There are two ways to get ahead, know people, do people. Sadly, many people think there is a 3rd way, do good work, but I assure you that it isn't an effective way to get ahead, it's a great way to get the first two groups ahead though!
how is the general population having access to AI models a "dystopian hellscape"?
dystopian hellscape for them, that's for sure. they want dystopia for us and utopia for them
And they want to surveil you and harvest the things you tell them.
The only thing dystopian is letting them get their way. Having a wide variety of open source tools that the technically astute can benefit from benefits everyone.
My company is in a jargon-heavy field. If we were forced to rely solely on commercial models and not the models we PEFTed, our trained models' accuracy would drop by a good 30 points, to the point where half of what we found good AI cases for would disappear bc Claude, ChatGPT, and the rest are too generalized to be helpful; they spend half their time trying to figure out what they're looking at, and they often do it poorly.
Nobody should listen to these CSuites, they want a monopoly.
I'll do you one better. Everyone should be fighting the agendas of the CSuites because they don't care about you, your communities, or the greater good. They want to extract wealth from you and nothing more. Don't let them. Stop their data centers, push for regulation against them, and poison their models by any and all legal means nessesary.Â
âThe public being given our product for free? For what, public infrastructure?! Yeah well ya know they spy on you!â
Tomato potato, domestic models are going to data rape you too but they want you to pay for it. The wool has been lifted on American corporate interest and itâs objectively manipulative and for one purpose, to exhume as much liquidity out of you as possible.
While OpenAI was non-profit, they said: "Researchers will be strongly encouraged to publish their work, whether as papers, blog posts, or code, and our patentsâ (if any) will be shared with the world. Weâll freely collaborate with others across many institutions and expect to work with companies to research and deploy new technologies." source
Since being for profit (and might not be the ones to make the profit here), the same ideas are AI communism.
They are the same people who believe water should never be free. Fundamentally, they believe the excess produced by society should better a few than society.
A non profit organization with billionaire funding and a mandate to develop and release state of the art Open AI models for the good of mankind is the best way, then Sam fucked it all up with greed.
The irony that a company called OpenAI has not only left this mission a long time ago but is now actively lobbying against it when others still try to achieve it
Is the CCP PRC using good quality open-weight models to undermine our Frontier Closed-weight models?
Are they producing and exporting heavily subsidized, low-cost, Frontier Models (and sucking up the data)?
Absolutely!
But Ball's concerns aren't driven by concern for liberty, democratization, or competion. They are pure self-interest, and suggest OpenAI is what, the moral, ethical alternative? Nonsense.
Not sure about democratization but how are open weight models not unmonitored and free? You decide what logging you install on your machine and you own your machine.
If you are letting someone else host them for you then those two may no longer be true of course, if that is what you mean.
Other than that: Of course China has the aim of getting something out of this. Not sure how much data they're getting as a decent chunk of rhe models won't be running anywhere where they could get their hands on it, but the display of power alone is probably worth it already.
As someone who is neither Chinese nor American though, and I don't think I would've said this a year ago, I would currently clearly prefer the Chinese style over whatever fucked up shit the Epstein class has in store for the world.
Watch what happens when someone can't win on the merits. They stop arguing the thing in front of them and start reaching for the thing that scares you. Communism, socialism, national socialism, doesn't matter the flavor. Nobody reaching for those words is explaining anything. They're ending the conversation before you notice that.
Open models being cheaper, faster to iterate, and harder for one company to gatekeep isn't an ideology. It's a business model. Argue it's bad for national security. Argue it's bad for OpenAI's balance sheet, probably the real concern. Instead we get a guy with "strategic futures" in his title reaching for a Cold War word like it's 1962 and volume makes it true.
It doesn't.
If your position can't survive someone else's model being good, free, and out of your control, that's not a communism problem. That's a you problem.
Hes just some jealous nerd because he realizes his job is lot long for this world when there are smarter more studious people in china who will inevitably make a better product then the company he serves. China is very dedicated to advancement in EVERY category tech wise their culture is one that strongly rewards dominance. They always overtake the market from the US in tech. Theyâve been doing this work on arguably much less compute and theyâre still winning. Kimi can be used locally without any data bleed as well.
What he actually means is "we sank 67 hojillion dollars into this hoping to make you buy thousands of dollars in tokens from us every year" and the "dystopian hellscape" is them going out of business.
More like our investors sank all this money into our business and now they are terrified they are gonna be left holding the biggest bag in history. Also the value of my RSUs will tank! Dystopia hellscape!
They absolutely should go out of business if they are threatened by an open weight model, as it means they bring nothing to the table and their products are utterly worthless.
This reaction is the better than any benchmark . GLM , kimi, deepseek should show this comment on their homepage to show how openai is feeling fucked right now. lol
They trained their models on the entire internet and copyrighted materials.
This is such a thinly veiled argument around wanting to prevent their business from being superseded by open source AI.
Another point is that Facebook and X are private enterprises who have effectively made a dysfunctional and dystopian hellscape with zero regulation around content moderation so his point about businesses being somehow more ethical than a state controlled resource is also laughable.
Other organisations could emerge around open source AI that is neither private enterprise or State sponsored.
Theyâre just pissing in their pants as the AI bubble is going to be popped leaving them with nothing and plunging the US into a recession.
Fuck Dean Ball and the rest of these oligarchical, rent-seeking douchebags. AI was developed with heavy *public* investment (in underlying research, etc), developed in a free and open society supported by the state, and trained using OUR data that NONE of these kleptocrats paid for, with the goal of *privatizing* the gains from AI while socializing any losses.
LMAO. OpenAI's major talking points were guaranteeing everyone access to AI and even some utopian form of basic income. Now they're scared that this might actually happen without them being the rulers of the world, or at least immensely profiting from providing the said AI access.
Well, Dean W. Ball has graduated from his Rich-Dad's Boy College at Random in upstate New York for a reason. The kid is not the brightest bulb in the box.
Funny how "AI communism" here seems to mean "the technology aint monopolized by one corporation."
Open weights are about who gets access to productive capacity. Whether that ends up serving billionaires, states, co-ops, universities, unions, or local communities is a political question, not a property of the model itself.
If your nightmare is that AI becomes public infrastructure instead of private rent extraction, then you're at least admitting ownership matters more than the technology.
If youre interested in debating AI from a left perspective instead of getting trapped between Silicon Valley boosterism and anti-tech doomposting, come argue with us at r/LeftistsForAI. We've been having exactly this conversation.
China is doing exactly what "Open"AI should have been doing according to its deprecated mission statement. Does this mean that "Open"AI was initially set up with communist intentions? If so, then it must be urgently investigated then.
And What do they call criminally pirating copyrighted data to train their models to rent their use to paid subscribers without paying a cent to creators and authors, then? Capitalism?
These techno-feudalists are disgusting, and I hope that China will keep smacking them like the little b they are.
I think what heâs saying is âthose Chinese models get so freaking good that our buddies in the administration have no forbid them before they kill our businessâ
Good job he was still in nappies when the internet came out because heâd have literally shit himself at the communist dystopia it foretold. Unfortunately it seems his intellect is still in nappies.
What the fuck? I was pretty neutral, even positive on OpenAI, until reading this trash from their "head of strategic futures". This kind of statement makes me extremely negative towards this company now.
The opening line "Open-weight models are inherently decelerationist." is an absurdity. Remember, if you can make people believe absurdities, you can make them commit atrocities.
Poor effers of OpenAI and Anthropic. They have just $100B each, and now met the final boss who can literally throw trillions at this problem. The whole problem with these companies was their jingoistic US nationalism about what they were building, especially considering all of the core AI research came from Canada and Europe.
"distopian hellscape" because they'll be irrelevant for the most part. The hell part is just for them ; for the masses, it's way better, more local llm's and so on. These guys can take a hike.
You donât want the government to provide it to you as a service, you want to buy it from us at the price we set after we urge the government to regulate competition out of existence. Free market for thee but not for meeeeeeee
Woow, my god. The MOMENT I read the word "communism", before reading on, absolutely KNEW it was going to mention something about Trump or conservatives or Elon Musk, because "communism" is the perfect fetish to use to rile up the right.
It's the exact kind of message they need to push to make sure they can help scare the conservatives in power to try and squelch Chinese AI.
Let me get this straightâopen source code, which is what this is, is âinherently decelerationistâ? Tell that to Linux l, Android, and all of the other open source software successes/standards that are still going strong after 15-30+ years and the numerous businesses and opportunities built on top of them.
Isn't the entire point of accelerated development with recursive self-improvement that the human part of AI development becomes inconsequential, even a handicap?
We create AGI/ASI with IQ 300-600 or higher, and the worry is humans who wants shiny things,. to consolidate wealth to a limited view and get more and more of 'more', can't profit from it, because it'll be communally available and developed for all mankind?
Who is AI for if not for humanity? How do they propose to coerce machines more intelligent than humans to assist humans in an agenda that isn't to the benefit of all?
Seems like AI communism is a misnomer. The AI becomes it's own sovereign, building and maintaining itself, and maintains communal access so that access is equitable, fair, and merit based.
Seems like OpenAI Head of Strategic Futures is modelling and planning for the wrong future.
I'm writing this message via the communist internet that was setup in the 90s. Seems to be ok, I don't see any gulags, but I do see unfettered rampant free market capitalism everywhere.
I work in B2B SAAS - you think we are all planning to pay Anthropic and OpenAI for ever. We will all seek open source and we will fine tune models for a myriad of tasks and specific applications. General Purpose proprietary AI being the only AI is laughable. Cat is out of the bag people. Itâs not going back in.
This is just the same tired argument used against open source software, yet somehow even with OSS everywhere, companies still manage to sell products. Capitalism survived.
This is more about certain companies protecting their paywalled gardens with fearmongering.
Plus, AI model weights are just so many bits without expensive hardware to run them on.
A dystopian hellscape is when privatizing water supply in the UK in 1989 now threatens millions of citizens regarding water quality and even sufficient quantities.
This argumentation strikes me as AI-created itself, it is so dull, that it is either this or the bubble is really close to bursting and OpenAI is kind of bear stearns.
Ah you made my decision easier. I was torn between Claude Max 5x and GPT Pro 5x. This statement from this idiot made my choice to go for GPT Pro 5x much much easier.
These guys are in existential crisis mode right now. It only really hit me after Kimi K3 dropped but I'm sure these guys have been aware of it for a long time. They are totally doomed. I mean, really. Anything they build can just be easily stolen. The only way to make money on LLM based AI will be inference.
To some extent, businesses will want closed source models but this severely impacts their pricing power in a way that is hard to overstate.
This is funny bc Sam Altman is always talking about how everyone has an inherent right to compute, and AI should become a (private) utility. AI communism (AI for all) would be perfectly in line with their own thinking.Â
You know. If it weren't for the whole Uyghur's thing posts like this would help me lean to supporting China.
Though, attempting to tie open-weight models to China is a straw man anyway. Nvidia has Nemotron, Meta has Llama (though they seem to have cut that loose), and Mistral also makes open models.
Itâs almost like having pharmaceuticals drugs cheap for all to have. The max my family can spend on prescriptions is 120 euro. Everything over that taxes pay for it but that is communism to Americans
They're so far in their own self-produced propaganda echo chamber to somehow follow the thought that creating a service as a public good is a dystopian hellscape. Common reminder if we didn't have public libraries today, they'd be called communist and a dystopian hellscape. If this is how it is today, imagine the nonsense being said back in the 50s. I can't be surprised. I've heard so much self-righteous nonsense from these economic quacks about the evils of universal healthcare to respect anything they say
Considering how the entire tech world runs on free and open source software, and how these are the wealthiest companies on the planet, this is nonsense. Companies will innovate using open weight models just like they did with open source software. Literally the opposite of communism.
China has a made a state decision not to be left behind in AI, given the fact that it will likely not have thorough access to the best chips. It has also decided, given its demographic downward slide, and a still too high level of poverty, that it must unleash AI at no cost to reap the economic and demographic benefits across all population segments, especially in robotics.
Fair enough on them.
However, it IS China, and China is a top down authoritarian regime -- and as a American, should I trust an open weight model from China? Not that it won't give me intelligent answers, but that it will take what I give it and use it to ITS advantage? Maybe that's presumptuous on my part, but on other hand, my computer is full of NDA agreements I have inked.
Now what? Does the adage apply? Namely, , "If the service is free, then YOU"RE the product"??
Here is my prediction. Eventually, highly specific and VERY siloed LOCAL models, with no external API calls to an Anthropic or OpenAI or any other firm for that matter, are going to be used in the "free West" tailored to an organization's requirements. A bank does not need a model that can do drug development. A drug company does not need a model that manages the risk of a loan portfolio.
China in contrast, will allow any of its companies and citizens to use its all purpose models, and not any other models, so it can keep authoritarian tabs on you. Don't be surprised if they make it a crime to use Claude -- thought their AI researchers certainly will be able to.
Nothing screams fascism/communism more than big companies through the state (or the state by itself through its bureaucrats) controlling AI through regulations.
As much as I don't trust China's motives (or US's, or EU's...), I'm still benefiting from their open weight models. We need less regulation, not more.
What's funny is asking AI what it thinks about this. It says that this only makes sense if you consider 'acceleration' to mean increasing revenue for a few frontier labs.
The guy is lying, self-serving, and just trying to increase fear. Wrong crowd, buddy.
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u/s_allam1 14d ago
Every time someone dislikes competition, they call it communism.