Fascinating take from OpenAI. It really gives the lie to the idea that they see AI leading to a better life for all.
"One probable outcome of an open-weight-model-dominant world is full AI communism, which is precisely what China proposes: rather than a market product, 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, but I've never met an open-weight models advocate who doesn't ultimately concede this is where things end."
He never says why he thinks AI as a "public good" is dystopian, but it's not hard to imagine why. It's because he and his inner circle won't have the power to dictate what we read, see and hear.
Economists at DeepMind believe that if AI were treated as a public good—like water or electricity—with profits distributed across the entire market, ordinary people would simply be able to invest in mutual funds.
If the government provided funding to independent organizations that made public-goods AIs, that could be great, as long as the government had no editorial control.
It sounds like he's imagining AIs only being trained and provided by governments, which could get pretty dystopian.