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What do you think the impact of "tokens to be so cheap they’re like electricity or water" will be? I think people who are intelligent and don't have their heads stuck in the sand see the implications of that. Why should people with money pay people to for intelligence, when they can buy machine intelligence very cheaply?
I guess it will free up smart people to finally take jobs that don't use their intelligence, or sit around scraping by on minimum-wage-like UBI (if we're so lucky).
If every cognitive task currently done by humans could be done for ~free, our global material abundance would be truly unprecedented, nigh unlimited.
I have many worries about a world where people aren't needed, but "scraping by" does not describe that world in any sense.
Serious question, how? Don't the people who own the models and the companies who want to want to use the models to do all the cognitive tasks want to make money? Are they going to give their products and services away for free? There always seems to be this kind of Underpants Gnomes logic about this where 1. We can do things cheaply 2. ??? 3. Material abundance! where step 2 is actually "very rich people give things away for free!". Which requires people like Altman/Thiel/Zuck whoever to have care for other humans and empathy and actual feelings other than a blind Will to Power. If all the cognitive tasks currently done by humans are ~free it seems like the far, far, far, far more likely outcome given who is actually creating and benefiting this nightmare is that all of us do tasks that don't require cognitive ability and subsist on whatever scraps we're given.
One of the common tasks LLMs are being trained to do is write software, which includes writing software for developing LLMs. That's reducing the cost to build alternative models and to run the ones that have already been trained and released. Many of these models aren't from America at all, so American billionaires don't get to decide how they're used. The competition is fiercer, and the potential for American monopolies or oligopolies is lower, than with technological waves of the recent past (e.g. mobile phone operating systems, search engines, social networking sites).
No, they're not going to give their products and services away for free, but I don't think they're going to make fat profit margins. The very tools they're building are helping competitive alternatives to spring up quickly. That's little comfort if you worry about job losses, but the technology is not under the thumb of Altman/Thiel/Zuck (or any other small number of people).
> There always seems to be this kind of Underpants Gnomes logic about this where 1. We can do things cheaply 2. ??? 3. Material abundance! where step 2 is actually "very rich people give things away for free!". Which requires people like Altman/Thiel/Zuck whoever to have care for other humans and empathy and actual feelings other than a blind Will to Power.
Exactly. The thing keeping us from "global material abundance" isn't really technology, it's ideology. The (by far) dominant global ideology is capitalism, and that simply does not permit "global material abundance" in conditions of extreme automation.
And it's fucking crazy to think the "step 2" is these business-kings will all the suddenly have a change of heart and share their wealth widely and freely, after their entire lives have probably taught them not to do anything of the sort. You can see it with UBI: it's not generosity, its some kind of minimum viable bribe to diffuse the threat of revolt against their wealth.
IMHO, the real "step 2" is some kind of communism. And I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader how likely that is going to happen in our lifetimes [1].
[1] As an aside, I actually see a path to some kind of twisted to communism from highly-automated capitalism over the long term, just not for me or anyone like me. It'll be for the nepo-babies of billionaires, after all the working people have died off or been pushed to the margins. The survivors would be so wealthy that maybe money ceases to have meaning and nepo-baby would own enough "means of production" to support themselves comfortably.
Two things are true at once: (1) wealth distribution has become less equal and (2) the poor of today are far, far, far richer than ever before in history in absolute terms. When the abundance line goes vertical, even the scraps from the table are meaty.
And if cognitive labor becomes ~free don't expect physical labor to automatically be valuable. The bottleneck for physical automation is, at the end of the day, cognitive.
None of this is an argument FOR inequality btw. Just saying that distribution of resources and total resources are two different things.
Many people, including myself, would feel very differently if models were open(and not just open weights), compute/resources were cheap enough to enable local access and ownership.
Unfortunately, despite what they may say in press releases, a lot of people in the space are banking on holding a stranglehold over the market and building a regulatory and resource moat to protect their investment.
Of course there is the argument that they deserve some return on the investment in training but lets not forget that it is our work, the work of the commons, that enabled it in the first place. People are frustrated that a small group of people endeavour to control the use of a tool that was created using the work, thoughts and content of us all, often using questionably legal means.
And it doesn't need to be passive, I use it to help me work better and it finds tools, helps me use them, pushes back when I make strategic mistakes I would only have noticed a couple of years from now when they bit.
Applied conscientiously AI has been a tremendous force multiplier and teacher for years now.
I am a soldier and language is vital in every day of my job. Tone, word choice, cadence ... all of it conveys meaning in a way that an LLM simply cannot. Soldiers will not follow an AI up a hill, nor will they follow those they know use AI to pretend they understand a subject.
Want to sound smart? Watch blackadder. Want to win no-win aguements through wit? Watch Archer. Want to inspire your troops to do somthing unpleasant? read and watch shakespeare. An LLM can teach you nothing that really counts.
> An LLM can teach you nothing that really counts.
Nothing you wrote supports that argument.
None of us can read everything. None of us can even read every novel published in a single month. So we filter. One way an LLM can teach you is as an excellent way of filtering information and give you a chance to read what really counts.