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Mary Leigh

pirating things is good, actually. this is one of the few things about LLMs i like. fuck copyright.

i mean yeah, it sucks if AI companies are stealing work from individuals for their own profit, but like... the entire world economy is based around the rich stealing from ordinary people, AI companies did not invent that.

feld

@feld@friedcheese.us remote

@lw people like to believe copyright is the an especially important thing protecting poor indie artists, authors, etc. It's not. This system serves to protect rich people and corporations by ensuring they can extract the maximum amount of capital out of everyone on the planet for absurd amounts of time in a world where culture and society is changing at a pace nobody could have ever predicted due to access to instant worldwide communication networks.

Mary Leigh

@lw@mastodon.bsd.cafe remote

@feld i can appreciate that, for example, without copyright it would be a lot more difficult for people to make money from things like stock photography and artwork, because it's the threat of copyright litigation (rather than actual litigation) that encourages companies to license that rather than just stealing it.

but in a general sense, yes, the entire system is broken and really only benefits middlemen and legacy copyright owners (Disney, etc).

feld

@feld@friedcheese.us remote

@lw and some business models are outdated. Stock photography? Doesn't even need to exist anymore now that we can generate whatever we want.

Technology caught up, that's just the way it is. And laws exist in response to changes in society; you really can't expect them to be proactive without disrupting potential progress. Too many unknown unknowns to play that game.

So unless your job is in the trades you probably shouldn't expect to be able to do the exact same job for your entire life or have one creative work that generates income for the rest of your life. It's an unrealistic expectation.

Mary Leigh

@lw@mastodon.bsd.cafe remote

@feld it's not clear to me that "we can generate whatever we want". in the sense that i could go on ChatGPT right now and ask for "an image of a woman fretting over how ridiculous capitalism is", yes, but OpenAI is losing billions of $ every year to let me do that.

no one has yet demonstrated that LLMs are sustainable either financially or environmentally.

feld

@feld@friedcheese.us remote

@lw

correction:

> no one has yet demonstrated that LLMs *as a centralized service* are sustainable either financially or environmentally at scale.

HOWEVER, the economics of this are rapidly changing. Huawei just released highly competitive frontier models trained and operated on their own hardware instead of Nvidia at 1/6th the cost. Jensen Huang recently warned about this saying it will be devastating for the American economy when China catches up. A few days later, China did.

Drop that hardware into OpenAI/Anthropic/etc and now they're no longer burning money

So it's totally doable, but not at the price Nvidia is selling the shovels.

feld

@feld@friedcheese.us remote

@lw we also shouldn't be shocked at this business model. Go ahead and point and laugh at Amazon, they lost money for a long time too (~20 years).

It's a game by investors to outlast the competition and then control the entire market. And it's not monopolistic as long as they aren't making choices that prevent a competitor from entering the market or attracting investors to play the same game of chicken.

It's such a dirty underhanded way of business though and the funding to make this business model possible only exists because we allow so much accumulation of wealth under the guise of "but they're creating businesses and jobs and and and...!"

Replying to @feld@friedcheese.us

Mary Leigh

@lw@mastodon.bsd.cafe remote

@feld the difference is Amazon was based on a well-known business model: undercut competitors through economy of scale. that would not have been a risky bet.

there's as yet no "economy of scale" in AI, only scaling at the same cost-per-user to support more users.

perhaps later models will change that, but perhaps not; we really don't know right now. i would certainly not be buying AI stocks right now, if i was rich enough to own stocks.

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Replying to @lw@mastodon.bsd.cafe

feld

@feld@friedcheese.us remote

@lw

> the difference is Amazon was based on a well-known business model: undercut competitors through economy of scale. that would not have been a risky bet.

You're ignoring that they also massively supported their retail business losses and competition undercutting with their AWS cloud revenue. If they weren't able to do that (and they shouldn't have, but laws are slow to catch up), it also would not have been possible. Their investors weren't funding *everything*. There's a bunch of evil accounting tricks being used that should be highly illegal.