A.I. Belongs to the Capitalists Now | Hacker News Reader

A.I. Belongs to the Capitalists Now

nytimes.com

54 pointsotoolep28 comments

“Now” as though there was a point it wasn’t?

But also the more open, free LLM community is popping off rn.

>the more open, free LLM community

open source software has always been ultimately of and in service of the capitalists

That's a pretty bold claim. You're saying the open source blog I host on my personal domain is in service to capitalists? That's news to me

The definition of Open Source is owned, operated, and in service to capitalists.

In aggregate, open source software under capitalism will always be of and in service of capitalists. All exceptions are simply that; exceptions with no potential to be anything more without a new political economic system of relations.

I guess when you make the distinction between open source and free software it can be that way.

Free software is definitely an anti-capitalist movement. And, personally, I think although open source is useful to capitalists (it can give you an edge in terms of people's perception but also it can be seen as free labor) generally, open source benefits society as a whole and it would function all the same in any sort of economic system.

So yeah, I mean, I kind of agree? But at what point would we be willing to say "air has always been in service of capitalists" or something.

The same goes for free software too. It may be "anti-capitalist" in sentiment, but it's just foolery as political practice. It's anarchist and cathartic at best. It is understandable that technologists could be inclined to convince themselves otherwise and it's understandable that capitalists profiting from it would parrot such nonsense, but that doesn't make it so. You can't do politics without doing politics.

Free software is emphatically not definitely an anti-capitalist movement; if it was it would say so.

It's a pro-freedom movement; it may incidentally screw up business models in the name of protecting freedom, but doesn't say much about "capitalism" directly.

(Hence my above comment about the problem with the word "capitalism?")

You're exactly right. Pro-freedom does not equal anti-capitalism. Matter of fact, the GNU licenses (among the more popular free software licenses) in no way prohibit making money off your (or someone else's) free software. They just specify certain terms under which the software can be used and / or shared. Beyond that, within the law, you can go ahead and make all the money you want with it, in any way that doesn't break any laws or license terms.

How so? GNU licensed software cannot be built on by large companies without them publishing the source code. You think they want that?

Yes. They also don't want competition. That's why opensource won.

Of course. Large companies already have business plans. They just need software to implement them, and GNU gives them exactly that for free! Who do you think uses that stuff? Your parents?

Ugh, this is why the word "Capitalism" is so increasingly useless.

There is "commerce," a thing that, like it or not, we're probably going to be doing for some time and is overwhelmingly likely inherently neutral.

Then there's something else, which is definitely bad, but needs clearer definitions.

Capitalism is an economic system in which capital is accumulated and reinvested for profit, and that is exactly what I'm talking about.

It's a perfectly good word.

Things that benefit everybody may sometimes disproportionately benefit some entities more than others, but that is the price of having something that's indiscriminately beneficial to everyone. On the other hand, the amount of people who get to benefit from those things is still vastly greater than something that is limited to benefiting just an exclusive group.

If anything, I think the way a lot of open source software winds up playing out just makes the economy a bit more efficient. Everyone does not have to write Apache or Nginx, or pay a lot of money for it. Everyone, from Spotify to some guy named Eric, can run Nginx on a server and do interesting things with it.

I'm all for fixing wealth inequality but blaming open source for it seems like a terrible mistake. Open source software certainly didn't cause the wealth inequality of our society, and it's not even clear it has yet made it much worse.

>Open source software certainly didn't cause the wealth inequality of our society

And it certainly does nothing to change it either, but we all have to pretend otherwise because our jobs depend on us drinking the kool-aid.

Personally, I don't feel a pressure to do that. It's not even really necessary, because while it may not solve all of society's problems, it's still a clear mutually beneficial relationship in the long run.

Open Source improved the world, from health, to 3d printing FFF, to learning, to start a business around it, ... and is continue giving a lot of opportunities in both education, research and business creation. But definitely it will not change inequality, but its contributions in the society are huge. Inequality will always exist, because we are not equal, not same intelligence, not same beauty, not same risk adversity, not same luck, not same environment...

You can make that argument about literally anything.

Anything is in the service of those who take advantage of it.

Another fact you may find surprising: water is wet.

The appointment of Quora CEO, a practitioner of the worst application of ChatGPT, SEO, as the new board member of OpenAI, is a cause for despair.

Yeah, this is so much worse than last week when the Quora CEO was on the board of OpenAI.

The fundamental problem is that neural nets scale too well. A model trained on a billion dollar GPUs is n times better than a model trained on a $1 million GPU, not to speak of consumer hardware. Unless some efficient form of distributed learning appears, open source will not stand a chance, Except for (niche) applications where smaller brains don't matter. Imagine all these crypto computers would've been used to train models!

The article makes a very simplistic analysis, in that because capitalists won in taking over OpenAI, those concerned about a responsible deployment of very powerful technology lost. But in truth, OpenAI was already a capitalist/commercial enterprise and has been for over a year and those concerned had already failed in keeping the beast contained. The cat is out of the bag, and trying to keep ChatGPT in the box wasn't going to do anything in preventing LLMs to continue to proliferate.

Clearly the board should have changed the moment Elon Musk left the company and OpenAI stopped being a non-profit. That's what failed here.

If you are going to accept billions of dollars in funding from Microsoft and you are going to start selling a service, then wake up, it's a capitalist venture.

The time to pull the trigger, was in releasing ChatGPT to the public. Trying to kick out the CEO after Skynet was activated is pretty pointless.

> But in truth, OpenAI was already a capitalist/commercial enterprise and has been for over a year and those concerned had already failed in keeping the beast contained. The cat is out of the bag, and trying to keep ChatGPT in the box wasn't going to do anything in preventing LLMs to continue to proliferate.

Exactly. The author writes as if OpenAI is the only company that does AI, where in fact many companies train AI models, many will do it in the future, and other countries will do it as well. Once LLMs have been invented you can't uninvent them.

Capitalists and ward outpatients.

Much better the capitalists rather than the type of people running the board of OpenAI.

This weekend convinced me that these people have no chance of “aligning” even a mildly intelligent AI, much less a superhuman AI.

Might as well al least get some useful work out of the AI before it takes over.

But useful work on who's behalf and for what 'use'?

Converting all matter in the universe to compute.

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