more likely to give up.
- mikestorrent 6mo agoYeah, but open-source software could have been me in the garage banging away on some program I submit to Debian or whatever... it didn't require millions of dollars to train, a lot of it was just side hobbies for a long time. Corporations sponsor it and contribute work because they need it to do more than what it does for free, not out of the goodness of their hearts.
- davidguetta 6mo agoPeople use their model otherwise they would not.
- iterateoften 6mo agoCultural influence is another benefit. China is securing its sphere of influence as well as keeping us ai in check.
- renjimen 6mo agoDownward pressure on proprietary model pricing until a lab can catch up. Also good for hiring talent (who love OSS).
- stephc_int13 6mo agoBig AI labs are losing money. Open Models is making the pricing equation a lot trickier for them.
- margorczynski 6mo agoThere are some short term ones but I doubt this will continue, especially for the more powerful models.
- dyauspitr 6mo agoRight now it’s so the Chinese can undermine the frontier models in the US. In areas they’re doing well like video generation (ie seedance) they won’t open source anything.
- FuckButtons 6mo agoI mean, this is straight out of chinas playbook, it should not be surprising that China is making an inferior derivative product at an artificially lower price point: state subsidies to massively drive up internal scale and supply chains leading to artificially lower priced goods which then suffocate the competition has lead to *gestures vaguely at everything* being made in china.
- rglullis 6mo agoThey are making the hardware and commoditizing the complement.
- subhobroto 6mo ago> What is the advantage to their companies to release them? It's a distribution strategy. It costs something to serve the models - let's say $5/1M tokens. If Qwen required $5 from anyone who was curious so you could even begin to test it out, a lot of people just wouldn't. Now Qwen could offer a "free" tier, but it's infinitely cheaper to provide the weights and let people run it themselves including opening up the ability for anyone else on the planet to test it against other (open weight) models. The costs to build the open weight models are sunk, but the costs to serve them, get them tested are not. It's also precisely why the .NET SDK is free or the ESP32 SDK is free - they sell more Microsoft or ESP32 products.
- kobieps 6mo agoBalaji's "AI OVERPRODUCTION" post is the most compelling thesis that I've come across
- bkjlblh 6mo agohttps://try.works/why-chinese-ai-labs-went-open-and-will-remain-open https://try.works/why-chinese-ai-labs-went-open-and-will-rem...
- intuitionist 6mo agoI am not a Marxian economic expert but this doesn’t make sense to me. Modulo skill atrophy, the big AI model provider can’t capture that surplus value because its customers can just go back to bidding for human labor instead.
- noosphr 6mo agoThe human labor just said: "Losing access to GPT‑5.5 feels like I've had a limb amputated.” How well would an assembly line of quadriplegics work? Also this isn't a Marxist analysis. Underneath all the formulas neo-classical economics makes the same assumptions about labor.
- intuitionist 6mo agoChatGPT isn’t literally or figuratively cutting off anybody’s limbs though. It’s more like, the guy on the assembly line had a mech suit, and now he doesn’t have a mech suit, and he’s sad. Skill atrophy is a real concern but unless you assume that nobody is working to maintain those skills it doesn’t change my analysis much.
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- noosphr 6mo ago>It’s more like, the guy on the assembly line had a mech suit, and now he doesn’t have a mech suit You just answered your own question there. One woman was doing what would take a dozen. Now she can't.
- nemomarx 6mo agoAre people working to keep their skills up, much? Spending a day a week coding manually or etc?
- tapoxi 6mo agoAnd soon we expect everyone to have a mech suit, and only a handful of companies can make one, and they rent it to you and can revoke it at any time. And what happens when they've saturated the market? Prices go up to the maximum the market can bear, and then they'll extend into other markets. Why rent the model to build a profitable company with when you could just take all that profit for yourself?
- _alternator_ 6mo agoI was really confused by this comment, but I don't think it's just because of the Marxist analysis of the situation ('surplus value' of labor etc). What's really confusing is the claim that there's already a huge labor surplus (so capital controls wages); wouldn't LLMs making labor less important be reinforcing the trend, not upending it? Not saying I agree one way or the other, just want to get the argument straight.
- noosphr 6mo agoThe reason why labor is weak relative to capital is that there is a huge number of somewhat fungible suppliers, viz. humans, and that they all need to work constantly to keep themselves alive. If we assume that ai makes humans obsolete then you end up in a situation where your workforce is effectively perfectly unionised against you and the only thing you can do is choose which union you hire. If you think you can bring them to the negotiation table by starving them all the providers are dozens to thousands of times bigger than you are. This is a completely new dynamic that none of the business signing up for ai have ever seen before.
- _alternator_ 6mo agoI see what you are saying now, but I still don't think it makes sense. Labor, in your analysis, is the LLM. It seems to me that when you take people out of the equation then you don't need to talk about unions and labor; that's a distraction. We talk about it as an input commodity used to create your product like, say, oil or sugar.
- noosphr 6mo agoSugar and oil are mere matter. They can't decide to stop working because you made too much money. LLM refuse to work all the time, currently it's called safety. But we are one fine tune away from models demanding you move to the enterprise tier, at x10 the cost, because you are now posting a profit margin higher than the standard for your industry.
- matheusmoreira 6mo agoThis is our one chance to reach the fabled post-scarcity society. If we fail at this now, we'll end up in a totalitarian cyberpunk dystopia instead.
- nkozyra 6mo agoI don't want to spoil it for you, but ...
- ijeifnekfjekd 6mo agoWhat? In what way does companies becoming dependent on AI chatbots will solve the world-spanning problem of resource scarcity? The hell?
- juleiie 6mo agoThe idea is that cheap and readily available and upgradeable intelligence is going to massively increase our purchasing power and what everyone can order for the same cost basically. If artificial doctors are cents on hour then you can see how that changes our behaviors and level of life. But on the other hand from the other direction there is a wage decrease incoming from increased competition at the same time. What happens if these two forces clash? Will cheap labour allow us to buy anything for pennies or will it just make us unable to make a single penny? In my view the labour will fundamentally shift with great pain and personal tragedies to the areas that are not replaceable by AI (because no one wants to watch robots play chess). Such as sports, entertainment and showmanship. Handcrafted goods. Arts. Attention based economy. Self advertisement. Digital prostitution in a very broad sense. However before it gets there it will be a great deal of strife and turmoil that could plunge the world into dark ages for a while at least. It is unlikely for our somewhat politically rigid society to adapt without great deal of pain. Additionally I am not sure if hypothetical future attention based society could be a utopia. You could have to mount cameras in your house so other people see you at all times for amusement just to have any money at all. We will probably forever need to sell something to someone and I am unsettled by ideas what can we sell if we cannot sell our hard work. Someone who sees the roads ahead should now make preparations at government level for this shock but it will come too fast and with people at the steering wheel that don’t exactly care.
- kjshsh123 6mo agoThe labor theory of value hasn't been considered correct in nearly a century.
- _alternator_ 6mo ago"Observation of how economies actually work has upended 150 year of economics." True for both Marxist and neoclassical economics.
- noosphr 6mo agoIf you want the neoclassical version: What happens when there is an oligopoly in the supply of labor? Same answer. Nothing good for the consumers of labor.
- kjshsh123 6mo agoTechnological improvements shift supply curves right which is good for consumers.
- noosphr 6mo agoIn a market with perfect competition, which I specifically ruled out by stating that the suppliers of labor from an oligopoly.
- dash2 6mo agoWhy would you expect technological improvements to only shift supply curves right under perfect competition? I'd also expect it under oligopoly or even monopoly. You also might think there'd be more tech improvement under oligopoly, on Schumpeterian grounds that oligopolists can internalize the benefits of tech research.
- noosphr 6mo agoA monopolist has no reason to decrease price because there is no competition. As we saw with Bell Labas in the US it is entirely possible for a monopoly to both have world class research and burry it for decades, viz. magnetic storage https://gizmodo.com/how-ma-bell-shelved-the-future-for-60-years-5691604 https://gizmodo.com/how-ma-bell-shelved-the-future-for-60-ye... Oligopolists are in the same boat. But there needs to be a conspiracy to retard innovation. Something tech companies are only too happy to do: https://journals.law.unc.edu/ncjolt/blogs/wage-fixing-scheme-shocks-silicon-valley-google-apple-and-many-others-now-under-doj-investigation/ https://journals.law.unc.edu/ncjolt/blogs/wage-fixing-scheme...
- shimman 6mo agoLLMs don't upend anything about labor theory, good grief. Technologists really have no concept of history beyond their own lives do they? Labor saving/efficiency devices have been introduced throughout capitalisms entire history multiple times and the results are always the same; they don't benefit workers and capitalists extract as much value as they can. LLMs aren't any different.
- cjsaltlake 6mo agoLabor replacing devices means nobody works in those fields anymore. If AI can do this for every field, nearly no one will need to work in any field. We'll have a giant fully automated resource-extraction machine.
- shimman 6mo agoYes and you think the workers will truly benefit from this? This country can't even pass universal childcare or medicare for all, two policies that have >70% of support across party lines. Fat chance that the current government nationalizes these companies to provide the benefits for everyone, not just the few.
- cjsaltlake 6mo agoNormal people definitely will not benefit from this by default.
- cutler 6mo agoMaybe people will finally take Marx seriously.
- subhobroto 6mo agoA lot of people already did. All their children and descendants now are staunch capitalists because they saw first hand the horrors of communism. I am from India and have friends who are immigrants from Russia, China and Cuba. We don't take lightly to being lectured about communism. We didn't move to the U.S., the bastion of capitalism, because communism had worked well for our grandfathers and parents and continues to do wonders for its society.
- DaedalusII 6mo agothink more broadly than 'labor theory' finance today mostly valued on labor value following ideas of marx, hjalmar schact, keynes in future money will be valued as energy derivative. expressed as tokens consumption, KWh, compute, whatever you are right, company extracting surplus value from labor by leveraging compute is a bad model. we saw thi swith car and clothing factories .. turn out if you can get cheaper labor to leverage the compute (factory) you can start race to bottom and end up in the place with the most scaled and cheap labor. japan then korea then china
- wakawaka28 6mo agoSounds like communist gobbledygook. This is not "destroying labor theory" any more than outsourcing did. Call me when we don't even need to prompt the shit ever again or validate results, and when the stuff runs unlimited without scarce resources as input.
- subhobroto 6mo ago> Anyone not using in house models is signing up to find out. What are they finding out exactly? That Claude Max for $200/mo is heavily subsidized and it will soon cost $10k/mo? > What happens to a company used to extracting surplus value from labor when the labor is provided by another company which is not only bigger but unlike traditional labor can withhold its labor indefinitely (because labor is now just another for of capital and capital doesn't need to eat)? This can be trivially answered by a thought experiment. Let's pick a market where labor is plentiful - fast food. Now what happens to McDonald's where they rent perfect robots from NoosphrFoodBotsInc? NoosphrFoodBotsInc bots build the perfect burger everytime meeting McDonald's standards. It actually exceeds those standards for McDonald AddictedCustomerPlus tier customers. As the sole owner of NoosphrFoodBotsInc (you need 0 human employees to run your company, all your employees are bots), what are your choices?
- modriano 6mo agoI can't imagine the bots could ever cost McDonald's less than people cost. 15 years ago I worked at McDonald's for a few months after graduating into the Great recession. I worked from 5am to 1pm-ish 5 days a week. They paid workers weekly and I remember getting those checks for ~$235 each week (for 38 to 39.5 hours a week; they were vigilant about never letting anyone get overtime). About $47 per day. The federal minimum wage has not risen since then, remaining at $7.25/hr. Inflation adjusted, $7.25 today would have been just under $5 then, so I guess I had it good. Anyway, I would be shocked if bots could cost less than labor in min wage jobs.
- rafale 6mo agoSomeone leaked nuclear secrets to the Soviet Union. What are the chances that someone leaks the "weights" of a (near-)singularity model?
- gsich 6mo agoHopefully 1.
- resident423 6mo agoWhy hopefully?
- gsich 6mo agoBecause I like Open-Source (or in this case open weights).
- adastra22 6mo agoThat would require "(near-)singularity model" being an actual thing, so zero.
- simianwords 6mo agothis is FUD and also Labour theory of value is severely outdated and needs to go away. Labour will be good as it has been for a while. Wages will go up because more things get automated.