Hacker News Reader

Comment by bigyabai | Hacker News Reader

> my team’s goal is ultimately to make AI much cheaper and lower-latency, and I don’t think that’s good for people right now

I have a lot of bones to pick with Google's morality, but "democratizing the transformer and LLMs" is at the bottom of my list.

View on HN

I don't believe at all in the idea that cheaper LLMs will somehow "democratize LLMs". Rich people will always be able to buy far more compute than poor people, and we know how to turn more compute into more capability (bigger models, more reasoning and more agents).

The only way to address wealth and power inequality is (in democracies) to vote for governments that will fix it.

So far, 100% of things "democratized" by big tech have been bad for people.

Oh, that's true. I just remembered that I hate Gmail, Google Maps, YouTube, Android, Gemma, Google Docs and free CalDAV syncing.

Woe is me, victim of the 21st century separated from my true calling of paying for software.

Edit (rate limited):

> Does Gemma belong to this list?

Yes, and Tensorflow too.

Does Gemma belong to this list? Not that impactful

There's no free lunch. You're paying one way or another.

Welcome to the capitalism 101. Everything has price. So far, I would say, humanity done quite well under this _oppressive_ regime when compared with others.

No, sometimes someone else is paying for it. A classic example would be GPS - paid for by US taxpayers but benefiting the world. Yes now there are, for national security reasons, several other GNSSes but still huge swathes of the world ride free.

> huge swathes of the world ride free

You really can't think of any way the rest of the world is paying for their dependence on US tech, besides monetarily?

I for one would prefer to pay for services, than be psychologically manipulated into paying (more, on average) to other companies who are paying to make those services worse.

Those were all centralised. I don't think handing most of the internet over to a handful of big tech giants is the same as democratisation.

For democratisation, I think of open source, open weight models you can run at home, the Fediverse, running your own stuff. I think those are all positive, at least compared to the centralisation.

Anytime you use absolutes you paint yourself in a corner. Definitely not 100% of things that big tech "democratized", as you put it, has been bad for people.

Presenting it as such does disservice to any serious conversation.

Very little "AI discovered cure for cancer" articles these days, more "10,000 workers let go, to be replaced with chat bots"

Interesting thing to write in a forum provided for free by big tech. Probably using a browser that big tech offers for free. On a phone or laptop purchased from big tech. Connected using networking gear and software made by big tech.

All bad?

How much of what you list has been "democratized"? Apart from the forum, and probably the browser, nothing. And both of those things are of questionable goodness to humanity.

> How much of what you list has been "democratized"? Apart from the forum, and probably the browser, nothing

Depends on what you mean by "democratized". It's surely at least as "democratized" as LLM access is, and that was the base line in this discussion. Probably meaning "everybody can use it for not-insane-money instead of just a small elite". (I don't necessarily agree with that notion, but at least we should use the same standards for things.)

> And both of those things are of questionable goodness to humanity.

If you think HN is bad for humanity, why do you participate? I can immediately list 100 things that are worse for humanity. Same thing with your browser.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com