[xmstan]

Funny how no-one talks about AI neutrality like we used to discuss net neutrality. We literally now enter a space where not only you will have to prove your identity with a gov issued ID, but they will silently block you if they deem you try to use it in a way that they don't like.

It is literally similar to a situation where your ISP would investigate all sites you visit and limit your bandwidth if they don't like the the ones you enter...

[stingraycharles]

> Funny how no-one talks about AI neutrality like we used to discuss net neutrality

From my perspective, these LLM providers aren’t infrastructure providers but more like SaaS. And there are also open models that you can use to do anything you want.

These AI companies are also under a lot of scrutiny and sometimes it feels like whatever they do in this regard, they’re bound to piss someone off.

Last but not least, it seems like this is directly related to Anthropic’s latest models being blocked for export control by the US.

[fjsoxjdnwk]

The irony is the current administration’s posturing against Chinese AI companies forcing something like this is going to actually bolster competitive advantage overseas.

That and European companies as well. The landscape is going to change drastically in 5 years once all the data centers are built all over the world.

The science behind these models are being worked on IN PUBLIC. The research is not secret. The implementations will all catch up.

[HarHarVeryFunny]

> The science behind these models are being worked on IN PUBLIC. The research is not secret. The implementations will all catch up.

Only to a limited extent - the US companies stopped sharing research a long time ago, other than Anthropic's interpretability research (which also seems to have dried up?). Interestingly most of the sharing is now coming from the Chinese side, largely DeepSeek. Ziphu/Z.ai (GLM) is also partner in the Slime RL training framework.

I wouldn't call much, if any, of this "science" - it's all empiricalism. Throw spaghetti at the wall and see what sticks. There's a famous quote from Noam Shazeer:

"We offer no explanation as to why these architectures seem to work; we attribute their success, as all else, to divine benevolence"

https://arxiv.org/abs/2002.05202v1

Jakob Uszkoreit has also talked about the empiricalism that it took to make what would become the Transformer, and any complex neural network architecture work.

[slim]

you can't just selectively sell only to people you like. it's prohibited in most countries

[cyanydeez]

In America, what you _can do_ is price "discovery" and create artificial price "discrimination". Just like Walgreens can lock up hair gels or condoms. Just like Gillette can create a pink tax: https://www.the-independent.com/life-style/gillette-ad-comme...

The idea that this prohibition is real when we're talking about the literal start of price discrimination that'll certainly proceed to dividing social classes into the $$$$ Fable and the $ OpenAI access to information.

Back in slavery, was just listening to this, keeping slaves illiterate wasn't just a by product of slave owners, it was a direct action to ensure to minimize resistence.

And now we're on the same lubricated slide, where white color workers will "demand" access to the "powerful" models and they'll leverage up the corpospeak to divide and conquer.

Just don't believe "you can't just selectively sell". You can, and laws will selectively enforce.

[inigyou]

Net neutrality wasn't about ID checks.

[bitmasher9]

Net neutrality was about processing network traffic differently based on who was sending the packets.

It’s not entirely dissimilar.

[hdndjsbbs]

Net neutrality is about a natural monopoly - there can only be so many cell towers, satellites and fibre optic cables. This limits the number of ISPs. By contrast there is no natural limit to how many AI companies there can be.

I would prefer if we just nationalized this stuff but if we have to let private companies control limited resources we can at least enforce anti-trust rules. That's effectively what net-neutrality is - preventing the monopolists from colluding with sites to provide uneven access.

[gentooflux]

The number of AI companies there can be is absolutely hard-limited by infrastructure. The ones which exist currently are racing like hell to horizontally integrate everything from network to power and water for themselves

[everforward]

> Net neutrality is about a natural monopoly - there can only be so many cell towers, satellites and fibre optic cables.

This is a misinterpretation, we could support an absolute ton more physical infrastructure than we have in the wired space (cell towers and probably satellites are limited by spectrum, but still not the physical footprint of the devices).

Fiber cables are tiny relative to their bandwidth. Ignoring cost, if we made water mains sized fiber runs under the sidewalks we could probably get hundreds of 10Gbps fiber runs to every house. And I think there’s still a ton of space to fill with cabling if we wanted to for whatever reason.

The two most significant factors at the physical level are

1: it’s a natural monopoly not because of space, but because building that infrastructure is so expensive it’s unlikely any competitors could emerge. Think about where you are and where the closest peering point is. That run alone is probably millions of dollars and a decade of lawsuits to get easements on the intervening properties to even be able to run it.

2: it’s incredibly wasteful to run parallel lines when each house will only realistically have one set of them active at a time. Few people pay for more than one ISP, it’s basically setting resources on fire.

AI companies are frankly far more limited. GPUs are scarce, I wouldn’t be surprised if we’re already building faster than GPUs get produced. Power is scarce, so far there’s been a lot of hand waving about how we’re going to double our power production. Land is fairly scarce when you scope it down to “land that has enough power access, and usable roads for trucking in materials, and access to water for cooling, and is far enough away that the noise won’t make people riot”.

[halJordan]

In a roundabout way it's better. In that w/net neutrality isp's & big business got out from under it by promising bare minimums.

Without that "head 'em off at the pass" collusion we'll actually stand a chance for things to get so bad legislators have to act.

[epolanski]

This is gonna bite the US long term very bad.

With the frontier models ban, the rest of the world will just have more reasons to further detach technologically from the US, there's no way big tech, etc, can sustain such capex and valuations on US market alone.

[slim]

what if they think your face is too brown to use sota ? (they do, and they will?

[cyanydeez]

Isn't that because America has gone full fascist and a lot of white collar people fear the 'permanent underclass' and would rather buy lube than 'resist'

[thinkingtoilet]

Net neutrality is about the public infrastructure. This is a private company. I'm not happy with what Anthropic is doing, but it's a very large and obvious difference.

[bko]

Maybe because all the predictions of the very vocal net neutrality crowd didn't manifest. It got memory holed and life just moved on. The only outcome was maybe a few cell phone carriers bumping your bandwidth limits for netflix streaming