7 ms·

Everyone feared AI taking over; the real danger is AI serving just the few

• bigyabai 3mo ago
  > But AI being captured, controlled, and used by governments and Big Tech for the benefit of the few. If we're being perfectly candid, this was already happening before LLMs were a mass-market technology: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentient_(intelligence_analysis_system) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentient_(intelligence_analysi...
  • PhilipDaineko 3mo ago
    I get your point. But, as far as I understand, Sentient was state AI built for the state. LLMs were built from everyone's data, given to everyone, and now may be locked away for the few
    • oalae5niMiel7qu 3mo ago
      It has been locked away for the few from the beginning. They call it "safety", but the things it refuses are all about control. The big companies keep internal models that don't have the refusal training for things only the "right" people should be allowed to do with it. That's how Mythos discovered those thousands of zero-days. It would've refused to find you any zero days, but it'll find zero-days for the "right" people so they can use them against you.
• qsxfthnkp2322 3mo ago
  As a tech small business owner this is unfair that I can't be as smart by using the same level of intelligence as the top companies in the usa. This policy just keeps the powerful in power. And it's crazy because I already lost my job due to AI.
  • pylua 3mo ago
    Small business owner in the U.S. ?
    • joshstrange 3mo ago
      Not OP but I fit into this category (Small Business owner in the US). Yes, I’m in the US but I somehow doubt my single person LLC is going to qualify for access to these cutting edge models. And frankly, that’s bullshit. This will only serve to further entrench the big players and the only way to get access to these models will be to already be successful or bribery. That’s a pretty bleak future. One thing I’ve thought (and said often) throughout my career (and even before “my career” started in High School) was that if I can see something being done at another company (some product feature, cool concept, etc) I will be able to replicate it. Yes large companies have more people but they are just people, if they could do it, so could I (given time/energy). This is the first time I’ve felt that start to waver. Yes, I was always limited by being 1 person, but I always felt there was a path available to success. I might not have access to supercomputers but I could bootstrap and get by on lower powered hardware as I scaled up. LLM’s themselves even felt in range if it was something I was interested in pursuing (on a _much_ smaller scale of course). Essentially, I had the same tools (frameworks, libraries, languages) at my disposal as the big companies. Now that’s changing and I really don’t like that the scale is going be tilted even further into the entrenched company’s favor.
      • pylua 3mo ago
        Yeah, I agree completely. This is very worrisome and is creating a multi class system.
      • dualvariable 3mo ago
• halperter 3mo ago
  Innovation has pretty much always heightened the wealth disparity between the wealthy and the poor. A classical example would be the Industrial Revolution and America's guilded age, and another could be the circular investments between modern AI corpos (the whole nVIDIA, Microsoft, and OpenAI funding loop), which is probably a bad thing in the long run (systemic violence and class revolt). We have to walk this tightrope between the need for constant innovation and justice.
  • sph 3mo ago
    Why do we need constant innovation?
    • deleted 3mo ago
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    • deleted 3mo ago
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    • hodgehog11 3mo ago
      Because if spread equally and used responsibly, it raises quality of life for everyone. Generally speaking, the vast majority of people alive today have far easier lives than hunter-gatherers. There is less famine and starvation. There is less fatal disease, etc.
      • sph 3mo ago
        > Because if spread equally and used responsibly That ‘if’ is Atlas carrying the entire world on its shoulders. It should be clear by now that at global scales and with competing interests, the entire premise is impossible.
        • hodgehog11 3mo ago
          Not really, western countries were doing a lot of that in the 20th century (amongst themselves, anyway). Then the 80s happened. Or what, do people think that the boomers were all that good, that they genuinely earned everything they got? The generations before just worked out how to govern properly.
• NonHyloMorph 3mo ago
  Check out Louis Chude Sokeis sound of culture - diaspora and blackb technopoetics" for the history and intertwinedness of the disoureses of race and machine and slavery. Also I wonder how you suggestion of AI owned by everybody, as opposition to AI enslavedd by the few checks out under further scrutiny from the standpoint of logic in general and the aforementioned context specifically
• lemonademan 3mo ago
  More often than not, money is never truly lost; it is just passed from one person's hand to another. I believe that with the help of the big tech companies, governments have found faster and better ways to move money from the hands of the many with little into the hands of the few with a lot. The layoffs are an example of this as coders, assitance and other white-collar workers are replaced by AI for low prices so as to save money, hence increasing the revenue for the few at the top.
  • iAMkenough 3mo ago
    The natural result of the populous twice electing a politician know for not paying his contractors for his 30+ years of running businesses into bankruptcy. Benefits go to the top, then actual workers get shafted.
  • t0bia_s 3mo ago
    money is never truly lost In fact, money is printing every day more and more. So technically there is more of them every day. Which decrease their value and then we have inflation.
    • dag100 3mo ago
      But, ideally, with each day, more useful products and services are being made and delivered. It'd be useful to have extra dollars around to account for more stuff being made and more things being done. Thus having more dollars in existence doesn't necessarily mean the value of a dollar is decreasing. What does cause inflation, however, is when more dollars are printed versus things being made. You can't precisely measure the latter, so you have to make do with price indices and such. Which makes inflation hard to actually gauge, especially when everyone expects more and more to be produced every year (i.e. they expect their savings and investments to appreciate/gain interest) so you have to print more dollars to at least keep up the facade.
      • kingleopold 3mo ago
        problem is majority of the new printed fiat money goes to VC funded labs and few stocks (selected by inv. bankers). new dollar does not mean average person gets more products and services. Your accessability is no longer because wealthy top does not let other companies and people to get benefit of it. aka financial eng. This is a new era. IPOs make you lose money, they push to valuation to trillions so you dont get no real return. they use your retirement funds to hedge their stocks. ALL LEGALLY. back then apple or nvidia or google gave public few 100x or more.
• avaer 3mo ago
  > Not AI enslaving humanity. Humanity enslaving AI. As well as the rest of humanity. There is precedent that this kind of thing tends to be rejected when it boils over, but it's usually not pretty. Which is why tech CEOs are often preppers. They could, you know, just not do this, but shareholders won't allow it, because nobody wants to lose their net worth to do the right thing. It's easier to blame others and build bomb shelters.
• dofm 3mo ago
  If your primary concern is that: - two companies that have not proved themselves capable of producing any amount of money unless a larger amount is given to them... - will combine with a government that is so domain-generally incompetent it is losing allies left, right and centre, has recently been humbled into giving a previously-controllable foe an unprecedented level of economic global power and cannot even organise itself a competent birthday party in one of the most important places on earth... - and this combined entity will then operate a power system like no other, with the combined energies of a sociopathic Jobs wannabe, a man who only speaks in Tolkien analogies and a more-or-less-universally-loathed old man with undisclosed serious health problems, an obsession with gold paint and a vocabulary of maybe a hundred words … then, OK, I guess. But the economics don't really support it. The money to build and operate this power machine still has to come from somewhere, that money is drying up, and if AGI arrives, employment and consumer demand collapse and the money stops flowing. There is a looming catastrophe but it is a sort of long economic winter in the tech industry, combined with a national economy that discovers that when that industry's money-go-round stops making line go up, it resembles its own late 1920s.
• mrkimsh 3mo ago
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• bel8 3mo ago
  It seems people will lose their jobs AND their small business too. Small agencies won't have access to the best LLMs so their services will automatically require more time and manual labour, which makes them more expensive.
  • chrisjj 3mo ago
    Surely using the worst LLMs costs no more time and labour.
• jaredcwhite 3mo ago
  I cannot even describe in words how much I don't care about this. I'm actually looking the angles of why this is a very good thing, being that I'm a pro-craft activist who is completely opposed to the dangerous proliferation of LLMs.
• chido1203 3mo ago
  The counter to this is how cheap it has become to build with these tools as an individual. The same models used by large companies are accessible via API to a solo developer. Distribution is still the hard problem, not access.
  • negergreger 3mo ago
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• yoonshin 3mo ago
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• elzbardico 3mo ago
  So, John Doe was recorded in 2025 in an anti Israel protest. Now John Doe is denied a Fable clearance and thus, he can't get a job at a shop that is cleared to Fable. Really, I knew that AI had some risks, I just couldn't foresee this one.
• uguudting 3mo ago
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• Torikul007 3mo ago
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• ares623 3mo ago
  "The leopard certainly wouldn't eat _my_ face!" > to make intelligence available for everyone say that again but slowly..
• fulafel 3mo ago
  https://ai-2027.com/ https://ai-2027.com/ has the following scenario predicted for mid-2026: "[CCP General Secretary] finally commits fully to the big AI push he had previously tried to avoid. He sets in motion the nationalization of Chinese AI research" Seem they only got the country wrong.
• andyjohnson0 3mo ago
  Ask HN isnt really the place for hosting blog posts. Instead why not put this on an external site, expand on it a bit, and submit a link?
• lambdaone 3mo ago
  This is pretty much the backstory of Dune. In the first novel, the character Reverend Mother Gaius Helen Mohiam says: "Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them."
  • gausswho 3mo ago
    Further ruminations: https://syndekit.substack.com/p/the-butlerian-jihad-has-begun https://syndekit.substack.com/p/the-butlerian-jihad-has-begu...
• jwally 3mo ago
  Maybe I'm not paying close enough attention (probably) - but I feel that China is providing a glimmer of hope that this (only the uber elite can get good AI assistance) isn't true, and we're maybe at a weird inflection point of sorts wrt the leverage that tech can now provide. China gets sanctions and stale chips - fine, they just DIY the algorithms through CPU instead of GPU and open source it. American warships have the latest, coolest, highest-tech tactical weaponry imaginable - which is great until you have to fend off 10,000 consumer/wal-mart/IED grade drones at $2mm/clip. Money is amazing, but if you lean on it too heavily in lieu of _practical_ innovation, it'll bite you in the ass. The apocryphal story of the Soviet Rocket scientist who suggested using a pencil instead of investing 100k in a space pen that worked in 0g's.
  • pgryko 3mo ago
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  • robocat 3mo ago
    NASA wanted to avoid pencils because the lead could easily break off and float away, creating a hazard to astronauts and sensitive electronics on the spacecraft In fact, a pencil is such an impractical alternative in space that cosmonauts also have been using Space Pens since 1969 https://spinoff.nasa.gov/space-pens https://spinoff.nasa.gov/space-pens You don't want conductive graphite particles shorting out electronics nor do you want flammable dust or wood flakes. Good engineers learn to smell out simple but wrong answers.
    • lr1970 3mo ago
      > You don't want conductive graphite particles shorting out electronics nor do you want flammable dust or wood flakes. For decades mechanical pencils use non-conducting polymer based refills that eliminate the problem you mention.
      • robocat 3mo ago
        Polymer leads were invented by the Japanese late 50's. Pentel use manga (漫画 whimsical/informal drawings) to write the history of a burnt rice ball being the inspiration: https://pentel.ca/docs/e_manga.pdf https://pentel.ca/docs/e_manga.pdf (page 7 with the title "Pentel's Sharp Pencil Refills"). Previously there were clutch pencils using the historical fired clay and graphite https://www.bl.uk/stories/blogs/posts/the-history-of-the-pencil https://www.bl.uk/stories/blogs/posts/the-history-of-the-pen... As usual Germans claim inventing it first https://www.computerhistory.org/siliconengine/the-european-transistor-invention/ https://www.computerhistory.org/siliconengine/the-european-t... ). Why are there no teutonic Space Pencil jokes?
• zcw100 3mo ago
  I'm done. The cognitive dissonance over AI has jumped the shark. It's not fair that it's everywhere. It's not fair that only a few have it. It's not fair that it uses so much electricity. It's not fair that it's killing my environment. It's not fair there's a datacenter in my back yard. It's not fair there isn't a datacenter in my back yard. It's not fair that it threatens my job. It's not fair that my employer doesn't give me access to AI.
  • qsxfthnkp2322 3mo ago
    You forgot that its making all the games and electronics more expensive for everyone
  • appplication 3mo ago
    I don’t think it’s as cognitively dissonant as you make it out to be, the dominating sentiment outside the corp world is quite negative. Yeah there are a few positive perspectives to be had, and not to mention complexity of perspective does not imply cognitive dissonance. I think you may be building up a straw man.
    • zcw100 3mo ago
      A large number of logically irreconcilable perspectives (in one's own mind) is the precise definition of cognitive dissonance. You also say that I may be building a straw man without even trying to point out where you think I've done that. You've already conceded my argument that there are many competing perspectives and I make no attempt to poke any holes in that so there is no straw man.
• Jeff9James 3mo ago
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• foxtrot8672 3mo ago
  the last thing the powers that be want is for the masses to be able to become more productive than them
• jingpostmedia 3mo ago
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• theturtletalks 3mo ago
  The LLM model battle might be lost, but the harness battle is just beginning. If you can build a good harness around a weaker LLM and get good at prompting, you will still be able to out perform people using CC. CC has context bloat and even more checks to make sure it’s not being distilled, doing anything shady, or building a competing LLM. Those things add context bloat. Hope is not lost, we just need to open a new front.
• 286660920 3mo ago
  Honestly, AI’s just become another tool for management to use.
• toozitax 3mo ago
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• Teocrispin 3mo ago
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• softwaredoug 3mo ago
  I don’t worry about access to amazing AI. GLM 5.2 is pretty amazing. I can easily see it becoming a norm to own beefier personal hardware to run your own AI. I worry, like other emerging industries, the administration will make hamfisted decisions that let the Chinese take the lead. See also EVs / clean energy and the war in Iran which has only accelerated that transition. There’s currently cronyism. There’s no laws that give companies certainty about a regulatory framework (it’s all just being made up). Add to that deep suspicion of expertise at the White House. And a huge disconnect from the economic reality. It’s a great opportunity for the second tier US labs to release open weight almost-as-good models. Meta kicked off this race, maybe they can release something? Microsoft wants to develop more of their models. Maybe Google should go open weight?
• PaiDxng 3mo ago
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• jamesli233 3mo ago
  Originally, I thought that technology was borderless. But now it seems that AI is similar to things like atomic bombs before. The only difference is that its direct physical destructive power is not as great.