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This is the real problem. We're looking at a future where those who control AI have an insurmountable advantage in everything. They can control the amount of in

This is the real problem. We're looking at a future where those who control AI have an insurmountable advantage in everything. They can control the amount of intelligence the masses have access to -- for their own safety, of course -- and they will never, ever be able to close the gap.

tomrod 22d ago
Say they do. What then? Will people buy from them? What if we decide not to?
- coderenegade 22d ago
  At a certain point, you don't have a choice. Before China got into the game, the only way to avoid giving Luxotica money if you wanted a pair of glasses was to essentially not buy glasses. This is the same for many industries -- consolidation behind the scenes.
  - eru 22d ago
    Huh? I've been able to buy reasonably priced glasses for all my life. (However, I've never lived in the US nor China.)
    - rvba 22d ago
      What is reasonably priced? Lenses are lenses so one vould debate the real cost, but the frames are incredibly overpriced for a piece of metal or plastic with two joints and those components that land on your nose. Frames could literally cost 1 dollar (only happened after china entered this market), but good luck finding ones like this with good lenses. You need to buy from one supplier who intentionally offers cheapest frames for 50+ dollars and those frames look like crap. The ones that look better (even if same plastic) cost 500+ dollars - and all due to price gouging. For lenses I am not sure, but suspect something similar.
      - eru 22d ago
        I grew up in Germany, but I got frames in UK and Singapore and Australia, too. Fielmann in Germany has been offering very reasonably priced glasses and frames for ages.
  - ndriscoll 21d ago
    e.g. Zenni has sold $7 glasses for like 20+ years. They appeared shortly after Luxotica started buying retailers. If there's a problem, it's that advertising reduces consumer information (basically economic jamming) and distorts markets.
eru 22d ago
There's lots of competition in AI. Where do you see the 'insurmountable advantage in everything'?
- dns_snek 22d ago
  They said "We're looking at a future". And if that future ends up developing the way these companies want it to then we're looking at extremely dystopian future where AI is essential to all work and people have to buy their "intelligence" from an oligopoly of large providers who have total control over the price and capabilities whilst simultaneously having unfiltered read/write access to people's stream-of-consciousness - their work life, their personal problems, their political opinions. This level of access and power is unprecedented in our society.
  - Marha01 22d ago
    Open AI models are just a few months behind closed models, and the gap is actually getting more narrow.
    - eru 21d ago
      Yes. And for most applications it's more important that the open models get better in absolute terms and perhaps that they are competitive on a per-Watt basis.
    - dns_snek 21d ago
      Two concerns: - I think competitive open models are just an artifact of the AI race we're witnessing right now. What's the incentive for a company to spend billions researching, developing, and training a model, only to release it for free? Leading to the next point. - Even if open models are good enough to be competitive, how are we going to run them? Doing so locally is next to impossible and I don't see that changing. The capabilities of models that you can run locally will always get better, of course, but the level of quality that is considered essential for work will always stay pinned at "near-frontier". Datacenters will always have better optimization and economies of scale, the industry will consolidate over time and eventually we'll end up with a handful of companies that operate the hardware serving 95% of all inference needs. I'm not convinced that we can reach the fantasy world that they're trying to sell without killing the entire planet, but if we somehow do I don't see how we can avoid the world turning into a dystopian hellscape. We would need extremely radical interventions to avoid that scenario, such that these models and the hardware to run them would be owned and governed democratically, i.e. the end of capitalism.

tomrod 22d ago

Say they do. What then? Will people buy from them? What if we decide not to?

coderenegade 22d ago
At a certain point, you don't have a choice. Before China got into the game, the only way to avoid giving Luxotica money if you wanted a pair of glasses was to essentially not buy glasses. This is the same for many industries -- consolidation behind the scenes.
- eru 22d ago
  Huh? I've been able to buy reasonably priced glasses for all my life. (However, I've never lived in the US nor China.)
  - rvba 22d ago
    What is reasonably priced? Lenses are lenses so one vould debate the real cost, but the frames are incredibly overpriced for a piece of metal or plastic with two joints and those components that land on your nose. Frames could literally cost 1 dollar (only happened after china entered this market), but good luck finding ones like this with good lenses. You need to buy from one supplier who intentionally offers cheapest frames for 50+ dollars and those frames look like crap. The ones that look better (even if same plastic) cost 500+ dollars - and all due to price gouging. For lenses I am not sure, but suspect something similar.
    - eru 22d ago
      I grew up in Germany, but I got frames in UK and Singapore and Australia, too. Fielmann in Germany has been offering very reasonably priced glasses and frames for ages.
- ndriscoll 21d ago
  e.g. Zenni has sold $7 glasses for like 20+ years. They appeared shortly after Luxotica started buying retailers. If there's a problem, it's that advertising reduces consumer information (basically economic jamming) and distorts markets.

eru 22d ago

There's lots of competition in AI. Where do you see the 'insurmountable advantage in everything'?

dns_snek 22d ago
They said "We're looking at a future". And if that future ends up developing the way these companies want it to then we're looking at extremely dystopian future where AI is essential to all work and people have to buy their "intelligence" from an oligopoly of large providers who have total control over the price and capabilities whilst simultaneously having unfiltered read/write access to people's stream-of-consciousness - their work life, their personal problems, their political opinions. This level of access and power is unprecedented in our society.
- Marha01 22d ago
  Open AI models are just a few months behind closed models, and the gap is actually getting more narrow.
  - eru 21d ago
    Yes. And for most applications it's more important that the open models get better in absolute terms and perhaps that they are competitive on a per-Watt basis.
  - dns_snek 21d ago
    Two concerns: - I think competitive open models are just an artifact of the AI race we're witnessing right now. What's the incentive for a company to spend billions researching, developing, and training a model, only to release it for free? Leading to the next point. - Even if open models are good enough to be competitive, how are we going to run them? Doing so locally is next to impossible and I don't see that changing. The capabilities of models that you can run locally will always get better, of course, but the level of quality that is considered essential for work will always stay pinned at "near-frontier". Datacenters will always have better optimization and economies of scale, the industry will consolidate over time and eventually we'll end up with a handful of companies that operate the hardware serving 95% of all inference needs. I'm not convinced that we can reach the fantasy world that they're trying to sell without killing the entire planet, but if we somehow do I don't see how we can avoid the world turning into a dystopian hellscape. We would need extremely radical interventions to avoid that scenario, such that these models and the hardware to run them would be owned and governed democratically, i.e. the end of capitalism.