academia_hack

Fair. My point is not that all of Marxism is correct (or even most of it) but rather that the specific pattern he and other theorists in that school of thought observed when developing the theory of historical materialism seems to strongly match a lot of what's playing out in AI.

AI, doesn't feel all that different to the mechanical loom that was the impetus behind a lot of Marx's early critiques of industrial technology.

You've got a really cool invention that replaces what was previously a skilled artisan trade. The wealthy then use this invention to excoriate the artisans and render the loom operators as replaceable commodities.

Dario is essentially writing a blog post about why only he (and a few other approved elite companies) should be trusted to own the loom and then make it available for everyone else to labor at. Like the capitalists of Marx's era, he genuinely believes it is better for everyone to have this arrangement and that it is natural people like him should sit as benevolent gods at the top of the pyramid.

It's fascinating to me to see the same underlying mechanisms that gave birth to some of the greatest failed political and social experiments of the 20th century bubbling up again so clearly with AI today.

I'm not terribly optimistic. I don't think humans have really figured out what to do about historical materialism. More just remarking that this is a blog post that almost literally reads "fellow elites, let us ensure only we control the means of production. It is our duty to humanity to control the masses."

I think you're reading too much into what I'm saying. We've got a whole legal system developed over the course of thousands of years which is well suited towards regulating the effects of "intelligence" by regulating what people _do_ with it.

Lobbying for a completely parallel regulatory framework to restrict who is allowed to run specific types of general purpose computer programs, just because we can imagine that some of those "general purposes" might be bad, feels a lot more like an attempt by capitalists to carve out a special kingdom over this specific technology for themselves.

For example, I'd be 100% in favor of holding anthropic criminally liable any time their AI enables someone to commit a crime. But I'm opposed to banning the export of GPUs above a certain size just because Dario doesn't trust what someone like me would do with them if he couldn't snoop on my conversations.

Dario's proposed approach is a classic example of capital attempting to control technological advancement and the means of production. For the first time in human history, any member of the working class can just about afford to have a team of expert scientist/physician/lawyer/engineers working directly for them.

Super intelligence (the ability to have many smarter minds than your own reporting to you) has always been available to the wealthy and powerful. They used it to invent nuclear weapons, cause climate change, mechanize warfare, and pillage the global south.

Now that this same tool is on the cusp of being available to everyone, capital is starting to panic and throw up fences. They want to pump the breaks on a revolution they know they can't control. They see what they've done with super intelligence and (perhaps not unreasonably) fear what the masses will do with that same power.

The essay includes specific regulatory measures to prevent developing countries from accessing hardware and software needed to benefit from technological development. The US government is constantly applying new perversions of arms control regulations based on the preposterous claim that an LLM is somehow an "arms" in order to restrict Chinese access to GPUs. They are willing to prevent virtually any country on earth from hosting and developing AI models just on the slight chance those countries resell or share AI knowledge with China.

This article explicitly asks for the US government to step in and push for further restrictions on model distillation, access to open frontier weights, and access to hardware. It also pushes heavily for independent auditors to monitor and control "AI companies" and for greater observation and control over of what people use AI models for and who provides them.

I'm tired of tech billionaires lobbying the US government to make an AI patriot act that gives them unprecedented control over speech, trade, and technology. The narrative is grotesquely transparent:

1) AI is a dangerous technology that can literally end the world.

2) Only me and a handful of other [people like me] should be trusted to determine who can use it and how.

3) The state must use its coercive power to support my control of this technology to the exclusion of [people not like me].

It's inordinately difficult and expensive to start an LLC or SA in some EU countries. It's even difficult and expensive to _stop_ an LLC and dissolve it. Huge amount of risk and cost on founders and a huge distraction from running a business.

I think that EU-Inc _could_ be an improvement, but it needs to avoid the committee laundry list of ideas/requirements/form fields that plagues the EU startup ecosystem. My worry is that the end result will require notarized declarations of honour, financial plans stretching decades into the future, 30 page business plan documents, reams of corporate governance documents, and tons of other nonsense to protect against the perceived risk that someone who failed at starting a business once fails a second time.

There needs to be UX requirements on the process from day one against which the end result is judged. (E.g. "a company should be able to register in x days", "a complete application should be no longer than y pages", "application costs should be less than z euros").

++

Anecdotally, I find you can tell if someone worked at a big AI provider or a small AI startup by proposing an AI project like this:

" First we'll train a custom trillion parameter LLM for HTML generation. Then we'll use it to render our homepage to our 10 million daily visitors. "

The startup people will be like "this is a bad idea because you don't have enough GPUs for training that LLM" and the AI lab folks will be like "How do you intend to scale inference if you're not Google?"

I hear this a lot (that children learn languages faster, or the corollary from various app ads that the best way to learn a language is to do so like a baby does), but is it actually true?

It takes children a very very long time to learn a language and they're quite bad at it for many years. I've even met some teens/young adults who are only borderline literate in their native language after years of schooling and immersion.

Everyone remotely competent in AI in the federal government that I know has quit in disgust over the past 6 months. I know zero talented AI people who are looking to take a cut in pay, benefits, and career stability to sign up for a new job working for this administration.

As a result, there's zero chance even the sensible parts of this strategy won't just end up coopted into multi-billion dollar Palantir contracts to deliver outdated llama models behind some clunky UI with the word "ontology" plastered on every button.

At least to me, loyalty _is_ the benefit. I can't conscience working for someone I hate or someone who I don't feel like I want to help succeed. I've definitely quit jobs before just because the senior leader in my reporting chain was replaced with some smarmy windbag I didn't believe in.

That's not to say it's _much_ of a benefit, but if the only thing a job gives me is a market-rational amount of dollars and health benefits in exchange for life-hours, the invisible hand ensures I can find that virtually anywhere.

Do you think there is a role for the federal government to employ engineers for any purpose? 18F was a general purpose engineering group that built software for many agencies instead of having those agencies pay vast amounts of money to Deloitte/Accenture/Booz Allen etc for a worse quality product.

The data collection isn't even quiet. There's an entire cottage industry of companies that scrape these traffic cam feeds, store everything for x numbers of months in low-cost cloud vaults (e.g. glacier) and then offer lawyers/clients in traffic disputes access to footage that may have captured an accident for exorbitant rates. It's a remarkable little ecosystem of privatized mass surveillance.