this post was submitted on 20 Nov 2023
96 points (99.0% liked)
Technology
37727 readers
687 users here now
A nice place to discuss rumors, happenings, innovations, and challenges in the technology sphere. We also welcome discussions on the intersections of technology and society. If it’s technological news or discussion of technology, it probably belongs here.
Remember the overriding ethos on Beehaw: Be(e) Nice. Each user you encounter here is a person, and should be treated with kindness (even if they’re wrong, or use a Linux distro you don’t like). Personal attacks will not be tolerated.
Subcommunities on Beehaw:
This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
To help you out with the monopolistic/capitalist concern: https://simonwillison.net/2023/May/4/no-moat/
tl;dr: OpenAI's edge with ChatGPT is essentially minor (according to the people from within), and the approach of building ever larger and inflexible models is challenged by (technologically more accessible and available) smaller and more agile models
Funny you bring this one up :)
https://marshallbrain.com/manna1
To a large extent, we have been there for a long time:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU
This, and the theory of bullshit jobs:
https://strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs/
were formative reads to me.
The end-game is pretty clear: we have reached the limits to the model on which our current society is built (working jobs to earn money to spend money to live). We now have excess supply of the essential goods to sustain lives and scarcity of jobs at the same time. We will have soon to either accept that working isn't a mean to an end (accept universal basic income and state interventionism), or enter a neofedalism era where resources are so consolidated that the illusion of scarcity can be maintain and justify the current system (which essentially the bullshit-jobs is all about).
It's perhaps the most important societal reform our species will know, and nobody's preparing for it :)
This is already the case today:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filter_bubble
And this is already weaponized (e.g. TikTok's algorithm trying to steer the youth towards education and science in China and towards … something completely different in the rest of the world).
@u_tamtam
It doesn't really matter if Microsoft/OpenAI are the only ones with the underlying technology as long as the only economically feasible way to deploy the tech at scale is to rely on one of the big 3 cloud providers (Amazon, Google, Microsoft). The profits still accrue to them, whether we use a larger/inflexible or smaller/flexible model to power the AI - the most effective/common/economical way for businesses to leverage it will be as an AWS service or something similar.
Are you saying you're cool with neofeudalism? Or just agreeing that this is yet another inevitable (albeit lamentable) step towards it?
Yup, but as the "no moat" link I posted implied, at least for LLMs, it might not be required to spend very much in hardware to be almost as good as ChatGPT, so that's some good news.
Oh, crap, no, sorry if I wasn't clear. I believe we are at the crossroads with not much in the middle between our society evolving into extensive interventionism, taxation and wealth redistribution (to support UBI and other schemes for the increasingly large unemployable population) or neufeudalism. I don't want billionaires and warlords to run the place, obviously. And I'm warry about how the redistribution would go with our current politicians and the dominant mindset associating individual merit to wealth and individualistic entrepreneurship.