[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.

[BriggyDwiggs42]

Just to clarify, are you starting from the point of view that AI simply does all the jobs we currently have? Were this the case, they’d also surely build robots and design AI themselves yeah? Labor as we know it wouldn’t exist anymore, because would simply be impossible to do useful work.

We’re willing to fork over money for things because those things require human effort to obtain, and we’d rather not expend it. In this new world, everything from the extraction of raw materials to the production of advanced technology would require no human effort. If our modern notions of property still persisted, however, then this doesn’t mean that people would simply have whatever they wanted. You need trees to get apples, you need a hole in the ground to get coal. Ultimately the limiting factor on everything would come down to land. Labor-time is replaced with land-time, because the land works itself. Not having land in this society would be like not having limbs or a brain in ours. You would have nothing to exchange in order to get the things you needed.

So I’d say that either the notion of property itself would change, or people without property would die until everyone had some amount of it, and people would generally occupy their time with various games that shuffled around the limited amount of land available as a proxy for social status. The flawed assumption that you make is that people would all have some amount of land in which to make their microfactory, but this would only be the case after lots of people died.

[beeflet]

>AI simply does all the jobs we currently have?

Not really. It would be good at doing generic, well-defined tasks but bad at doing specialized, novel tasks. You would still need some humans in the loop to get to the bottom of niche problems.

I agree that it would still go to hell without some type of Georgism or UBI or socialism. I agree that wealth will transfer to companies that control industrial means of production (like 3M or mining companies or intel or something), but it will also transfer out of companies whose moat is based on control of human capital (like accounting, software development, and law).

I think that even before AI, we are already seeing this sort of "land is everything" economy. Physical labor has largely been automated in the industrial revolution. Intellectual labor has been displaced not by newfangled AI mechanisms, but by information storage mediums and general pre-AI automation. If you are an artist, you are competing with all of the art that came before you. If you are an engineer, you are reinventing the wheel working on some sort of project that, if open sourced, would only need to be done once.

A major sense in which AI eliminates jobs is by acting as a bypass for copyright, it allows you to plausibly make a near-copy of something without a license. There is simply not an infinite amount of demand in the economy for intellectual labor. The thing that destroys the world as we know it is not so much AI, but information sharing and de-duplication of work. Open source would have destroyed the economy if AI didn't.

So everyone is working in the service sector now, it's unsustainable. Property prices keep going up, fertility rate keeps going down.