In terms of quality of life, much/most of the value of intelligence is in how it lets you affect the physical world. For most knowledge workers, that takes the form of using intelligence to increase how productively some physical asset can be exploited. The owner of the asset gives some of the money/surplus earned to the knowledge worker, and they can use the money to affect change in the physical world by paying for food, labor, shelter, etc.

If the physical asset owner can replace me with a brain in a jar, it doesn't really help me that I have my own brain in a jar. It can't think food/shelter into existence for me.

If AI gets to the point where human knowledge is obsolete, and if politics don't shift to protect the former workers, I don't think widespread availability of AI is saving those who don't have control over substantial physical assets.

My potato RTX vs your supercomputer cluster and circular chipfab/ai-training economy. Challenge:

“Be competitive in the market place.”

Go.

the ai isnt the useful thing, the stuff you can do with it is.

if your job is replaced by ai, you having ai at home doesnt change whether you're making money or not.

the capital owner gets their capital to work more effectively, and you without capital don't get that benefit

Because the open models are not going to make as much money?

If we're in fantasy land about AI, why do we keep thinking anyone will actually _own_ AI? Human hubris alone cannot contain a super intelligent AI.

Economies of Scale have been such a huge influence on the last ~by 300 years of industrial change. In 1725 people sat at home hand crafting things to sell to neighbors. In 1825, capitalists were able to open factories that hired people. By 1925, those products were built in a massive factory that employed the entire town and were shipped all over the country on rail roads. By 2025 factories might be partially automated while hiring tens of thousands of people, cost billions to build and the products get distributed globally. The same trend applies to knowledge work as well, despite the rise of personal computing.

Companies are spending hundreds of millions of dollars on training AI models, why wouldn’t they expect to own the reward from that investment? These models are best run on $100k+ fleets of power hungry, interconnected GPUs, just like factory equipment vs a hand loom.

Open weight models are a political and marketing tool. They’re not being opened up out of kindness, or because “data wants to be free”. AI firms open models to try and destabilize American companies by “dumping”, and AI firms open models as a way to incentivize companies who don’t like closed-source models to buy their hosted services.

If robots can do all industrial labor, including making duplicate robots, keeping robots the exclusive property of a few rich people is like trying to prevent poor people from copying Hollywood movies. Most of the world doesn't live under the laws of the Anglosphere. The BRICS won't care about American laws regarding robots and AI if it proves more advantageous to just clone the technology without regard for rights/payment.