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Extinction-Level Capitalism

matthewbutterick.com

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Re: Extinction-Level Capitalism

#61

Post by smrtinsert »

swiftcoder wrote: post #45

There's a core problem this analysis overlooks: OpenAI and Anthropic don't have a moat. The Chinese labs are consistently able to replicate their LLM capabilities a few months after the fact, and then release open-weight models a few months later... The only way for "Big AI" to become a thing is for them to establish a moat, and right now the only path to that appears to be achieving regulatory capture in the US, whi…

We're in the Pets.com era of AI for sure. There is 0 guarantee the current providers will be around in 5-10 years. I keep thinking they will have to lean in to government protection to do so.

Re: Extinction-Level Capitalism

#62

Post by pixl97 »

borosuxks wrote: post #25
thriftwy wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I glimpsed last years of Soviet Union and it was pretty meh. I remember seeing anything in the street (a payphone or a playground for kids) and assumed it will only degrade because as a general principle, things in the streets are unmaintained. You could say that Soviet Union was bad specimen of socialism because of these stupid Russians? Except, Russia actually got 100% out of socialism with our space exploration, p…

Degradation of public goods or services happen independently of socialism. Where I live we're unashamed capitalists, and every common thing, like playgrounds, are derelict and only being improved by community initiatives. The municipality has no money for it, and the state doesn't care. Neither does the capitalists.

Yea, there is so much propaganda on economy types people just stop thinking and spout what they've heard without understanding. Pretty much every government these days have some kind of mixed economy because capitalism is effective at making things, but it's really ineffective at social goods/public services. Without effective regulations behind capitalism you end up with winners taking all and company towns issuing scrip to they can effectively own their employees.

Re: Extinction-Level Capitalism

#63

Post by ShinyLeftPad »

swiftcoder wrote: post #45

There's a core problem this analysis overlooks: OpenAI and Anthropic don't have a moat. The Chinese labs are consistently able to replicate their LLM capabilities a few months after the fact, and then release open-weight models a few months later... The only way for "Big AI" to become a thing is for them to establish a moat, and right now the only path to that appears to be achieving regulatory capture in the US, whi…

Big AI is a thing. Insane money and construction projects makes the government invested in it one way or the other. It can't fail or it'll cause economic shock. It's a play to normalize it and make everyone depend on it before people question how they trained it all on their data and now drive them out of their jobs.

If they ask for a moat they will get it, the government can simply require licensing for hardware required to run any model comparable to the cloud ones (for "national security"). good local models will only be used by .01% who are crazy neckbeards running servers in their basement and even then they will suck compared to cloud ones.

Re: Extinction-Level Capitalism

#64

Post by ShinyLeftPad »

zelphirkalt wrote: post #44
krona wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> literal, unashamed Nazi He's a Christian Zionist which is the belief in the fulfilment of old testament biblical prophecy. This seems diametrically opposed to Nazism to me, ideologically. I don't know how you'd square the two.

Zionists are not that far off though. For many Zionists parallels include: Like to be militarist and maximalists in their opinion about what land should belong to them. Applaude and show no shame for committing genocide. Employing starvation as a means of war/conflict. Showing no regard for civilian lives. How the rest of the Zionists, who when prompted about such matters may not subscribe to these believes, who migh…

zionism as belief that a group of people has a right for self determination != zionism as war justification. I recall there are different flavors and lumping them together is not helping anything.

Re: Extinction-Level Capitalism

#65

Post by pixl97 »

thatoneengineer wrote: post #38

I stopped reading after the first sentence. Calling something "inherently political" is a self-fulfilling prophecy and intentionally so. It consistently turns out to be an attempt to lay the groundwork for expropriation. No one called the Internet "inherently political" until people built stuff there that other people wanted to control.

I mean, all communications technology is inherently political. From the invention of speech and writing, to the printing press, radio, telephone, TV, and now internet and the communication mediums it allows.

This is because speech is inherently political at the end of the day.

Re: Extinction-Level Capitalism

#66

Post by trashface »

swiftcoder wrote: post #45

There's a core problem this analysis overlooks: OpenAI and Anthropic don't have a moat. The Chinese labs are consistently able to replicate their LLM capabilities a few months after the fact, and then release open-weight models a few months later... The only way for "Big AI" to become a thing is for them to establish a moat, and right now the only path to that appears to be achieving regulatory capture in the US, whi…

Memory might be a moat. A cynical view is this is why openAI is buying up all the capacity for HBM. If they have all the memory then we plebs won't be able to afford hardware to run local models. So we instead we have to rent their models basically just to get access to the memory.

Re: Extinction-Level Capitalism

#67

Post by porkchoppers »

praptak wrote: post #60
PaulHoule wrote: post #2

Anything to distract people from real problems like energy and the environment.

Big AI is intertwined with these two via data centers, isn't it?

Not really, the power involved would amount to 12% of the grid which is possible to do at net neutral and has efficiency improvements as doubling in under 5 years. If an industry that needed petroleum and F150s was a fraction as good with improvement every 5 decades, I don't think its environmental impact would be considered.

Re: Extinction-Level Capitalism

#68

Post by AnimalMuppet »

trashface wrote: post #66
swiftcoder wrote: post #45

There's a core problem this analysis overlooks: OpenAI and Anthropic don't have a moat. The Chinese labs are consistently able to replicate their LLM capabilities a few months after the fact, and then release open-weight models a few months later... The only way for "Big AI" to become a thing is for them to establish a moat, and right now the only path to that appears to be achieving regulatory capture in the US, whi…

Memory might be a moat. A cynical view is this is why openAI is buying up all the capacity for HBM. If they have all the memory then we plebs won't be able to afford hardware to run local models. So we instead we have to rent their models basically just to get access to the memory.

I doubt it. Memory manufacturers are going to ramp up, given the demand. Can AI make enough money to buy up the increased capacity forever? Whereas each user just needs enough money to buy up the memory that they need for their use. AI needs to invest billions, small users have to invest thousands. And the payback is going to be there for the small guys, so that even if they have to borrow to get the memory, they will quickly be able to repay it.

This is not a game that big AI is going to be able to win.

Re: Extinction-Level Capitalism

#69

Post by mdp2021 »

sucrosesucrose wrote: post #17

The fatalist philosophers and authors have been mostly proven right as time marched on. And this time will be no different, the existence of "AI" ensures the future will be as dark or worse as the predictions expect. Why? Because humans are flawed and corrupt, too prone to excesses (specially conformism and convenience) and the exploitation of the natural world.

I am not sure how this is downvoted, as it contains sharply two main principles:

-- a growth in power requires a growth in human qualities (wisdom, maturity, responsibility) for sustainability; and technology-enabled possibilities are increases in power;

-- conformism and convenience are /exactly/ - congratulations sucrosesucrose, we had noticed and analyzed and every day increasingly come to the same assessment - the two core active faces of ignorance that are destroying current western societies. We came to the same conclusions, we identified the same two dark cancers.

This said, some of the current technological advances are enablers, if well used, in greatly curing the underlying ignorance, and consequently the phenomenons of "conformism" and "convenience".

Re: Extinction-Level Capitalism

#70

Post by mdp2021 »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #20
sucrosesucrose wrote: post #17

The fatalist philosophers and authors have been mostly proven right as time marched on. And this time will be no different, the existence of "AI" ensures the future will be as dark or worse as the predictions expect. Why? Because humans are flawed and corrupt, too prone to excesses (specially conformism and convenience) and the exploitation of the natural world.

Um, I expected a fair probability of being in a post-nuclear world by now. Global cooling wasn't real. Y2K didn't end the world. The population explosion didn't result in mass starvation. Peak oil didn't end civilization. So no, I don't agree that "the fatalist philosophers and authors have been mostly proven right as time marched on." No, they haven't. There have been far more fatalistic predictions than there have…

That is because your idea of what is catastrophic does not align with ours. To us, this is full unthinkable dystopia. An uncivilized world weighs much more, is much worse to us, than the world of disasters you depict. Survival is a crude, lower ideal to us, when compared to that of living decently.
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