simianwords

No, I disagree. This is not what happened in 2008 which was fundamentally different because it was the people that held the bad debts.

If market crashes tomorrow due to commoditised models, it is true that those people who bought these stocks would lose money. But its honestly not a big part of it - if you run the numbers, pensioners will lose 10% of their money.

This is a transfer of wealth from people who have exposure to these stocks vs everyone else. Do you disagree with this transfer of wealth? It comes down to that.

> Kind of funny considering how you started out by accusing others of fallacies and being mindless extremists. Maybe the shoe's on the other foot?

Your utopia is me asking some one approval before I use my LLM for my own work.

I'll let others decide whether this is extreme or not.

> If AI was public, we could have usage restrictions based on societal merit, as an example. Not every AI use is ... useful. All of them are costly to society.

Ok so you want people to vote for public AI usage. Like if I want to use AI for my own research, I need to first vote for it, get it approved for its "social merit".

Is this the kind of utopia you are arguing for?

You've deliberately been vague about your position on the utility of AI.

So I'll assume you think AI is useful for society and a net good if it were not controlled by capitalists. Again I wouldn't have to assume this if you had been straight about it.

If you think AI is useful if it were publicly owned, surely high energy costs and hardware costs are necessary if the public were to use it?

Whats the point of talking about hardware and energy costs when that's something the public needs to bear that cost in one way or another, whether by voting for it or not?

If the bubble bursts and the models become commoditised, the margins on hosting drop to near zero and people can access models at much cheaper costs and there's no central authority (like spooky oligarchy who control power) that you are scared of.

So why is hardware and energy costs even a problem if the public consents to using AI with their own revealed preference?

You believe that AI is not useful and you want the bubble to burst.

I believe it is useful. I don't think its worth arguing at this point with anyone who thinks AI is a net bad to humanity, even when it is controlled by public. Its kinda extremist.

Collapsing all identities into labour and capitalists is a nice Marxist rhetorical move. But it makes no sense at all. People move freely into becoming labourers and capital owners. There are managers who kinda fit in the middle. There are CEO's who have to answer to the Board.

Marx tried but failed in his effort to collapse identities into two buckets.

This comment shows the exact problem with the incoherent ideology prevalent in some bubbles.

You fundamentally believe that AI is useless and that it wastes energy and hardware. Shouldn't you then want the bubble to burst even faster? If not, you are just delaying the bubble.. but to what end? So that you personally won't be affected? This is a morally bankrupt stance to take.

My ideology is at least more coherent in this context. I think AI is useful, and AI being cheaper for the masses is good for them rather than the value being captured by a few companies.

False. They are based on future revenues that companies can capture. If the companies can’t capture the value and there’s no moat, then the public stands to gain from it.

Why is this controversial?

Why do you discount the immense gains due to AI that the public can use cheaply?

There has to be a name for this fallacy.

Do you believe that AI is (or could be) better than humans at everything in every dimension?

If AI share crashes, that’s actually good for the public because all the value is now captured by them instead of companies. This is because a crash can only happen if prices go down (which is good) or Chinese models become as good as frontier (which is also good).

The question is, if this happens then how do you incentivise more R and D? Which investor would invest without the returns?

Edit: not surprisingly people don’t understand the point.

Would you rather NVIDIA and OpenAI get rich and capture the value or the public? Such a strange thing to see people rooting for the big companies.

That’s not the point I made actually. Most writing is redundant. Our moral imperative should only be to document the out of distribution information - stuff that you can’t elicit from model.

If your writing is compressible, you are doing it wrong.

EDIT: I see your point. Same mechanism, different substrate.

I think we have the moral imperative to document all "out of distribution" information somewhere. By this I mean anything that is tribal knowledge or principles that just exist within our heads.

So we both agree that it really comes down to a single question

"Can humans do any single thing better than AI"

If its true then companies will scale out just enough that it requires 40 hours per week of our labour.

> I agree that companies will scale out, but all signs point to them scaling out their token spend rather than hiring

I disagree. My question back to you is, if you were a company, why would you not scale out to have as many humans as possible? You'd do it because if you don't, your competitors have an advantage over you

pretty extremist and naive worldview

I think think its a good thing a lot of people are banning AI contributions. This will clearly differentiate and make space for the free market to pick the best winners.

Omarchy is on the opposite spectrum.

It would be tiring if you want a big essay on why LLMs are useful and whether they are productive. Much of the people are already convinced.

I don't think its useful to keep having to prove LLMs don't hallucinate or LLMs help in coding each time.

Specific mechanism:

1. jobs being automated implies companies can do way more with fewer workers

2. this means they have extra profit that they can push somewhere

3. they will push it again to capital by finding new ventures to scale out

4. for achieving (3) they need labour pool, which is where we come in

Few open questions

- What kind of new ventures? Colonising Mars is an example, but ambition is unlimited

- Will companies choose to scale out or just eat profits? I think they will scale out due to ideology and market dynamics

- Biggest question: can humans still provide value in some dimension where AI can't? I don't know..

If you think AI can't get so good that it is a superset of Human capabilities, there's a good news.

We will expand the job market and create new jobs that weren't possible before.

The only other alternative is getting more conservative with prescribing drugs and its not clear that your alternative will lead to more or fewer deaths overall.

Actually both are outcome oriented and both can use AI to compress decades of progress. One camp accepts this naturally. Other camp is making their profession to be mysterious and spiritual to run away from the implications of AI

This is a strawman. No one’s saying it’s going to be sudden or anything. It’s gonna have clear provenance and the same type of verification channels

I’m not sure who u or Tao is arguing against.

EDIT: people have a hard time choosing between

1. Yeah it’s pure slop and completely useless

2. Oh no OpenAI has stolen my ideas and solved all my problems and we have nothing to do

My dude, if OpenAI’s dump were really that worthless to be as good as noise, why is Tao getting agitated? Just like ignore it or something.

False. Experts don’t understand many drugs and still prescribe it. And it’s a good thing.

sure but i was talking against singling any society out

completely true. No society is innocent of this. One good example is slavery - I myself was surprised that chattel slavery was common everywhere in the world and it was the west that had the mental capacity to stop it.

There's a great post I read on twitter on how marathons and Iron Man have come to be the new status signal. The argument was that people who grew up with privileges find it hard to show something they've personally worked for. Every other "achievement" could be attributed to something other than their hard work.

ex: getting a big seed round from a VC for your start up still may show that your parents had connections.

but marathons have this grindability and somewhat stable feedback loop.

EDIT: https://x.com/aporia9n/status/2085413571568222443

Humanity itself progressed because people specialised and one doesn't need to know about the entire supply chain of their hamburger to eat it.

A good programmer or a good knowledge worker knows how to work with lossy details.

Relevant article: The Median Voter is Maoist.

https://nicholasdecker.substack.com/p/the-median-voter-is-a-...

> When you ask the question about what coding harness they use, like, there are only really two acceptable answers. One is that all coding harnesses are fungible, and they use whatever they can to get tokens the cheapest, or their eyes light up and go, I use my own

Strange take. No, Codex is not the same as Claude Code. And it is normal to prefer one over the other.

And it’s extremely abnormal to make your own harness.

Could it be that the companies have nerfed the models on these domains? It is a very hard thing to do because it can hurt related domains. But its not beyond the ideology of Dario - he tried it publicly .