> Do you want the US to "win" AI?
I don't want any one particular country, or organization, to "win" AI. I want AI capabilities to remain diffuse and spread out, so that everybody has access to approximately equal levels of AI. If anything, you might say that I want "Open Source to win AI".
That's the last thing big tech companies want. Maybe Meta being the odd exception with Llama.
Meta wants the models to be cheap and available because their strength is the context data and platform control.
Apple, at least at present.
Meta is not in the AI game any more
Didn't they just announce they were going to be surveilling all their employees screens and keystrokes for AI training? Is that just for the love of the game rather than as part of a product?
That's probably just for internal metrics, automating dev work and facilitate stack ranking. Not to release a product necessarily.
Just saw Zuckerberg post from July 2025 saying they are going to be "careful" with what they release.
1) In the AI world, that's a very long time ago
2) That still equates to "Meta is not in the AI game any more" in meta-corporate speak
Yes, point two is what I meant.
Right, in particular my belief long term is that there must be functional open source AI + Robotics that common people can own and operate.
Otherwise big corporations and/or governments will own everything and most folks will be serfs. However if you can buy a few robots and go run a homestead then there can be a counterbalance of people not beholden to the system.
A telling sign of techno-feudalism will be AI becoming heavily regulated and even illegal for common people to make or own. You know because “public safety”.
>I want AI capabilities to remain diffuse and spread out...
The most widely used AI systems are controlled by a few billionaires. I'd like to see it become much more spread out.
Fair. I could have phrased that better. I agree, things should ideally become even more diffuse than they currently are!
This smells like how markets would work well if everyone had a little capital. But money is too fungible. The more you have the more you can get.
But if electricity and hardware is a proxy for AI then those things are much less fungible. And if those two things in turn are not tied to the hip with money.
> If anything, you might say that I want "Open Source to win AI".
Has OSS won in terms of being software for the people?
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The Chinese government is bad, sure. But notice that recently the US government has been co-opted by people who want to bring back feudalism and reduce most of us to the status of "serf".
And the big US tech companies largely seem to be run by, and occupied by, people who at least tacitly support this whole "techno-feudalism" thing.
So for my money, I'm not particularly a fan of either camp. I'm just hoping that when the cyberpunk dystopia fully develops, I'll have as much open source AI on my side as I can muster to help me survive.
This is very true, but:
- very little of this has ever extended outside Chinese borders, apart from the extraterritorial policing of Chinese nationals; they've not "gone global" in the way the US did
- the current US faction is also trying to work towards an ethnostate, and has turned hard against non-USians and increasingly against non-white US nationals: https://edition.cnn.com/2024/05/01/politics/trump-immigratio...
As a Brit:
"it so happens that I was born not [American] and have no ancestry in [America], and the preponderance of evidence over the last few decades shows that the result of this, is that [American billionaires] will pretty much never "share the wealth" with me in any meaningful form." Moreover, American and Russian billionaires have shown substantial interest in making the politics of my home country much worse.