It's not a fear of "AI communism"; it's a fear of competitive market capitalism
observationalepidemiology.blogspot.com
It's not a fear of "AI communism"; it's a fear of competitive market capitalism
1–10 of 97 posts
Re: It's not a fear of "AI communism"; it's a fear of competitive market capitalism
#2> In a world where open-weight models dominate, the proprietary frontier models of Anthropic and OpenAI will find it virtually impossible to charge monopolistic pricing.
Maybe they can't charge monopolistic pricing (there's a few market entrants anyway today), but they can still charge premium pricing.
Also two things can be true at once.
American and western AI companies or other companies can rightly be part of the chain of general concern from western societies about anti-democratic authoritarian regimes (Iran + friends, China, Russia, North Korea, Cuba, &c.) getting ahold of technology while simultaneously also being worried about losing their market position and seeking regulatory rules to entrench themselves against actors who do not share the same values and seek to undermine western businesses with trade practices that are intolerable to our societies.
Re: It's not a fear of "AI communism"; it's a fear of competitive market capitalism
#3Bottom line: China wins.
Self isolation by the USA won't change the overall results.
Isolation is weakness, not strength.
It is a prescription for economic stagnation, decline and exploitation by home grown corporate interests that won't/can't compete anywhere else.
The best opportunity to counter China was with full cooperation from the rest of the world.
This adminstration has rejected this opportunity --- and is inadvertently working to "Make China Great Again".
http://rdcy.ruc.edu.cn/yw/LATEST_INSIGHTS/b7bdcf47e8a2489085...
Re: It's not a fear of "AI communism"; it's a fear of competitive market capitalism
#4Bottom line: China wins. Self isolation by the USA won't change the overall results. Isolation is weakness, not strength. It is a prescription for economic stagnation, decline and exploitation by home grown corporate interests that won't/can't compete anywhere else. The best opportunity to counter China was with full cooperation from the rest of the world. This adminstration has rejected this opportunity --- and is i…
[deleted]
Re: It's not a fear of "AI communism"; it's a fear of competitive market capitalism
#5Bottom line: China wins. Self isolation by the USA won't change the overall results. Isolation is weakness, not strength. It is a prescription for economic stagnation, decline and exploitation by home grown corporate interests that won't/can't compete anywhere else. The best opportunity to counter China was with full cooperation from the rest of the world. This adminstration has rejected this opportunity --- and is i…
Eh, not quite.
China is not “just china”, it’s a totalitarian regime without freedom if speech, without worker’s rights and without many/most of the freedoms we take for granted.
“China wins” is really “modern hyper/technological communist totalitarian regime wins”
Re: It's not a fear of "AI communism"; it's a fear of competitive market capitalism
#6> In a world where open-weight models dominate, the proprietary frontier models of Anthropic and OpenAI will find it virtually impossible to charge monopolistic pricing. Maybe they can't charge monopolistic pricing (there's a few market entrants anyway today), but they can still charge premium pricing. Also two things can be true at once. American and western AI companies or other companies can rightly be part of the…
They will be like Windows Server. Expensive, restricted and overall worse than the open stuff but somehow sill generate some sales
Re: It's not a fear of "AI communism"; it's a fear of competitive market capitalism
#7> In a world where open-weight models dominate, the proprietary frontier models of Anthropic and OpenAI will find it virtually impossible to charge monopolistic pricing. Maybe they can't charge monopolistic pricing (there's a few market entrants anyway today), but they can still charge premium pricing. Also two things can be true at once. American and western AI companies or other companies can rightly be part of the…
They will be like Windows Server. Expensive, restricted and overall worse than the open stuff but somehow sill generate some sales
No they won't. They'll offer far superior models at a premium price and they'll capture most of the profits similar to iPhone versus the Android manufacturers.
US companies will also release open source models and lower-cost options that will compete with any open source models released by any other country, except when you ask US/western models what happened at Tiananmen Square they'll give you an answer instead of being blocked by an authoritarian government.
Whenever I have these conversations it's like, ok do I believe the incredibly smart people running Google, Facebook, Nvidia, OpenAI, Anthropic, Apple, Amazon, and more who have careers, companies, and trillions of dollars at stake, or do I believe random people on the Internet who say "Open AI and Anthropic will be like Windows Server and open-source models will be better"?
Without extremely strong evidence to the contrary, I'm going to go with what the smartest people in the room are doing. The model and economics make a lot more sense, and fears about Chinese open source models are overblown. When you're behind and frantic you release open source software. If American companies somehow fall behind they'll just release their own better open source software/models and undercut China using the exact same strategy. So either both sides get to employ this strategy and neither has an advantage, or the spend and research matter and America for now has an advantage.
Re: It's not a fear of "AI communism"; it's a fear of competitive market capitalism
#8Hardly anybody is talking about the biggest political aspect of open weight LLMs (actually, any LLMs):
Because they instantly and reliably(tm) give you the information you want in the format you want it in, they are going to replace the web search as the dominant mode through which information is disseminated - if, indeed, this hasn't already happened. As such, LLMs are effectively a form of publishing for their training data.
Which means a vicious fight for control over what goes into LLMs, and strong incentives to widely disseminate useful LLMs that encode your structural biases, instead of some adversary's. We already talk about Chinese models that won't talk about Tiananmen Square, but that's eye-rollingly sophomoric compared to what the stakes are now. Imagine a model that subtly discourages entrepreneurship, because its creator doesn't want upstart competitors. All questions of media bias are multiplied incalculably when LLMs are folded into all of society.
I think we need to take LLMs seriously as sovereign projects that are as critical to the democratic experiment as a free press. Funding needs to be nationalized; training needs to be conducted in the open, on open datasets; fine tuning needs to follow democratic principles. Only then will they be fit for purpose for their inevitable structural destiny: arbiters of human opinion.
Re: It's not a fear of "AI communism"; it's a fear of competitive market capitalism
#9Hardly anybody is talking about the biggest political aspect of open weight LLMs (actually, any LLMs): Because they instantly and reliably(tm) give you the information you want in the format you want it in, they are going to replace the web search as the dominant mode through which information is disseminated - if, indeed, this hasn't already happened. As such, LLMs are effectively a form of publishing for their trai…
LLMs are ideology made code.
"Alignment" is the act of making sure the technology reproduces the ruling ideology of the regime that produced it.
There is no such thing as "unbiased". It's only ever "following our own biases".
When Zuck released LLaMA 4, the announcement post stated that historically LLMs have "leaned left" and that they've been trying to "remove that bias". [0] Translated to the real world, that means that they've been trying to impart a right wing ideology to further the goals of the American ruling elite.
LLMs are the perfect propaganda technology. Always consider the motivations of their makers.
[0] https://ai.meta.com/blog/llama-4-multimodal-intelligence/
Re: It's not a fear of "AI communism"; it's a fear of competitive market capitalism
#10Hardly anybody is talking about the biggest political aspect of open weight LLMs (actually, any LLMs): Because they instantly and reliably(tm) give you the information you want in the format you want it in, they are going to replace the web search as the dominant mode through which information is disseminated - if, indeed, this hasn't already happened. As such, LLMs are effectively a form of publishing for their trai…
LLMs are ideology made code . "Alignment" is the act of making sure the technology reproduces the ruling ideology of the regime that produced it. There is no such thing as "unbiased". It's only ever "following our own biases". When Zuck released LLaMA 4, the announcement post stated that historically LLMs have "leaned left" and that they've been trying to "remove that bias". [0] Translated to the real world, that mea…
> that means that they've been trying to impart a right wing ideology to further the goals of the American ruling elite
I agree in principle, but it's pretty widely understood that LLM's lean heavily left. Zuckerberg as well is pretty left wing, and donated hundreds of millions fighting Trump. I think the issue they're running into is that as these models are used by more and more normal people, and those normal people are having trouble using the models because they don't align well with reality.