Originally, I thought that technology was borderless. But now it seems that AI is similar to things like atomic bombs before. The only difference is that its direct physical destructive power is not as great.
Maybe I'm not paying close enough attention (probably) - but I feel that China is providing a glimmer of hope that this (only the uber elite can get good AI assistance) isn't true, and we're maybe at a weird inflection point of sorts wrt the leverage that tech can now provide.
China gets sanctions and stale chips - fine, they just DIY the algorithms through CPU instead of GPU and open source it.
American warships have the latest, coolest, highest-tech tactical weaponry imaginable - which is great until you have to fend off 10,000 consumer/wal-mart/IED grade drones at $2mm/clip.
Money is amazing, but if you lean on it too heavily in lieu of _practical_ innovation, it'll bite you in the ass. The apocryphal story of the Soviet Rocket scientist who suggested using a pencil instead of investing 100k in a space pen that worked in 0g's.
NASA wanted to avoid pencils because the lead could easily break off and float away, creating a hazard to astronauts and sensitive electronics on the spacecraft In fact, a pencil is such an impractical alternative in space that cosmonauts also have been using Space Pens since 1969
Polymer leads were invented by the Japanese late 50's.
Pentel use manga (漫画 whimsical/informal drawings) to write the history of a burnt rice ball being the inspiration: https://pentel.ca/docs/e_manga.pdf (page 7 with the title "Pentel's Sharp Pencil Refills").
> Maybe I'm not paying close enough attention (probably) - but I feel that China is providing a glimmer of hope that this (only the uber elite can get good AI assistance) isn't true, and we're maybe at a weird inflection point of sorts wrt the leverage that tech can now provide.
I think it's easy for China to be more open right now (and Western governments to essentially not worry about it yet) because they're playing catchup.
If we reach some endpoint where American models stop improving for the general public and only party apparatchiks and sycophantic oligarchs can access them, the situation is different. Chinese models could exceed the publicly available SOTA, and surely they would close off their own models in the same way.
> same level of intelligence as the top companies in the usa.
I would not be worried about it at all. These models are expensive to train and after shrinking the market for these models to just few entities, it will take centuries to just break even.
you are missing the part that they can print more to keep them going. it's already the case new printed fiat already goes to them via inv. bankers and such. those valulation and spending all come via "printing". it hops few funds/LPs and the. ends up in labs.
I posted about it on a comment thread in my history on here.
Ran platform tooling with an active Dev team
Two years in our director retired
My manager at the time (good guy who cared) and a sister team got in an argument
My manager told me on our last 1:1 together that he hated those guys. They play politics and speak bullshit
Leadership took just me and the app/ tooling to that sister team
New manager made me responsible developer. He was okay.
Year later he is promoted and promotes his best friend from highschool to be this groups manager
That new guy takes a few months off, paternity leave
Before he somes back higher leadership starts allowing us to use AI
I created a pull request with AI help to fix some logging that I couldn't get to, too busy with other things
This new manager is currently anti AI, tells me he noticed I used AI slop and proceeds to say I'll never be a software developer even though I've been doing it for 15 years.
He starts emailing me about a bunch made up busy work and stuff "I didn't do" and was late about everything
Reality is he didn't attend out team standups. He would constantly reschedule 1:1 with me last minute and then end up canceling after rescheduling a handfull
He just didn't like anything my first manager created and hated me by association and was very anti AI like a lot of the management at the time.
Summer comes along and I request a mentor. He denies it without reason
I even traveled to his office location with my own money to get some. Facetime with him but he didn't show up to the office those days I was in town.
That AI pull request started this guy digging in
Then company wide. AI is open for all and we need to use it
He still shames me for using Claude. Even small. Focused PRs. Didn't matter.
January I talk to three level directors up. That guy just shrugged his shoulders and said to do what my manager wanted
Two months later that guy setups another second call with me. Starts out well. Then manager joins.
They told me the news.
I told them on that call that it was insane that I couldn't tell my side of the story and that that manager opinion was all that mattered.
At that time my manager was starting a AI project. Full hypocritical timeline.
And my account was restricted right away. And security found where I was on campus and escorted me out while taking many photos of me and my vehicle.
Almost five years thrown away. All I did was make my tooling and software less buggy, more reliable, and help all people using the tooling. But that kind of work isn't respected. And management at these places could care less that my dog got cancer during this time. They could care less I moved to that town to work at that company and was there for almost five years with a mortgage. Could care less that I need healthcare. Could care less about all the things I did.
Hell I had good to great performance reviews with the first and second manager. But that third just gave me
Not OP but I fit into this category (Small Business owner in the US).
Yes, I’m in the US but I somehow doubt my single person LLC is going to qualify for access to these cutting edge models. And frankly, that’s bullshit.
This will only serve to further entrench the big players and the only way to get access to these models will be to already be successful or bribery. That’s a pretty bleak future.
One thing I’ve thought (and said often) throughout my career (and even before “my career” started in High School) was that if I can see something being done at another company (some product feature, cool concept, etc) I will be able to replicate it. Yes large companies have more people but they are just people, if they could do it, so could I (given time/energy).
This is the first time I’ve felt that start to waver. Yes, I was always limited by being 1 person, but I always felt there was a path available to success. I might not have access to supercomputers but I could bootstrap and get by on lower powered hardware as I scaled up.
LLM’s themselves even felt in range if it was something I was interested in pursuing (on a _much_ smaller scale of course).
Essentially, I had the same tools (frameworks, libraries, languages) at my disposal as the big companies. Now that’s changing and I really don’t like that the scale is going be tilted even further into the entrenched company’s favor.
This is pretty much the backstory of Dune. In the first novel, the character Reverend Mother Gaius Helen Mohiam says:
"Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them."
So, John Doe was recorded in 2025 in an anti Israel protest. Now John Doe is denied a Fable clearance and thus, he can't get a job at a shop that is cleared to Fable.
Really, I knew that AI had some risks, I just couldn't foresee this one.
Innovation has pretty much always heightened the wealth disparity between the wealthy and the poor. A classical example would be the Industrial Revolution and America's guilded age, and another could be the circular investments between modern AI corpos (the whole nVIDIA, Microsoft, and OpenAI funding loop), which is probably a bad thing in the long run (systemic violence and class revolt). We have to walk this tightrope between the need for constant innovation and justice.
> Innovation has pretty much always heightened the wealth disparity between the wealthy and the poor.
In absolute terms however most poors in, say, the EU today live better than any king ever lived up until, say, the early 20th century (quality of clothes / bed, medicine, communication, knowledge, etc.).
I'd rather be working 8/5 at a gas station today (and then enjoy gaming or watching TV at home) then be an emperor with an infested tooth in the 17th century or a king with syphilis in the late 19th century.
True, I'd agree that my wellbeing today (as a member of a rich western country) is far more preferable to someone who lacks modern innovations. However, these innovations continue and will continue to help the rich far more than the poor. For example, medical treatments for life threatening conditions are still incredibly expensive. Even insulin, something so cheap to manufacture, is being gouged to eyewatering prices. The danger is that the disparity becomes so large that the rich become the only people who can afford these innovations, thus leading the innovations becoming only avalible to the rich and not the poor. Structural violence ensues and pretty bad things happen.
Because, for example, no parents should lose their kids to leukemia.
At 17 y/o I was save from peritonitis / sepsis first misdiagnosed as harmless belly pain and hidden by painkillers. Then it became a matter of hours and from the moment the doctor saw me again and I undergo surgical operation, less than two hours happened.
My father got diagnosed a stage 3 bladder cancer with metastasis to the prostate about 3 years ago. He's still there and doing better.
That's why we need innovation.
And, no, science ain't a bag out of which you pick what suits you (medicine) and leave out what you don't like (the Internet / LLMs / etc.).
> And, no, science ain't a bag out of which you pick what suits you (medicine) and leave out what you don't like (the Internet / LLMs / etc.).
Uhhhh. Sure it is. We stopped nuclear weapons development. At best, rogue countries can catch up to where we are but there's no political will to build even bigger or more powerful bombs anymore. Thats an entire branch of science that we've literally cut off on a worldwide basis.
Science is, and must, be controlled to stay within the realm of useful to the people. The minute it is no longer serving us is the minute we should work on getting rid of it. Fortunately, science isn't a cohesive bathtub where everything must be thrown away with the baby. We can (and do) pick-and-choose what to develop.
Nuclear weapons development hasn't stopped outside of US. Maybe you mean it hasn't spread to any new countries lately... which is true but I wouldn't count on that lasting.
Both USA and Russia, have decided that ~Megaton Hydrogen Bombs are the biggest we're going to get and we don't plan to build anything bigger than that ever again.
The USSR wanted to make sure they were the ones who built the largest bomb of all time (the Tsar Bomba at 50 MTon). And after that, development on more ferocious weapons has stopped.
Because if spread equally and used responsibly, it raises quality of life for everyone. Generally speaking, the vast majority of people alive today have far easier lives than hunter-gatherers. There is less famine and starvation. There is less fatal disease, etc.
GPU innovation in the past led to the development of new artforms and allowed researchers to solve tougher computational tasks. Today, not so much. You're missing the "spread equally and used responsibly" part here. Nvidia's customers now are the data centers, which have debatable impact on quality of life.
I think the point hodgehog was trying to make is that overall wellbeing increased. Famine is down, disease is down, wars are down, security up, well-being up. Innovation overall benefits everyone in the long run. Global scales aren't the problem---goods once reserved for the wealthy are being copied and produced at markedly lower prices, with examples such as EVs and drones. I realize that "overall" is doing some heavy lifting but I think it's rather unreasonable to dismiss the entirety of human technological progress as only benefiting the elite.
Not really, western countries were doing a lot of that in the 20th century (amongst themselves, anyway). Then the 80s happened.
Or what, do people think that the boomers were all that good, that they genuinely earned everything they got? The generations before just worked out how to govern properly.
only if you assume capitalism is the only stable economic system. without wealth differences there is nothing other than your own abilities that can make access to tech unequal.
Because our economy is based on the sacred right to compound interest, and the only way this can work is with continuous growth. Lacking new markets, given the population growth is accelerating, the only way we can keep this running is by increasing consumption via new gadgets and innovation.
I don’t worry about access to amazing AI. GLM 5.2 is pretty amazing. I can easily see it becoming a norm to own beefier personal hardware to run your own AI.
I worry, like other emerging industries, the administration will make hamfisted decisions that let the Chinese take the lead. See also EVs / clean energy and the war in Iran which has only accelerated that transition.
There’s currently cronyism. There’s no laws that give companies certainty about a regulatory framework (it’s all just being made up). Add to that deep suspicion of expertise at the White House. And a huge disconnect from the economic reality.
It’s a great opportunity for the second tier US labs to release open weight almost-as-good models. Meta kicked off this race, maybe they can release something? Microsoft wants to develop more of their models. Maybe Google should go open weight?
The LLM model battle might be lost, but the harness battle is just beginning.
If you can build a good harness around a weaker LLM and get good at prompting, you will still be able to out perform people using CC. CC has context bloat and even more checks to make sure it’s not being distilled, doing anything shady, or building a competing LLM. Those things add context bloat.
Hope is not lost, we just need to open a new front.
More often than not, money is never truly lost; it is just passed from one person's hand to another. I believe that with the help of the big tech companies, governments have found faster and better ways to move money from the hands of the many with little into the hands of the few with a lot. The layoffs are an example of this as coders, assitance and other white-collar workers are replaced by AI for low prices so as to save money, hence increasing the revenue for the few at the top.
Money can be lost - if lots of it are invested in endeavors that don't pan out, a good chunk of it simply gets wasted. As in: we really did have a bunch of money that we could have spent on many valuable things, but we didn't, so instead of food on the table we collectively get bupkis for it all.
If you invested money into a trade where you bought and lost, there is someone else or others who sold and won. You may have lost that particular sum at that time, but someone else gained a part or some of that sum you lost. If you invested in building and opening a shop and eventually closed it because it wasn't making money. We can say the workers hired to construct the store made money from that investment, the manufacturers and wholesalers you bought from made revenue from selling you their products, which you intended to sell for higher prices to make a profit. You are right in your assessment that you could lose money, but that loss was someone else's gain, hence money moved from you to them. In this life, two seemingly opposing ideas could be correct at the same time.
I'm talking about as a society. There's no "1st law of thermodynamics" for the value of the money. If the world spends a shitload of money on something that doesn't pan out, that means we squandered actual finite resources - human labor, materials, and energy that we previously had.
Manufacturing ordnance just to blow up caves in Afghanistan that the USSR already just spent 20 years blowing up doesn't yield fruit - the materials and labor on both sides quite literally goes up in smoke.
Simply, it is absolutely the case that wealth sometimes gets destroyed rather than merely transferred. Sure, the fiat dollars might "just circulate" but that's an uninteresting, trivial tautology. When people talk about "losing money" in the general case, the meaning of those terms transcend the pedantic, trivial case that you espouse.
When the whole world gets feverish over an investment fad that's doomed to fail, "spending money on it" really means "allocating vast resources in the hope that we all get a return on that investment". If we don't get any return, all that investment truly is lost - destroyed, even. There have been cases where we (the humans of Planet Earth) had wealth that we could have done anything with, we chose to put it towards something that didn't work out, and now it's just gone.
(To be clear: I don’t think AI specifically is valueless)
The part of the bomb is an interesting perspective, and I do believe you are right on this one. Basically, you could blow up a place with a bomb you invested more in and achieve your particular goal, or not achieve it at all, and still lose money. I yield
The natural result of the populous twice electing a politician know for not paying his contractors for his 30+ years of running businesses into bankruptcy. Benefits go to the top, then actual workers get shafted.
How is money not zero sum? I agree prosperity as such isn't, but money, land, other things are limited. And wealth is only wealth because not everybody else has as much, right? As in, it doesn't matter if you have a dollar and I have 100, or you have 1 trillion dollars and I have 100 trillion dollars, it's the same difference.
I think that wealth is pretty much comparative, as you said, but I think that money (which I'm interpreting as an indentifier of worth, tell me if that's wrong) isn't zero sum. Price is (generally) proportional to value, measured in how much you stand to benefit by owning/selling/using an asset as compared to doing nothing. The physical dollar bill may have limited circulation at a moment in time, but value fluctuates. Supply up, value---and then price---down, assuming all other factors are constant. Value can be created and dissolve in weeks as it is intriniscally subjective---think fads and trends. One pair of jeans could be worth a couple hundred one day and be worthless the other. Thus, value and thus money is not zero sum.
"Value", being subjective, is just warm fuzzy feelings. You can't measure it, let alone prove that it's proportional to anything (such as price, which is objective), and you can't pay bills in it. They say how much "value" something has is determined by how much is satisfies someone's wants. But you can't sell how satisfied you are. Money is what determines what you can afford, not "value". If you have money, or can get money easily, you are rich, and if you don't have and can't get money, then you are poor. Money IS zero-sum. For someone to acquire money, someone else must spend money. The only exception is when the Federal Reserve creates money out of nothing and hand it to their friends.
The question isn’t about money but rather wealth. Is AI just about transferring of wealth or creating new wealth/prosperity? It is obviously creating it and not merely transferring.
Money is just a medium or technique to enable this whole economic process. It’s not important here.
It's not obviously creating any wealth (which is just anything you own that you can get money for). What it's obviously doing is creating a whole lot of people who used to have money and no longer do, and a handful of people with massive "net worth" based on the belief that AI companies are going to make a lot of money one day (from what buyers? everybody is going to be unemployed, and therefore poor, and therefore unable to afford any product that might come out of the other end of the AI investment craze, at least not at a price that would support a profit).
The only way AI can turn a profit is from a government bailout.
"fiat money" is not limited. wtf? they keep printing without matching anyting or giving anything for new prints. new printed money ends of up VC companies and selected inv. bankers favorites (aka Elon) it's not fully zero sum because you can take positining to these. Getting allocation or finding the real undervalued stock is real hard part
It's easy if you have enough data on Kevin Warsh, as the Big Tech companies probably do. They can probably predict when he'll print more money, and who he'll give it to.
In fact, money is printing every day more and more. So technically there is more of them every day. Which decrease their value and then we have inflation.
But, ideally, with each day, more useful products and services are being made and delivered. It'd be useful to have extra dollars around to account for more stuff being made and more things being done. Thus having more dollars in existence doesn't necessarily mean the value of a dollar is decreasing.
What does cause inflation, however, is when more dollars are printed versus things being made. You can't precisely measure the latter, so you have to make do with price indices and such. Which makes inflation hard to actually gauge, especially when everyone expects more and more to be produced every year (i.e. they expect their savings and investments to appreciate/gain interest) so you have to print more dollars to at least keep up the facade.
problem is majority of the new printed fiat money goes to VC funded labs and few stocks (selected by inv. bankers). new dollar does not mean average person gets more products and services. Your accessability is no longer because wealthy top does not let other companies and people to get benefit of it. aka financial eng. This is a new era. IPOs make you lose money, they push to valuation to trillions so you dont get no real return. they use your retirement funds to hedge their stocks. ALL LEGALLY. back then apple or nvidia or google gave public few 100x or more.
"[CCP General Secretary] finally commits fully to the big AI push he had previously tried to avoid. He sets in motion the nationalization of Chinese AI research"
But, as far as I understand, Sentient was state AI built for the state. LLMs were built from everyone's data, given to everyone, and now may be locked away for the few
It has been locked away for the few from the beginning. They call it "safety", but the things it refuses are all about control. The big companies keep internal models that don't have the refusal training for things only the "right" people should be allowed to do with it. That's how Mythos discovered those thousands of zero-days. It would've refused to find you any zero days, but it'll find zero-days for the "right" people so they can use them against you.
I cannot even describe in words how much I don't care about this. I'm actually looking the angles of why this is a very good thing, being that I'm a pro-craft activist who is completely opposed to the dangerous proliferation of LLMs.
I'm done. The cognitive dissonance over AI has jumped the shark. It's not fair that it's everywhere. It's not fair that only a few have it. It's not fair that it uses so much electricity. It's not fair that it's killing my environment. It's not fair there's a datacenter in my back yard. It's not fair there isn't a datacenter in my back yard. It's not fair that it threatens my job. It's not fair that my employer doesn't give me access to AI.
I don’t think it’s as cognitively dissonant as you make it out to be, the dominating sentiment outside the corp world is quite negative. Yeah there are a few positive perspectives to be had, and not to mention complexity of perspective does not imply cognitive dissonance. I think you may be building up a straw man.
A large number of logically irreconcilable perspectives (in one's own mind) is the precise definition of cognitive dissonance. You also say that I may be building a straw man without even trying to point out where you think I've done that. You've already conceded my argument that there are many competing perspectives and I make no attempt to poke any holes in that so there is no straw man.
The counter to this is how cheap it has become to build
with these tools as an individual. The same models used
by large companies are accessible via API to a solo
developer. Distribution is still the hard problem,
not access.
Humanity enslaving AI. As well as the rest of humanity.
There is precedent that this kind of thing tends to be rejected when it boils over, but it's usually not pretty.
Which is why tech CEOs are often preppers. They could, you know, just not do this, but shareholders won't allow it, because nobody wants to lose their net worth to do the right thing. It's easier to blame others and build bomb shelters.
It seems people will lose their jobs AND their small business too.
Small agencies won't have access to the best LLMs so their services will automatically require more time and manual labour, which makes them more expensive.
Check out Louis Chude Sokeis sound of culture - diaspora and blackb technopoetics" for the history and intertwinedness of the disoureses of race and machine and slavery.
Also I wonder how you suggestion of AI owned by everybody, as opposition to AI enslavedd by the few checks out under further scrutiny from the standpoint of logic in general and the aforementioned context specifically
- two companies that have not proved themselves capable of producing any amount of money unless a larger amount is given to them...
- will combine with a government that is so domain-generally incompetent it is losing allies left, right and centre, has recently been humbled into giving a previously-controllable foe an unprecedented level of economic global power and cannot even organise itself a competent birthday party in one of the most important places on earth...
- and this combined entity will then operate a power system like no other, with the combined energies of a sociopathic Jobs wannabe, a man who only speaks in Tolkien analogies and a more-or-less-universally-loathed old man with undisclosed serious health problems, an obsession with gold paint and a vocabulary of maybe a hundred words
… then, OK, I guess.
But the economics don't really support it. The money to build and operate this power machine still has to come from somewhere, that money is drying up, and if AGI arrives, employment and consumer demand collapse and the money stops flowing.
There is a looming catastrophe but it is a sort of long economic winter in the tech industry, combined with a national economy that discovers that when that industry's money-go-round stops making line go up, it resembles its own late 1920s.
Originally, I thought that technology was borderless. But now it seems that AI is similar to things like atomic bombs before. The only difference is that its direct physical destructive power is not as great.
Maybe I'm not paying close enough attention (probably) - but I feel that China is providing a glimmer of hope that this (only the uber elite can get good AI assistance) isn't true, and we're maybe at a weird inflection point of sorts wrt the leverage that tech can now provide.
China gets sanctions and stale chips - fine, they just DIY the algorithms through CPU instead of GPU and open source it.
American warships have the latest, coolest, highest-tech tactical weaponry imaginable - which is great until you have to fend off 10,000 consumer/wal-mart/IED grade drones at $2mm/clip.
Money is amazing, but if you lean on it too heavily in lieu of _practical_ innovation, it'll bite you in the ass. The apocryphal story of the Soviet Rocket scientist who suggested using a pencil instead of investing 100k in a space pen that worked in 0g's.
You don't want conductive graphite particles shorting out electronics nor do you want flammable dust or wood flakes.
Good engineers learn to smell out simple but wrong answers.
> You don't want conductive graphite particles shorting out electronics nor do you want flammable dust or wood flakes.
For decades mechanical pencils use non-conducting polymer based refills that eliminate the problem you mention.
Polymer leads were invented by the Japanese late 50's.
Pentel use manga (漫画 whimsical/informal drawings) to write the history of a burnt rice ball being the inspiration: https://pentel.ca/docs/e_manga.pdf (page 7 with the title "Pentel's Sharp Pencil Refills").
Previously there were clutch pencils using the historical fired clay and graphite https://www.bl.uk/stories/blogs/posts/the-history-of-the-pen...
As usual Germans claim inventing it first https://www.computerhistory.org/siliconengine/the-european-t... ). Why are there no teutonic Space Pencil jokes?
> Maybe I'm not paying close enough attention (probably) - but I feel that China is providing a glimmer of hope that this (only the uber elite can get good AI assistance) isn't true, and we're maybe at a weird inflection point of sorts wrt the leverage that tech can now provide.
I think it's easy for China to be more open right now (and Western governments to essentially not worry about it yet) because they're playing catchup.
If we reach some endpoint where American models stop improving for the general public and only party apparatchiks and sycophantic oligarchs can access them, the situation is different. Chinese models could exceed the publicly available SOTA, and surely they would close off their own models in the same way.
As a tech small business owner this is unfair that I can't be as smart by using the same level of intelligence as the top companies in the usa.
This policy just keeps the powerful in power.
And it's crazy because I already lost my job due to AI.
> same level of intelligence as the top companies in the usa.
I would not be worried about it at all. These models are expensive to train and after shrinking the market for these models to just few entities, it will take centuries to just break even.
you are missing the part that they can print more to keep them going. it's already the case new printed fiat already goes to them via inv. bankers and such. those valulation and spending all come via "printing". it hops few funds/LPs and the. ends up in labs.
> And it's crazy because I already lost my job due to AI.
Shit! I'm with you, esp. in these times.
Am I allowed to ask out ofcuriousity, what happened? Feel free to share, you are on HN :)
I posted about it on a comment thread in my history on here.
Ran platform tooling with an active Dev team Two years in our director retired My manager at the time (good guy who cared) and a sister team got in an argument My manager told me on our last 1:1 together that he hated those guys. They play politics and speak bullshit Leadership took just me and the app/ tooling to that sister team New manager made me responsible developer. He was okay. Year later he is promoted and promotes his best friend from highschool to be this groups manager That new guy takes a few months off, paternity leave Before he somes back higher leadership starts allowing us to use AI I created a pull request with AI help to fix some logging that I couldn't get to, too busy with other things This new manager is currently anti AI, tells me he noticed I used AI slop and proceeds to say I'll never be a software developer even though I've been doing it for 15 years. He starts emailing me about a bunch made up busy work and stuff "I didn't do" and was late about everything Reality is he didn't attend out team standups. He would constantly reschedule 1:1 with me last minute and then end up canceling after rescheduling a handfull He just didn't like anything my first manager created and hated me by association and was very anti AI like a lot of the management at the time. Summer comes along and I request a mentor. He denies it without reason I even traveled to his office location with my own money to get some. Facetime with him but he didn't show up to the office those days I was in town. That AI pull request started this guy digging in Then company wide. AI is open for all and we need to use it He still shames me for using Claude. Even small. Focused PRs. Didn't matter. January I talk to three level directors up. That guy just shrugged his shoulders and said to do what my manager wanted Two months later that guy setups another second call with me. Starts out well. Then manager joins. They told me the news. I told them on that call that it was insane that I couldn't tell my side of the story and that that manager opinion was all that mattered. At that time my manager was starting a AI project. Full hypocritical timeline. And my account was restricted right away. And security found where I was on campus and escorted me out while taking many photos of me and my vehicle.
Almost five years thrown away. All I did was make my tooling and software less buggy, more reliable, and help all people using the tooling. But that kind of work isn't respected. And management at these places could care less that my dog got cancer during this time. They could care less I moved to that town to work at that company and was there for almost five years with a mortgage. Could care less that I need healthcare. Could care less about all the things I did.
Hell I had good to great performance reviews with the first and second manager. But that third just gave me
Small business owner in the U.S. ?
Not OP but I fit into this category (Small Business owner in the US).
Yes, I’m in the US but I somehow doubt my single person LLC is going to qualify for access to these cutting edge models. And frankly, that’s bullshit.
This will only serve to further entrench the big players and the only way to get access to these models will be to already be successful or bribery. That’s a pretty bleak future.
One thing I’ve thought (and said often) throughout my career (and even before “my career” started in High School) was that if I can see something being done at another company (some product feature, cool concept, etc) I will be able to replicate it. Yes large companies have more people but they are just people, if they could do it, so could I (given time/energy).
This is the first time I’ve felt that start to waver. Yes, I was always limited by being 1 person, but I always felt there was a path available to success. I might not have access to supercomputers but I could bootstrap and get by on lower powered hardware as I scaled up.
LLM’s themselves even felt in range if it was something I was interested in pursuing (on a _much_ smaller scale of course).
Essentially, I had the same tools (frameworks, libraries, languages) at my disposal as the big companies. Now that’s changing and I really don’t like that the scale is going be tilted even further into the entrenched company’s favor.
Yeah, I agree completely. This is very worrisome and is creating a multi class system.
The capitalist free market in the United States is a lie.
Regulatory capture now ensures that billionaires and trillion-dollar corporations can put you out of business and sell whatever remains for parts.
If they don't decide to squash you, you're just lucky.
This is pretty much the backstory of Dune. In the first novel, the character Reverend Mother Gaius Helen Mohiam says:
"Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them."
Further ruminations: https://syndekit.substack.com/p/the-butlerian-jihad-has-begu...
So, John Doe was recorded in 2025 in an anti Israel protest. Now John Doe is denied a Fable clearance and thus, he can't get a job at a shop that is cleared to Fable.
Really, I knew that AI had some risks, I just couldn't foresee this one.
Innovation has pretty much always heightened the wealth disparity between the wealthy and the poor. A classical example would be the Industrial Revolution and America's guilded age, and another could be the circular investments between modern AI corpos (the whole nVIDIA, Microsoft, and OpenAI funding loop), which is probably a bad thing in the long run (systemic violence and class revolt). We have to walk this tightrope between the need for constant innovation and justice.
> Innovation has pretty much always heightened the wealth disparity between the wealthy and the poor.
In absolute terms however most poors in, say, the EU today live better than any king ever lived up until, say, the early 20th century (quality of clothes / bed, medicine, communication, knowledge, etc.).
I'd rather be working 8/5 at a gas station today (and then enjoy gaming or watching TV at home) then be an emperor with an infested tooth in the 17th century or a king with syphilis in the late 19th century.
True, I'd agree that my wellbeing today (as a member of a rich western country) is far more preferable to someone who lacks modern innovations. However, these innovations continue and will continue to help the rich far more than the poor. For example, medical treatments for life threatening conditions are still incredibly expensive. Even insulin, something so cheap to manufacture, is being gouged to eyewatering prices. The danger is that the disparity becomes so large that the rich become the only people who can afford these innovations, thus leading the innovations becoming only avalible to the rich and not the poor. Structural violence ensues and pretty bad things happen.
Why do we need constant innovation?
> Why do we need constant innovation?
Because, for example, no parents should lose their kids to leukemia.
At 17 y/o I was save from peritonitis / sepsis first misdiagnosed as harmless belly pain and hidden by painkillers. Then it became a matter of hours and from the moment the doctor saw me again and I undergo surgical operation, less than two hours happened.
My father got diagnosed a stage 3 bladder cancer with metastasis to the prostate about 3 years ago. He's still there and doing better.
That's why we need innovation.
And, no, science ain't a bag out of which you pick what suits you (medicine) and leave out what you don't like (the Internet / LLMs / etc.).
> And, no, science ain't a bag out of which you pick what suits you (medicine) and leave out what you don't like (the Internet / LLMs / etc.).
Uhhhh. Sure it is. We stopped nuclear weapons development. At best, rogue countries can catch up to where we are but there's no political will to build even bigger or more powerful bombs anymore. Thats an entire branch of science that we've literally cut off on a worldwide basis.
Science is, and must, be controlled to stay within the realm of useful to the people. The minute it is no longer serving us is the minute we should work on getting rid of it. Fortunately, science isn't a cohesive bathtub where everything must be thrown away with the baby. We can (and do) pick-and-choose what to develop.
Nuclear weapons development hasn't stopped outside of US. Maybe you mean it hasn't spread to any new countries lately... which is true but I wouldn't count on that lasting.
Both USA and Russia, have decided that ~Megaton Hydrogen Bombs are the biggest we're going to get and we don't plan to build anything bigger than that ever again.
The USSR wanted to make sure they were the ones who built the largest bomb of all time (the Tsar Bomba at 50 MTon). And after that, development on more ferocious weapons has stopped.
Right so now China, India, Pakistan all need to catch up. And France for some reason.
Good one!
Nitpicking here: I bet 100 USD that this type of innovation, is not that type of "innovation" meant by befores posting? :-D
Because if spread equally and used responsibly, it raises quality of life for everyone. Generally speaking, the vast majority of people alive today have far easier lives than hunter-gatherers. There is less famine and starvation. There is less fatal disease, etc.
So how does quality of life increase overall for everyone, if Nvidia builds now HA200 instead of HA100? (or whatever they are called)
GPU innovation in the past led to the development of new artforms and allowed researchers to solve tougher computational tasks. Today, not so much. You're missing the "spread equally and used responsibly" part here. Nvidia's customers now are the data centers, which have debatable impact on quality of life.
> Because if spread equally and used responsibly
That ‘if’ is Atlas carrying the entire world on its shoulders.
It should be clear by now that at global scales and with competing interests, the entire premise is impossible.
I think the point hodgehog was trying to make is that overall wellbeing increased. Famine is down, disease is down, wars are down, security up, well-being up. Innovation overall benefits everyone in the long run. Global scales aren't the problem---goods once reserved for the wealthy are being copied and produced at markedly lower prices, with examples such as EVs and drones. I realize that "overall" is doing some heavy lifting but I think it's rather unreasonable to dismiss the entirety of human technological progress as only benefiting the elite.
Not really, western countries were doing a lot of that in the 20th century (amongst themselves, anyway). Then the 80s happened.
Or what, do people think that the boomers were all that good, that they genuinely earned everything they got? The generations before just worked out how to govern properly.
The 80s happened because of the stagnation of the 70s.
only if you assume capitalism is the only stable economic system. without wealth differences there is nothing other than your own abilities that can make access to tech unequal.
I assume that capitalism is viral enough that no alternative can be realistically by established on a global scale.
Ignoring wealth differences is another instance of dreaming of a magical world where greed has disappeared.
A good read is Mark Fisher’s book Capitalist Realism
Because our economy is based on the sacred right to compound interest, and the only way this can work is with continuous growth. Lacking new markets, given the population growth is accelerating, the only way we can keep this running is by increasing consumption via new gadgets and innovation.
It's inevitable. We can't stop innovating.
Because I would like for a future with better health.
And technology is a great catalyst for that.
I don’t worry about access to amazing AI. GLM 5.2 is pretty amazing. I can easily see it becoming a norm to own beefier personal hardware to run your own AI.
I worry, like other emerging industries, the administration will make hamfisted decisions that let the Chinese take the lead. See also EVs / clean energy and the war in Iran which has only accelerated that transition.
There’s currently cronyism. There’s no laws that give companies certainty about a regulatory framework (it’s all just being made up). Add to that deep suspicion of expertise at the White House. And a huge disconnect from the economic reality.
It’s a great opportunity for the second tier US labs to release open weight almost-as-good models. Meta kicked off this race, maybe they can release something? Microsoft wants to develop more of their models. Maybe Google should go open weight?
The LLM model battle might be lost, but the harness battle is just beginning.
If you can build a good harness around a weaker LLM and get good at prompting, you will still be able to out perform people using CC. CC has context bloat and even more checks to make sure it’s not being distilled, doing anything shady, or building a competing LLM. Those things add context bloat.
Hope is not lost, we just need to open a new front.
More often than not, money is never truly lost; it is just passed from one person's hand to another. I believe that with the help of the big tech companies, governments have found faster and better ways to move money from the hands of the many with little into the hands of the few with a lot. The layoffs are an example of this as coders, assitance and other white-collar workers are replaced by AI for low prices so as to save money, hence increasing the revenue for the few at the top.
Money can be lost - if lots of it are invested in endeavors that don't pan out, a good chunk of it simply gets wasted. As in: we really did have a bunch of money that we could have spent on many valuable things, but we didn't, so instead of food on the table we collectively get bupkis for it all.
If you invested money into a trade where you bought and lost, there is someone else or others who sold and won. You may have lost that particular sum at that time, but someone else gained a part or some of that sum you lost. If you invested in building and opening a shop and eventually closed it because it wasn't making money. We can say the workers hired to construct the store made money from that investment, the manufacturers and wholesalers you bought from made revenue from selling you their products, which you intended to sell for higher prices to make a profit. You are right in your assessment that you could lose money, but that loss was someone else's gain, hence money moved from you to them. In this life, two seemingly opposing ideas could be correct at the same time.
I'm talking about as a society. There's no "1st law of thermodynamics" for the value of the money. If the world spends a shitload of money on something that doesn't pan out, that means we squandered actual finite resources - human labor, materials, and energy that we previously had.
Manufacturing ordnance just to blow up caves in Afghanistan that the USSR already just spent 20 years blowing up doesn't yield fruit - the materials and labor on both sides quite literally goes up in smoke.
Simply, it is absolutely the case that wealth sometimes gets destroyed rather than merely transferred. Sure, the fiat dollars might "just circulate" but that's an uninteresting, trivial tautology. When people talk about "losing money" in the general case, the meaning of those terms transcend the pedantic, trivial case that you espouse.
When the whole world gets feverish over an investment fad that's doomed to fail, "spending money on it" really means "allocating vast resources in the hope that we all get a return on that investment". If we don't get any return, all that investment truly is lost - destroyed, even. There have been cases where we (the humans of Planet Earth) had wealth that we could have done anything with, we chose to put it towards something that didn't work out, and now it's just gone.
(To be clear: I don’t think AI specifically is valueless)
The part of the bomb is an interesting perspective, and I do believe you are right on this one. Basically, you could blow up a place with a bomb you invested more in and achieve your particular goal, or not achieve it at all, and still lose money. I yield
The natural result of the populous twice electing a politician know for not paying his contractors for his 30+ years of running businesses into bankruptcy. Benefits go to the top, then actual workers get shafted.
This kind of thinking is the root of most populist rhetoric - that money and wealth is zero sum and it just shifts hands.
This is false and a dangerous rabbit hole of an ideology to get into.
How is money not zero sum? I agree prosperity as such isn't, but money, land, other things are limited. And wealth is only wealth because not everybody else has as much, right? As in, it doesn't matter if you have a dollar and I have 100, or you have 1 trillion dollars and I have 100 trillion dollars, it's the same difference.
I think that wealth is pretty much comparative, as you said, but I think that money (which I'm interpreting as an indentifier of worth, tell me if that's wrong) isn't zero sum. Price is (generally) proportional to value, measured in how much you stand to benefit by owning/selling/using an asset as compared to doing nothing. The physical dollar bill may have limited circulation at a moment in time, but value fluctuates. Supply up, value---and then price---down, assuming all other factors are constant. Value can be created and dissolve in weeks as it is intriniscally subjective---think fads and trends. One pair of jeans could be worth a couple hundred one day and be worthless the other. Thus, value and thus money is not zero sum.
"Value", being subjective, is just warm fuzzy feelings. You can't measure it, let alone prove that it's proportional to anything (such as price, which is objective), and you can't pay bills in it. They say how much "value" something has is determined by how much is satisfies someone's wants. But you can't sell how satisfied you are. Money is what determines what you can afford, not "value". If you have money, or can get money easily, you are rich, and if you don't have and can't get money, then you are poor. Money IS zero-sum. For someone to acquire money, someone else must spend money. The only exception is when the Federal Reserve creates money out of nothing and hand it to their friends.
The question isn’t about money but rather wealth. Is AI just about transferring of wealth or creating new wealth/prosperity? It is obviously creating it and not merely transferring.
Money is just a medium or technique to enable this whole economic process. It’s not important here.
It's not obviously creating any wealth (which is just anything you own that you can get money for). What it's obviously doing is creating a whole lot of people who used to have money and no longer do, and a handful of people with massive "net worth" based on the belief that AI companies are going to make a lot of money one day (from what buyers? everybody is going to be unemployed, and therefore poor, and therefore unable to afford any product that might come out of the other end of the AI investment craze, at least not at a price that would support a profit).
The only way AI can turn a profit is from a government bailout.
"fiat money" is not limited. wtf? they keep printing without matching anyting or giving anything for new prints. new printed money ends of up VC companies and selected inv. bankers favorites (aka Elon) it's not fully zero sum because you can take positining to these. Getting allocation or finding the real undervalued stock is real hard part
It's easy if you have enough data on Kevin Warsh, as the Big Tech companies probably do. They can probably predict when he'll print more money, and who he'll give it to.
Difficult argument to make with the huge increase in wealth disparity the last several decades.
money is never truly lost
In fact, money is printing every day more and more. So technically there is more of them every day. Which decrease their value and then we have inflation.
But, ideally, with each day, more useful products and services are being made and delivered. It'd be useful to have extra dollars around to account for more stuff being made and more things being done. Thus having more dollars in existence doesn't necessarily mean the value of a dollar is decreasing.
What does cause inflation, however, is when more dollars are printed versus things being made. You can't precisely measure the latter, so you have to make do with price indices and such. Which makes inflation hard to actually gauge, especially when everyone expects more and more to be produced every year (i.e. they expect their savings and investments to appreciate/gain interest) so you have to print more dollars to at least keep up the facade.
problem is majority of the new printed fiat money goes to VC funded labs and few stocks (selected by inv. bankers). new dollar does not mean average person gets more products and services. Your accessability is no longer because wealthy top does not let other companies and people to get benefit of it. aka financial eng. This is a new era. IPOs make you lose money, they push to valuation to trillions so you dont get no real return. they use your retirement funds to hedge their stocks. ALL LEGALLY. back then apple or nvidia or google gave public few 100x or more.
https://ai-2027.com/ has the following scenario predicted for mid-2026:
"[CCP General Secretary] finally commits fully to the big AI push he had previously tried to avoid. He sets in motion the nationalization of Chinese AI research"
Seem they only got the country wrong.
> But AI being captured, controlled, and used by governments and Big Tech for the benefit of the few.
If we're being perfectly candid, this was already happening before LLMs were a mass-market technology: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentient_(intelligence_analysi...
I get your point.
But, as far as I understand, Sentient was state AI built for the state. LLMs were built from everyone's data, given to everyone, and now may be locked away for the few
It has been locked away for the few from the beginning. They call it "safety", but the things it refuses are all about control. The big companies keep internal models that don't have the refusal training for things only the "right" people should be allowed to do with it. That's how Mythos discovered those thousands of zero-days. It would've refused to find you any zero days, but it'll find zero-days for the "right" people so they can use them against you.
I cannot even describe in words how much I don't care about this. I'm actually looking the angles of why this is a very good thing, being that I'm a pro-craft activist who is completely opposed to the dangerous proliferation of LLMs.
I'm done. The cognitive dissonance over AI has jumped the shark. It's not fair that it's everywhere. It's not fair that only a few have it. It's not fair that it uses so much electricity. It's not fair that it's killing my environment. It's not fair there's a datacenter in my back yard. It's not fair there isn't a datacenter in my back yard. It's not fair that it threatens my job. It's not fair that my employer doesn't give me access to AI.
I don’t think it’s as cognitively dissonant as you make it out to be, the dominating sentiment outside the corp world is quite negative. Yeah there are a few positive perspectives to be had, and not to mention complexity of perspective does not imply cognitive dissonance. I think you may be building up a straw man.
A large number of logically irreconcilable perspectives (in one's own mind) is the precise definition of cognitive dissonance. You also say that I may be building a straw man without even trying to point out where you think I've done that. You've already conceded my argument that there are many competing perspectives and I make no attempt to poke any holes in that so there is no straw man.
You forgot that its making all the games and electronics more expensive for everyone
The counter to this is how cheap it has become to build with these tools as an individual. The same models used by large companies are accessible via API to a solo developer. Distribution is still the hard problem, not access.
> Not AI enslaving humanity.
Humanity enslaving AI. As well as the rest of humanity.
There is precedent that this kind of thing tends to be rejected when it boils over, but it's usually not pretty.
Which is why tech CEOs are often preppers. They could, you know, just not do this, but shareholders won't allow it, because nobody wants to lose their net worth to do the right thing. It's easier to blame others and build bomb shelters.
It seems people will lose their jobs AND their small business too.
Small agencies won't have access to the best LLMs so their services will automatically require more time and manual labour, which makes them more expensive.
Surely using the worst LLMs costs no more time and labour.
Ask HN isnt really the place for hosting blog posts. Instead why not put this on an external site, expand on it a bit, and submit a link?
Check out Louis Chude Sokeis sound of culture - diaspora and blackb technopoetics" for the history and intertwinedness of the disoureses of race and machine and slavery.
Also I wonder how you suggestion of AI owned by everybody, as opposition to AI enslavedd by the few checks out under further scrutiny from the standpoint of logic in general and the aforementioned context specifically
the last thing the powers that be want is for the masses to be able to become more productive than them
If your primary concern is that:
- two companies that have not proved themselves capable of producing any amount of money unless a larger amount is given to them...
- will combine with a government that is so domain-generally incompetent it is losing allies left, right and centre, has recently been humbled into giving a previously-controllable foe an unprecedented level of economic global power and cannot even organise itself a competent birthday party in one of the most important places on earth...
- and this combined entity will then operate a power system like no other, with the combined energies of a sociopathic Jobs wannabe, a man who only speaks in Tolkien analogies and a more-or-less-universally-loathed old man with undisclosed serious health problems, an obsession with gold paint and a vocabulary of maybe a hundred words
… then, OK, I guess.
But the economics don't really support it. The money to build and operate this power machine still has to come from somewhere, that money is drying up, and if AGI arrives, employment and consumer demand collapse and the money stops flowing.
There is a looming catastrophe but it is a sort of long economic winter in the tech industry, combined with a national economy that discovers that when that industry's money-go-round stops making line go up, it resembles its own late 1920s.
"The leopard certainly wouldn't eat _my_ face!"
> to make intelligence available for everyone
say that again but slowly..
Honestly, AI’s just become another tool for management to use.