If you framed it as 'the biggest criminal' it'd still be impressive but would read mighty different. Acquiring money and power is no way to go through life. Not at that cost.
That’s some weirdly perverse attitude to have. Regardless if it’s Musk or anyone else, in general the actions of highly successful people have a disproportionally high impact on the society. So they need to be criticized as harshly as is reasonable for any misstep they take.
Some of the richest people the world has ever seen seem to tick all the same boxes as the least likeable and most devoid of love and empathy.
If only some billionaires (trillionaires?) could strike a better balance between successful and human. Especially since most wealth is actually wealth transfer from the poor and from taxpayer coffers to the rich.
It is only a single counterpoint in a sea of depressing examples but you may enjoy the story of Yvon Chouinard, owner of Patagonia, who gave it all away to trusts for protecting the environment.
Yvon is solid. Bezo's ex is good. There's plenty of gray, too, where they're trying to give a lot away or make life better for everyone.
But, fundamentally,bro become a billionaire, you exploited some people at some point in the process. Their mere existence is not ideal for society. And their assets would be better served distributed to the masses. Unfortunately, we also lack many good and strong governments and policies - so I wouldn't feel great just transfering their wealth to the governments of the world for said distribution, either.
I know this will sound inconceivable to you but some people genuinely think nobody should have that much money - including themselves. If you want to make it sound irrational and emotional the correct word wouldn't be "envy" - it would be "fremdschämen" or if you prefer something not borrowed from German: "cringe".
Yes I'm sure that is genuine belief and not just a manifestation of envy. I can't describe the level of contempt I have for people who go around opining on how much money they think other people should have.
It doesn't rise to the level of critique. Just baseless accusations and conspiracy theories. Success speaks for itself and the mental gymnastics of those that deny it screams "envy" as loudly as if it was written on the accuser's forehead.
Stalin was also an immensely talented and successful man. In fact he was so successful that any criticism of him became entirely inconceivable to many.
You are implying that any successful person should strive to achieve something like that? Or what point are you even trying to trying to make?
I have achieved nothing this year, and yet I have had a lot more success than Mr. Musk in the "human lives saved" category by not gutting USAID. With reasonable estimates on the weight of this category I'm quite confident to have been more successful overall as well.
Or $150 billion SpaceX? Internet constellations may be mildly profitable, but beyond that, most things are an endless money pit without clear path towards profit anytime soon. Like, no one is going to spend a trillion on a moon base (or exponentially more for mars) without plans to somehow recover all that money.
> Forecasting models predicted that the current steep funding cuts could result in more than 14 051 750 (uncertainty interval 8 475 990–19 662 191) additional all-age deaths, including 4 537 157 (3 124 796–5 910 791) in children younger than age 5 years, by 2030.
So you think a malaria prevention program can be canceled without notice and no one will die from that?
The only people who believe that do not believe in anything. They think there is no such thing as competence or honesty because they have never experienced it.
We were responsible for providing notice and a transition period when we stopped paying for it. We didn't have to pay for it, and they didn't have to die. But we have an administration that can't plan a pool party.
Should I pick a model
a) run by a lying crypto bro once obsessed with scanning eyeballs
b) that costs too much and resulted bombing innocent kids
c) that is cheap but ultimately owned by re-education camp operators
d) something else
About 2 years ago I used to have conversations with GPT while walking the dog. It really emphasized the need to think before you speak, but you had to think fast before it hung up on you.
They benefited greatly from the FTC not doing their job. Google too. Overall it has been extremely damaging to the industry but I suspect that it is the main reason for a small part of California (it not even American exceptionalism, it's Silicon Valley exceptionalism) completely dominating tech.
Mate, I live in Europe. The UK (as bad as it is, is still better than the US), the Netherlands, Belgium, and generally anywhere else that has public transport.
Because (collective) we don't own the tech. Frontier models are proprietary, their reasoning logic is hidden, and as seen with Fable the government giveth and taketh away on a whim.
Capabilities can be gated behind certification programs, or by money, or any other numerous corrupt and non-corrupt means. Model capabilities can be segregated by pricing tiers, creating an economic underclass that cannot afford access to frontier intelligence.
For humanity to benefit, the tech needs to be open and equally available to all.
I agree with this. Computing as a field is the way it is because there is a low barrier to entry. My dad gave me a Tandy 1000 and some programming books, and now I have a very lucrative career. I never took any classes. I never had to beg anyone for permission. I could just get started making things with the minimal investment of a cheap personal computer. (And eventually, an Internet connection. Working with other people is fun!)
In a world where everyone is a Claude controller (something I honestly enjoy!), that goes away. I use hundreds of dollars of tokens a month. Suddenly, the kid in her basement with an unloved computer can't get in on the ground floor. You have to be rich to even get started. That worries me deeply. It's a big change for our field, and I don't think it's a good one.
Did your dad give you a Tandy 1000 or a Cray X-MP/48? Do you really think you need the most top-of-the-line model to learn anything, or will a locally run gemma4 (or whatever it turns into) still get you going just the same as when you were a child?
That's true, local models are good. The Tandy 1000 was really only good for a little bit QBASIC. Still fun!
The other is that computing in general feels more accessible? While some models are free, you still can't easily make your own model. But I see the argument where you can't really just build your own computer anymore (no one person knows how to make a modern CPU, and you can't do it at home). You are always beholden to society, nothing truly starts in your basement at home. And it didn't in the nostalgia era that I remember either.
Your "concentration of power" is just two labs making models that most people prefer the last couple of months. Neither has more access to capital and resources than Google, more ability to pivot quickly than Xai, more access to labor than all of the Chinese labs, etc. How do you keep from a "concentration of power" without just forcing subsets of the population to use a known lesser model, or purposely kneecapping Research and Development at the labs that currently have the best models?
Do you hate all lessons from humanity's past or just the most important ones? If it takes work from a specific subset of the population and isn't compensated, then my friend, what you advocate for is slavery...
Torvalds hasn't coded in years and lives off the achievements of others. The amount of people that tonguebathe his asshole is astounding. He brings very little to the Linux project, and actually hinders it.
None of them were compelled, and nobody is stopping you from running your own LLM generously provided by others. Doesn't mean when linux came out people nationalized Apple and Microsoft.
The risk I'm talking about isn't nationalization of companies, its corporate monopolization of frontier intelligence capabilities through capital consolidation and regulatory capture.
"Just run your own LLM" ignores the asymmetry of frontier intelligence. You can build an operating system in your garage with just time and cheap hardware. You cannot go build GPT-5. And that's the problem with keeping it proprietary. If the primary cognitive engines of human progress are consolidated within just a handful of closed, proprietary cartels that can gate, alter, and revoke capabilities at will it creates a permanent economic underclass.
The foundational infrastructure of our collective future shouldn't be entirely walled off. Fair compensation for a commercial product doesn't mean monopolization of foundational capabilities.
And everybody should have free access to the latest medicine, healthiest food, premiere education, fastest transportation, best compute, etc. When you're doing stuff on the bleeding edge, investing HEAVILY into R&D, there's no way to distribute the product to everyone without killing the rate of progress. Free models aren't too far behind, why do only the best, most risky ventures need to be kneecapped? Nobody is stopping you from building your own, better model. I can't help but to see this as you seeing someone else who made something better and want to take it for yourself while heavily discounting the enormous amounts of work and risk it took to make it.
But "some assholes" is an extremely large, growing group of people. Do you have any idea how much more productive small business owners are now? It's an insane boost for people who didn't want to spend their time on things that are extremely critical for business but not the focus of the business.
And people loved "free next day delivery" from Amazon, when it started. It's not quite the same level of service anymore, and membership has gone up in price.
Would these businesses pay 2x? 5x? 10x? What is their breaking point? I'm sure xAI/OpenAI/whoever will find it and charge 0.9x that (eventually). Just look at telecoms / internet access and their rubbish "network congestion" claims to keep raising prices.
I still get a lot of free next day, and now sometimes even same day, delivery for amazon. I doubt the membership prices has even matched inflation, but it is certainly well worth it. I can't see any governmental or volunteer organization that would produce even slightly comparable results with the same budget.
One is the potential for skill rot where AI grows a heavy dependence in new employees and once the real price per token cost is settled on and discoverable (post massive IPOs and probably a while post - not immediately after) we, as a society, are left with a bunch of people dependent on a deeply inefficient technology to maintain software we now view as vital that might severely impede our ability to actually deal with climate change (press X to doubt Bezos).
The second is that the psychological damage of interacting with models in a social context during your formative years is deeply damaging and we've essentially destroyed the ability for a generation or two to actually interact as productive members of society.
Addressing the second issue doesn't necessarily exclude our ability to leverage models for business productivity but it seems unlikely to happen in the current climate without that also happening. I am hesitant to believe in a sudden outbreak of common sense at this point. The first point, could really be a systems collapse trigger - we can argue about the likelihood but denying it as a possibility is excessively naive.
Both seem to just point at the WALL-E outcome, summarized as humans outsourcing too much thinking. I just don't see that as an end- just another divide between people. I'm seeing some degradation for sure, but not really an "end".
there are claims that llms might be taxing on the planet to run BUT that they will solve [some, all] problems including climate change and therefore be beneficial in the long run.
I agree with the skill drain argument but also think its a little too dramatic. Most people still can do the shit claude does for them, it just takes them 10x as long.
How can it end well, when it's mostly owned / controlled by narcistic billionaires who would love to eradicate anyone who so much as looks at them sideways? And who view "mass population reduction" and "I'll get to be a king in my castle, served by peons who depend on my favor to live" as the most desirable outcome of AGI?!?
If even one of these had pledge that all profit goes to end world hunger, cancer research, etc, I could possibly see it - but they haven't. They're all after finding a way to be the biggest, richest asshole possible with the ability to crush anyone in their way..
Have you isolated yourself completely from reality? I don't even know where to begin on this. Let's start with the fact that China is pumping out some near-frontier models and open sourcing the weights- and they don't even follow capitalism and the owners aren't billionaires. Really there are like four models in the USA that are "owners/controllers", and only one is even slightly controllable by its CEO, though none of the frontier models can last a week without the support of entire teams.
Why on earth would you want to siphon off the proceeds of AI development to (ok my bias is strong here- mostly corrupt) "ideals" like world hunger and cancer research (that probably get more dollars annually than the sum of actual profit any of these companies will ever get). That would just instantly kill the ability to improve AI at all, and the world could possibly be better for a few months?
I got out of the habit of leaning on debuggers with first making sure I'm not lacking in logging. I can't remember the last time I actually needed to set a break point.
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