Haven't really seen competitive market capitalists worried about AI communism.
Plenty of left-leaning and communists and communists adjacent worried about ai, however.
It's not a fear of "AI communism"; it's a fear of competitive market capitalism
51–60 of 97 posts
Re: It's not a fear of "AI communism"; it's a fear of competitive market capitalism
#52Earlier quoted context omitted.
Right. Calling China "Communist" is the same as calling North Korea "Democratic". It's State Capitalism.
Its State Capitalism (which is a complete misnomer), in about 2% of the country which is in "special economic zones" around major ports. In reality it is "socialism with Chinese characteristics". The number of own goals the CCP has made in the last decade is quite large. But when your opponent is making a mistake, don't interrupt them. Without the CCP, China would probably have the world's largest economy right now.…
And, for what is is worth,
this is what ChatGPT tells me:
Here are the approximate recent (2024–2025) GDP per capita figures for the two countries:
China
Nominal GDP per capita: about $12,500 – $13,000
PPP GDP per capita: about $22,000 – $24,000
Namibia
Nominal GDP per capita: about $4,500 – $5,500
PPP GDP per capita: about $9,000 – $11,000
A factor of 2-3x is not 'on par', tone down on the reality bending a bit, please.
Re: It's not a fear of "AI communism"; it's a fear of competitive market capitalism
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
Right. Calling China "Communist" is the same as calling North Korea "Democratic". It's State Capitalism.
Its State Capitalism (which is a complete misnomer), in about 2% of the country which is in "special economic zones" around major ports. In reality it is "socialism with Chinese characteristics". The number of own goals the CCP has made in the last decade is quite large. But when your opponent is making a mistake, don't interrupt them. Without the CCP, China would probably have the world's largest economy right now.…
According to the International Monetary Fund China does have the largest economy if you go off GDP (PPP)
[1] https://www.imf.org/external/datamapper/PPPGDP@WEO/OEMDC/ADV... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PPP)
Re: It's not a fear of "AI communism"; it's a fear of competitive market capitalism
#54> 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…
> 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.
It'll never be economical to run open-weight models compared to paying per token from the big providers. The cost is going to be roughly proportional to energy inputs over time, and they're going to be the ones that have the scale and engineering ability to knock it down.
Re: It's not a fear of "AI communism"; it's a fear of competitive market capitalism
#55Earlier 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.
I would argue the only real boundaries for right vs left are what people actually believe. If pools said 55% of people wanted government to own the means of production, and no AI suggested it, that would suggest they may be right-leaning. Since almost nobody wants that, as it's killed ~100 million people, the fact LLM's don't argue for it is not odd. In the same vein would not set the bar for a right-wing LLM to be wanting to purify the country down to a single race.
A more realistic comparison would be gender ideology. Something like 65% of voters believe gender is assigned at birth (ie biological), including ~39% of Democrats (https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2024/06/06/gender-ident...). While I'm not here to say which is morally correct it is a normal opinion, which is supported by facts, and has been held for decades before being transgender was invented. An unbiased model should reflect the political views of the people, but they effectively all don't, and instead push the left-wing ideology. I don't think you could draw a conclusion from a single topic but the best way to gauge political bias in my opinion would be to find contentious topics, and see where LLM's land. I would be shocked if you found a major LLM which didn't lean much further left than the average American or European.
Re: It's not a fear of "AI communism"; it's a fear of competitive market capitalism
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I would argue the only real boundaries for right vs left are what people actually believe. If pools said 55% of people wanted government to own the means of production, and no AI suggested it, that would suggest they may be right-leaning. Since almost nobody wants that, as it's killed ~100 million people, the fact LLM's don't argue for it is not odd. In the same vein would not set the bar for a right-wing LLM to be w…
Gender has nothing to do with left/right.
Think Lenin had thoughts on gender? Think Lenin was not a leftist?
It's a liberal (i.e. right wing) distraction from class issues.
> An unbiased model should reflect the political views of the people
This wouldn't be unbiased, it would just be status quo bias.
Re: It's not a fear of "AI communism"; it's a fear of competitive market capitalism
#57> 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…
Sometimes people say AI is the next big thing since the internet and at other it is like cloud computing where companies can charge premium.
Both cannot be true at the same time.
If you look back in the early days there were premium ISP providers with better up times and stable speeds. In the long run none have survived because everyone has caught on.
If AI is important then there is always going to be incentive to try something cheaper even if it is not the best - especially on enterprise budgets and the costs can be offloaded to the customer somehow - if the uptime and service stability is guaranteed by a third party provider.
Re: It's not a fear of "AI communism"; it's a fear of competitive market capitalism
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I would argue the only real boundaries for right vs left are what people actually believe. If pools said 55% of people wanted government to own the means of production, and no AI suggested it, that would suggest they may be right-leaning. Since almost nobody wants that, as it's killed ~100 million people, the fact LLM's don't argue for it is not odd. In the same vein would not set the bar for a right-wing LLM to be w…
> before being transgender was invented
Separate from how you're trying to gauge left and right, this is extremely wrong.
Re: It's not a fear of "AI communism"; it's a fear of competitive market capitalism
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I would argue the only real boundaries for right vs left are what people actually believe. If pools said 55% of people wanted government to own the means of production, and no AI suggested it, that would suggest they may be right-leaning. Since almost nobody wants that, as it's killed ~100 million people, the fact LLM's don't argue for it is not odd. In the same vein would not set the bar for a right-wing LLM to be w…
My dood, we were here before the first stone of Athens was laid. Being trans was never "invented".
Nice try derailing the conversation, though.
Re: It's not a fear of "AI communism"; it's a fear of competitive market capitalism
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 ar…
> 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 not wish casting whatever that means. The cru…
> It's not wish casting whatever that means.
Wishcasting is describing a hypothetical. Your statement was about what you think America can do, but not about what it has proven to do already. It is wishcasting by any definition you'll find online. Economic roadblocks are not any less important than capability roadblocks, look at how proprietary UNIX went from a billion-dollar IP business to being entirely cannibalized by "good enough" free alternatives like Linux and BSD. You can whine and call Linux/BSD "communist plots" or decry them for being less powerful than AIX, but history was not kind to nonfree UNIX-like software. They died out, and a superior alternative flourished in it's place. Same happened to Texas Instruments, Espressif and STMicroelectronics IP - American adversaries have access to better, cheaper microcontrollers than America's supply chain can compete with. China's clones already won.
> The point about Mythos doesn't strengthen your argument, it weakens it.
Does it? I don't think Anthropic is profitable yet, show me the balance sheet that confirms Mythos and Fable are putting them in the black. Even with "premium" models, Anthropic and OpenAI are both finding out that it's not enough to move the needle. Hell, their desire to IPO should be enough to understand that their future is overpriced B2B rice bowl contracts and not some benevolent B2C relationship like Google and Apple fought over. Even XAI/SpaceX deserves a crumb of credit for recognizing that the winner is whoever helps the US government transgress the laws of God fastest. The taxpayer is the only one that can feasibly foot the bill, and China has recognized this from Day 1 (say what you will about Xi Jinping thought).
> I believe the folks actually doing the work and with money at stake. I have yet to find a convincing argument otherwise.
Some great consolation that would be, if you said the same thing for Enron, Theranos, Vision Pro, Meta Quest, Microsoft Groove, Google+, Juicero, Hololens... why, you could be convinced to buy any of history's most dogshit technology. Remember, an appeal to authority is just one third of effective rhetoric.
> Sure but there's an American government coalition which American companies will have to accommodate
In a so-called free market, that's the most heretical and counterintuitive solution that you can concoct. Laissez-faire lore would have us believe that competition is keeping the market alive, but it's the regulation that is preventing America's businesses from releasing their most powerful models. If this becomes a political policy issue, then China has already won. At that point, America might as well forfeit to save money that would have been wasted on "AGI" research graft.