[ThrowawayTestr]

AI might be the biggest transfer of wealth from the rich to the poor in history. Billions have been poured into closed sourced models which have led directly and indirectly to open weight models being available to everyone.

[BriggyDwiggs42]

Open weight models aren’t worth very much money to most people.

[beeflet]

They do everything the closed weight models do, slightly less effectively, but for way cheaper. I'd buy that for a dollar!

Just because people aren't spending money on them doesn't mean it won't eat your lunch.

[BriggyDwiggs42]

The closed weight models aren’t worth very much money to most people, who find a 20 dollar subscription a bit pricey.

[beeflet]

It's not just the cost, but the freedom to do what you want... With open weight models I can run them on my own hardware on the edge, work with data I am not cool with uploading, experiment with different interfaces, use them for things the original trainers did not intend, even retrain the model a bit.

I am developing a p2p program where the model runs on the end user's computer. So I don't even need to pay money for each user and have a bunch of infrastructure monetize them. It is a game changer and allows for a completely different architecture.

[BriggyDwiggs42]

That’s awesome, but I think we’re kinda talking past each other. I was responding to the claim that these models represent the largest wealth transfer from rich to poor in history. In order for that to be true, these models, closed or open, need to have value for average people. I don’t see that at all. Most use it as a glorified google, some are actively harmed by the sycophantic tendencies of the models.

Edit: I’d like to add that I personally get a lot of value out of the models. They’ve helped me learn to do frontend development very quickly at my job. That said, that hasn’t translated into higher pay. The expectations have risen with employee capacity.

[beeflet]

Well that makes sense. Perhaps it is not a transfer of wealth to the poor, but a transfer of power to the middle class.

I would say this: in the future I think we are gonna have all sorts of robotics that will be able to use LLMs and vision models and stuff to do basic reason and coordination to automate a ton of tasks. The average person is basically going to be able to fit a micro-factory in their house that can knit all of their clothes, make circuit boards for all of the computers they need, stitch their wounds together, and such.

In the future, we won't even need to engage in the economy of mass production, and we will basically all be low effort self-sufficient sustainable farmers and manufacturers due to AI reducing the effectiveness of economies of scale.

No one will have conventional jobs, so we will each recreate the old economy on a tiny scale to avoid the expensive monopolies. A single person's job would be like operating a tiny factory that produces a certain type of insulin or a certain antibiotic, or some sort of resistor or tobacco or something. Like the idea of family farms extended to the industrial domain.

And all of this progress is being taken on for free at massive cost by these AI companies that think it will have the exact opposite effect, which is monetizable.

I think that LLMs can be used as a far more advanced search than google. Imagine you have some project that requires a certain part. You could spend hours browsing the internet for the best deal, or you run a local LLM that scrapes websites and does the shipping calculations and runs a reasoning model to decide if it is a good fit based on the criteria you give it, etc. You essentially have the shopping done for you, it is just a matter of one person designing the framework and open sourcing it.

Most searching isn't so much finding a direct answer to your query, but scoping out a general field of information where you don't even know what it is you want to know. LLMs give us the opportunity to script general reasoning tasks.

Maybe it is bad or neutral for labor in the short term, but in the long run I think it is worse for capital. A lot of the moat that capital has is the ability to organize labor. If anyone with a computer can do the work of 100 men, then when the 100 men get laid off they will all ask themselves "why can't I also just start a competitor where I automate all the tasks in the company?".

Thanks for reading my TED talk.

[breppp]

At the cost of buying the poor's thoughts (training data)

[yannyu]

Pretty similar to social media in a lot of ways. They've strip mined the commons and provided us a corporate controlled walled garden to compensate us for our loss.

[beeflet]

they were always free. The notion of intellectual property is lofty in the first place