[KuSpa]

> Here are the principles that guide our work.

> 1. Democratization. We will resist the potential of this technology to consolidate power in the hands of the few.

For example they could publish their models and research... instead of doing the opposite of what they claim being their very first principle.

[alecco]

I prefer distributed power, not a democratic system as it's often abused.

If large models become a +100x productivity multiplier they can charge crazy money for access. So rich/money people will dominate the world in no time. Today many corporations are happy to pay $5k/mo/user. Everyday people and small companies can't afford that. I can't. We need to build an open ecosystem that at least shrinks the gap.

Learn to run your own models. Get yourselves at least a cheap GPU or even share one with friends. Join groups. There's a lot to do from data to fine-tuning.

The other day Anthropic cut off 100 users of a company without warning and stonewalled them: https://old.reddit.com/r/ClaudeAI/comments/1sspwz2/psa_anthr...

[Lalabadie]

Or they could resist harvesting everyone's work for free to turn into their own revenue

[rdevilla]

This is one of many factors that precipitated the Soviet collapse.

Turn on the news and you know the language being spewed has no relation to reality. A society full of liars where people say the exact opposite of the truth. Now that LLMs can produce infinitely many words for free, trust in language is falling to all-time lows.

Eventually people just stop believing in words, the fundamental unit of human communication.

I can't recommend Adam Curtis' Hypernormalisation more than ever.

> What emerged instead was a fake version of the society. The Soviet Union became a society where everyone knew that what their leaders said was not real.

> Everybody had to play along and pretend that it was real, because no one could imagine any alternative. One Soviet writer called it "hypernormalisation."

[babymetal]

Apologies for the naive question (because I haven't read the book). I grew up with the Evil Empire waiting to nuke me until Gorbachev provided a brief respite before the KGB returned. As I recall, they were presented as an enemy with almost but just barely not quite unlimited capacities. I still don't understand what happened in terms of global geopolitics in the last forty years.

Does the book suggest that the Soviet collapse was caused by rather than delayed by their Orwellian perversion of language?

[aspenmayer]

HyperNormalisation (2016) is a documentary film by Adam Curtis; the word/concept is from a book, so maybe that's what you're referring to? I have only seen the film myself.

As to your question about Soviet collapse, I don't think I could coalesce the views of the 166 minute documentary to this comment field while doing it justice. I'm not sure that there is a direct casual relationship or arrow of causality between the collapse and use/misuse of language, as much as there is a feedback loop between the two.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HyperNormalisation

> HyperNormalisation is a 2016 BBC documentary by British filmmaker Adam Curtis. It argues that following the global economic crises of the 1970s, governments, financiers and technological utopians gave up on trying to shape the complex "real world" and instead established a simpler "fake world" for the benefit of multi-national corporations that is kept stable by neoliberal governments.

> The word hypernormalisation was coined by Alexei Yurchak, a professor of anthropology who was born in Leningrad and later went to teach at the University of California, Berkeley. He introduced the word in his book Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation (2006), which describes paradoxes of Soviet life during the 1970s and 1980s. He says everyone in the Soviet Union knew the system was failing, but no one could imagine any alternative to the status quo, and politicians and citizens alike were resigned to maintaining the pretense of a functioning society. Over time, the mass delusion became a self-fulfilling prophecy, with everyone accepting it as the new norm rather than pretend, an effect Yurchak termed hypernormalisation. It has since gained further resonance in the social media era in 2025 in the U.S.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yS_c2qqA-6Y

I think you might also like to check out another Adam Curtis documentary series, Russia 1985–1999: TraumaZone. I'm not an expert, but it seems to me that, ironically (or not), after the fall of the USSR, the government no longer controlled the media directly. Oligarchs appear to have taken over nearly everything under privatization, including the media and the nominally democratic government, so it's hard to say that it was better or worse than before the fall, rather than differently bad. Certainly many lost their lives, and that's lamentable to say the least.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russia_1985%E2%80%931999:_Trau...

https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLSjQL8MYniTTLA3wnZ25U-s6R...

In researching this response, I learned of a new Adam Curtis doc series that came out last year, which I just started watching. The "talking computer" at the crisps factory with a phone based ordering system was interesting to see.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shifty_(TV_series)

> Shifty is, according to the Guardian columnist Lucy Mangan, a "purely UK-focused dissection of recent history, built around the idea that the growing atomisation of society has ushered in an age in which the concept of a shared reality on which we can all depend has dissolved – and with it any hope of a functioning democracy." The overarching theme is that Britain is haunted by its past, constantly replayed through the media, which prevents it from going forward with a vision for the future.

> Shifty depicts the changing landscape of Britain under Margaret Thatcher, including a shift of focus from politics to finance that saw the collapse of industry in the UK.[8] Curtis argues that this shift towards individualism and consumerism has incurred a dismantling of democracy over the last 45 years.

https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLPSo2fAdxXUW-y5xCATilyzBO...

[sebastianconcpt]

Hypernormalisation yes!

Curtis is my favorite documentalist :)

All the others are great too but Hypernormalisation is the most relevant to this.

Watching that one and Yuri Bezmenov's masterclass and long interview are life changing

[oa335]

they are trying to co-opt and dilute the term "democratization".