How do you steal knowledge? Knowledge shouldn't be locked up.

If you believe that, then why aren't LLMs free to use for every person on Earth?

If you want anybody to keep making anything, including programmers, artists, and writers, you're going to have to pay them somehow.

Anthropic and OpenAI would not have a product at all without the contributions of thousands of non-consenting humans. Yet they somehow have the gall to charge customers a premium.

You're paying for compute?

They refuse to release the models, the training method and, training data. They don't even want you to ask it too many questions lest you teach another ai. Very "open".

I'm all for it, free AI allotment and universal income is the future.

It’s not a future that’s currently in the cards, no.

It certainly is. People will put up with scraps only for so long before the system comes down.

Anthropic and OpenAI aren't the only ways to use LLMs. There are plenty of LLMs where you can download the weights and run them locally. There are even others that you can train yourself (see the LLM360 family).

> And, how do you envision the white collar economy, which is entirely built off of selling knowledge, will operate if you get your way?

It will crash and burn anyway. That kind of economy made sense before the Internet, before mobile phones made it possible to carry the entire world's knowledge in your pocket, only impeded by your ability to efficiently query the database and apply the concepts.

Now with AI? It's even worse. AI not just can efficiently query its own knowledge dataset it was trained upon, but it can also search other databases, apply the knowledge to the input and to put the cherry on the icing, it can do so when operated in natural language. And we're not going to be able to put the genie back into the bottle, not with people being used (and able) to run open weight models on local hardware. OpenAI et al don't have any actual moat behind them, they are just making stuff a bit more convenient and are for now the cheaper way to access compute resources.

For Western countries, the white collar economy is going down the drain, black collar (mining and other forms of dirty resource extraction) is already gone off to places that "compete" by using slave labor, and what remains of blue collar now that industry went the same way as black collar is heavily under threat because so many white collar people are fleeing towards the trades.

> It will crash and burn anyway.

It's unclear from your comment whether you think this is good or bad. You certainly seem to think it is inevitable.

I just want to remind you that nothing here is inevitable - someone is making it happen, and it's only possible because we're not enforcing any of the laws we have about it for some reason, such as copyright. Well, the US isn't enforcing it. The EU is scrambling to come up with reasonable regulations. God knows what China is doing.

I agree that AI, like many other things, would have been an unambiguously great invention in a post-capitalist society, but that's not where we are. They are unbelievably powerful, impossible to control, and fully owned by powerful corporations, so the future looks pretty dystopic for humans who love freedom, art, and science.

But I hope you realize that we have the chance to fight back and get this right. But it does require that you do something.

> It's unclear from your comment whether you think this is good or bad. You certainly seem to think it is inevitable.

I think it is bad, but the consequences are manageable.

> someone is making it happen

We're past that point. Open weights plus local inference is already good enough for an awful lot of use cases. Even if we'd say we ban all AI training, we yeet China and the US from the Internet... it's too late.

> But I hope you realize that we have the chance to fight back and get this right.

The best chance we have is mitigate the consequences. That means first and foremost UBI, backed by actually useful corporate taxation. We need to prepare our economies for the shift towards an economy that requires fewer and fewer people to actually do work. For the moment, the only thing that is relatively safe from both automation and scale efficiencies is some trades (plumbers and electricians), some sections of healthcare and some sections of black collar work. Everything else is under massive threat from AI, automation (have you looked at precision farming?!) or both, and politicians seem like a deer frozen in the headlights.

This is the classic doomer take. Beware of dramatic but simple answers. UBI doesn’t really seem like a sustainable way forward, and at the same time there’s so much we don’t know about the limits.

Don’t play half-court tennis. Other people can read and write too, and social shifts are simultaneous slow, but then sudden.

For example, I’m not seeing a lot of trust in AI as a technology for things that are actually important. It takes one wrong diagnosis from an expensive AI doctor to erode all trust and make everyone prefer a human expert.

It is inevitable. You can ban it but that will only drive it underground. The technology is too good, it will never go away.

One thing is that most if not all models more likely than not were trained on leaked Microsoft and other proprietary code sets.

For projects like WINE or ReactOS that absolutely have to enforce hard firewalls between people with "insider knowledge" to avoid contamination and resulting legal issues, this alone makes the use of AI for coding highly problematic.

I hope everything you make is public domain, then. Otherwise that would be hypocritical.

As it should. Copyright shouldn't exist in the first place.

Most of it is...