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Comment by popalchemist | Hacker News Reader

Whether they believe it or not is immaterial. It is the end-goal they want to achieve, because then they own the means of production entirely.

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They own the means of production for the leading models but they're far from monopolizing them since the techniques are well known. At this point it's a matter of having a head start and lots of capital to pay for the data annotation and GPU time to train them. Others are playing catch-up but they're hot on their heals which is the biggest reason for them to continue spending like crazy to keep their leads.

For the non-bleeding edge they have a lot of competition with more competitors showing up every day.

The way this is playing out is not surprising, it's similar to any other technological breakthrough as it becomes commercialized. Eventually those means of production will become commoditized as well.

these are capital intensive commodity businesses. They can be plenty big - see railroads or airplanes... or refining... but that doesn't mean that most value won't be added elsewhere.

I find these nefarious intention theories shallow. It can both be the case that the endstate is them owning the means of production without that being the intended guiding goal. Companies can chase profit without being Leninistic boogeymen.

There is no nefariousness in owning all the means of production, it's the endgame of maximizing profit.

However the result is exactly the same, concentration of power.

This is such a defeatist and low agency take. "means of production" are not a limited resource like gold that you have to extract from natural sources or divvy up. They are fundamentally skill and knowledge that anyone can attain and put to use, maybe not on the same scale as a well funded business but even those businesses had to start somewhere in order to grow to the size they are now. So rather than casting aspersions on them, your time would be better spent learning how you too can create some means of production and start producing value.

AI companies are trying to mechanize skill and knowledge and to own the infrastructure around it. If they succeed, your suggestion does not work. Even if they can't succeed, they will try because that's the most obvious path to maximizing profit for them.

Also about "creating" means of production, these companies actively try to sabotage this as another profit maximization strategy. They buy all the ram, so others cannot compete. They buy startups who succeed, so they stop competing.

It's not aspersions, it's just describing the phenomenon.

Even if I take your suggestion to heart, once my company would be big enough, if I wanted to optimize for profit, I would have to do the same as these companies.

The end result is concentrated power.

You think AI tech doesn't use rare earth metals?

Rare earth metals aren't rare, it's a misnomer.

Depends on how you define rare. Also irrelevant — the only thing important to the argument is that they are "limited resources."

No nefariousness other than the subjugation of the majority of humanity? You're insane

What I meant is that nefariousness from people is not a prerequisite. It's a machine that wants to maximize all profit and all the evil is a natural product. If you magically put saints in charge they would be eaten and replaced by the same kind of people very quickly if the end goal remains.

The "evil" is not just in the effect, it is in the callous, sociopathic disregard for the sanctity of life that lives in Zuckerberg and all the individuals involved; that is the evil "prima materia" out of which downstream actions and outcomes are borne.

Sam Allan has said some things that would make Lenin blush

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