AI systems exist to reinforce and strengthen existing structures of power and violence. They are the wet dream of capitalists and fascists. Enormous physical infrastructure designed to convert capital into power, and back into capital. Those who control the infrastructure, control the people subject to it.
While it sways away from the initial thesis of how the use of LLMs could be detrimental to our very being and expression of identity - at least that’s how I interpret what they’re saying - it ends in a fantastic claim on how AI is a tool of the ruling class. Worth a read!
This doesn’t make sense when you look at it from the perspective of open source models. They exist and they’re fantastic. They also get better just as quickly as the big AI company services.
IMHO, the open source models will ultimately what pops the big AI bubble.
Agree, eg. Apertus (FOSS) is a great choice, but even some indie ones are pretty private, eg.Andisearch. AI can be great to improve our research, work and creativity, but it’s bad if we use it to substitute our research, work and creativity. But yes, avoiding the AIs from big (US) corporations, which use it to spy and log user data.
Right, Betamax much? It doesn’t really matter if one technology is objectively “better” on all aspects than another if the strategy to make it popular outpaces the other.
To be clear I wish you were right (even though I don’t find open source models to be free of problems) but I think the conclusion is a wish, not a logical one.
How is that wishful thinking? Open models are advancing just as fast as proprietary ones and they’re now getting much wider usage as well. There are also economic drivers that favor open models even within commercial enterprise. For example, here’s Airbnb CEO saying they prefer using Qwen to OpenAI because it’s more customizable and cheaper
I expect that we’ll see exact same thing happening as we see with Linux based infrastructure muscling out proprietary stuff like Windows servers and Unix. Open models will become foundational building blocks that people build stuff on top of.
It always horrifies me a little bit how much open source has been exploited by large corporations for profit while much of the open source tech they rely on they do not invest in. Meaning by and large it often feels like open source has been unintentionally the largest transfer of the wealth created by labor to the corporate class in human history because labor had lofty ideals and capitalists are happy to exploit that.
Linux has the majority share of corporate servers and has for a long time, and yet is barely cracking 3% of the desktop (consumer, laborer) market. Corporations profit wildly from open source while the general public has not.
I very much agree there, but think of how much worse it would be if we were stuck dealing with proprietary corporate tech instead.
Oh of course, I’m not saying we should dump open source, closed source is so much worse, it just sucks how much the great ethics of open source are exploited by those with no ethics.
Yup, and this is precisely why it was such a monumental mistake to move away from GPL style copyleft to permissive licenses. All that achieved was to allow corporations to freeload.