alt Hacker NewsWhile I see lots of discussion about AI solving these problems, I feel like there's a more sinister undercurrent that's is less discussed - about who did the solving. It wasn't academics empowered by AI, but OpenAI themselves.
I feel like it's a sign of what's to come - large AI companies with resources academia never had, at some point deciding that selling access to AI is not as important as just doing the research themselves with models inaccessible to anyone else. The end game is all scientific advancement will be done by one or two companies, who will reap all the profits. Why would they give access to a model that develops a cure for cancer when they could develop the cure themselves and get all the money?
(Kind of like Amazon coming out with their own products - use the greater community for ideas, then become a competitor at a scale they often cannot match).
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I think you are right to note the undercurrent missing of "empowering" the people doing the solving.
This is in notable contrast to the "PC revolution" in the late 70s/early 80s, the marketing was all about equipping people, empowering individuals. It was a "personal" computer after all, not a big mainframe owned by corporate... designed to make you more powerful.
That messaging is wildly absent from the EA/SV-centric LLM/AI boom.
Instead it's about replacing you, the singularity, inevitability, fear-mongering, etc. And there is much more of a flavor of information asymmetry to the business model because of the Internet connectivity and SaaS structure to it all designed to enable the fastest possible feedback loops for the inventors combined with a bunch of pinkie promises with no actual controls possible on the user side at least for the frontier large models. What exactly did OpenAI peek at when doing Navier-Stokes and do they even know or would you trust them to tell you? You are right, it is a very different vibe.
Indeed. I think this will ultimately require government intervention and regulation to keep it from destabilizing and monopolizing the entire economy. They’ll have to make AI more like a public utility than a private SaaS subscription.
Mathematics is much easier that way to train. Science in general. Governments will again need to become powerhouses of resources for compute to generate public research.
Trump already spilled the beans on this. They want to just dump public money into these companies they can buy calls on and end the whole research model as we know it, replacing it with what exactly, they don't care as long as they can skim off the trillions spent on research.
Such a depressing time to be a knowledge worker with domain expertise.
I feel it would be effective and prudent to protest the current use of AI and to effectively unionize and ostracize AI use until many of these demands are met. The companies that own the models and the infrastructure will never be more vulnerable. They have fired a salvo. Fire Back.
100%. Thinking tasks cost money now. Some colleagues and I were having this very conversation this morning. Universities don't have the resources to access unlimited compute to do this kind of work. There are a lot of very cool projects being done but it's always like I'm spending 50k in tokens for X project.