prngl

There are 2 economic arguments for why it would make sense for Chinese State to subsidize the open-sourcing of models beyond undermining Anthropic's and OpenAI's investments (and by proxy the American financial economy, ie capital class):

1. As induced demand for domestic semiconductor production, where the level and diversity (ie number of distinct corporate users) of demand for the hardware is tied to the availability of models you can run yourself, ie open-weight models. If you believe that semiconductors will continue to be an important sector for innovation, productivity growth, and security, then it would make sense to subsidize broadly now, for future gains later. This would be the same export-led manufacturing discipline that allowed China to successfully develop several other sectors over the last 50 years.

2. It is likely that the bulk of value production will happen above (and below, ie #1) the large models. We already know that 90% of the training cost (maybe even closer to 99%) is in the single pre-training, but that an enormous amount of the value is actually in the supervised, RL, constitutional fine-tuning, and harness building that happens afterward. So, if your interest was in maximizing the size of the pie, you may actively subsidize the pre-training so as to maximize the downstream usages. This induces a direct value transfer from the labs specializing in pre-training to all downstream builders and users. There's a similar logic to subsidizing or state-financing the construction of other infrastructure and basic research.

This was an interesting interview. Like a lot of great comedians, Odenkirk has a very grounded and bleak view of the world. I suppose a lot of art, comedy included, is a way of coping with their perspective, for themselves and for the audience.

Should have specified old used thinkpads. I’ve never bought one new. My daily driver is 10+yo, bought for $200 and upgraded mem, battery, and ssd with another $100.

Resonates. Reminds me of old Thinkpads. Cheap sometimes means accessible, simple, minimal, functional.

Very Don Norman problem. It is odd that things like this aren't more of a "solved problem." Maybe they are in some places and builders in the US just ignore the best practices.

These are the points I'm making, which I think are fairly one-to-one with my original comment:

- American politics presents a false choice between Democrats and Republicans

- America is both a consumerist and corporatist society

- Anthropic asked for minimal limits on AI usage

- People view Anthropic's stand as heroic, while viewing OpenAI as villainous

- The false choice between Anthropic and OpenAI mirrors the false choice in American politics.

- People at OpenAI, Anthropic, and elsewhere used to view ethical deployment of AI as paramount, but those goalposts have shifted as financial and political incentives changed.

- Specifically, the ethics of AI have become conveniently synonymous with the current financial and political moment.

- The current political moment is fascist.

- Technology is broadly neutral and it is politics that primarily dictates how technology is actually used and deployed, and therefore its broad impacts.

- The internet was developed in the neoliberal era, which began with the election of Ronald Reagan and extended through the Obama presidency.

- The structure and dynamics of the internet over the last 30 years is more reflective of neoliberal politics than it is of anything inherent in the technology. Extreme privitization and the refusal to use public institutions to provision or regulate public goods.

- AI is being developed in a new political era, begun with the first Trump presidency, and taking more full shape under the second Trump presidency.

- We are likely to find that AI's trajectory is similarly dictated largely by politics rather than anything inherent to the technology.

- With this political era being fascist and explicitly neo-imperial/neo-colonial, I fear for the technology's impact on humanity.

- God help us.

It's funny how the false choice of American politics (Red vs Blue) also makes it into its consumerist corporatist life. That Anthropic's threadbare "limits" on government usage are seen as a heroic stand is a testament to just how far the goalposts on "ethical" deployment of AI have moved to the (fascist) right. As ever, politics precedes technology. We have Reagan's internet, we will have Trump's AI. God help us.

Looks nice!

I think this is spot on. It’s interesting how rhetoric about “liberty” seems to practically serve oligarchy. I suppose an alternative to bans and regulations is to genuinely pursue the elimination of deprivation, orient our collective capacities towards our collective well-being, and then let people do what they will. Anything short of that seems to be a rather false liberty (and a rather false democracy, while we’re at it).

Looks nice. Maybe share a bit about the implementation (windowing, networking, security, Mac APIs, …)?

Here here. Strategy and efficiency are overrated, desire (even obsession) underrated.

Yes, I think you're right. Seems to reveal a fundamentally extractive, rather than value-generative, economic model.

I always find it odd when media (and others) consider consumerism as somehow "helping" the economy. The economy is entirely about the collective activity of humans serving humans. Everything we make or do is really about prioritizing that activity over others. Why would it be advantageous to prioritize barely-distinguishable "new" devices over the myriad other things human labor and capital could be put to?