It's not a fear of "AI communism"; it's a fear of competitive market capitalism(observationalepidemiology.blogspot.com) |
It's not a fear of "AI communism"; it's a fear of competitive market capitalism(observationalepidemiology.blogspot.com) |
Maybe they can't charge monopolistic pricing (there's a few market entrants anyway today), but they can still charge premium pricing.
Also two things can be true at once.
American and western AI companies or other companies can rightly be part of the chain of general concern from western societies about anti-democratic authoritarian regimes (Iran + friends, China, Russia, North Korea, Cuba, &c.) getting ahold of technology while simultaneously also being worried about losing their market position and seeking regulatory rules to entrench themselves against actors who do not share the same values and seek to undermine western businesses with trade practices that are intolerable to our societies.
US companies will also release open source models and lower-cost options that will compete with any open source models released by any other country, except when you ask US/western models what happened at Tiananmen Square they'll give you an answer instead of being blocked by an authoritarian government.
Whenever I have these conversations it's like, ok do I believe the incredibly smart people running Google, Facebook, Nvidia, OpenAI, Anthropic, Apple, Amazon, and more who have careers, companies, and trillions of dollars at stake, or do I believe random people on the Internet who say "Open AI and Anthropic will be like Windows Server and open-source models will be better"?
Without extremely strong evidence to the contrary, I'm going to go with what the smartest people in the room are doing. The model and economics make a lot more sense, and fears about Chinese open source models are overblown. When you're behind and frantic you release open source software. If American companies somehow fall behind they'll just release their own better open source software/models and undercut China using the exact same strategy. So either both sides get to employ this strategy and neither has an advantage, or the spend and research matter and America for now has an advantage.
For example if (when) open ai decides to 10x their price once every one is sufficiently hooked these open weight models will still be here.
Because they instantly and reliably(tm) give you the information you want in the format you want it in, they are going to replace the web search as the dominant mode through which information is disseminated - if, indeed, this hasn't already happened. As such, LLMs are effectively a form of publishing for their training data.
Which means a vicious fight for control over what goes into LLMs, and strong incentives to widely disseminate useful LLMs that encode your structural biases, instead of some adversary's. We already talk about Chinese models that won't talk about Tiananmen Square, but that's eye-rollingly sophomoric compared to what the stakes are now. Imagine a model that subtly discourages entrepreneurship, because its creator doesn't want upstart competitors. All questions of media bias are multiplied incalculably when LLMs are folded into all of society.
I think we need to take LLMs seriously as sovereign projects that are as critical to the democratic experiment as a free press. Funding needs to be nationalized; training needs to be conducted in the open, on open datasets; fine tuning needs to follow democratic principles. Only then will they be fit for purpose for their inevitable structural destiny: arbiters of human opinion.
Self isolation by the USA won't change the overall results.
Isolation is weakness, not strength.
It is a prescription for economic stagnation, decline and exploitation by home grown corporate interests that won't/can't compete anywhere else.
The best opportunity to counter China was with full cooperation from the rest of the world.
This adminstration has rejected this opportunity --- and is inadvertently working to "Make China Great Again".
http://rdcy.ruc.edu.cn/yw/LATEST_INSIGHTS/b7bdcf47e8a2489085...
Here you have something to start reading: https://www.seerinteractive.com/insights/how-to-get-your-bra...
Yes but this also holds for the internet and social media, and I see little action taken there.
https://www.dropsitenews.com/p/israel-brad-parscale-ai-chatb...
Someday, the publishing of LLMs that generate video will be the thing historians talk about most from this period of history. Even if the vast majority of people today don't realize it has been happening for a couple years at this point.
"Alignment" is the act of making sure the technology reproduces the ruling ideology of the regime that produced it.
There is no such thing as "unbiased". It's only ever "following our own biases".
When Zuck released LLaMA 4, the announcement post stated that historically LLMs have "leaned left" and that they've been trying to "remove that bias". [0] Translated to the real world, that means that they've been trying to impart a right wing ideology to further the goals of the American ruling elite.
LLMs are the perfect propaganda technology. Always consider the motivations of their makers.
[0] https://ai.meta.com/blog/llama-4-multimodal-intelligence/
I agree in principle, but it's pretty widely understood that LLM's lean heavily left. Zuckerberg as well is pretty left wing, and donated hundreds of millions fighting Trump. I think the issue they're running into is that as these models are used by more and more normal people, and those normal people are having trouble using the models because they don't align well with reality.
The policy and the keyword should have been collaboration and not cooperation.
Honest questions:
What does it mean for a nation state to "win" in this context?
Assuming I don't like totalitarian oligopoly in the United States OR China, what realistic outcome should I be hoping for?
I also don't want totalitarian oligopoly from the US or China. What I'm hoping for is "the rest" of the democratic free nations get together in a proportionally representative alliance. Together they may have both the economic power and cultural soft power to maintain an counterweight to the authoritarian nations. Being a proportionally representative democratic alliance, whatever form that should take, gives us the people the most control over our lives that we can really hope for.
China is not “just china”, it’s a totalitarian regime without freedom if speech, without worker’s rights and without many/most of the freedoms we take for granted.
“China wins” is really “modern hyper/technological communist totalitarian regime wins”
Just shows the complete naive view on China, but whatever.
You know, the USA is kinda going that direction.
> modern hyper/technological communist totalitarian regime wins
Yup, remove "communist" and be afraid of the semblance.
The Chinese models already do that with the absolute minimum of coaxing.
> US companies will also release open source models and lower-cost options
This is wishcasting. People are raising the alarm because models like GLM-5.2 and Kimi K3 have already displaced demand for frontier models in highly demanding fields like security research. There's no amount of money that you can pay for "premium" access to Mythos, so those researchers are taking their money to inference providers that give them comparable models.
It's okay if this is your prediction, but it's not particularly grounded in the present scenario.
> ok do I believe the incredibly smart people running Google, Facebook, Nvidia, OpenAI, Anthropic, Apple, Amazon, and more
Why do you conflate all of these businesses with vastly different business strategies to one another?
Apple and Facebook do not have the same AI strategy, same for Amazon and Nvidia or Google and OpenAI. Many of these businesses made expressly terrible choices that hamstrung their ability to capitalize on AI profits. FAIR failed to scale their early Llama models into a service; Apple abandoned OpenCL too early and invested in a dark-silicon NPU coprocessor instead of supporting CUDA's multi-trillion dollar ARM rollout; Google went all-in on hardware research and failed to create a frontier model that moved significant tokens; OpenAI forfeit the frontier to Anthropic, and Anthropic bent over backwards to appease American censorship demands and push cringeworthy marketing campaigns to capture LLM mindshare with Claude.
There is no "American companies" coalition. They're all reacting in drastically different ways and your eagerness to conflate them suggests that you don't have any real position outside tribalist "us vs them" pugilism.
- Upton Sinclair
The very existence of capitalist oligarchs like Zuck is contrary to left wing values.