An interesting exercise, is to flip that question upside down:
Assuming everyone gets access to the same quality of AI, how will rich people maintain their compounding advantages over the non-wealthy?
The first way, is by having more computing resources. The same AI, but with more computing resources, is going to come up with equal or higher quality results.
The second, is being able to requisition more physical resources. The same AI can help a wealthy person set up a business, by quickly acquiring physical and IP assets, or labor, vs. someone without the wealth to do that.
The third, is by having better information. Small differences in information, such as having a market's trading history just a fraction of a second before someone else, can translate into a lot of economic power. Wealthy people can pay for better information, or put systems into place to get better information.
The fourth, is risk tolerance. Even with an AI helping someone making choices, some choices with the highest expected return also come with the highest volatility or risk. Someone with resources can tolerate a lot of individual risks. But a low resource person will have to play it safe and forgo those opportunities.
Conclusion: The efficiencies delivered by AI will intensify existing compounding effects, and the inequality those already generate.
Swisher: One of the excuses that tech always uses is you don’t understand it, we need to keep it in the back room. It’s often about competition.
Altman: Well, for us it’s the opposite. I mean, what we’ve said all along — and this is different than what most other AGI efforts have thought — is everybody needs to know about this. AGI should not be built in a secret lab with only the people who are privileged and smart enough to understand it. Part of the reason that we deploy this is, I think, we need the input of the world, and the world needs familiarity with what is in the process of happening, the ability to weigh in, to shape this together. We want that. We need that input, and people deserve it. So I think we’re not the secretive company. We’re quite the opposite. We put the most advanced AI in the world in an API that anybody can use. I don’t think that if we hadn’t started doing that a few years ago, Google or anybody else would be doing it now. They would just be using it secretly to make Google search better.
Interesting. Looked at this way, OpenAI is perhaps less ‘closed’ that I thought, since they’re making LLMs available cheaply to so many people, not just the elite with access to the computing power.
This could change very quickly once AI has become an established industry and the markets are captured, and the familiarity argument above doesn't fully apply anymore.
Technology does not, in itself, create all the advantages. I likely have the same model iPhone as Bezos but his contact list probably includes much more powerful people. Similarly, we could have access to the same AI but he’d be positioned to derive much more leverage from it
As always, knowing what to do with a tool is more important than having the tool in front of you. If the value is in having the tool itself, then it will quickly lose its value, because everyone else will be using it.
Baseline models are going to be commoditized for sure. But when you need to tune it on your specific demands, it will needs more data and expertise. That's going to be luxury that only those wealthy people can enjoy.
Paid users get priority access, with quotas. Free users get to are often shown a "Sorry, at capacity" type screen, that I suspect will increase through time, suggested by the fact that paid quotas are already shrinking, with ChatGPT4.
I suspect these models will usually have a "free", highly limited, option. It's the perfect bait! (worked for me)
Sure, computers are, but the really important ones - the ones that can perform the biggest calculations, make the fastest trades, mine bitcoin fastest, and now run the heaviest AI models - aren't. Capital always gives advantages, many of which are sizeable. There's a reason that the new AI hotness has investments in the billions.
On other hand we are currently hitting limits or at least we see them. And we have some picture how much resources is required to train and run these models. So I think we could draw some conclusions with spending let's say 1000 and a million to run one or have one available.
Is that the analogy you're choosing? I'm not sure much of a wealth gap exists in software in general. In many ways software is the most egalitarian product in history, since it costs nothing to copy it. Sure, not everyone can afford a $60 game, but there are no $6,000 games.
I think a better analogy (or perhaps a more specific one, since you did mention "web services") would be computing services, i.e. rich startups with hundreds of thousands in credits and funding vs. single bootstrapped founder with a little bit of cash.
> In many ways software is the most egalitarian product in history,
Indeed, and that's kind of my point. Even in the most egalitarian product in history, a bit of a wealth gap exists. It's inescapable. That $60 game may not cost $6,000, but it won't run on cheap hardware. And it'll probably depend on a good, high speed Internet connection to acquire in the first place...
Current AI is either relatively low cost but centralized, or very expensive to run locally. I believe AI will be more egalitarian than software in general (as Stanford Alpaca showed), if a lot of work is done to make inference at the edge practical.
A 200 and 2000 computer has power difference of a few times for example for gaming. And that is single machine where scaling is hard. With AI you can and actually have to throw more resources at.
There is a naive assumption that AI will be one of the tools at our disposal and that the rich will own better versions of that tool. The rich people merely control the money flow, and they are only useful because the state cannot do it better. With the "eye of sauron" that AI will likely become, the state will know better how to shape the money flow and so it won't need rich or wealthy people. Everyone will be on a subsistence wage, while the state-AI is building the next gen AI with transecendent capabilities.
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Assuming everyone gets access to the same quality of AI, how will rich people maintain their compounding advantages over the non-wealthy?
The first way, is by having more computing resources. The same AI, but with more computing resources, is going to come up with equal or higher quality results.
The second, is being able to requisition more physical resources. The same AI can help a wealthy person set up a business, by quickly acquiring physical and IP assets, or labor, vs. someone without the wealth to do that.
The third, is by having better information. Small differences in information, such as having a market's trading history just a fraction of a second before someone else, can translate into a lot of economic power. Wealthy people can pay for better information, or put systems into place to get better information.
The fourth, is risk tolerance. Even with an AI helping someone making choices, some choices with the highest expected return also come with the highest volatility or risk. Someone with resources can tolerate a lot of individual risks. But a low resource person will have to play it safe and forgo those opportunities.
Conclusion: The efficiencies delivered by AI will intensify existing compounding effects, and the inequality those already generate.
Even if AI access was somehow kept even.
source: https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2023/03/on-with-kara-swisher...
Swisher: One of the excuses that tech always uses is you don’t understand it, we need to keep it in the back room. It’s often about competition.
Altman: Well, for us it’s the opposite. I mean, what we’ve said all along — and this is different than what most other AGI efforts have thought — is everybody needs to know about this. AGI should not be built in a secret lab with only the people who are privileged and smart enough to understand it. Part of the reason that we deploy this is, I think, we need the input of the world, and the world needs familiarity with what is in the process of happening, the ability to weigh in, to shape this together. We want that. We need that input, and people deserve it. So I think we’re not the secretive company. We’re quite the opposite. We put the most advanced AI in the world in an API that anybody can use. I don’t think that if we hadn’t started doing that a few years ago, Google or anybody else would be doing it now. They would just be using it secretly to make Google search better.
Technology does not, in itself, create all the advantages. I likely have the same model iPhone as Bezos but his contact list probably includes much more powerful people. Similarly, we could have access to the same AI but he’d be positioned to derive much more leverage from it
I’m sure a super premium category will emerge, but the 80-20 rule likely applies here.
I suspect these models will usually have a "free", highly limited, option. It's the perfect bait! (worked for me)
I think a better analogy (or perhaps a more specific one, since you did mention "web services") would be computing services, i.e. rich startups with hundreds of thousands in credits and funding vs. single bootstrapped founder with a little bit of cash.
Indeed, and that's kind of my point. Even in the most egalitarian product in history, a bit of a wealth gap exists. It's inescapable. That $60 game may not cost $6,000, but it won't run on cheap hardware. And it'll probably depend on a good, high speed Internet connection to acquire in the first place...
Current AI is either relatively low cost but centralized, or very expensive to run locally. I believe AI will be more egalitarian than software in general (as Stanford Alpaca showed), if a lot of work is done to make inference at the edge practical.
The open community shouldn't lose sight of this.
Trading your private info for societal gain is a proven model, it'll now extend to your..voice patterns?, and so on.
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