Lugh

joined 2 years ago
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January 2025 has seen two significant events for Big Tech. Their moves to further enable authoritarianism, and the neo-nazi far right & their loss of the AI arms race to a tiny Chinese upstart.

Meta embraced the trend of using open-source to weaken its competitors 18 months ago, and since then open-source AI from places as diverse as France and China have been using the same tactic. That culminated in recent weeks in DeepSeek - the open-source AI that has become the world's most powerful.

So it seems the power of AI, or even AGI when it comes, may not be in the hands of a few Silicon Valley billionaires, but instead decentralized and democratized around the world. As those billionaires embrace ever darker and more fascistic visions of the future, maybe we should be relieved they are all hobbling and weakening each other via open-source AI.

 

I'd guess by the end of 2025, it's almost guaranteed locally run Chinese AI models will become by far the most common and used forms of AI around the world.

So far the Chinese AIs have been using the global corpus of internet scraped data, but they are about to get a new source - Chinese public data. This raises an interesting possibility. First, that Chinese AI starts thinking in a more Chinese way, and second that this form of thinking may become the most dominant form of AI thinking globally.

 

Here's a Jan 25th 2025 quote on X/Twitter (which his firm helped Musk buy) from Marc Anderessen, head of VC firm Andreessen Horowitz/a16z.

"A world in which human wages crash from AI -- logically, necessarily -- is a world in which productivity growth goes through the roof, and prices for goods and services crash to near zero. Consumer cornucopia. Everything you need and want for pennies."

This is the world Big Tech is building for us. Given their hold over the current US administration, barring a political revolution - there's not much to stop them for the next 4 years.

If their power to create that world via AI & robotics is seemingly unstoppable, what about a counter-intuitive idea? Engage them on it seriously. At the very least the transition to this world might need the kind of emergency economic supports the Covid era had.

It seems strange Big Tech is so open about what it intends to do, yet we are still not taking it seriously, despite them saying it all out loud.

 

Throughout 2024 Open Source AI has been slowly catching up with investor-funded AI, but in the first weeks of 2025 that has dramatically accelerated. Now Open Source isn't just catching up, it is arguably better and superior to investor-funded AI.

Restrictions on chip imports seem to be driving Chinese innovation, not slowing them down. Using lesser chips, they've optimized AI to run cheaper and more efficiently, but be just as powerful. Not only that, they've open-sourced that AI.

Where does that leave the hundreds of billions poured into investor-funded AI? Who knows. But they've no product to sell that people can't get elsewhere way cheaper or for free.

This also means AI will become decentralized and democratized. Many thought it would just be in the hands of Big Tech, but the exact opposite scenario is playing out.

What are the economic implications? AI hype is keeping the US stock market afloat - how long can that last?

Source

[–] Lugh 5 points 1 year ago

Chinese companies often get accused of copying Western technology, so it's unusual to hear the CEO of such a major Western company bucking that assumption by calling on Western companies to copy China.

What Jim Farley is saying about cars is equally true about 21st century energy infrastructure. There is no doubt that China is the global leader in innovation there too.

Meanwhile in many Western countries, debate still centers around persuading some people that the energy transition to renewables is real and the age of fossil fuels can't end quickly enough. Hostility to renewables, EVs and the energy transition gives China the edge.

Next up we can expect China to race ahead in robotics.

[–] Lugh 3 points 1 year ago

If you are an optimist or even a glass-half-full kind of person, sometimes it can be hard to miss the good news among all the doom and gloom that social media promotes. The story of our energy transition to renewables is surely good news. Chiefly because it will help us alleviate climate change, but there is another under-reported and under-appreciated aspect of the energy transition.

As energy production becomes decentralized and in the hands of individuals and small communities it smashes the power of centralized top-heavy states, authoritarians, and autocrats.

Some people have nightmare visions of the future where humans are reduced to powerless serfs. However if you can live in a world where you can generate your own energy off-grid, and AI can provide for many of your other needs, perhaps with robotics helping with local and personal food production - then who the hell is going to want to be a serf-slave in some horrible Hollywood sci-fi dystopia that we know from movies?

[–] Lugh 3 points 1 year ago

Yes, it's an odd statement. The authors are all Harvard scientists, and I have checked what they post on Twitter, they aren't anti vaccine cranks. Though one of them, Al Ozonoff, does try to engage with such people. Perhaps this is a concession in a similar vein of outreach. The Hill is a conservative news website. Perhaps they felt they had to get their own dubious science a mention, and that was the price of publication for the Harvard scientists?

[–] Lugh 9 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I agree, to me one of the most frustrating aspects of much online discussion of AI is that it focuses on trivial chatter and nonsense. In particular boring fanboyism when it comes to the likes of Musk or OpenAI. Meanwhile the truly Earth shattering long-term events are happening elsewhere, and this is one example of them. Halving unexpected deaths in hospital settings is such a huge thing and yet it goes barely reported, in comparison to the brain-dead ra-ra Silicon Valley gossip that passes for most discussion about AI.

[–] Lugh 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

As ever he has got so many interesting things to say. He makes a connection here between the first two centuries after the introduction of the printing press in Europe, and how artificial intelligence is due to affect us very soon. Contrary to the optimistic interpretation that the printing press led directly to The Enlightenment (which was true eventually) for the first two centuries it just led to the medieval version of clickbait, with people consuming content that led to religious intolerance and witch hunts.

[–] Lugh 2 points 1 year ago

Yes, it was an odd example to give. I guess a better example would be if the passengers were talking about how hot they were, and the car just lowered the air con temperature without asking them.

[–] Lugh 10 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

I admit I don't know very much about any of this, but I've never heard of children who grow up in relatively isolated circumstances, for example home schooling, having lower functioning immune systems?

[–] Lugh 7 points 1 year ago

At this point, I'm pretty sure Chinese taikonauts will get to the Moon, before American astronauts return.

[–] Lugh 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I don't mean to diminish people's fears and anxieties because they are extremely real, but I think it's worth considering other outlooks.  For example, look at how quickly the world changed in March 2020 in response to COVID-19. Isn't there something hopeful about that? Doesn't it suggest that the world can adapt to sudden change far more quickly than we expected?

Sometimes I wonder if some people are too apocalyptic in their ideas especially if they come from a product in an apocalyptic Christian background.  if you look at thousands of years of European history isn't the lesson to take away that revolution and change happen all the time, but eventually, progress is what people settle into and things work out in the end.

I realize that is the most hopeful interpretation of events, and perhaps too hopeful, but I'm optimistically natured and that's what I try to stick to.

[–] Lugh 3 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I feel like we are heading to a post-work future where eventually AI and robotics will do most of the work and that will be a good thing. In the meantime, I'm sure there will be a lot of pain and revolution to get to that point.

Even in rich Western countries tens of millions of people rely on driving, delivery and taxi jobs. When people realize they are disappearing forever we'll be one step closer to that future.

[–] Lugh 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

I don't have sources for the 2024 deflation in China and AI. (I qualified my initial statement "hard to know").

Robotics are a proxy for AI in manufacturing.

I suspect AI is about to give us a type of deflation no economist has ever seen or modeled before. What will happen when AI gives us the expert knowledge of doctors, lawyers, technicians, teachers, engineers, etc etc almost for free?

You can't talk of this scenario in terms of past models, because it's never happened before, but we can clearly see that it's just about to happen to us right ahead.

[–] Lugh 6 points 1 year ago (3 children)

The last 12 months have seen the most sustained period of deflation in China since the late 1990s. It's hard to know how much AI is responsible, but I would guess it is to some extent. It's driving the reduction in prices in the manufacturing of so many things, EVs especially.

Many people assume unemployment will be AI's most destructive economic effect. That may be true, but before it causes a problem, there will be a far more immediate one to deal with - deflation.

Deflation is so destructive because it shrinks businesses' incomes while increasing the size of their debt relative to this income. If there is sustained deflation, then this leads to a spiraling collapse that takes asset prices like the stock market and property values with it. This was the main mechanism that caused most of the damage in the Great Depression.

If AI is on the cusp of giving us lawyers, doctors, and other experts knowledge for practically free, then it follows that there is massive deflation to come. There is already a backlash against AI in some quarters, I would expect it to grow when the deflation problem arrives.

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