There is something immoral about a company saying "we are going to spend $100bn this year on building a LLM"
The icing on the cake is when all their competitors say "so will we".
The icing on the cake is when all their competitors say "so will we".
How have we gotten to a point in just a decade where multiple companies are dropping annual numbers that are in the realm of "the market cap of the worlds biggest companies" on these things?
Have we solved all (any of) the other problems out there already?
It didnt come from nowhwere, or from Silicon Valleys exceptionalism - It came from changing the value of money, labour and resources. It came from everyday people, deficits and borrowing from the next 10 generations of children.
You can swap "LLMs" with "pointless wars over books or dirt" if you want - same same, nothing is new.
The same exact premise was proclaimed about the Internet circa 1999-2003 (boom and bust). Then the entire global economy and nearly all electronic communication was rebuilt on top of the Internet.
For the coming century AI is more important than the Internet.
The parent mentioned inequality and energy transition. But LLMs seem to be about crud apps and influence campaigns.
There's more to value than just quantity. Quantity of what?
It's kind of worse than that: this is actually exacerbating the climate crisis as mega tech corps like Microsoft, Google and Meta are scrambling to secure more energy to power their power-hungry LLMs.
The public discourse is weirdly unable to adress burning problems that had been formulated almost 150 years ago. Much like the climate change topic originating in the 1970s.
Money printing does not cause inflation equally especially if not distrubuted so.
Jan 2010: 174b
Jan 2020: 1400b (23% growth per year)
Today: 3200b (18% growth per year)
The S&P as a whole grew about 12% a year from 2010 to 2020, and 12.5% a year from 2020 to today
Meanwhile the median wage from 2010-2019 grew 3% a year, from 2019-2023 7% a year
Seems whatever happened in 2020 was good for workers, in that they aren't falling behind owners as much as they were.
However we could also argue that most things in human society are less moral than moral (e.g. cars, supermarkets, etc).
But we can also argue that dropping some hundreds of millions in VC capital is less immoral than other activities, such as holding that money in liquid assets.
* Glares at Apple cosplaying Smaug *
Copyright is bad like inheritance is bad. Arguing about good and bad industrialists is missing the point.
How is inheritance bad? Imo, estate taxes are more immoral. Why should the state be allowed a cut of my private assets? Gift taxes are also immoral. Why should I have to pay taxes for giving away assets?
A world without private property leads to a world of pure lawlessness. Sure... We could do that, but it would quickly devolve into forever warfare where only might wins, and even that for only fleetingly small timeslices.
History's progression has proven that exploited workers still prefer to exist in that system vs one of continual peril.
Let's consider the most basic form of ownership: that over one's body. By your logic, my life is a spec on the eternal timeline, so why make it a crime to harm or murder my physically?
The obvious issue is that if you don't tax gifts it becomes far too easy for people to dodge taxes (or at least much more convoluted to enforce payment).
Inheritance is much more complicated and controversial. There's an argument to be made that it results in social ills if left unchecked, an argument that estate taxes fail rather spectacularly to address those ills, and an argument that the ills tend to be self righting given how easy it is to lose money. And probably several others.
To prevent family dynasties from building more and more economic power over time and threatening the state in the future due to the forces of compound interest. To be fair, most family dynasties don't do this, but others can wreck exceptional havoc just by wanting to, due to the generational power they've amassed. The damage they can do is further accelarated by them lacking understanding of how people without generational wealth live.
We already see this happening in our society as most media organisations are run by billionaires or multi-millionaires. News organisations are run less and less by journalists or normal people and the headlines are set more and more by people with very keen and niche vested interests.
This specific issue is being played out in real-time in the Murdoch succession as he attempts to leave the propaganda firm in the hands of his most idelogically similar successor. Yet the majority of his children see the world differently from their father and are challenging this. On one side we have natural break up and change occuring due to generational shifts, and on the other the strong desire of the ancestor wanting their legacy to remain unspoilt after their death.
I don't think its as simple as calling them immoral. Rather the immorality comes on them being poorly regulated. With regulated term limits on patents and copyright we create a world where an artist can create licensed product and protect themselves during the course of their career, and people are them able to riff on their works after some decades or after they pass on.
I think if behavior needs to be regulated by government in order to be moral, then it's immoral behavior by default
The regulation doesn't make it moral, the regulation only limits the damage by limiting how immoral you're allowed to be
I have a hard time arguing that it's a net positive.
Without copyright it was hard to assemble high quality educational books/manuals, because they take a lot of effort with relatively little reward/return. In fact the first 'modern' copyright act in 1701ish was titled something about improving education.
Without copyright it is not worth it for authors to spend nights/weekends flushing out plot ideas for complete sharable works, so you end up with less/lower quality literature as no one can be a professional author. Which has better quality on average, published books or self published? Self published tend to be the 'passion projects' you would still have without copyright, published books tend to be what get's created when authors are compensated for their efforts. Society can't lose from copyright because without it the works would never have existed. If I say 'I'll bake a cake if you will buy a piece' and I bake a cake and sell a piece, society didn't 'lose'. If I don't bake a cake because no one would buy a piece than society was a little sadder, a little plainer that day. There is only upside, there is no downside. Anyone that would release if copyright didn't exist is still free to waive their copyright protection. So having it is the best of both worlds, those that want to release just to release can, and those that want to try and create something that can be sold can.
Without copyright there are no big budget movies, only passion projects because no one is injecting millions when the work will just be copied no sold/screened/rented.
Without copyright the world has less joy, less discussion, less contemplation, less entertainment, less education. Without patents the world has less productivity, less safety, worse health, less food, worse/much less clothing/housing, less free time. The systems in their current forms have been abused and are unfit for the original purpose but when kept to the original purpose with reasonable protection periods they are a HUGE net plus for society.
Patents and copyrights don't cause people to create things
They prevent people from stealing things that other people created
The immoral behaviour being regulated is the IP theft not the IP creation
Regulation is creating rules for businesses to run within. This goes back to rule of law. You can't tell a group of children to "behave" and walk away and expect good results and then call the children "bad" when they fail to behave.
Rather, you must give them systems to understand, to channel their energy, productively, in a way that matches the desires of the parent (government) and their strategies. Then you have to meaningfully punish those who intentionally break the rules in order to give those behaving the knowledge that they have chosen the good path and they'll be rewarded for it.
Free markets are not about "morality"/"immortality", its about harnessing an existing energy to make a self-sustaining system. A system a state is less good/interested at keeping going or unable to act quickly enough to move in. But part of creating that system is putting in guard rails to prevent the worst sort of crashes.
In the new world that's incentive for enough people to create. Let knowledge rein free.. bellowing through the lands.
It really depends a lot on how those liquid assets are deployed.
I agree that Apple should have probably done something with their cash hoard like maybe buying or bolstering Intel so that they could have a domestic supply of chips, but apparently Apple has decided that there's just not much else to do with that money right now that would give them a better return? We might not agree with that assessment, but it's hard to call it immoral.
For some things it’s even a worldwide consensus, e.g. any groups with a desire to acquire large amounts of plutonium (who don’t belong to a preapproved list).
There’s even a strong consistent push to make it ever more inescapable, comprehensive, resistant to any possible deviation, etc…
Just writing your opinion down doesn’t seem relevant to real life government organization.
I don’t see how there could be “school teachers” above the majority of congressman or regulatory decision makers. The very existence of pork filled bills thousands of pages long and byzantine regulations suggest that couldn’t possibly be true.
e.g. Plenty of countries have huge bills that no one fully reads and huge numbers of regulations.
People are also sick and tired of rules in the AppStore. Or the fact that when their Apple/Google/whatever account is unilaterally blocked they have no recourse. At least with a government there are some checks and balances.
Yes, some governments are more trustworthy than others. Doesn't mean the concept is bad.
Repeating your opinion isn’t going to lead to any productive discussion.
Of course that is a very simplified description. In practice, most societies promote a balance between positive and negative freedom, recognize some limits on the government's ability to use force, recognize some degree to which people can choose to act in ways that don't promote positive freedom/prosperity, etc.
It will take the power away from the workers, such that there will be no power left for people to make demands.
We can hope it’ll be positive, but we aren’t even involved in its creation and the incentives are there to ensure it isn’t.
When expertise is commoditized, it becomes cheap; that reduces payroll and operational costs - which reduces the value of VC investment and thus the power of pre-existing wealth.
If AI means I can compete with fewer resources, then that's an equalizing dynamic isn't it?
but they'll start happening because of the new incentive.
Yes - and those without are compelled to trade their labor for assets.
My point is that the assets themselves mean less when the average person can use AI to design anything - that makes the costs of production go down.
In a world where production is cheap, the money required to produce has relative less value.
I’m not sure which assets you think that devalues; it certainly increases the value of the assets needed to run AI, and also of the assets needed to realize the things that people can design with AI.
> In a world where production is cheap, the money required to produce has relative less value.
In a world where your labor isn't required for production, the assets that are required for production have a much greater value relative to your labor than they do in one in which your labor is required to produce something.
“Cheap” is only a thing relative to some other thing.
Currently VC has a great deal of power because up-front investment is required to hire staff and other expenses until the startup can become cash-flow positive. When a lone individual can start a venture using AI then the payroll costs go down. The investment requirements go down.
Yes, automation means that people with assets don't have to pay other people for their labor.
But it also means that people starting new ventures have less need of significant up-front capital.
However the technology that is expected to reduce labor requirements (and thus expenses) has an uncertain endpoint. It seems plausible that at some point a threshold could be crossed beyond which the human labor that you are able to add on top becomes essentially irrelevant. It is this second occurrence, or rather how society might react to it, that should be cause for at least some concern.
“Immoral”, “should not exist”, “late-stage capitalism” are tribal affiliation chants intended to mark one’s identity.
E.g. I go to the Emirates and sing “We’re Arrrrrsenal! We’re by far the greatest time the world has ever seen”. And the point is to signal that I’m an Arsenal fan, a gooner. If someone were to ask “why are you the greatest team?” I wouldn’t be able to answer except with another chant (just like these users) because I’m just chanting for my team. The words aren’t really meaningful on their own.
If "their" political views have the same value as ones affiliation to a sports team, but your political views are well researched and valid, could you be overlooking something? Edit0: and more importantly, what are they to you? Do they not have the same mental faculties as you? How they able to live and thrive while in total abhorrence to natural law? Or are they all naive children who don't know better?
And yes, in any group you'll find loud idiots. Those are in your group too - you just ignore them and focus on the other group's idiots, while disregarding the valid views that are behind.
Especially in the age of algorithmic social media, it's hard to parse what's actually being said.
Glancing over the last few decades of tax returns it looks like they are claiming a lot of tax credits for R&D, so much so that if someone had a closer look they might find some Fraud, Waste or Abuse.
If the company does get a return, then the R&D wasn't wasteful.
And regardless, the tax code doesn't and shouldn't (IMO) differentiate there, to encourage companies to take risks.