Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Private Capture of Public Genius

wysr.xyz

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 111 posts

Re: The Private Capture of Public Genius

#21

Post by nradov »

wwind123 wrote: post #12
marcus_holmes wrote: post #2

This was interesting right up until "The fund pays every eligible American the same amount each year. " I'm in Australia. I've contributed my share of dirt to the delta. Why do I not get a share of this? I get that the frontier companies are (for the moment) US companies. But that's just corporate ownership, it's not what we're talking about. We're talking about compensating the people who wrote the training data for…

I agree UN sounds like a good organization to help distribute the wealth created by AI to the world. But this idea won't be considered by the current U.S. administration. In that case what other countries can do is probably to tax the AI companies at rates higher than regular companies.

Do you really want countries like Saudi Arabia and North Korea to have a vote in wealth redistribution?

Re: The Private Capture of Public Genius

#22

Post by antonvs »

marcus_holmes wrote: post #2

This was interesting right up until "The fund pays every eligible American the same amount each year. " I'm in Australia. I've contributed my share of dirt to the delta. Why do I not get a share of this? I get that the frontier companies are (for the moment) US companies. But that's just corporate ownership, it's not what we're talking about. We're talking about compensating the people who wrote the training data for…

> I'd happily trade my collected years of shitposts to help folks get out of poverty.

In other words, you'd happily do nothing to help folks get out of poverty?

Re: The Private Capture of Public Genius

#23

Post by typ »

martialg wrote: post #8
typ wrote: post #5

We cannot always want to capture only the (temporary) winners whenever we see a lucrative business and expect to share a free ride. I'd also assume that most of the revenue these AI labs are making is turned into depreciating fixed capital (hardware) and OPEX at this point. Why don't we capture Meta and Google as they allegedly take advantage of more publicly available information for profit? Let alone the truly valu…

Author here. Thanks for taking the time to read. I agree we’re in an interesting era where frontier research has shifted from mostly publicly funded to mostly private and it creates challenging incentive structures especially regarding externalized costs of research. Did you have any thoughts on my argument of how public knowledge does get damaged by the proliferation of AI over time?

I don't understand how knowledge, either public or private, could get damaged.

Though the income of the individuals and businesses that rely on the expertise of the knowledge would be damaged. Is that what you meant?

Edit: At this stage, the revenue made by the AI labs is almost entirely spent on the formation of fixed capital and opex. The demand is mobilizing physical resources with money. Atoms are relocated and reconfigured into compute racks. But eventually, the created productivity will perhaps make supply-elastic goods extremely cheap and abundant, while the supply-inelastic goods will be worth even more relative to the elastic ones.

After all, money is simply a token for the transmission of physical resources. It doesn't create stuff out of thin air. When new stuff is created, it just makes money cheaper, so that the banks can respond with more money to counteract it. More stuff -> deflation -> more money creation allowed to undo the deflation.

But the "exchange rates" between different goods and services will diverge. That's also why I don't think a direct money transfer like UBI would fix the problem, when it doesn't change the divergence of relative economic values of different goods. Let's say, extremely cheap software and entertainment, but unaffordable healthcare and housing. More money for everyone doesn't make limited resources available. So, what I am leaning into is some sort of Georgist policy. That could hopefully mitigate the price divergence, assuming that AI cannot make every commodity equally abundant.

Re: The Private Capture of Public Genius

#24

Post by abalashov »

CaptWorld wrote: post #15
abalashov wrote: post #9

It was a brilliant article, and it succinctly captured the offenses to ethics and humanism posed by LLMs. I'm not sure it'll get a lot of reception in the technocracy here on HN, whether of the AI booster or AI nihilist sort. However, I think it's a very comprehensive digestion of the questions that will swirl around the idea of LLMs as a public good in the near to medium future.

What technocracy lol? people here turn into luddites if there's a positive reception of AI.. I can guarantee that there are at least 40 percent of the top 5 comments of any positive/negative post about AI gonna turn "hackers" to luddites. It was amazing before Covid times and now it's indistinguishable from reddit.

I suppose valid grounds for both perceptions can coexist.

Opposition to AI here is more than understandable; it takes much of the joy out of programming as a craft, while leaving one with so much much more of what is hateable about it as a day-job.

Re: The Private Capture of Public Genius

#25

Post by abalashov »

nradov wrote: post #21
wwind123 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree UN sounds like a good organization to help distribute the wealth created by AI to the world. But this idea won't be considered by the current U.S. administration. In that case what other countries can do is probably to tax the AI companies at rates higher than regular companies.

Do you really want countries like Saudi Arabia and North Korea to have a vote in wealth redistribution?

I suppose countries like KSA and DPRK would ask the same question about us.

Re: The Private Capture of Public Genius

#26

Post by nradov »

martialg wrote: post #10
abalashov wrote: post #9

It was a brilliant article, and it succinctly captured the offenses to ethics and humanism posed by LLMs. I'm not sure it'll get a lot of reception in the technocracy here on HN, whether of the AI booster or AI nihilist sort. However, I think it's a very comprehensive digestion of the questions that will swirl around the idea of LLMs as a public good in the near to medium future.

Author here. Really appreciate you taking the time to read and for the kind comment. I think the tension between these ethical questions and the practical realities (both the good and the bad) of AI is likely the defining issues for technology and perhaps society in this decade. It’s important we’re thorough and rigorous with how we think and act here so I really appreciate you engaging with the topic.

It's so weird how technologists overestimate the importance of LLMs to society at large. It's going to be far less important than real world issues like nuclear weapons proliferation, access to fossil fuels, declining birth rates, and breakdowns in global free trade.

Re: The Private Capture of Public Genius

#27

Post by abalashov »

typ wrote: post #23
martialg wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Author here. Thanks for taking the time to read. I agree we’re in an interesting era where frontier research has shifted from mostly publicly funded to mostly private and it creates challenging incentive structures especially regarding externalized costs of research. Did you have any thoughts on my argument of how public knowledge does get damaged by the proliferation of AI over time?

I don't understand how knowledge, either public or private, could get damaged. Though the income of the individuals and businesses that rely on the expertise of the knowledge would be damaged. Is that what you meant? Edit: At this stage, the revenue made by the AI labs is almost entirely spent on the formation of fixed capital and opex. The demand is mobilizing physical resources with money. Atoms are relocated and r…

Well, lots of ways. One is some degree of model collapse, as the slop-enshittified Internet itself is ingested as training data--despite the AI companies' best efforts to prevent this, they won't be altogether successful.

But the more consequential one may be that few are motivated to contribute more training data to make Dario or Sam richer. This is already playing out in open source. People write open-source so humans can use it, in that human way that humans do, not to make Dario richer because his models will emit statistically convoluted copies of that open-source. What is my incentive to open-source something that I could commercialise today, compared to what it was before the LLM age?

(Many will say there's not much point in commercialising it, either, but to the extent that software still has commercial value, the appeal of the alternative path has greatly diminished.)

Re: The Private Capture of Public Genius

#28

Post by nradov »

abalashov wrote: post #25
nradov wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you really want countries like Saudi Arabia and North Korea to have a vote in wealth redistribution?

I suppose countries like KSA and DPRK would ask the same question about us.

Fortunately we don't have to care much about questions asked by shithole countries today because the UN is virtually powerless. Let's keep it that way.

Re: The Private Capture of Public Genius

#29

Post by abalashov »

nradov wrote: post #26
martialg wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Author here. Really appreciate you taking the time to read and for the kind comment. I think the tension between these ethical questions and the practical realities (both the good and the bad) of AI is likely the defining issues for technology and perhaps society in this decade. It’s important we’re thorough and rigorous with how we think and act here so I really appreciate you engaging with the topic.

It's so weird how technologists overestimate the importance of LLMs to society at large. It's going to be far less important than real world issues like nuclear weapons proliferation, access to fossil fuels, declining birth rates, and breakdowns in global free trade.

I don't think we're going to agree about many things, but we definitely agree on that!

Re: The Private Capture of Public Genius

#30

Post by nradov »

abalashov wrote: post #27
typ wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand how knowledge, either public or private, could get damaged. Though the income of the individuals and businesses that rely on the expertise of the knowledge would be damaged. Is that what you meant? Edit: At this stage, the revenue made by the AI labs is almost entirely spent on the formation of fixed capital and opex. The demand is mobilizing physical resources with money. Atoms are relocated and r…

Well, lots of ways. One is some degree of model collapse, as the slop-enshittified Internet itself is ingested as training data--despite the AI companies' best efforts to prevent this, they won't be altogether successful. But the more consequential one may be that few are motivated to contribute more training data to make Dario or Sam richer. This is already playing out in open source. People write open-source so hum…

Dario and Sam are literally hiring human experts today specifically to create proprietary training data which their competitors can't access.
Post reply on HN