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Comment by chatmasta | Hacker News Reader

Much of the fear of AI is really a fear of concentrated increase in power of those controlling it. Decentralizing models mitigates that risk by spreading the power amongst a more diffuse population.

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.

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I believe you've touched on the crux of the matter. Corporations can not only censor, but also train AI models utilizing biased data, granting them significant influence over shaping the AI discourse among the general populace. This warrants serious contemplation and discussion.

Not exactly the point but current smartphones are comparable to 90s supercomputers in terms of FLOPs - an iPhone 14 can hit 2 TFLOPs whereas ASCI Red achieved 2.38 TFLOPs in 1999. Now the comparison is muddied by the fact that supercomputer GFLOPs were fp64 while modern GPUs are optimised for fp32 (with machine learning going for fp16 and now fp8), and the iPhone probably can’t maintain 2 TFLOPs before getting thermally throttled. But otherwise matching the 90s is far more impressive than the 70s.

Would you feel safer if somebody made it easy to make nuclear weapons in your garage?

Google and Microsoft (read: corporations) don't have nukes. But if they could and did, yes, why not Joe Schmoe? A little deterence for those days when your Google account suddenly stops working. Just send a stern letter to Mountain View.

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.

Russia and China suck, but it's still better that only a few countries have nukes instead of millions of people having 1 each :) If everybody had nukes we'd stop living in big cities :)

No, and I frequently encounter this analogy about AI, but it's completely absurd. AI is not a nuke. I don't see the point of even entertaining the idea of it.

This whataboutism isn't a good fit for this particular issue, I think.

Computers can’t think for themselves. It’s more like if everybody had a trained police dog - one of those dogs that will bite and not let go, would you feel safer walking around?

“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.

"Hey OpenChatGPT, find a list of every person who's asked OpenChatGPT to harass me, and block any harassing messages likely originating from them."

It works both ways. Attack and defense.

Spot on. Broadly speaking, if you want peace you have to prepare for war. If you don’t distribute and democratize power, those who typically control it in concentrated form will weaponize and wield it (power tends to corrupt, absolute power corrupts absolutely and all that jazz).

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.

What is this fear mongering? With logic like this we would have banned the internet in the early 90s.

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