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It's not a fear of "AI communism"; it's a fear of competitive market capitalism

observationalepidemiology.blogspot.com

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Re: It's not a fear of "AI communism"; it's a fear of competitive market capitalism

#21

Post by platevoltage »

vrganj wrote: post #12
guywithahat wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 peop…

I have never ever seen an LLM advocate for public ownership of the means of production, nationalizing industry or any other left wing policy. The very existence of capitalist oligarchs like Zuck is contrary to left wing values.

Exactly. The most charitable thing you can call Zuck would be apolitical. Zuck does whats best for Zuck, whether that means funding a hospital in SF (and receiving naming rights), or donating to Trump's inauguration fund. I have a different word for him personally.

Re: It's not a fear of "AI communism"; it's a fear of competitive market capitalism

#22

Post by platevoltage »

znpy wrote: post #5
jqpabc123 wrote: post #3

Bottom 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”

A guy in the USA was just put in prison for decades for distributing a zine.

Re: It's not a fear of "AI communism"; it's a fear of competitive market capitalism

#23

Post by bigyabai »

ericmay wrote: post #7
theplumber wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> They'll offer far superior models at a premium price

> US companies will also release open source models and lower-cost options

This is wishcasting. People are raising the alarm because models like GLM-5.2 and Kimi K3 have already displaced demand for frontier models in highly demanding fields like security research. There's no amount of money that you can pay for "premium" access to Mythos, so those researchers are taking their money to inference providers that give them comparable models.

It's okay if this is your prediction, but it's not particularly grounded in the present scenario.

> ok do I believe the incredibly smart people running Google, Facebook, Nvidia, OpenAI, Anthropic, Apple, Amazon, and more

Why do you conflate all of these businesses with vastly different business strategies to one another?

Apple and Facebook do not have the same AI strategy, same for Amazon and Nvidia or Google and OpenAI. Many of these businesses made expressly terrible choices that hamstrung their ability to capitalize on AI profits. FAIR failed to scale their early Llama models into a service; Apple abandoned OpenCL too early and invested in a dark-silicon NPU coprocessor instead of supporting CUDA's multi-trillion dollar ARM rollout; Google went all-in on hardware research and failed to create a frontier model that moved significant tokens; OpenAI forfeit the frontier to Anthropic, and Anthropic bent over backwards to appease American censorship demands and push cringeworthy marketing campaigns to capture LLM mindshare with Claude.

There is no "American companies" coalition. They're all reacting in drastically different ways and your eagerness to conflate them suggests that you don't have any real position outside tribalist "us vs them" pugilism.

Re: It's not a fear of "AI communism"; it's a fear of competitive market capitalism

#24

Post by higginsniggins »

dosinga wrote: post #19

People keep saying that the open models are cheaper. Until recently that seemed true because they were smaller. And some of the best smaller models are still open and cheap. But K3 with its 2.7T parameters is never going to be really cheap.

Yes but at the very least they are an insurance against the big companies deciding to Enshittify their product.

For example if (when) open ai decides to 10x their price once every one is sufficiently hooked these open weight models will still be here.

Re: It's not a fear of "AI communism"; it's a fear of competitive market capitalism

#25

Post by tharmas »

znpy wrote: post #5
jqpabc123 wrote: post #3

Bottom 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”

But increasingly this describes Western countries more and more, particularly the United States.

Re: It's not a fear of "AI communism"; it's a fear of competitive market capitalism

#26

Post by platevoltage »

plastic-enjoyer wrote: post #16
znpy wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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”

>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. Just shows the complete naive view on China, but whatever.

Right. Calling China "Communist" is the same as calling North Korea "Democratic". It's State Capitalism.

Re: It's not a fear of "AI communism"; it's a fear of competitive market capitalism

#27

Post by javcasas »

znpy wrote: post #5
jqpabc123 wrote: post #3

Bottom 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”

> it’s a totalitarian regime without freedom if speech, without worker’s rights and without many/most of the freedoms we take for granted

You know, the USA is kinda going that direction.

> modern hyper/technological communist totalitarian regime wins

Yup, remove "communist" and be afraid of the semblance.

Re: It's not a fear of "AI communism"; it's a fear of competitive market capitalism

#28

Post by hunterpayne »

pbiggar wrote: post #14
dTal wrote: post #8

Hardly 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…

This has already happened. It appears that Israel has poisoned the Common Crawl. https://www.dropsitenews.com/p/israel-brad-parscale-ai-chatb...

Hate to break it too you, but LLMs made an awful lot of the content people thought came from the Gaza war. There was a small group of people who tried to help the media verify content for publication but the many in the media didn't seem to actually care if the videos were real or not.

Someday, the publishing of LLMs that generate video will be the thing historians talk about most from this period of history. Even if the vast majority of people today don't realize it has been happening for a couple years at this point.

Re: It's not a fear of "AI communism"; it's a fear of competitive market capitalism

#29

Post by javcasas »

higginsniggins wrote: post #24
dosinga wrote: post #19

People keep saying that the open models are cheaper. Until recently that seemed true because they were smaller. And some of the best smaller models are still open and cheap. But K3 with its 2.7T parameters is never going to be really cheap.

Yes but at the very least they are an insurance against the big companies deciding to Enshittify their product. For example if (when) open ai decides to 10x their price once every one is sufficiently hooked these open weight models will still be here.

Don't forget they will also downgrade the quality, like Claude has shown multiple times.

Re: It's not a fear of "AI communism"; it's a fear of competitive market capitalism

#30

Post by anticorporate »

jqpabc123 wrote: post #3

Bottom 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…

> Bottom line: China wins.

Honest questions:

What does it mean for a nation state to "win" in this context?

Assuming I don't like totalitarian oligopoly in the United States OR China, what realistic outcome should I be hoping for?

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