> Should we have scrapped it all, called it a crime against humanity, and never developed AI, because it will take a decade to disseminate the benefits to everyone?

Nah, we should have:

1. invested less, in a more targeted way

2. ideally like ARPANET, with the benefits given to all humanity

3. with fair royalties paid to all (where relevant)

4. and by creating an ever growing shared curated and high quality data set that would allow anyone to create their own competitive LLM

ARPANET & co were all taxpayer funded and the internet has created more wealth than most human inventions. The base should be part of the commons, everyone should knock themselves out by building on top.

Exactly like the internet.

> and never developed AI, because it will take a decade to disseminate the benefits to everyone?

Yes, probably. The benefits of dissemination already existed. The internet was free. Libraries are free. You deny people basic reading and comprehension growth by giving a distilled, without thought, answer.

You say "some time in the future this might be available on our phones for free" and "what's 10 years in the grand scheme of things?"

We'll, I'll argue that in 10 years from now we may see the full damage of what doing this has done to us and I'd rather not wait for "the what's 10 years in the grand scheme of things" to playout and irreversibly damage an entire generation the way we let the unmitigated and unregulated rollout of social media do the same to the most recent generation.

The risk/reward of this technology is unproven regarding the long-term effects on developing minds. We are beta testing the bullshit dreams of a couple billionaire techbros on an entire cohort of kids and young adults.