This is only true if productivity gains tied to general well being, but instead it's being concentrated in the hands of a few.

I can't think of any period in time where it was so easy to go into business yourself and to generally have access to the same "means of production" as the biggest companies have.

If you want to use LLMs, you can either use cloud resources at what I think are really reasonable per-token prices compared to the value, or to set up your own server with an open-weights model at a comparable level of quality (though generally significantly slower tokens/s). In any case, you absolutely don't have to pay OpenAI/Anthropic/Google if you don't want to.

I'm well aware of this: I bought a pretty beefy (consumer grade beefy) GPU machine and run all sorts of open weight models. I do think there is potential.

But are you expecting 360m Americans to start their own businesses? That is a solution that doesn't scale. Consumer grade GPUs aren't going to scale all that much either, and the cost of the models are going up rather than down as vendors start seeking profits. We already see the memory and storage markets exploding in cost due to the rise in demand as well.

Also: A handful more of already well-off people going into business for themselves is not going to move the needle on inequality. When people say "It's never been a better time to start your own business" they still mean "the people who already have their needs met and have the capital to live off for a while while their business becomes viable: In other words, the people who have always started businesses: Already-Rich people.

It's never been a worse time for the poor or middle class to think about starting their own business. Prices on everything are rising, it's getting to be a struggle for even the middle class to continue to afford their homes. Healthcare is even more fraught than ever before, and if you're lucky enough to have a decent plan from your employer, aint no way you're going to give it up to go start a business.

> But are you expecting 360m Americans to start their own businesses?

I do not. I grew up on post-scarcity utopias like Star Trek, coupled with social capitalism, and believe that when there is a market need, people with the interest to tackle it will do so, even in the face of personal financial risk, but I absolutely don't think that it should be the default for everyone. Where there's no strong economic benefit for others to work, I would hope that we could offer everyone UBI, so that a comfortable basic level of life is available for everyone, without having to invent bullshit jobs that aren't needed.

I know I sound naive, but I truly believe that we can move into a future where human value is decoupled from their job, without going into communism.

Seems like you've just agreed with "concentrated in the hands of a few" -- it's just a different "few" than before AI.

Well, yes, the number of entrepreneurs in America (~30M) is a different "few" than the number of frontier labs (~3).

The answer to that question was the US before the 1970s when manufacturing was still onshored. So many joe shmoes literally started companies in this era taking some garage creation and manufacturing it at scale at a local plant.

Now that all takes place in China. With layers of middle men who collect arbitrage between you and the Chinese manufacturers they connect to you. With tariffs. Weeks of international shipping. Enough volume of orders to justify international shipping at all. Enough production capacity ordered to even be worth while making your thing versus larger orders from around the world all being made in china.

> AI is actually a mass decrease in inequality, as much as the Gutenberg printing press was. It takes something that used to be the foremost example of pure bourgeois and intellectual privilege - the culture contained within millions of books and other instances of human creativity[.]

I would rather claim that this is a proper description of shadow libraries [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadow_library

And is controlled by a handful of mega corporations? How is that equitable?

Yup. This is why if you claim to espouse literally any form of egalitarian political belief while being upset about (open source) generative AI, I know you're a fraud/charlatan/intellectual bankrupt/ontologically evil.

Huggingface, Swartz et al have done more social/political good for this world than billions have.

Swartz died in 2002, decades before LLMs. It is distasteful to put words in the mouths of the dead by invoking him here.

Even local AI concentrates power in the hands of a few, the few who can afford the hardware to run it, and the few who have the luxury of enough time and energy to devote to engaging with the intricate, technical rabbit hole of local models.

You should read that comment again, they're not putting any words in Swartz's mouth, they are lauding his accomplishments.

It is lauding his accomplishments, yes. Why bring him up in specific if there is no relation intended? There are many broad shouldered giants in this space.

No.

Because success is individual, inequality is statistical.

It ia true that AI gives ordinary people a lot more chance to be successful.

But do not forget that success depends on lots of factors that are not in one’s control: knowing the right people, time being right for what you are doing, and lots of others. So while the mechanics of success is a lot different to lottery, it does not work much differently: 1 in 1M attempts are successful.

Yes, AI gives everyone more lottery tickets, but it gives rich people a lot more tickets.