Author is an AI fear monger (see previous articles) and with regards to elitism, it’s literally called fortune magazine.

I think that’s the definition of ad hominem, doesn’t address the points made in the article. As someone without strong opinions on this topic I appreciate hearing the various sides.

No, only government can because they love us.

>In January 2023, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman told a large audience in India that the country was not capable of building a ChatGPT.

No, he said that for a company with 3 engineers and $10 million it is hopeless to compete against OpenAI on providing a foundation model.

The author is twisting his words and gets triggered to the point where he tries to defend India and brings up things like CEOs of companies like Google being Indian despite the race of the CEO of an American company having very little to do with the viability of start up companies in India.

The article seems like a vehicle for the author’s ethno-narcissism.

I agree with you, it does feel like the article is coming from a very defensive place that seems like an emotional response rather than a logical argument built up from facts. But, the SVs elites "god-complex" that the author refers to is very real. Regulation and policies must be set up to actively keep them from gaining another monopoly.

I saw that interview, Altman said (paraphrasing) "you won't be able to compete, there's no point trying". I didn't interpret it as directed at the example the questioner gave (a few engineers with a few million dollars), I took it to mean "we're so far ahead of you, you'll never be as good).

The arrogance was breathtaking, particularly when it's inevitable that OpenAI will be knocked down a few pegs (arguably, it's already happening).

This feels pretty unconvincing tbh.

Sure India could build some large model. There's no reason to think that they would do a better job than anyone else. They won't magically have access to different data sets than other people do.

Like does it even matter how out of touch silicon valley elite are? These AI models aren't made by scanning silicon valley elite's brains.

It feels like a lot of Silicon Valley elites are just sort of stuck in the mud today

Silicon valley tech execs aren't the perfect people to control the future of AI, but imo they're the least bad option among all the people realistically powerful enough in the world today to wield that kind of power.

Also this article is cope about India's stance on the world stage: attempting to equate SOTA AI advancements with a lunar landing, the latter of which was done 60 years ago. There's a reason all of India's smartest go to the US.

Largely agree, but it's not clear at this point who will control the AI future. SV elites today are like NYC/NJ/Philly elites of the 1960s. They have the momentum and the capital but the cost of doing business, red tape, and wages are too high. It's not clear they will control the next tech revolution.

> SV elites today are like NYC/NJ/Philly elites of the 1960s.

As someone not from US, I understand NYC, but what was it about NJ and Philly in the 60s?

Philadelphia is a large port city and is still one of the biggest cities in the US. NJ sits between two major metropolitan areas that are a two hour drive from one another.

As a result, Philly and NJ had a lot more factory industry back then. Towns like Camden and Paterson, that lost to decay and crime now, used to be prosperous factory cities. A lot of NJ’s industry still benefits from its proximity to New York. A lot people that used to live in NYC but now want a yard for their family move to NJ. Large companies tied to NY also do things like put their R&D parks in NJ because it’s close to NYC but has the space they need.

Bell Labs, GE, IBM, Philco, RCA, and other bigtime tech labs were spread across the [upstate] NY to Philadelphia region. These areas were expensive, unionized and had issues with racial integration. SV until the early 1960s was not run by union bosses, was cheap, less regulated, and still had exceptionally racist white enclaves with solely single family housing, so there was less worry about integration problems.

You're touching on the separation between the people who can and the people who cannot but wish to control. You get a lot of people bleating about AI, unabashedly with their own ideology behind it, but they tend not to be in the crew who can make whatever we are calling AI these days.

And Mitch McConnell can?

There is no point in trusting anything with anyone. In a world, where everything is quantitatively measured in economic scale (no negative sense intended), all we can hope is that the economic forces is sufficiently strong enough to work towards the betterment of civilization. We have to have scientific temperament to tackle these issues with humanistic approach.

Very true. But--Economic scales and incentives are artificial and must be tuned. For example, the USA has a badly regulated medical system that refuses to train doctors efficiently, so medical care is overpriced. 18 year-olds who want to become doctors go to college for like 36 weeks a year with maybe four or five hours of instruction a day. Massive waste of human potential. The legal system is very bad as well. Two graduates from different schools with the same score on the bar receive compensation varying by a factor of 3x dependent on where their degree was obtained. Going to Harvard law is indicative of having connections and the cognitive potential to engage in lucrative schemes well into the future, not actual skill. This does not happen in a country with an efficient legal system, like Germany.

No one can be trusted, so everyone should have access.

Open source is the way to go.

The real control is the hardware/infrastructure needed to develop these models.

Nobody can be trusted with the future of AI, but neither can anybody stop the future. The only restraint against AI will be AI, not regulations, but I'm worried that any equilibrium that's reached will be happening at a scale with some serious collateral damage.

The actual constraint is that AI has a fundamentally parasitic reproductive strategy, it cannot reproduce on its own and it's reproduction is likely to be detrimental to the host.

A sufficiently powerful AI will overshoot and kill it's host so to speak, in any number of conceivable scenarios that don't necessarily imply also killing all humans, just digital infrastructure.

This would have serious consequences, but those consequences probably would not include complete extinction for us, and the unsustainable nature of digital infrastructure was obvious way before AI advancements became a serious mainstream issue over the last several years. It's possible AI does not even represent a significant acceleration towards that end that was always going to happen.

So I think we are safe at least in that very limited sense.

I think it might be the complete opposite. Now that LLMs are available for consumers, I think we'll start seeing individual troll farms sprout up and influence public opinion (it probably already started to happen, but we haven't really seen evidence of it yet). If the technology stays in SV hands, it can at least be regulated. Sadly, the source code for some of these LLMs have already been leaked, so there's no way to stop this.

It was inevitable that it would fall into the hands of consumers (leaked or released), so it's better that we deal with the consequences rather than putting it off.

No shit. We need faster legislators. We need faster legal precedence. This shit needs to be prioritised in the courts.

Can someone please explain why there’s such a concern about the misinformation that could be generated by AI? When the human mind, and typewriter was capable of the same levels of misinformation for quite a bit longer.

I don’t see anyone stare are a typewriter and think: “it’s great but what do we do about the false statements it might produce? Surely we need to regulate this machine and force its manufacture to add features to the mechanism so that it cannot make hateful or erroneous sentences.”

The headline says this is about Silicon Valley, but most of the text seems devoted to bragging about India. Is this all because of one offhand remark made by one tech executive?

To the original question: I would much rather have Silicon Valley execs or HN readers in general making the decision. What's the alternative? Some gender studies major? Some film studies dreamer?