The second problem is more obvious, but not talked about in concrete terms yet. As these technologies mature, the legal, policy, and social constructs around them will also mature, and will shape the future of what is coming as much as any technical or business decision. Some examples:
- Imagine if courts really find that these models are in gross copyright violation and that model builders will need to work through a scheme similar to sampling in music in order to do their work into the future. Not only will it dramatically increase the cost of model development, but will drive some of the work to alternative sources of data if it's cheaper. What effect will this have on these models?
- Suppose these models are found to be reliable enough for certain mission critical work (healthcare, defense, etc.) and they lead a user down a path that results in harm or death? Who's at fault? Suppose it becomes a liability of the company offering the model? How does the insurance market respond?
- What if these models become good enough, and the automation around them as well, that we start turning them into fully automated agents that make up a significant part of our economy? Do people still have jobs? Or will these things just become the equivalent of hiring more people into an economy and we work in a blended AI/Human Intelligence world? What happens when these things decide to tank capital markets or choke supply chains?
- What about the long-term use of these models by individuals with severe mental impairments or psychological issues? What happens when those models go down, or produce a response that's not liked, or there's a loss of historical conversational data? What about otherwise normal people who end up down a path of social isolation?
- There's an entire legal market about to be created for remote-work fraud where somebody just replaces themself with one of these models for 90% of their work. It's sci-fi utopia, but fraudulent if you misrepresent who's doing the work in many cases.
- Some company, somewhere, will crack the nut on figuring out how to improve the speed and performance of these models, and build custom hardware that offloads the entire effort onto rapidly commoditizing systems. When multi-modal LLMs and diffusion models come preloaded on disposable $.10 SOCs that are put on cereal boxes and in Birthday cards, we'll be well beyond every one of these questions. But we'll be firmly in a different future.
We have yet to encounter most of these things to the point that as a society we have to build responses, and that itself points to the immaturity of both these technologies and the use cases for which they will be adopted.
Which cloud to pick and why aren't consumers spending thousands of dollars getting the complex systems in place to use this stuff aren't even the problems that are going to become interesting in the next 10 years.