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Comment by imjonse | Hacker News Reader

"as we get closer to achieving AGI, we believe that trending more towards individual empowerment is important; the other likely path we can see is AI being used by authoritarian governments to control their population through mass surveillance and loss of autonomy."

The AI being controlled by megacorps scenario conveniently left out.

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Even pointing that out is kind of a distraction from the real issue: DOGE is currently an excellent demonstration that the distinction between authoritarian governments and megacorps is a mostly-artificial one, which can and will be blurred to irrelevance if doing so is convenient for the powers that be.

"Fascism should more properly be called corporatism because it is the merger of state and corporate power." — Benito Mussolini

https://blog.skepticallibertarian.com/2013/02/07/fake-quote-...

Yeah, I've seen the two sites that claim that it's a fake quote. The link you posted contains a bunch of doublespeak in an attempt to avoid the fact that fascism leans very heavily into corporatism.

Whether it's fake or not is missing the point. Either way, Italian fascism was corporatist. But "corporatism" doesn't mean what people think it means. It refers to dealing with society in terms of different fields, professions, and industries, with "corporation" referring to groups that represented the common interests of those. It's not used here in the common sense of "legally recognized business" and it doesn't refer to rule by said businesses.

So just say that and don't post a fake quote, jeez. Wikiquote has it under "misattributed":

https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Benito_Mussolini#Misattributed

"You won't win anyone over with fake quotes" -- Joan of Arc

I didn't post a fake quote. I pasted a quote that two sites -- one of which is nearly a direct copy of the other -- claim is fake.

Do you disagree that fascism leans heavily into corporatism? Surely you realize that's the point here, right? If your entire argument is "I don't believe that Mussolini actually wrote that" then we have nothing to discuss.

Sovereignty is the ultimate business, because you get paid just for existing. You become the ultimate rentier, because you own all land by default, and have a monopoly on violence.

The British East India Company outright ruled vast areas of India; it was eventually nationalized, and all territories it controlled were ceded to the crown because it became too powerful in its own right.

Currently, OpenAI is the only real big corporation that controls it, but DeepSeek and the myriad academic researchers working on making the models even more efficient are smaller scale and fairly disruptive.

> even more efficient are smaller scale and fairly disruptive.

your tiny powerful PC "against" data centers running tickytackytock style brainwashing, priming rythms over days, weeks, months, personalized and perfectly timed with all that IoT you pass every day everywhere, just for the sale, the vote, disrupting your cognitive processes, watching you react and act, testing and quantifying your interactions and their (crawling:) psycho-social envelopment of your development... berry undisruptive, if you ask me, all while you think you're so very normal, thank you very much.

not much to hope for except "uuuuh you can makes animes and animations for bluestergram and threats" and ADverse content for le Tube and run automated companies whose supply chains will be just that and maybe maybe maybe train a wAIfu to post on XXX to hopefully find an accelerating ( or exhilarating) and adequately perverted one made of flesh and so on ...

Yep. There's a big difference between personal truth and statiscal truth.

In the short term, an individual can avoid the megacorp manipulations. But society will change and those changes will affect the individual.

At this stage, it's looking entirely possible that large closed models aren't viable as a moat, because, by virtue of making the model available for use, you open yourself up to having your weights distilled. AI, like anything else, will hit diminishing returns, because there's only so far ahead you can look without error bars exploding, and beyond a certain point, writing "better" code is an academic exercise. Under these circumstances, it would be reasonable to expect that the average person could have a decent amount of useful intelligence at their fingertips.

The cynic in me suspects that the result will be zero public access, and a b2b AI service model only from the big players. The optimist in me hopes that the genie has already been unbottled, and open weights (if not necessarily open source) has enough momentum to ensure that people can host this stuff on their own if they so choose. In both cases, training data will be so locked down it'll make breaking into the Pentagon look like an excursion to the sand pit.

Meta, Alphabet, Amazon, and Microsoft have considerable control over state of the art models.

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