If you think this is the modern-day equivalent of a printing press, it's vital to avoid this being in the hands of only one or two multi-billion-dollar corporations with a history of morally questionable moves.
If you think privacy rights and freedom from surveillance are critical to democracy, you want your smart speaker or video doorbell to do all its processing on board, without uploading recordings to the cloud. And you want your neighbour's doorbell to do the same.
And frankly, nobody goes after Microsoft Word when someone writes Xi Jinping satire using it, or ICE buy it - because people know it's a tool rather than a platform.
On the other hand, if you think ML technology is going to produce the next wave of fake amazon reviews and forum spam - you might be a lot less eager to see it in the hands of everyone.
If you think society will be slow to adapt to things like deepfakes; and that cops and corporations will immediately start using things like facial recognition technology - well, then wider access to ML might seem to have a great many downsides.
I think AI has the same potential: filling administrative work, walking the complexity of an information overloaded world, keeping up to date with laws you can't ignore but have no way to know about, planning logistics that our modern life impose on us...
Suddenly, like the CEO of today, every one will be able to have a secretary.
Yes, that can make a huge different.
Don't think about AI as the thing we have today. GPT the nokia 3310 of AI. Amazing, but very basic.
Think that one day, somebody will come out with the iphone of AI.
- reading boring documents and giving me the gist of it
- classifying my emails
- checking for typos and problems in my writing
- writing the boiler plate of documents
- translating doc
- doing basic search on a topic, such as legal obligations that haven't change in the last 2 years
It's cheaper than my secretary, faster, and has roughly the same error rate for those tasks. I have to double check her work anyway.
With plugins, people are already making stuff like booking a plane, another thing my secretary does.
It will expend.
I don't think you realize the amount of risk involved in giving these opaque probabilistic systems control over data and compute. They are not people replacements and assuming so and acting on it will create more problems than it solves... Because extending thee lines to wrap around your needs is wishful thinking and there is a lot more complexity and hidden unintended consequences than assumed when saying chatbots capable of using APIs will be dependable personal assistants, which is the point I'm trying to make.
After playing around with ChatGPT for a few hours I have a hard time seeing how someone could objectively call it "basic".
But compared to what we have today, it's very basic.
Same for chatgpt.
The washing machine has reached a tipping point, we hit diminishing returns from now on.
The AI is in the nokia phase. It's at the primitive stage of development.
You lost me at iPhone for AI. I think I know what you mean but it can be expressed better.
In other words the jump ahead from GPT to broadly useful AI is akin to the jump from the old Nokia feature phone to iPhone. Don’t let the current limitations of GPT color what you think AI will be generally capable of within the next decade.
I think something that was majorly lost in the past 60 years is the secretary. I agree with you that it’d be great if everyone had one - the working relationship between a secretary and the person they support can be amazingly productive.
The biggest game changer was the fossil fuel that enabled that washing machine, and all the other modern devices we rely on.
That same substance is used to as chemical feedstock for fertilizers and more than double yields, and more than double the amount of "arable" land. If we were to run out, half of humanity would likely starve.
But I was thinking of the tool-vs-platform distinction in the context of the censorship question raised by Midjourney blocking images of Xi Jinping.
'Platforms' like Facebook and Github often censor things like porn, terror recruitment, and political satire fearing reputational damage and loss of advertisers from having such content on their domain, next to their logo - whereas offline tools like MS Word aren't subject to the same fears.
So people who think political satire is a particularly important form of speech might prefer an offline tool for their greater censorship resistance, irrespective of their opinion on issues of copyright.
I don't see how it should be any different from the PC revolution. We've all got a 1970s supercomputer in our pocket now, for better or worse. But it's certainly preferable to only the richest and most powerful having one.
“Hey OpenChatGPT, find a list of every person who has ever wronged me and constantly harass them with death threats from behind seven proxies”
Yeah that will make the world better.
It works both ways. Attack and defense.
You may not feel the need to construct a strong defense because of your disposition and mental model, but you should because of the motivations and mental models of those building a strong offense.
A take as old as time. History books are always written by the victors.
More seriously: Corporations have fiduciary obligations only to the shareholders. Civilization disrupting technology can not, must not, be trusted to sole custodianship of such decision making regimes.
Well, I can't speak about strengthening democracy for sure, but what I see is that AI will become a significant means of digital production, and we wouldn't want those means to be in the hands of a few people.
> but it potentially enables AI to run on any device with a low footprint for surveillance purposes as well,
Yes, a low barrier for inference cuts both ways. That is a risk.
> democratising the means of digital production is the difference between a dystopian authoritarian future and an empowered (and admittedly chaotic) humanity
The usage here means make accessible to everyone.
It's literally the dictatorship of the majority over all the other minorities.
We should move towards decentralising power (ideally up to the individual level), not strengthening democracy.
Democracy is just a tool we use to decide what to do with the collective power we have.
And enabling everyone to run LLMs definitely helps everyone to become more independent of governments and large corporations.
As long as surveillance tech requires big resources, governments will have the edge. Miniaturize it, decentralize it, and it means citizens and public interest organizations can hold the government accountable more easily (this is, notably, what OSINT is all about).