The difference is that now only the owner of a machine profits where before lots of individuals profited. More power to the owners, I guess.
We need to find a way to distribute the benefits of such developments.
Until then, some sabotage may be in order.
Seriously though, I used to think this was mostly a done deal that's being occasionally brought up by people fascinated with socialism or something. But the longer I live, the more I realize that the issue has not meaningfully improved at all - we've only been distracted from it. And it's much, much older than Marx and co. too. This, and not some general fear of technology, was the whole point of the Luddite movement (very relevant in context of AI). And you can probably find examples stretching back way before industrial revolution too.
I don't know if OpenAI has actually confirmed what hardware they use or if the press and bloggers did citeogenesis on each other, but the claim is they're using A100 GPUs, and the bigger models have to use several in parallel. I've seen detached houses in Eastern Europe going for the price of two of those cards.
The DGX-2 is (was?) priced more like a detached house in Western Europe; the GH200 they just announced appears to be "if you have to ask, you can't afford it".
This is similar to how, despite that lathes, kilns, and chainsaws can be bought in supermarkets as impulse purchases, industrial versions of each are rather more expensive.
That’s the natural end of capitalism, as has been noted literally since the word “capitalism” waa coined for it (largely, for that reason.)
It is end to which every tool and technology is put under that system, and has nothing to do with the particular technology and everything to do with the system.
No evidence of that.
The rate of return on capital is what dictates the concentration of wealth, or conversely, the dispersal of wealth.
The conceptual systems introduced by Marx and others is that only workers can own capital and are based on a set of assumptions about Capital returns versus labor power.
In the same sense that the US electoral system doesn’t preclude more than two viable parties. The system of property rights that defines capitalism doesn’t specify any limit, but the structure it creates promotes it in function.
> The conceptual systems introduced by Marx and others is that only workers can own capital
No, the conceptual system introduced by Marx rejects the concept of ownership as applied to capital [0], though it favors workers exercising control of the capital to which their labor is applied. Different variants derived from this and related ideas have different specific mechanism for this exercise of control.
[0] When Marxists talk about rejecting/abolishing “private property”, it refers to this, because in the Marxists terminology “private property” refers not to property of non-state individuals and entities in general as it does in current common use, but specifically to property rights in the means of production, i.e., capital.
That said, I don't see you the distinction between controlling the means of production use for one's labor and owning it, when controlling the means of production also includes allocation of the additional value created using them.
It also is also worth noting how far current thoughts on socialism and communism have come from Marxist theories. contemporary sentiment seem to advocate that individuals (working or not) are entitled share of the labor value created by others, even if they are in another workplace.
All this is really an aside from what I thought my greater point was about the underpinning assumptions or conditions that lead to the "expected" systemic outcomes. The US federal electoral system currently favors two parties, but this could change with different conditions. For example, ranked choice voting, and proportion state electoral allocation could impact this without overturning the entire governmental system.
Similarly, the concentration of capital is based on an number of conditional assumptions. For example, if the real rate of return on capital is less than the rate of capital creation, you would not expect the concentration of wealth to increase. under this condition, capital investment could only serve to slow the losses due to inflation.
Conditional control while you are a laborer whose labor is applied to particular capital (which, to be fair, is one of many patterns advocated within Marxist-influenced socialism, not the only operationalization of the concept) is distinct from ownership which persists until the owner chooses to alienate the property.
> It also is also worth noting how far current thoughts on socialism and communism have come from Marxist theories. contemporary sentiment seem to advocate that individuals (working or not) are entitled share of the labor value created by others, even if they are in another workplace.
Yeah, its not like Marx said anything like: “In a higher phase of communist society, after the enslaving subordination of the individual to the division of labor, and therewith also the antithesis between mental and physical labor, has vanished; after labor has become not only a means of life but life's prime want; after the productive forces have also increased with the all-around development of the individual, and all the springs of co-operative wealth flow more abundantly—only then can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be crossed in its entirety and society inscribe on its banners: From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!” [0]
[0] Except, of course, that he did, in Critique of the Gotha Programme, 1875.
It’s called free software and making models at various ‘weight classes’ to support many GPUs. Basically don’t let companies like OpenAI/Google/Microsoft run the show and, ironically, support companies like Facebook who open source their models.
And yes, I know OpenAI has open sourced models in the past, but the fact that they won’t open source ChatGPT, GPT-4, and select other models like DALL-E 1/2 make me wary of them.
Market disruption due to technology/innovation/progress is nothing new. There have always been winners and losers but the aggregate wealth/value continues to climb. Devising ways to mitigate the loses seems like a more feasible approach than pretending that we can prevent these sorts of changes through regulation or legislation.
This is just an accentuation and further acceleration thereof.
So there is precedence for this scenario.
You can rent the hardware from someone else, but that's a matter of convenience, not affordability.
Hello post-industrial/ai/ml capitalism.
This development will do to designers, programmers, support what the industrial revolution did to cobblers and weavers ...
Which made cheap shoes and clothes available to everybody.
If you want to buy a tailor made shirt, it'll cost you at least $500. And that's still with machine made cloth. What do you think it would cost if the cloth was made by hand by a weaver?
I'd argue the efficiency in production led to lower prices - while the concentration in wealth mostly kept buying power/living standards lower for the workers (or; capitalist class reaped an unfair share of productivity gains).
I believe commodisation of "knowledge" work will lead to lower prices (and unfair distribution) too.
Go take a look at Fort Williams, and at the clothes in it they preserved. They look like kids' clothes. The same for Civil War uniforms. Larger than the FW clothes, but still looking like kid clothes.
I flipped through a high school history book a few years ago, and it insisted that the middle class in America didn't emerge until FDR. This is laughably wrong. It was there from the beginning.