Comment by toth | Hacker News Reader

Comment by toth | Hacker News Reader

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I can't understand how you reach your conclusion.

At present, if you have financial capital and need intellectual capital you need to find people willing to work for you and pay them a lot of money. With enough progress in AI you can get the intellectual capital from machines instead, for a lot less. What loses value is human intellectual capital. Financial capital just gained a lot of power, it can now substitute for intellectual capital.

Sure, you could pretend this means you'll be able to launch a startup without any employees, and so will everyone. But why wouldn't Sam Altman or whomever just start AI Ycombinator with hundreds of thousands of AI "founders"? Do you really think it would be more "democratic"?

> But why wouldn't Sam Altman or whomever just start AI Ycombinator with hundreds of thousands of AI "founders"? Do you really think it would be more "democratic"?

AI is useful in the same way with Linux

- can run locally

- empowers everyone

- need to bring your own problem

- need to do some of the work yourself

The moral is you need to bring your problem to benefit. The model by itself does not generate much benefits. This means AI benefits are distributed like open source ones.

Those points are true of current AI models, but how sure are you they will remain true as technology evolves?

Maybe you believe that they will always stay true, that there's some ineffable human quality that will never be captured by AI and value creation will always be bottle-necked by humans. That would be nice.

But even if you still need humans in the loop, it's not clear how "democratizing" this would be. It might sound great if in a few years you and everyone else can run an AI on their laptop that is as a good as a great technical co-founder that never sleeps. But note that means that someone who owns a data-center can run the equivalent of the current entire technical staff of Google, Meta, and OpenAI combined. Doesn't sound like a very level playing field.

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