It still is oppression. What many of us object to now is how starkly it's revealed the 2 tier illegitimate judicial system that on the one hand ruins grandmas and teenagers, but gives multinationals a free pass for charging everyone to get access to the human corpora. Anna's Archive, while equally illegal in a sense, but at least operates itself in a way compatible with uplifting everyone is getting more backlash than these tech companies that are dead set on "renting out access to intelligence". At this point, if you can't see the absurdity of the System as it functions past the "bing bing wahooness" of AI, I don't know what to tell ya.
To me, the problem is when IP laws are stretched and abused by big corporations (like, say Disney) or by patent trolls. If IP laws could work in a way that gave limited and reasonable protections to actual creators and innovators, then I don’t have a problem with them.
They are there for attribution and, depending on the license, preventing people from making money off something that is supposed to be free.
Attribution from an LLMs output is nearly as infeasible as attribution of where I learned the words I'm using to talk to you right now. I mean, AGI is incompatible with that kind of attribution, so saying we have to do it is equivalent to saying "AI not allowed".
It's a valid opinion, but, IMO kind of a wolf-in-sheeps-clothing argument.
I'd say both are equally soulless, dualism is a little bit of a philosophical dead end.
Frankly, I don't particularly care much for the moral panic around capitalism. Capitalism has it's downsides for sure, but it's the system our society has chosen to motivate people, and it seems to work okay for many things. Does it matter if the AI model that solves your diagnosis, creates a life saving drug or solves an Erdös problem is made by a corporation or not? It bothers me none, progress is progress. As long as the authors of Textbooks everywhere wouldn't have otherwise invented LLMs a decade ago if they only had been given a little bit more money, then I'd say the money is going to the right place.
I don't think anyone's disputing advantage and progress AI brings. What's at odds are corporate leeches bringing it on by leeching of everyone's work and giving back nothing for it except for a subscription service. That's where the soulless comes from, not teligious context.
China and EU are somewhat doing the right thing though. Not at the scope yet.
Well, is it true that they give back nothing? What about the compute? Pay checks? The value of the subscription you pay for? What about actual examples of things they have given back for free, like Whisper, which used to be SOTA and is still extremely useful. Occasional excellent research papers, particularly from anthropic?
My point about "moral panic" is that it leads to statements like "giving back nothing"... which are objectively untrue. They might not reward every person that contributed to the tokens they are training on, but doing so is extremely practically difficult, and hard to do fairly, and is also probably a waste of limited resources in terms of net human progress. All these companies are doing is exactly what society has set up as the capitalist methodology to get work done: gather investors, pay people, sell products, etc... As opposed for example to the communist party deciding that the state should fund your project, or to fight for a research grant, or some other methodology, which might or might not work as well.
The only curious part about capitalism is that some individuals get a disproportionate amount of the reward for work done. At a societal level, this is essentially a soft power redistribution system, but often also leads to obnoxious individuals with supercar collections. Whether this is an overall good or bad thing for human progress is really, really hard to say for sure. However, it has a tendency to promote a lizardbrain response evolved to promote resource sharing in tribal societies, which was the best overall strategy in that setting. Or in other words, it makes people jealous.
I mean, I get your point but you're making me more and more disagreeing with it, hah. Not that it matters in the grand scheme of things, but I'll entertain the response.
Let's start with the fact that payroll and subscription tier can't be "giving back". That's just running a business. Whisper was a fig leaf when it was an open-everything era. Where are frontier weights now? Anthropic's papers describe how they did it, not who they did it to. That methods section isn't a royalty check for millions of people whose work is baked into those weights.
"Too hard to compensate fairly" is demonstrably false. If ASCAP figured out fractional royalties with paper ledgers, so can high tech. It's not _hard_, it's expensive which is _the actual reason_, but it's dressed up as logistics.
"Lizardbrain jealousy" bit is reducing critique to tribal envy and that's a move in the debate when your on the positive side of the curve and you'd prefer the conversation to end there. It's stupid, come on.
What I wanted to contrast it with is the non-capitalist version you kind of waived off. Publicly funded research, open initiatives, public private partnerships.. that's literally how we got transistor, the internet, GPS, mRNA, hell even math underneath the transformer. Capitalist layer didn't invent any of that, it wrapped subscription around it. The actual productive parts of the stack came from exactly the model you're mocking. OTOH, credit where it's due for Google's research arm that actually contributed back at the foundational level. An exception to the rule, if anything.
I remember when IP laws were looked at like a form of oppression in the tech community...