this post was submitted on 26 Jul 2023
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You know what would solve this? We all collectively agree this fucking tech is too important to be in the hands of a few billionaires, start an actual public free open source fully funded and supported version of it, and use it to fairly compensate every human being on Earth according to what they contribute, in general?
Why the fuck are we still allowing a handful of people to control things like this??
No entity on the planet has more money than our governments. It’d be more efficient for a government to fund this than any private company.
The government and efficiency don't go together
Plenty of research shows that each dollar into government programs gets much more returns than private companies. This literally a neolib propaganda talking point.
That's a lazy generalization.
Actually many bills are more of a fabric material now than an actual paper product. Many bills in Europe now are polymer based. Both of which add to the difficulty of counterfeiting
Actually most of the money are just 1‘s and 0‘s in a computer, coming into existence from nothing and vanishing into nothing. Fiat money backed by "trust". As Henry Ford once said:
It is well enough that people of the nation do not understand our banking and monetary system, for if they did, I believe there would be a revolution before tomorrow morning.There is nothing objectively wrong with your statement. However, we somehow always default to solving that issue by having some dragon hoard enough gold, and there is something objectively wrong with that.
Setting aside the obvious answer of "because capitalism", there are a lot of obstacles towards democratizing this technology. Training of these models is done on clusters of A100 GPU's, which are priced at $10,000USD each. Then there's also the fact that a lot of the progress being made is being done by highly specialized academics, often with the resources of large corporations like Microsoft.
Additionally the curation of datasets is another massive obstacle. We've mostly reached the point of diminishing returns of just throwing all the data at the training of models, it's quickly becoming apparent that the quality of data is far more important than the quantity of the data (see TinyStories as an example). This means a lot of work and research needs to go into qualitative analysis when preparing a dataset. You need a large corpus of input, each of which are above a quality threshold, but then also as a whole they need to represent a wide enough variety of circumstances for you to reach emergence in the domain(s) you're trying to train for.
There is a large and growing body of open source model development, but even that only exists because of Meta "leaking" the original Llama models, and now more recently releasing Llama 2 with a commercial license. Practically overnight an entire ecosystem was born creating higher quality fine-tunes and specialized datasets, but all of that was only possible because Meta invested the resources and made it available to the public.
Actually in hindsight it looks like the answer is still "because capitalism" despite everything I've just said.
I know the answer to pretty much all of our “why the hell don’t we solve this already?” questions is: capitalism.
But I mean, as Lrrr would say “why does the working class, as the biggest of the classes, doesn’t just eat the other one?”.
The short answer is friction. The friction of overcoming the forces of violence the larger class has at its disposal and utilizes at the smallest hint of uprising is greater than the friction of accepting the status quo.
Most people don’t even think that’s an option though.
The end of history, with the fall of USSR and capitalism winning the propaganda wars, means most people don’t even see a different future.
Why would you fight a future that looks the same?
People need to wake up and have hope for a different, better future. That’s the only way they’ll more against this.
But for that 100+ years of propaganda have to be overcome…
Because we shy away from responsibility.
I think the longer response to this is more accurate. It’s more “because capitalism” than anything else.
And capitalism over the course of the 20th century made very successful attempts of alienating completely the working class and destroying and class consciousness or material awareness.