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The Private Capture of Public Genius

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Re: The Private Capture of Public Genius

#31

Post by abalashov »

nradov wrote: post #30
abalashov wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Fine, but my point was that releasing open source software implies contributing to that, virtually by definition, and then to be met with a déluge of slop PRs and GH issues. Who can blame a developer for saying, "screw that?"

Re: The Private Capture of Public Genius

#32

Post by wwind123 »

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?

It's about how to benefit the entire human species, or at least to reduce human suffering across the board. If there is famine in North Korea, then the surplus food from the world flowing into there won't be an issue right?

Re: The Private Capture of Public Genius

#33

Post by abalashov »

martialg wrote: post #13
abalashov wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you in turn, I have circulated your piece to thoughtful friends. My immediate, from-the-hip thought is that we are slowly lumbering toward the idea that LLMs ("AI") should be a public utility. It may take us quite a while to get there yet, as an unprecedented concentration of wealth and power is arrayed precisely against this outcome, but I think that will be the eventual effect, in that, "in the long run, we'r…

Thank you kindly I’m working through thoughts on this as well and agree with your read on the incentives. There is an interesting set of conditions that happens if/when models get so competent that they’re effectively indistinguishable from each other and inference becomes a true commodity. IRL impact will lag this ofc but it’s such a wild time to be alive.

I do think it's easy, in this technology discussion bubble in which we dwell, to overestimate the centrality of LLMs to the arc of developments in our time.

They'll be important, but I don't think they'll be _that_ important, because the rest of society and the economy don't move at the speed of SV. Instead, they'll be overtaken by other, more traditional categories of events, ruptures and dislocations.

Moreover, folks will eventually realise that while they are very impressive derivative databases of knowledge, they're not at all "AI" -- well, not the "I" part, anyway -- as the concept is traditionally understood. There's not any "I". It emits convolutions of its training, and it does so very impressively, and that can even be harnessed by agents to connect them to levers, servos and richer information sources. It's nifty. But it's just not intelligence. It's more of a kind of queryable database than a robot.

Once that realisation diffuses more widely, I think it'll turn out to be a more prosaic and underwhelming development than is presently hypothesised, either here or by the press. It doesn't mean many business and managerial class folks won't try to squeeze everything they can out of so-called AI, but the idea that this can effectuate truly widespread labour displacement will probably quiet down considerably. (The valuations that depend on this assumption may collapse more abruptly and less gracefully.)

The challenge is staying solvent until then. :-)

Re: The Private Capture of Public Genius

#34

Post by strictnein »

marcus_holmes wrote: post #16
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.

The USA helped form the UN as specifically the organisation to do exactly this kind of thing. It's a shame the current administration can't play nicely with others. The current administration is also playing strange games about export controls (can we run Fable yet? Kinda. Maybe). I think if they keep this up they'll just be shooting the US AI industry in the foot and the Chinese models will take over as the frontier…

The US formed the UN to distribute funds?

> Maybe the UN can levy the USA for this

The UN has no "levy" powers.

Re: The Private Capture of Public Genius

#35

Post by imrehg »

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…

As long as places like Taiwan are effectively blocked from being in the UN[0], I don't believe we should be adding more to their power and responsibilities than what they have now, au contraire!

If it was a truly world representation, this might be different. But if things like health are sacrificed (ie. no WHO access either), I don't think they really deserve the benefit of the doubt.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taiwan_and_the_United_Nations

Re: The Private Capture of Public Genius

#36

Post by nradov »

wwind123 wrote: post #32
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?

It's about how to benefit the entire human species, or at least to reduce human suffering across the board. If there is famine in North Korea, then the surplus food from the world flowing into there won't be an issue right?

Yes, that would be an issue because it allows the regime to divert more resources to weapons. In general major famines are always caused by corrupt or incompetent political leaders rather than lack of food.

Re: The Private Capture of Public Genius

#37

Post by nradov »

abalashov wrote: post #31
nradov wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Fine, but my point was that releasing open source software implies contributing to that, virtually by definition, and then to be met with a déluge of slop PRs and GH issues. Who can blame a developer for saying, "screw that?"

I'm not blaming anyone. A lot of open source developers are paid to do that so presumably most of them will continue doing so if they want to keep their jobs. The major volunteer projects will probably introduce access controls to limit which users are allowed to create PRs and GH issues.

Re: The Private Capture of Public Genius

#38

Post by wwind123 »

nradov wrote: post #36
wwind123 wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's about how to benefit the entire human species, or at least to reduce human suffering across the board. If there is famine in North Korea, then the surplus food from the world flowing into there won't be an issue right?

Yes, that would be an issue because it allows the regime to divert more resources to weapons. In general major famines are always caused by corrupt or incompetent political leaders rather than lack of food.

Famine could be caused by drought or flood or other numerous things. When the country can't produce enough food, its people would need to rely on food from outside.

Re: The Private Capture of Public Genius

#39

Post by archagon »

marcus_holmes wrote: post #14
martialg wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Author here. Thanks for reading! I have additional essays coming out that will address this exact issue and other issues I know that people will raise. I’m building the essays series around arguing for practical policy I believe can get implemented and am sequencing it as thoughtfully as I can. I just can’t fit every argument into every essay.

It's a great idea, I hope you get traction with it :) I am personally coming to the conclusion that having these vast repositories of knowledge that can actually talk to us is actually great. We have some issues to solve, but the end-state of having a global repository of all knowledge that can talk to us and answer questions is actually an amazing outcome. We just need to solve those problems first; mostly getting p…

Imagine that AI lives up to its promise, gets captured by a handful of corporations, and ushers in a world of untouchable über-oligarchs that de facto rule the world. Would it have been worth it then? Can this problem even be solved?

Re: The Private Capture of Public Genius

#40

Post by w10-1 »

"Fair use" was always fuzzy. To be honest, I care a lot less about slurping up the public internet and private books to make models than about every profession on the planet being forced by their employers to create skills that automate their knowledge work. The latter is much more directly an expropriation, legitimized only by the shortage of work, i.e., market power.
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