Ask HN isnt really the place for hosting blog posts. Instead why not put this on an external site, expand on it a bit, and submit a link?
Everyone feared AI taking over; the real danger is AI serving just the few
51–60 of 97 posts
Re: Everyone feared AI taking over; the real danger is AI serving just the few
#52This is pretty much the backstory of Dune. In the first novel, the character Reverend Mother Gaius Helen Mohiam says:
"Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them."
Re: Everyone feared AI taking over; the real danger is AI serving just the few
#53It seems people will lose their jobs AND their small business too. Small agencies won't have access to the best LLMs so their services will automatically require more time and manual labour, which makes them more expensive.
Surely using the worst LLMs costs no more time and labour.
Re: Everyone feared AI taking over; the real danger is AI serving just the few
#54Maybe I'm not paying close enough attention (probably) - but I feel that China is providing a glimmer of hope that this (only the uber elite can get good AI assistance) isn't true, and we're maybe at a weird inflection point of sorts wrt the leverage that tech can now provide.
China gets sanctions and stale chips - fine, they just DIY the algorithms through CPU instead of GPU and open source it.
American warships have the latest, coolest, highest-tech tactical weaponry imaginable - which is great until you have to fend off 10,000 consumer/wal-mart/IED grade drones at $2mm/clip.
Money is amazing, but if you lean on it too heavily in lieu of _practical_ innovation, it'll bite you in the ass. The apocryphal story of the Soviet Rocket scientist who suggested using a pencil instead of investing 100k in a space pen that worked in 0g's.
Re: Everyone feared AI taking over; the real danger is AI serving just the few
#55As a tech small business owner this is unfair that I can't be as smart by using the same level of intelligence as the top companies in the usa. This policy just keeps the powerful in power. And it's crazy because I already lost my job due to AI.
Small business owner in the U.S. ?
Not OP but I fit into this category (Small Business owner in the US).
Yes, I’m in the US but I somehow doubt my single person LLC is going to qualify for access to these cutting edge models. And frankly, that’s bullshit.
This will only serve to further entrench the big players and the only way to get access to these models will be to already be successful or bribery. That’s a pretty bleak future.
One thing I’ve thought (and said often) throughout my career (and even before “my career” started in High School) was that if I can see something being done at another company (some product feature, cool concept, etc) I will be able to replicate it. Yes large companies have more people but they are just people, if they could do it, so could I (given time/energy).
This is the first time I’ve felt that start to waver. Yes, I was always limited by being 1 person, but I always felt there was a path available to success. I might not have access to supercomputers but I could bootstrap and get by on lower powered hardware as I scaled up.
LLM’s themselves even felt in range if it was something I was interested in pursuing (on a _much_ smaller scale of course).
Essentially, I had the same tools (frameworks, libraries, languages) at my disposal as the big companies. Now that’s changing and I really don’t like that the scale is going be tilted even further into the entrenched company’s favor.
Re: Everyone feared AI taking over; the real danger is AI serving just the few
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Because if spread equally and used responsibly That ‘if’ is Atlas carrying the entire world on its shoulders. It should be clear by now that at global scales and with competing interests, the entire premise is impossible.
only if you assume capitalism is the only stable economic system. without wealth differences there is nothing other than your own abilities that can make access to tech unequal.
I assume that capitalism is viral enough that no alternative can be realistically by established on a global scale.
Ignoring wealth differences is another instance of dreaming of a magical world where greed has disappeared.
A good read is Mark Fisher’s book Capitalist Realism
Re: Everyone feared AI taking over; the real danger is AI serving just the few
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
This kind of thinking is the root of most populist rhetoric - that money and wealth is zero sum and it just shifts hands. This is false and a dangerous rabbit hole of an ideology to get into.
How is money not zero sum? I agree prosperity as such isn't, but money, land, other things are limited. And wealth is only wealth because not everybody else has as much, right? As in, it doesn't matter if you have a dollar and I have 100, or you have 1 trillion dollars and I have 100 trillion dollars, it's the same difference.
The question isn’t about money but rather wealth. Is AI just about transferring of wealth or creating new wealth/prosperity? It is obviously creating it and not merely transferring.
Money is just a medium or technique to enable this whole economic process. It’s not important here.
Re: Everyone feared AI taking over; the real danger is AI serving just the few
#58I'm done. The cognitive dissonance over AI has jumped the shark. It's not fair that it's everywhere. It's not fair that only a few have it. It's not fair that it uses so much electricity. It's not fair that it's killing my environment. It's not fair there's a datacenter in my back yard. It's not fair there isn't a datacenter in my back yard. It's not fair that it threatens my job. It's not fair that my employer doesn't give me access to AI.
Re: Everyone feared AI taking over; the real danger is AI serving just the few
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Re: Everyone feared AI taking over; the real danger is AI serving just the few
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not really, western countries were doing a lot of that in the 20th century (amongst themselves, anyway). Then the 80s happened. Or what, do people think that the boomers were all that good, that they genuinely earned everything they got? The generations before just worked out how to govern properly.
The 80s happened because of the stagnation of the 70s.
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