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  swiftcoder
  There's a core problem this analysis overlooks: OpenAI and Anthropic don't have a moat. The Chinese labs are consistently able to replicate their LLM capabilities a few months after the fact, and then release open-weight models a few months later...The only way for "Big AI" to become a thing is for them to establish a moat, and right now the only path to that appears to be achieving regulatory capture in the US, which is a fickle and unstable state of affairs.
• ruricolist
  If you're actually planning on reading any of the essay, "The Poisoned Chalice" is the section most likely to be of interest to this audience, especially this bit:> Big AI essen­tially uses its tech customers as an R&D facility. Big AI licenses models to these compa­nies. Tech compa­nies compete to adapt their busi­nesses to AI. Once a concept is proven, Big AI directly takes over that market. The labor-replace­ment story will grow into a company-replace­ment story.
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  epsteingpt
  Interesting argument, but wrong.It's not obvious that there will be a single AI and that it will by definition concentrate power.At a certain point - intelligence doesn't matter. Unless we're literally headed toward 1984 / matrix at which point it doesn't matter.My guess is the argument for what we're doing is counterintuitively the opposite of what he's making.Unless we go hard at the market - now - an authoritarian state actor who is willing to use the technology to fully silence and kill critics will win.And boy, do they desperately, desperately want to win.
• skybrian
  The argument is that labor depending on LLM’s is dangerous but it makes speculative assumptions that the big AI labs will win.> Consider large law firms, aka Big Law. Currently certain legal-AI star­tups license LLMs from Big AI and repackage them for Big Law at high prices. These star­tups claim to add other special sauce. OK, sure. Where’s the economic equi­lib­rium? If legal-AI star­tups prove that money can be made selling AI to Big Law—won’t Big AI just sell to Big Law directly, and cut out the star­tups? Or if legal-AI star­tups prove that AI can effec­tively provide legal services—won’t legal-AI star­tups just sell to clients directly, and cut out Big Law? Won’t members of Big Law that adopt AI have to lay off a lot of equity part­ners, because adop­tion of AI will shrink profit margins?…> Along these lines, I expect that to succeed finan­cially, Big AI will likely need to demolish a signif­i­cant number of existing tech compa­nies and grab their revenue for itself.Nobody knows how this will play out. Maybe the legal-AI startups win because they know their market better? They can switch to cheaper providers.
• strogonoff
  > How Big AI plans to profit from this inter­me­di­a­tion is an open ques­tion. One AI company has suggested taking a cut of AI-assisted discov­eries. The logis­tics and legal­i­ties would be boggling. Details—what­ever.Interesting if they pull it off, because clearly they did not have the logistics to pay the people whose IP they used to power the LLMs.> For now, AI compa­nies largely agree on the first step: make workers depen­dent on AI to do their jobs, just as tech fore­bears made workers depen­dent on a certain soft­ware program to share a file, or on a certain website to have friends. This time, however, the soft­ware ulti­mately consumes the worker.
• artninja1988
  Why is the guy suing open source ai whining about big ai?
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  PaulHoule
  Anything to distract people from real problems like energy and the environment.
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  sucrosesucrose
  The fatalist philosophers and authors have been mostly proven right as time marched on. And this time will be no different, the existence of "AI" ensures the future will be as dark or worse as the predictions expect. Why? Because humans are flawed and corrupt, too prone to excesses (specially conformism and convenience) and the exploitation of the natural world.
• alephnerd
  Meanwhile China is preparing to deploy $295 BILLION in an AI Data Center buildout [0] and is shifting from open models to commercialization [1].Any proposal about slowing down AI that doesn't put the onus on both the US and China is facetious.[0] - https://www.reuters.com/world/china/china-prepares-295-billi...[1] - https://www.digitimes.com/news/a20260609VL215/alibaba-ceo-ai...
• internet2000
  Alarmism does not make your post more convincing.
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  huragok
  Capitalism was cool and good before one specific technology was invented.
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  himata4113
  Warning: This is more of a rant because I was waiting for a post like this for awhile that I could build from to express ny own feelings on it.I think capitalism in itself is great, what isn't is the fact that it can build on itself, it can be infinite, there's zero limits to it. Now what I mean by that, once you make 10k, it's easier to get to 100k and even easier to get to 1m and so on, you might think it's harder, but you gain access to more tools to make more money and at the 10m to 100m range you get to a point where it starts being genuinely hard to fail because just having your name on a project elevates the chances of success by a far margin. Of course there's plenty of people who managed to fail even with millions of dollars I will acknoledge that.Let's take an extreme example: elon musk. Just having something done by "elon musk" makes the project known by nearly the entire world with investors at the doorstep ready to go, a pretty famous example of this would be hyper-loop, although the project itself is a complete failure, it effectively mobilized a decent chunk of companies into investing into this "modern form of transport".People will argue that the solutions like wealth limits and higher taxes create complacency and stop people from achieving progress and pushing humanity forward, but I don't think that's quite true because at a certain point (beyond ~1m/month or even year in some cases like Linus Torvalds) is enough to effectively do 95% to 99% of what you could spend the money on, anything beyond that is pretty much infinite wealth due to the fact that you can get 5% returns nearly risk free.There is this popular video of a businessman claiming that if they're taxed more that they will simply work less, but there's way more people that love their work and money is just a nice bonus. I think focusing your life around a number is a very unhealthy mindset and surfaces the worst parts of what we are as humans.That said, money is a great motivator and probably the reason why we are here and the problems really only start to rear their ugly head when no one person can comprehend the money they have anymore. I don't have a solution, but I also believe that we need some kind of category beyond the "motivation" treshold where it stops being a motivator and instead becomes an aggressive fight with survival of the fittest.
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  thatoneengineer
  I stopped reading after the first sentence. Calling something "inherently political" is a self-fulfilling prophecy and intentionally so. It consistently turns out to be an attempt to lay the groundwork for expropriation. No one called the Internet "inherently political" until people built stuff there that other people wanted to control.
• anon
  undefined
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  euroderf
  Socialism XOR Dystopia
• dfilppi
  [dead]