Could you just be an API to serve intelligence instead of moving into the app layer and putting your clients out of business. How much wealth and power do you need to accumulate seriously?
Don't worry, we had DreamWeaver, Wordpress and other tools for a long time now but it still did not replace web developers. Build quality tailor made websites that connect to humans and you will be fine.
DreamWeaver and WordPress both had limits on the complexity of site they could build. If you wanted more than what they can do, you look to web developers.
This was always the play…
Wait until the models are trained to work on “capsules of your data” stored by OpenAI, and deploy your apps/services onto OpenAI cloud where you can _easily_ share the development with your team members’ AI agents. Ofcourse, they will all work only if you use and pay for their models via their subscriptions. A new global {K-V, Relational, Vector} database that your coding model is already trained to work with! will come very soon…
They know the API price wars are a race to the bottom with little/no profit margins.
I think this is going to back fire. I have talked to 5 tech leaders at companies and universities this week about setting up their own infrastructure for inference and training. They are worried about multiple rug pulls: increasing cost of tokens, stealing ideas, training on data etc. they are all willing to uses less intelligence models if they avoid these issues. They’ve seen me setting up propelcompute.com for my start up and propelcode.app neither of which are intended to be commercial products and want to do the same.
The question of them moving into the app layer is completely irrelevant. If you are threatened by this the reality you need to begin making peace with is that your business is not going to exist within 10 years. And that's being extremely generous.
Irrelevant to what? It’s highly relevant to how AI will evolve and how the distribution of its benefits will propagate across society.
If they merely acted as APIs, even if that meant they would be “relegated” to the status of a utility then individuals and businesses would have faith and confidence that their use of AI wouldn’t be the very thing that puts them out of business. I think that would result in more innovation, faster adoption and deployment, and broader distribution of economic benefits.
As OpenAI and anthropic march towards an everything app they are smothering infant industries in the cradle and undermining their own users confidence that it’s safe to use their models.
I have talked to over 10 people at universities, SMBs, and large enterprises that are actively allocating millions of dollars to bring AI in house.
No it won't matter because if they don't someone else will.
It's like trying to stop adoption of computers by cobbling together a union of human calculators. It's an economically nonsensical position that simply comes across as denialism. It's not even desirable.
You are advocating a protection of the managerial and owner class to keep the economy needlessly balkanized. Universities are some of the greatest offenders in perpetuating inequality. Why have universities gotten more unaffordable?
Replacing most universities with federated campuses, eliminating their managers, open classrooms, LLM TAs and other resources to respect the diversity of the student population, etc. would be better for the world, not worse. If you want to take the side of the incumbents in an economy already teeming with inequality be my guest.
The saving grace of the approaching compute as utility end state is the destruction of the class of interests you purportedly represent. With mass layoffs will come mass demand for UBI, and the destruction of universities that are in truth the ones doing the rug pulling you mentioned elsewhere. People complain about public incentives for AI? What about schools? Has the quality of schooling increased with price? And I'm supposed to be taking your side?
The ultimate rug pull is one we should all look forward to - the polity saying, thank you for your hard work Mr. Altman, Mr. Musk, Mr Whoever but this technology belongs to everyone now. It would only be right given we all know they are trained on a corpus that really should be considered a public good.
If LLMs become the "everything app" they will have to either be nationalized by the state (UBI), or the billionaires are going to kill us all with their robot soldiers. The battle is not over technology, it's about ownership. The owners you represent are less desirable because their continued existence is further behind the most desirable end state, and they themselves are only desirable if you assume only the worst possible futures will come to pass. I believe if UBI is progressively scaled enough over the years enough billionaires will be satisfied to refrain from mass homicide, as has happened before when wealth generating technologies essentially became state utilities.
Good luck in your efforts. It's always possible my model of the world is incorrect. A meaningfully informative rejoinder in that respect would be welcome.
I am not suggesting we don't adopt tech, it's how the tech is allowed to be sold and propagated through society. Using your analogy it's like if we allowed only a single company to manufacture cpus, hard drives and build the software such that there was no possibility of a competitive market. That's a policy choice that can and should be evaluated for the harms monopoly systems create. We as a civilization don't have to allow openai and anthropic to move into the app layer we can say as a condition of the ability to operate a commercial enterprise they are prohibited. We do that with antitrust law, utility regulations, telecom and countless other sectors.
I am not advocating protecting the management class, quite the opposite, I am saying their demonstrated greed in vertical and horizontal integration should be stopped because they have shown they cant be responsible with management authority. You use the word balkenized to imply that fragmented AI is a bad but fragmentation is the basis of free market capitalism and in particular the start up ecosystem.
Your advocating that society just capitulate to Sam Altman and grant a permanent monopoly and the status as permanent underclass because he did "hard work" but that is flawed for two reasons: 1. Hard work doesn't justify destroying the very system that allowed the conditions for that hard work and innovation to create wealth by letting winners convert a free market to a monopoly. That tension is the internal contradiction of free market capitalism, winners will become monopoly such that no more winners are possible. We solved this in the progressive era with utilities, oil companies etc, by either breaking up the companies that had too much market dominance, or making them divest vertical integration units (like standard oil having to sell its rail lines because owning transportation gave it an insurmountable advantage). 2. There is no AI without training data AI which was taken without consent or compensation from public and private sources created by civilization over generations. So the polity has a clear preceding claim to that work and if any industry lacks a right to the ownership of what they've created it's AI. Sam Altmans hardwork is trivial compared to the totality of civilization writing over generations and creating the internet and maintaining libraries and a mailing system so they could collect that data economically.
For those reasons it's totally justified and we'll within the legal and commercial precedents we've established to limit how a single company can develop and operate AI. We should not allow vertical integration across the stack. Openai cant manufacture chips, train models, and build an everything app from customer training data. I don't know ow what owners your think I am defending or representing but I would suggest you are arguing with a phantom opponent that isn't me or are misunderstanding my position. I am not suggesting nationalizing AI or giving the polity ownership, I am suggesting standard corrective regulation to preserve a free market with clear preceding examples from the last technology transformation. We suffered great harm when the electric grid and phone lines and oil and shipping consolidation was unimpeded and unlocked innovation and broad wealth creation when we broke them up.
I appreciate the response but I think you need to read what I wrote again.
I don't think I'm arguing with a "phantom" at all, rather you seem to suggest I want OpenAI to own the economy when I rather precisely articulated the most desirable "rug pull" (using a phrase you yourself invoked elsewhere in this discussion) would be depriving them of that very opportunity. If anyone has misread this, I would suggest it's you. We simply seem to disagree on the timing and nature of the regulatory intervention.
Are you against UBI? We've gone back and forth with each other for a bit now and I still don't have an answer to that question.
I have read your posts closely. If I misunderstand them I am open to being corrected. So here is what I take from them. I don’t think you are advocating for OpenAI to be a monopoly. I think you assume that it’s inevitable that someone will. And the only solution is to nationalize them and then use the proceeds to fund UBI.
Is that accurate and complete? If not, what am I missing?
Btw you didn’t ask me for my opinion on UBI, you declared your opinion as a statement or at most a rhetorical question not something that warranted a response. That might not be what you intended but reread your sentence and ask if someone would interpret it as a question rather than a statement.
I am not opposed to UBI or nationalizing AI, and I am not defending a managerial or ownership class. I am arguing that there is an intermediate step available to prevent the emergence of a monopoly that is fully vertically integrated with custom chips —> training —> inference —> application—> deployment.
Society doesnt need to allow that. We can limit OpenAI and anthropics ability to build the app layer. We could limit their share of compute to a percentage of available compute and make the remaining share available to other competitors. We could require that they distribute their training data to others after some period of time. We could require they release their weights.
There are a broad set of tools available to ensure that don’t capture the whole intelligence stack and then expand horizontally to, as you said, make it so “my business doesn’t exist in 10 years”. The fact that you don’t know my business but could credibly predict that they could put most businesses out of existence is a massive problem that UBI won’t fix.
I don’t want to live in a society where humanity is living on the patronage of monopoly AI. And AI won’t be viable if no one has money because they greedily expand everywhere and put people out of work and businesses out of existence.
I think there are intermediate solutions before UBI and full nationalization are needed and we should implement them. Specifically, making sure vertical integration isn’t allowed, making sure compute access is broadly distributed rather than let openAI and anthropic lock it all up, making sure training data sets must be released within a short time frame like we do with patents, making sure the labs can’t copy customers.
You mostly have it right. I appreciate the response.
Now it is my turn to make sure I understand what you are saying. On that count, I think there is a remaining point where we are not understanding each other. And really the rest of the discussion hinges on this.
You say:
> I am not defending a managerial or ownership class.
But also say:
> I have talked to over 10 people at universities, SMBs, and large enterprises that are actively allocating millions of dollars to bring AI in house.
Who are these people with such authority if not the managerial or ownership class, or at the very least, their representatives?
I think what you are saying is quite plainly a defense of such interests. We sort of need to agree on that or the rest of the discussion cannot follow.
Once we align on that, I will have more to say which I believe will close the loop I have been attempting to weave.
I have been enjoying this back and forth though. Some of your points do make sense. Perhaps you are even correct. But let's be accurate about the nature of the two options we each propose, only then can we attempt to grasp some sense of the tradeoffs.
Where do you live in a hut somewhere? How are you accessing the internet?
Civilization is all about giving up control. Are roads also a mechanism to control people?
UBI is desirable and will likely only come about by the sorts of collective action that defined the labor movement. Are weekends also a "mechanism to control people"? I think you need to consult a history book, it would give you a better grasp of who is "spreading nonsense" here.
The "intelligence API" layer seems like a pretty rough business to be in. The smarter the models the more they're commodities (since they can use any harness or scaffolding) resulting in a race to the bottom on pricing. And then each new better model requires double the cost of the previous one.
I'm surprised there's not a bigger push into better and useful memory, since that would result in actual lock-in.
What is wrong with being a commodity, or a utility? Oil companies do just fine. So do electricity companies. Why does everyone have to seek world domination instead of building a good business. My point is by cannibalizing their clients they risk not being trusted by anyone. But Microsoft did the same thing and created a durable monopoly because Republicans abandoned anti trust enforcement and that seems likely here.
digitaltrees · · focus · HN ↗
[deleted] · · focus · HN ↗
[deleted]
bit1993 · · focus · HN ↗
copperx · · focus · HN ↗
tripleee · · focus · HN ↗
That limitation doesn't exist with ChatGPT
hyperionultra · · focus · HN ↗
reacharavindh · · focus · HN ↗
They know the API price wars are a race to the bottom with little/no profit margins.
digitaltrees · · focus · HN ↗
transdev12 · · focus · HN ↗
[dead]
godwinson__4-8 · · focus · HN ↗
I hope you support UBI.
digitaltrees · · focus · HN ↗
If they merely acted as APIs, even if that meant they would be “relegated” to the status of a utility then individuals and businesses would have faith and confidence that their use of AI wouldn’t be the very thing that puts them out of business. I think that would result in more innovation, faster adoption and deployment, and broader distribution of economic benefits.
As OpenAI and anthropic march towards an everything app they are smothering infant industries in the cradle and undermining their own users confidence that it’s safe to use their models.
I have talked to over 10 people at universities, SMBs, and large enterprises that are actively allocating millions of dollars to bring AI in house.
godwinson__4-8 · · focus · HN ↗
It's like trying to stop adoption of computers by cobbling together a union of human calculators. It's an economically nonsensical position that simply comes across as denialism. It's not even desirable.
You are advocating a protection of the managerial and owner class to keep the economy needlessly balkanized. Universities are some of the greatest offenders in perpetuating inequality. Why have universities gotten more unaffordable?
Replacing most universities with federated campuses, eliminating their managers, open classrooms, LLM TAs and other resources to respect the diversity of the student population, etc. would be better for the world, not worse. If you want to take the side of the incumbents in an economy already teeming with inequality be my guest.
The saving grace of the approaching compute as utility end state is the destruction of the class of interests you purportedly represent. With mass layoffs will come mass demand for UBI, and the destruction of universities that are in truth the ones doing the rug pulling you mentioned elsewhere. People complain about public incentives for AI? What about schools? Has the quality of schooling increased with price? And I'm supposed to be taking your side?
The ultimate rug pull is one we should all look forward to - the polity saying, thank you for your hard work Mr. Altman, Mr. Musk, Mr Whoever but this technology belongs to everyone now. It would only be right given we all know they are trained on a corpus that really should be considered a public good.
If LLMs become the "everything app" they will have to either be nationalized by the state (UBI), or the billionaires are going to kill us all with their robot soldiers. The battle is not over technology, it's about ownership. The owners you represent are less desirable because their continued existence is further behind the most desirable end state, and they themselves are only desirable if you assume only the worst possible futures will come to pass. I believe if UBI is progressively scaled enough over the years enough billionaires will be satisfied to refrain from mass homicide, as has happened before when wealth generating technologies essentially became state utilities.
Good luck in your efforts. It's always possible my model of the world is incorrect. A meaningfully informative rejoinder in that respect would be welcome.
digitaltrees · · focus · HN ↗
I am not advocating protecting the management class, quite the opposite, I am saying their demonstrated greed in vertical and horizontal integration should be stopped because they have shown they cant be responsible with management authority. You use the word balkenized to imply that fragmented AI is a bad but fragmentation is the basis of free market capitalism and in particular the start up ecosystem.
Your advocating that society just capitulate to Sam Altman and grant a permanent monopoly and the status as permanent underclass because he did "hard work" but that is flawed for two reasons: 1. Hard work doesn't justify destroying the very system that allowed the conditions for that hard work and innovation to create wealth by letting winners convert a free market to a monopoly. That tension is the internal contradiction of free market capitalism, winners will become monopoly such that no more winners are possible. We solved this in the progressive era with utilities, oil companies etc, by either breaking up the companies that had too much market dominance, or making them divest vertical integration units (like standard oil having to sell its rail lines because owning transportation gave it an insurmountable advantage). 2. There is no AI without training data AI which was taken without consent or compensation from public and private sources created by civilization over generations. So the polity has a clear preceding claim to that work and if any industry lacks a right to the ownership of what they've created it's AI. Sam Altmans hardwork is trivial compared to the totality of civilization writing over generations and creating the internet and maintaining libraries and a mailing system so they could collect that data economically.
For those reasons it's totally justified and we'll within the legal and commercial precedents we've established to limit how a single company can develop and operate AI. We should not allow vertical integration across the stack. Openai cant manufacture chips, train models, and build an everything app from customer training data. I don't know ow what owners your think I am defending or representing but I would suggest you are arguing with a phantom opponent that isn't me or are misunderstanding my position. I am not suggesting nationalizing AI or giving the polity ownership, I am suggesting standard corrective regulation to preserve a free market with clear preceding examples from the last technology transformation. We suffered great harm when the electric grid and phone lines and oil and shipping consolidation was unimpeded and unlocked innovation and broad wealth creation when we broke them up.
godwinson__4-8 · · focus · HN ↗
I don't think I'm arguing with a "phantom" at all, rather you seem to suggest I want OpenAI to own the economy when I rather precisely articulated the most desirable "rug pull" (using a phrase you yourself invoked elsewhere in this discussion) would be depriving them of that very opportunity. If anyone has misread this, I would suggest it's you. We simply seem to disagree on the timing and nature of the regulatory intervention.
Are you against UBI? We've gone back and forth with each other for a bit now and I still don't have an answer to that question.
digitaltrees · · focus · HN ↗
Is that accurate and complete? If not, what am I missing?
Btw you didn’t ask me for my opinion on UBI, you declared your opinion as a statement or at most a rhetorical question not something that warranted a response. That might not be what you intended but reread your sentence and ask if someone would interpret it as a question rather than a statement.
I am not opposed to UBI or nationalizing AI, and I am not defending a managerial or ownership class. I am arguing that there is an intermediate step available to prevent the emergence of a monopoly that is fully vertically integrated with custom chips —> training —> inference —> application—> deployment.
Society doesnt need to allow that. We can limit OpenAI and anthropics ability to build the app layer. We could limit their share of compute to a percentage of available compute and make the remaining share available to other competitors. We could require that they distribute their training data to others after some period of time. We could require they release their weights.
There are a broad set of tools available to ensure that don’t capture the whole intelligence stack and then expand horizontally to, as you said, make it so “my business doesn’t exist in 10 years”. The fact that you don’t know my business but could credibly predict that they could put most businesses out of existence is a massive problem that UBI won’t fix.
I don’t want to live in a society where humanity is living on the patronage of monopoly AI. And AI won’t be viable if no one has money because they greedily expand everywhere and put people out of work and businesses out of existence.
I think there are intermediate solutions before UBI and full nationalization are needed and we should implement them. Specifically, making sure vertical integration isn’t allowed, making sure compute access is broadly distributed rather than let openAI and anthropic lock it all up, making sure training data sets must be released within a short time frame like we do with patents, making sure the labs can’t copy customers.
godwinson__4-8 · · focus · HN ↗
Now it is my turn to make sure I understand what you are saying. On that count, I think there is a remaining point where we are not understanding each other. And really the rest of the discussion hinges on this.
You say:
> I am not defending a managerial or ownership class.
But also say:
> I have talked to over 10 people at universities, SMBs, and large enterprises that are actively allocating millions of dollars to bring AI in house.
Who are these people with such authority if not the managerial or ownership class, or at the very least, their representatives?
I think what you are saying is quite plainly a defense of such interests. We sort of need to agree on that or the rest of the discussion cannot follow.
Once we align on that, I will have more to say which I believe will close the loop I have been attempting to weave.
I have been enjoying this back and forth though. Some of your points do make sense. Perhaps you are even correct. But let's be accurate about the nature of the two options we each propose, only then can we attempt to grasp some sense of the tradeoffs.
rudolftheone · · focus · HN ↗
This is rather just another mechanism to control people - by creating a dependency from entity which is providing this kind of support.
godwinson__4-8 · · focus · HN ↗
Civilization is all about giving up control. Are roads also a mechanism to control people?
UBI is desirable and will likely only come about by the sorts of collective action that defined the labor movement. Are weekends also a "mechanism to control people"? I think you need to consult a history book, it would give you a better grasp of who is "spreading nonsense" here.
nharada · · focus · HN ↗
I'm surprised there's not a bigger push into better and useful memory, since that would result in actual lock-in.
digitaltrees · · focus · HN ↗
micromacrofoot · · focus · HN ↗