alt Hacker NewsMany of us on HN are beneficiaries of the standing world order and American hegemony.
I see the developments in LLMs not as getting us close to AGI, but more as destabilizing the status quo and potentially handing control of the future to a handful of companies rather than securing it in the hands of people. It is an acceleration of the already incipient decay.
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Are you seeing a moat develop around LLMs, indicating that only a small number of companies will control it? I'm not. It seems that there's nearly no moat at all.
Im pretty skeptical "the people" are smart enough to control their own destiny anymore. We've deprioritized education wo heavily in the US that it may be better to have a ruling class of corporations and elites. At least you know where things stand and how they'll operate.
The standing world order is already dead since well before AI, it ended back in 2010s in terms of when the US had an opportunity to maybe resist change and we're just watching the inevitable consequences play out. They no longer have the economic weight to maintain control over Asia even assuming China is overstating their income by 2x. The Ukraine war has been a bloodier path than we needed to travel to make the point, but if they can't coerce Russia there is an open question of who they can, Russia isn't a particularly impressive power.
With that backdrop it is hard to see what impact AI is supposed to make to people who are reliant on US hegemony. They probably want to find something reliable to rely on already.
It is not decay. People are just more conscious than previous generations ever were about how the world works. And that leads to confusion and misunderstandings if they are only exposed to herd think.
The chicken doesn't understand it has to lay a certain number of eggs a day to be kept alive in the farm. It hits its metrics because it has been programmed to hit them.
But once it gets access to chatgpt and develops consciousness of how the farm works, the questions it asks slowly evolve with time.
Initially its all fear driven - how do we get a say in how many eggs we need to lay to be kept alive? How do we keep the farm running without relying on the farmer? etc etc
Once the farm animals begins to realize the absurdity of such questions, new questions emerge - how come the crow is not a farm animal? why is the shark not used as a circus animal? etc etc
And thro that process, whose steps cannot be skipped the farm animal begins to realize certain things about itself which no one, especially the farmer, has any incentive of encouraging.
I agree. You wouldn't see incredibly powerful and wealthy people frothing at the mouth to build this technology if that wasn't true, in my opinion.