This framing is hardly fair, since it treats AI as an incinerator of knowledge rather than the democratizer of knowledge that it is.
Every human uses that "resource" to train themselves, and now they use AI to supercharge that consumption.
The companies are giving average lay people access to a personal PhD to help with whatever they are working on, for $20/mo, and those companies are committing an evil cardinal sin?
I get the gatekeepers are pissed, LLMs are way cheaper than those expensive gate fees, and I cannot come up with a good faith argument about how giving the power of SOTA LLMs to anyone for $20/mo is somehow evil or bad.
In an alternate universe these same models are $100k/mo with limited invite only access, occasionally the public gets a single demo prompt with a short reply, and $20/mo access is a utopian wet dream.
If you want UBI, then the framing shouldn't be around "whoever had content on the internet circa 2024 is entitled to lifetime AI company payouts that effectively act as permanent unemployment checks."
It's not democracy if you can't destroy it. It's not democracy if the citizens cannot reject it. It's not democracy if it's being forced down your throat.
Sick of how SV/VC absolutely ruin words for their own monetary benefit.
How about you put up it up to a national vote and see what democracy gets you? I highly suspect that vast majorities of the electorate would want to nationalize this tech to benefit everyone rather than benefiting the few.
Democracy means there is a politics of rejection, rejection is normal in functioning democracies; what isn't normal are small handfuls of people capturing all collective human intelligence then claiming only they are allowed to benefit from it.
Democratize means to make something available to everyone.
I suppose the root of the word is from democracy, everyone gets a vote/equal rights, but the meaning doesn't really have anything to do with politics or government...
So to reframe my argument for clarity;
I have a hard time coming up with an honest critique of why giving everyone incredibly cheap access (often free!) to incredibly powerful LLMs is somehow evil. And obviously these things are ridiculously popular. Average people seem to think they are fucking awesome, and anger seems to be mostly from gatekeepers that are relentlessly screaming that their gates are being bypassed for pennies.
Considering that books have probably been the easiest thing to pirate for the last 30 years, and LLMs are probably the worst way to try and read a book free, I'm not sure why authors would be focusing their anger at AI.
Free books for you as an individual, not free for the library and the city backing it. What's in your library still ends up paying authors (and their publishers).
> Average people seem to think they are fucking awesome
Average people who wants to go home from work and game are angry at AI for raising the ram prices.
Average person who wants to own the stuff and not have things on cloud are angry at AI for raising prices 5 times in such a short period of time.
Have you talked to an average person and how they use AI? They use it as a glorified no-code editor (I would admit not no-code editor itself but rather the vibe-coding aspects with no regards to what tech stack is being used, how its being deployed, literally anythoing) and search engine. Refer to how things like lovable etc.
A search engine which can make some pretty wrong cases which can literally lead to near death like scenarios all while being completely trust me bro attitude.
Normal people use AI to confide in it secrets, seek therapy somehow. And the same AI generates AI pyschosis.
Now coming to tech industry: Tech industry is worried about that such levels of democratization just means that nobody is going to pay for them yet at the same time, we will see projects who are completely created by AI seek money. It's this weird mush where if you are a genuine guy who just loved computing, who loved tinkering, yeah we're offloading that capability to AI
I have seen this even more and more with as agents want to get more autonomous or we are letting them be. The projects generated feel hollow to me. I don't consider myself a full fledged programmer right now and AI did supercharge me and made me have projects. Nowadays, it just feels like prompt ---> (Time) --> Output.
It just feels hollow and AI companies did it by abusing the passion of these same developers and scraping stack overflow, scraping github and having all disregards for properties.
People could spend years creating a book about say postgres and an AI took it, ripped it in half and then decided to use that info and not even give credits.
All, at the same time that AI is being pushed down on employees. Some just don't want to have it but nope, they must. they are forced.
Essentially engineering with AI feels like it becomes a marketing gimmick. Anyone who can market somehow (Ahem ahem Openclaw) can get a job at OpenAi all because in some attention hype breeds hype and they had stars and people talked about stars on twitter, and more people found it and starred it and so on and started using it
Turns out that nowadays there are allegations being made against Openclaw
> Star velocity shocked analysts. Moreover, the repository added roughly 220,000 stars within 84 days of launch. In contrast, Kubernetes needed five years for similar numbers. Many builders call the growth organic. Nevertheless, some observers link the surge to hype, bot accounts, and headline attention, fueling the GitHub Stars Controversy. Independent GitHub Archive pulls show several single-day jumps above 25,000 stars. Such abrupt spikes often signal scripted starring, yet no formal audit confirms abuse. These patterns feed community debate. Consequently, trust in the star metric has weakened, prompting calls for verification.
The marketing industry has been very closely linked to sometimes scam prone areas and shady areas of the internet and engineering used to be clean from all of this for the most part. Now, the norm to me feels like buy github stars and buy twitter attention or pray to be in an algorithm which you can't read but it reads every move you make, and yes this is your business strategy now
Have you looked at truly AI-first companies and what they do/like how do they generate numbers in the first place?
These are two distinct points. I don't think that people of here would be any mad if someone made a little prototyping script for themselves with the power of this Phd that you mention. Heck, these same programmers that you now call gatekeepers have never gatekeeped much of it. They worked and contributed to open source for free while being severely undermainted.
The audacity to call these same people gatekeepers shockens me because open source people if anything are the Opposite of that and yet AI stole their rights and their licenses from them. An AI can take AGPL code and then somehow churn it into MIT tada! It doesn't even have to give any accredits when it gets trained on AGPL or ANY type of code, no matter how restrictive or permissive.
these are the same people btw who are on programming forums which yes at times did have moderation issue but still tried to help noobs learn for free. They did it because they loved tinkering with computers
That's my take on it. feel free to ask for more things if you may as I would love to tell you more but for the sake of this discussion, I think enough can be relevant.
It's absolutely ironical to call say the Open source people gatekeepers because AI violated their rights and licenses.
Calling Open source Contributors gatekeepers might as well be an oxymoron.
Edit: I have been downvoted in so little time after I wrote this comment that I am pretty sure that someone might not have even read my comment and had it downvoted.
The topic can be at times too polarizing to even have a discussion.
Oh well. That's completely okay but to any human who read this, I know my writing can be sporadic and it was written in much frustration over how people try to frame AI as this harbingers of liberty. I absolutely think that's not the case and its viewing things from a very rose tinted glasses.
So thanks to all the humans who read my comment and were patient haha!
I really appreciate this patience in a world of TLDR and I wish you to have a nice day!
>why do you think all the LLM companies are trying to force these tools through corporate mandates that have been falling
Ironically if you actually read that study, the "MIT report: 95% of generative AI pilots at companies are failing", they found that almost everyone was using AI tools they paid for.
>While official enterprise initiatives remain stuck on the wrong side of the GenAI
Divide, employees are already crossing it through personal AI tools. This "shadow AI" often
delivers better ROI than formal initiatives and reveals what actually works for bridging the
divide.
Behind the disappointing enterprise deployment numbers lies a surprising reality: AI is
already transforming work, just not through official channels. Our research uncovered a
thriving "shadow AI economy" where employees use personal ChatGPT accounts, Claude
subscriptions, and other consumer tools to automate significant portions of their jobs, often
without IT knowledge or approval.
The scale is remarkable. While only 40% of companies say they purchased an official LLM
subscription, workers from over 90% of the companies we surveyed reported regular use of
personal AI tools for work tasks. In fact, almost every single person used an LLM in some
form for their work. In many cases, shadow AI users reported using LLMs multiples times a day every day of their weekly workload through personal tools, while their companies' official AI initiatives remained stalled in pilot phase [1]
If you want to avoid info bubbles, read the reports, not just headlines and comments.
> If they're so popular and so great, why are they struggling to make profit?
Because they are optimizing for growth not for profit
> Why are they struggling to show large returns
Because they are growing their reach
> Why are they all trying to use the strategy of securing corporate welfare to enrich themselves?
"Securing corporate welfare" well this is one of those reject the premise things. They aren't doing that in any capacity that is different than any other company or sector.
> These things are enabling mass surveillance and human misery, maybe instead of constantly chasing the shiny and letting SV dictate the direction of tech in the US we start introducing public alternatives to this mess?
You're welcome to do that any time, you'll just find that your reality breaks when you realize people actually like LLMs and use them a lot. go ahead and do some basic research
> Something tells me that if you gave $100 billion to a consortium of devs across the US they would come up with a better plan to enable technological flourishing rather than mass inequality.
Yawn. You're speaking about the tech bubble but live in a bubble that doesn't match that bubble's reality. Developers love LLMs. Demand is ATH, we have less capacity to deliver LLMs than there is demand.
How do you operate in the regular world when you're so unaligned with reality?
Both apple and google's app store has LLMs as the #1 downloaded app "BuT thEy ArEn't PoPuLar EvErYbody HaTes Them".
Maybe you should unsubscribe to your bubble subreddits or wherever you are getting information to form such a discordant understanding of reality. I don't think it's working for you.
I mean, raise you hand if you have never paid for AI "slop", I see maybe a hand or two in this room of tens of thousands.
It's a strawman to frame it as AI labs get everything and society gets nothing. Bruh, the fastest growing applications of all time didn't explode in popularity because they "offer nothing of value". I'm not giving you an argument, I'm giving you a reality check.
The users aren't the ones getting trillion dollar valuations. And for most of them the answer is "they don't have a choice, it's bundled into Microsoft 365 / Google Workspace / Meta / everything" or "they're not, their employer is paying for it".
The answer to "why do businesses pay for stupid things of questionable hard-to-prove value based on hype cycles" would take many books.
> How about you put up it up to a national vote and see what democracy gets you? I highly suspect that vast majorities of the electorate would want to nationalize this tech to benefit everyone rather than benefiting the few.
You're probably right -- except for the billions in massive PR campaigns that will be spent to successfully convince enough of them that it's in their best interest to let the companies keep ownership.
This is in addition to the billions in PR already being spent to make AI palatable in spite of the societal and economic costs.
Their billions in PR isn't stopping people from rejecting data centers being built in their communities.
What you have to understand about advocacy is that it's the worst form of politics and it only goes so far. Paid canvassers aren't convincing compared to actual humans organizing with one another.
> vast majorities of the electorate would want to nationalize
Lol, then you've missed how propaganda in the US has worked for the last 100 years. The wealthy have launched a continuous attack against the idea of nationalization/socialization to the point it creates a irrational Pavlovian response in huge portions of the population. Us the population have already lost a war we had no idea we were fighting to an enemy that plays a far longer game than most of us.
I never said AI companies are evil or that $20/mo access is bad. You're arguing against a position I don't hold.
AI can be genuinely useful AND the people whose collective output made it possible can deserve a share of the wealth it generates. These aren't in conflict.
Alaskans benefit from oil too. It heats their homes, paves their roads, funds their schools. That wasn't an argument against the dividend. "You're already benefiting from the resource" has never been a reason the people who generated it shouldn't share in the profits.
The question was never "is AI good." It's "when something built on collective human output generates trillions, does the public have a claim to a share." Nothing you said here addresses that.
> In an alternate universe these same models are $100k/mo with limited invite only access, occasionally the public gets a single demo prompt with a short reply, and $20/mo access is a utopian wet dream.
So your understanding of the present state is that we are living in a utopian wet dream now that we have models who can generate slop faster so much so that we have a term of it called AI slop?
I or many people don't want this Utopian wet dream, so I want to know, did I or other people have say it or not?
A few select people decide what's the definition of a Utopian wet dream is and they then take the collective properties of everybody else to fulfill that and even putting the employment/livelihood of those same people into risks
Sir, does that sound familiar?
> I get the gatekeepers are pissed
No, humans are pissed, humans just like how you and your family are humans too (well I sure hope so)
A helper tool that I can ask a question and which responds with relevant information gleaned from the vast collection of human-gathered knowledge and experience would be fantastic.
What we have instead is something that often gets things mostly right, if you don't look too hard at it. And the poisoned output of this thing seeps back into the knowledge pool, reducing its accuracy and therefore usefulness.
The problem of LLMs is the dissolution of human knowledge into a sea of slop.
>The companies are giving average lay people access to a personal PhD to help with whatever they are working on, for $20/mo, and those companies are committing an evil cardinal sin?
The social media companies gave their services for free, and now it turns out they've committed quite a few sins. None of the AI companies are doing this out of the goodness of their hearts, nor will they be satisfied with subscription revenue. If they see opportunities to make more money by manipulating the population, rest assured they will take those opportunities.
Every human uses that "resource" to train themselves, and now they use AI to supercharge that consumption.
The companies are giving average lay people access to a personal PhD to help with whatever they are working on, for $20/mo, and those companies are committing an evil cardinal sin?
I get the gatekeepers are pissed, LLMs are way cheaper than those expensive gate fees, and I cannot come up with a good faith argument about how giving the power of SOTA LLMs to anyone for $20/mo is somehow evil or bad.
In an alternate universe these same models are $100k/mo with limited invite only access, occasionally the public gets a single demo prompt with a short reply, and $20/mo access is a utopian wet dream.
If you want UBI, then the framing shouldn't be around "whoever had content on the internet circa 2024 is entitled to lifetime AI company payouts that effectively act as permanent unemployment checks."