If we're being perfectly candid, this was already happening before LLMs were a mass-market technology: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentient_(intelligence_analysi...

But, as far as I understand, Sentient was state AI built for the state. LLMs were built from everyone's data, given to everyone, and now may be locked away for the few

This policy just keeps the powerful in power.

And it's crazy because I already lost my job due to AI.

Yes, I’m in the US but I somehow doubt my single person LLC is going to qualify for access to these cutting edge models. And frankly, that’s bullshit.

This will only serve to further entrench the big players and the only way to get access to these models will be to already be successful or bribery. That’s a pretty bleak future.

One thing I’ve thought (and said often) throughout my career (and even before “my career” started in High School) was that if I can see something being done at another company (some product feature, cool concept, etc) I will be able to replicate it. Yes large companies have more people but they are just people, if they could do it, so could I (given time/energy).

This is the first time I’ve felt that start to waver. Yes, I was always limited by being 1 person, but I always felt there was a path available to success. I might not have access to supercomputers but I could bootstrap and get by on lower powered hardware as I scaled up.

LLM’s themselves even felt in range if it was something I was interested in pursuing (on a _much_ smaller scale of course).

Essentially, I had the same tools (frameworks, libraries, languages) at my disposal as the big companies. Now that’s changing and I really don’t like that the scale is going be tilted even further into the entrenched company’s favor.

Regulatory capture now ensures that billionaires and trillion-dollar corporations can put you out of business and sell whatever remains for parts.

If they don't decide to squash you, you're just lucky.

I would not be worried about it at all. These models are expensive to train and after shrinking the market for these models to just few entities, it will take centuries to just break even.

That ‘if’ is Atlas carrying the entire world on its shoulders.

It should be clear by now that at global scales and with competing interests, the entire premise is impossible.

Or what, do people think that the boomers were all that good, that they genuinely earned everything they got? The generations before just worked out how to govern properly.

Ignoring wealth differences is another instance of dreaming of a magical world where greed has disappeared.

A good read is Mark Fisher’s book Capitalist Realism

Because, for example, no parents should lose their kids to leukemia.

At 17 y/o I was save from peritonitis / sepsis first misdiagnosed as harmless belly pain and hidden by painkillers. Then it became a matter of hours and from the moment the doctor saw me again and I undergo surgical operation, less than two hours happened.

My father got diagnosed a stage 3 bladder cancer with metastasis to the prostate about 3 years ago. He's still there and doing better.

That's why we need innovation.

And, no, science ain't a bag out of which you pick what suits you (medicine) and leave out what you don't like (the Internet / LLMs / etc.).

Uhhhh. Sure it is. We stopped nuclear weapons development. At best, rogue countries can catch up to where we are but there's no political will to build even bigger or more powerful bombs anymore. Thats an entire branch of science that we've literally cut off on a worldwide basis.

Science is, and must, be controlled to stay within the realm of useful to the people. The minute it is no longer serving us is the minute we should work on getting rid of it. Fortunately, science isn't a cohesive bathtub where everything must be thrown away with the baby. We can (and do) pick-and-choose what to develop.

The USSR wanted to make sure they were the ones who built the largest bomb of all time (the Tsar Bomba at 50 MTon). And after that, development on more ferocious weapons has stopped.

And technology is a great catalyst for that.

In absolute terms however most poors in, say, the EU today live better than any king ever lived up until, say, the early 20th century (quality of clothes / bed, medicine, communication, knowledge, etc.).

I'd rather be working 8/5 at a gas station today (and then enjoy gaming or watching TV at home) then be an emperor with an infested tooth in the 17th century or a king with syphilis in the late 19th century.

Also I wonder how you suggestion of AI owned by everybody, as opposition to AI enslavedd by the few checks out under further scrutiny from the standpoint of logic in general and the aforementioned context specifically

In fact, money is printing every day more and more. So technically there is more of them every day. Which decrease their value and then we have inflation.

What does cause inflation, however, is when more dollars are printed versus things being made. You can't precisely measure the latter, so you have to make do with price indices and such. Which makes inflation hard to actually gauge, especially when everyone expects more and more to be produced every year (i.e. they expect their savings and investments to appreciate/gain interest) so you have to print more dollars to at least keep up the facade.

This is false and a dangerous rabbit hole of an ideology to get into.

Money is just a medium or technique to enable this whole economic process. It’s not important here.

Manufacturing ordnance just to blow up caves in Afghanistan that the USSR already just spent 20 years blowing up doesn't yield fruit - the materials and labor on both sides quite literally goes up in smoke.

Simply, it is absolutely the case that wealth sometimes gets destroyed rather than merely transferred. Sure, the fiat dollars might "just circulate" but that's an uninteresting, trivial tautology. When people talk about "losing money" in the general case, the meaning of those terms transcend the pedantic, trivial case that you espouse.

When the whole world gets feverish over an investment fad that's doomed to fail, "spending money on it" really means "allocating vast resources in the hope that we all get a return on that investment". If we don't get any return, all that investment truly is lost - destroyed, even. There have been cases where we (the humans of Planet Earth) had wealth that we could have done anything with, we chose to put it towards something that didn't work out, and now it's just gone.

(To be clear: I don’t think AI specifically is valueless)

Humanity enslaving AI. As well as the rest of humanity.

There is precedent that this kind of thing tends to be rejected when it boils over, but it's usually not pretty.

Which is why tech CEOs are often preppers. They could, you know, just not do this, but shareholders won't allow it, because nobody wants to lose their net worth to do the right thing. It's easier to blame others and build bomb shelters.

- two companies that have not proved themselves capable of producing any amount of money unless a larger amount is given to them...

- will combine with a government that is so domain-generally incompetent it is losing allies left, right and centre, has recently been humbled into giving a previously-controllable foe an unprecedented level of economic global power and cannot even organise itself a competent birthday party in one of the most important places on earth...

- and this combined entity will then operate a power system like no other, with the combined energies of a sociopathic Jobs wannabe, a man who only speaks in Tolkien analogies and a more-or-less-universally-loathed old man with undisclosed serious health problems, an obsession with gold paint and a vocabulary of maybe a hundred words

… then, OK, I guess.

But the economics don't really support it. The money to build and operate this power machine still has to come from somewhere, that money is drying up, and if AGI arrives, employment and consumer demand collapse and the money stops flowing.

There is a looming catastrophe but it is a sort of long economic winter in the tech industry, combined with a national economy that discovers that when that industry's money-go-round stops making line go up, it resembles its own late 1920s.

Small agencies won't have access to the best LLMs so their services will automatically require more time and manual labour, which makes them more expensive.

Really, I knew that AI had some risks, I just couldn't foresee this one.

> to make intelligence available for everyone

say that again but slowly..

"[CCP General Secretary] finally commits fully to the big AI push he had previously tried to avoid. He sets in motion the nationalization of Chinese AI research"

Seem they only got the country wrong.

"Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them."

China gets sanctions and stale chips - fine, they just DIY the algorithms through CPU instead of GPU and open source it.

American warships have the latest, coolest, highest-tech tactical weaponry imaginable - which is great until you have to fend off 10,000 consumer/wal-mart/IED grade drones at $2mm/clip.

Money is amazing, but if you lean on it too heavily in lieu of _practical_ innovation, it'll bite you in the ass. The apocryphal story of the Soviet Rocket scientist who suggested using a pencil instead of investing 100k in a space pen that worked in 0g's.

Their tagline was: "The computer for the rest of us."

Computers normal people could actually use.

The same vibe feels true for AI agents right now.

Yes, people use ChatGPT and Claude. (mainly as an advanced use of Google search though).

But of the billions of people on earth, only a tiny tiny fraction of people are actually using agents.

The reason is that they still think using AI to do useful + advanced work is for devs or technical early adopters.

It feels like this gap is where the Mac was in 1984.

All of the tech was there. All of the capabilities were real.

The same is true for all of the tech around us right now.

We just need an "Agents for the rest of us" moment.

That is exactly what we're building at https://twent.xyz , because majority of the billions of people on earth, are ANDROID USERS.

If you can build a good harness around a weaker LLM and get good at prompting, you will still be able to out perform people using CC. CC has context bloat and even more checks to make sure it’s not being distilled, doing anything shady, or building a competing LLM. Those things add context bloat.

Hope is not lost, we just need to open a new front.