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The AI Credit Resale Economy

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131–140 of 141 posts

Re: The AI Credit Resale Economy

#131
post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you familiar with Chinas version of capitalism? It is markedly different than “the” western model

I am not, but would be interested to hear. Any articles?

There's no English-language article that can fully capture the system because it's a moving target to begin with, and anything official is vague on purpose (to be fair, much of the legislation in the US is too, except the Constitutional backstop and co-equal judiciary does not exist in China). The official messaging is always targeted and curated with a specific audience in mind and how much truth is contained within varies. The best way to describe it without turning it into an essay is that it's "aspirationally market-driven" system that is not defined by a fixed and consistent ideology but rather the constraints of the capacity of the administrative state to control the parts of the economy that is legible to the state. It's not a free market except for the black market, but the black market is frankly huge if nothing else to compensate for the state asserting not just a monopoly on the use of violence but also the monopolistic determinator of morality, which the people are less willing to buy into, but that disconnection itself creates an opportunity for arbitrage. That is the relationship dynamic that have retained some degree of stability, but everything else is effectively subject to change on a dime without notice. The party will never accept openly that it is capitalistic and in some sense that's not even a lie, but what the state is able to impose and what the people actually do are very different things. As the state excludes 99% of the population writ large from politics, full stop (you are either born into it, or you're not eligible to participate, with some narrow exceptions that occasionally pop up), there's not much of a ground-level appetite for dogma and doctrines. Instead you end up with a pragmatic, descriptive market that exists differently within and without, and just like the socialism label being basically symbolic, same goes for capitalism.

People have been talking about late capitalism in the west for a century. The Chinese state would argue that we cannot be in late capitalism because we're actually in the first stage of socialism, and the people would wonder how we got to late capitalism when they never got to experience early or middle capitalism. But really the only thing we know that definitively does not work is implenting Marxism and Marxism-Leninism and Maoism and its offshoots as doctrine. Whether that means that the default is a prescriptive version of capitalism is, well, open to debate, and probably too simplistic.

Re: The AI Credit Resale Economy

#133

Distillation is one of the most unique and interesting aspects of this. But otherwise, if a company gives something valuable for creating an account on their platform, expect that people will automate the creation of millions of accounts. If employees of B2B partners get benefits, they will resell them. Accounts will be hacked and resold. The same basic abuse patterns are decades old for online delivery services, loy…

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Re: The AI Credit Resale Economy

#134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except for the cases of credit card fraud, I don't see what's morally wrong with it, for it to be called "fraud". It's just reselling. Maybe people are starting to copy Anthropic's rhetoric of "everything that inconveniences me is fraud (e.g. distillation). Everything that benefits me is legit."

> Except for the cases of credit card fraud, I don't see what's morally wrong with it, for it to be called "fraud". Signing up to the startup credit programs with fake startups is fraud. In general, performing a misrepresentation to deceive another party for financial gain is fraud. So there are plenty of ways to define this as fraud

If you sign a contract on paper, I 100% agree. It's fraud.

Signing up for it on a website and checking a box that says "I agree to the terms of service", I don't think carries the same weight. But maybe that's just me.

Re: The AI Credit Resale Economy

#135
post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is what every chinese "credit reseller" is doing, selling all the prompts and responses to labs in addition to selling quanted kimi/ds/etc as opus/fable

Arena.AI does this as well - they may appear as a leaderboard but what keeps business booming is their sale of traces to chinese labs

What's the source of information?

Re: The AI Credit Resale Economy

#136
post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> and providers don't have to cover training capex. How so?

With an open-weights model, anyone with the hardware to run the model can act as a provider. The median provider pays nothing for the model, so they do not contribute to the cost of training it.

Ah! Makes sense. Thanks!

Re: The AI Credit Resale Economy

#137
post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> and providers don't have to cover training capex. How so?

Providers like Fireworks offer inference, they're not training their own models. Yet training is the most expensive part, inference is easy profit.

And even the ones who trained it can’t afford to offer it at a price covering their training capex, since any good open-source model will see other providers selling inference without any training expenses to cover.

Didn’t see it, but it’s obvious in retrospect. Thanks!

Re: The AI Credit Resale Economy

#139
Funniest thing is I am fairly sure grey beards would be familiar with this happening during the cloud compute days, and probably during the every other days. Everyone thinks they are different when it is actually probably a better bet to be like how are we not.

Re: The AI Credit Resale Economy

#140

Distillation is one of the most unique and interesting aspects of this. But otherwise, if a company gives something valuable for creating an account on their platform, expect that people will automate the creation of millions of accounts. If employees of B2B partners get benefits, they will resell them. Accounts will be hacked and resold. The same basic abuse patterns are decades old for online delivery services, loy…

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