Right now AI is looking a lot like a bubble. Wealthy people keep investing in it, but all the AI companies are losing money way faster than their profits. They’re selling compute at a vast loss, and if they charged full price, no-one would buy it.
With tin-foil hat firmly in place, this is what the owner class hopes to get out of AI:
1. Automate everything. As Corey Doctorow surmises, they want to automate as much as possible, until the working class just isn’t needed anymore, so they can build their Ayn Rand private city utopias (Peter Thiel has plans) and let the rest of us starve somewhere, displaced by the quarries, data centers and automated factories.
2. Create armies of swarming killer drones that are commanded by AI, as Randall Munroe predicted, not only to annex any territory that they can’t buy, but to garrison all the working class they’ve confined to reservations to die of thirst and hunger. And…
3. In the meantime, process all the mass surveillance information in order to predict who is a dissident or a troublemaker or is capable of organizing resistance, so that they can be dispatched early. Also to micromanage their dwindling workforce and make sure women can’t go to an abortion provider.
Not at all! China isn’t trying to do the same buildout. In fact, they’re turning towards the AI-as-software model, in which AI is run locally and sold as software rather than being sold as compute from large supercomputers.
It turns out that most of the things common folk and common businesses do with AI are managed pretty well with open source AI software run locally with a dozen terabytes of training data.
And if the US companies sold tokens at their actual rate (not at a loss) then it would be cheaper for even small businesses to put together a high-powered PC and set it up to do AI tasks. So for everything that isn’t the stuff I listed, the AI-as-service model is already obsolete.
Right now AI is looking a lot like a bubble. Wealthy people keep investing in it, but all the AI companies are losing money way faster than their profits. They’re selling compute at a vast loss, and if they charged full price, no-one would buy it.
With tin-foil hat firmly in place, this is what the owner class hopes to get out of AI:
1. Automate everything. As Corey Doctorow surmises, they want to automate as much as possible, until the working class just isn’t needed anymore, so they can build their Ayn Rand private city utopias (Peter Thiel has plans) and let the rest of us starve somewhere, displaced by the quarries, data centers and automated factories.
2. Create armies of swarming killer drones that are commanded by AI, as Randall Munroe predicted, not only to annex any territory that they can’t buy, but to garrison all the working class they’ve confined to reservations to die of thirst and hunger. And…
3. In the meantime, process all the mass surveillance information in order to predict who is a dissident or a troublemaker or is capable of organizing resistance, so that they can be dispatched early. Also to micromanage their dwindling workforce and make sure women can’t go to an abortion provider.
whatever you said is only true for US not China
Not at all! China isn’t trying to do the same buildout. In fact, they’re turning towards the AI-as-software model, in which AI is run locally and sold as software rather than being sold as compute from large supercomputers.
It turns out that most of the things common folk and common businesses do with AI are managed pretty well with open source AI software run locally with a dozen terabytes of training data.
And if the US companies sold tokens at their actual rate (not at a loss) then it would be cheaper for even small businesses to put together a high-powered PC and set it up to do AI tasks. So for everything that isn’t the stuff I listed, the AI-as-service model is already obsolete.