it will be up to governments to represent the people. A massive risk might be that GPT makes it trivial to simulate humans and thus simulate political demands to political leaders.

I think politicians and organisations might need to cut their digital feedback loops (if authentication proves too much of a challenge) and rely on canvassing IRL opinion to cut through the noise.

I feel like the governments that do this will/might be the ones whose supporting lobbies don't have ai tech companies or access to ai. But how long is that for? Take Monsanto eg. There is no govt that is not in it's pockets. Now there are counters to it as there are other industries (and subsequent lobbies) to balance Monsanto or act as alternative sources of funding. What would that be for ai when ai is going to be in everything (including your toaster haha)?

> I think politicians and organisations might need to cut their digital feedback loops (if authentication proves too much of a challenge) and rely on canvassing IRL opinion to cut through the noise.

They'll just get the results of "ChatGPT 17.0, write and produce an ad and astruturfing campaign to convince a cohort having the traits [list of demographic factors and opinions] that they should support position X and reject position Y" (repeat for hundreds of combos of demographic factors and opinions, deploy against entire populace) parroted back at them.

"Yeah but every position can do that, so it'll all even out" nah, the ones without a ton of money behind them won't be able to, or not anywhere near as effectively.

Basically, what we already have, but with messaging even more strongly shifted in favor of monied interests.

> Much like mechanization was possible by ultra rich at the turn of the last century.

If by "last century" you mean 19th century, then there was a lot of backlash against mechanization being controlled only by the rich, starting with Communist Manifesto, and continuing with 1st and 2nd International. The important part of this was education of the working class.

I think the AI might seem as a threat, but it also provides more opportunity for education of people (allowing them to understand cultural hegemony of neoliberal ideology more clearly), who will undoubtedly not just accept this blindly.

I have no doubt that within next decade, there will be attempts to build a truly open AI can help people deeply understand political history and shape public policy.

The 19th century "turned" on Jan 1, 1801 and lasted through Dec 31 1900 [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/19th_century

Yep I meant around 1890+ ish phase (or which ever century mechanization was on the rise). My point was the communist manifest at least seemed like a thing to propose/predict such dangers. I am not sure we are seeing any such thing now? I love the power and opportunities of ai without anthropomorphising it (afaict it is just a crazily powerful and huge statistical engine). What worries me is just like we in in America think of ourselves as temporary impoverished millionaires we also seeing AI as the thing that will give us back 50 hours a week for fun pursuits without wondering who is owning it. Reminds me of that show on Amazon Prime - Upload!

This didn't start with the Communists, it started with the Luddites. We don't think of them as the start of this sort of thing because wealthy Englishmen successfully slandered them as just hating technology for the sake of hating technology, so instead they're a by-word for "technophobe".

You're right that the backlash started earlier. But I think the important difference is that communists and socialists embraced the technological progress instead of simply rejecting it. And they also embraced it as a tool for education. And this is my point, we shouldn't just be worried about the AI (and wish we go back or slow it down), we should embrace it somehow, as this strategy proved more successful with the mechanization too.

So true. My fear is not of AI but the wielders of AI who sadly still remain mere human :)

> Today building a gazillion param model is only possible by the ultra rich

True, but in 5 years there’ll be an open source equivalent running on commodity GPUs.

I hope so and there is some kind of Moore's law for memory - especially gpu memorh. Even the mighty h100 has something like "only" 100gb? As model sizes grow exponentially memory sizes don't seem to be catching up. But yes hope these do get commoditized soon.

What I feel scared about is the economies of this. The so called democratized/commoditized chips are still controlled by Nvidia. So why Nvidia would give that up is not clear to me.

One thing I really wish could happen is the equivalent of seti project for model training and inference! (No btc/crypto please).

"The cat is out of the bag" so to speak.

No there will not. Yes, you may have a GPT-4 substitute running on your 3090, but the billionaire will have GPT-666 or whatever running on a supercomputing cluster guzzling a significant fraction of the world's data every day and playing hi frequency idea trading on a scale never before seen.