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by throwaway290 291 days ago
This is beyond naive.

who would bother to develop it in a lab and publish pro bono if it can never be commercial? Making money is why the most capitalist countries developed this tech. like most other tech

and even if it is only published, do you think we wouldn't run chatbots ourselves at home with same results? remember how Google engineer went off the rails thinking it is conscious while working on this stuff, do you think he also was misled by adverts or something? or big corps won't buy the patent and run with it commercially advertising it like they do anyway? or if you pretend money and big corps don't exist and we deploy it for free for friends, same problem? etc

if you went back in time and killed capitalism in US and switched to command economy where people innovate because they will be sent to gulag otherwise, for sure most of today tech including this would not be developed. but it seems like a pointless exercise.

instead what should happen is all these megacorps are sued for copyright infringement, fined and shut down. the model won't be smart enough to sweet talk ppl into suicide if megacorps can't infringe our copyrights to train it.

4 comments

you're making this comment on the world wide web, which was invented and given away for free - likely against a linux machine, an open and free project
you are making this comment on computer hardware which is a prerequisite for www and which was invented and made because it's profitable
That's a bit of a stretch. Lots of stuff that gets published still has patents associated with it. Just because something is done in the open doesn't mean it can't be commercialized.
Eh, we fund a lot of research through grants. It may not have been 2022, but a society without as strong of a profit motive would have discovered transformer models and LLMs eventually. They probably wouldn't have scaled up datacenter production and tried to shove a chatbox into every digital interface though.

> and even if it is only published, do you think we wouldn't run chatbots ourselves at home with same results

Yes, my point is exactly that I don't think the results would be the same if people were running it themselves at home, without the marketing machine running full bore to convince the world that these impressive toys are machine oracles. You'd end up with a handful of crazies, that's unavoidable, but it wouldn't be a civilizational threat.

You just perfectly described why capitalism is the problem.