> AI is a "public good" which will ultimately be provided by the state as a kind of "digital public infrastructure." This future strikes me as a dystopian hellscape

I don't know what this guy thinks AI is, but this strikes me as delusional.

In my view, AI (LLM) is two things mixed together:

1. A reasoning engine on top of relatively rich fuzzy modal logic, implemented through variety of rules, which implement very common concepts.

2. A huge dictionary of words defined (with lot of detail) in the said logic, together with many known facts about them. Maybe bigger than Wikipedia.

Now, how on Earth do you want to gatekeep either of this? You can't gatekeep the 1st, logic of common sense, that's almost as difficult as gatekeeping a Turing machine (a concept of a computer). And gatekeeping the 2nd is ridiculous too, as it was built mostly from already published sources like a giant Wikipedia.

If anything, the opposite, to gatekeep AI is actually dystopian. It would mean end not only to right to compute, but also end of right to scientific knowledge.

(And I think, honestly, Chinese understand this. Trying to control-export AI makes as much sense as trying to control-export an English dictionary.)

> One probable outcome of an open-weight-model-dominant world is full AI communism ... This future strikes me as a dystopian hellscape.

Wow, just wow. He is not even subtle about it.

What a full, mask-off crashout.

Point four is especially telling.

Ball is deeply terrified of "AI communism", or in less red-scarey terms a world where AI is a public good and him and his fellow oligarchs don't get to centralize the accumulated knowledge of all of humanity and charge rent for it.

I think he's so deeply stuck in his ideological bubble he can't conceive that what he describes as a dystopia is the only way the future wouldn't be a dystopia for the vast majority of people.

Or to put it more clearly, the oligarch utopia he's trying to build is dystopia for the vast majority of humanity. The "utopia" he's trying to build is one of riches for him and serfdom for us.