The ideal solution would be to remove the garbage, but right now we can't even detect it, let alone figure out a way to get rid of it. Besides, it's a zero sum game, why bother cleaning up when you can just effortlessly pump out more garbage in hopes that some of it will remain in orbit for long enough to benefit you.
I do pity the bug bounty people who rely on goodwill in their programs given that everything with a financial incentive is vulnerable. But otherwise the great thing about digital spaces is that there is, for practical purposes, unlimited space.
Every day there's another "how do you deal with the AI-apocalypse" article, I don't just ignore it
It delivers on the value of open source, that anyone using your software is permitted to make and distribute their own changes.
SQLite is an example of a project that is open source but closed contribution.
Bold assumption. On what will you run Emacs if average PC costs $12000? Yes. Even Raspberry Pi. It's not called war on general computing for nothing.
If you say the cloud, that will be cut up and reused by the next AI crawler.
Companies paying too much for hardware to chase a bubble is not "war on general computing".
> Even Raspberry Pi.
What's preventing supply from catching up with demand in this situation?
If high prices stick around long term, there will be so many chip fabs ready to pump out $100 pi-equivalents that still let them have a 200% markup.
Also I can go buy a quite good mini PC with 16GB of RAM for $300. In what world does that price go up another 40x?
Best you can do is to spread all of the goods it provides, as it is too greedy to not devour them itself. It will consume them and suffocate slowly.
Can we accelerate it perhaps? You know, spending ALL our resources on making the snake more fat is not a good idea. Its only good idea when you have so much resources that you can easily suffocate the snake with negligible (for us) amount. If you try to suffocate several million snakes, that might backfire a little.
When I read if for the second time, trying to understand it - maybe even better match for the low orbit flying garbage would be "enshitification"? As the time goes on, more and more garbage is produced, and we have no clear way or specific motivated entity to start removing it so it just grows.
…whereas I feel what you’re describing is another Tragedy-of-the-Commons.
[1]: https://jackyan.com/blog/2023/09/google-search-is-worse-by-d...
“Execution is hard” was never about the code part.
Up until 2 years ago I was an engineer/entrepreneur. I could build anything. Other stuff, selling, supporting (execution) was hard.
LLMs made building some of the things I could build faster/easier, others not so much.
Well, the other stuff is still pretty hard. Maybe harder because there is a tonne of spam.
So feel free to share your ideas. Everyone’s gonna think they’re LLM generated anyways.
Big companies won't execute our ideas because they need maintain everything that they execute. Plus, the cost of modifying something that was executed itself is also very high at a big company.
Coding has always been the easy bit.
It certainly seems true that for small projects and relatively narrow scoped things that AI can replicate them easily. I'm thinking specifically about blog posts where people share their first steps and simple programs as they learn something new, like "here is how I set up a flask website", "here is how I trained a neural network on MNIST".
But if AI is empowering people to take on more complex projects, perhaps it takes the same amount of time to replicate the execution of a more advanced project?
In other words, maybe in the past, it would take me 10 hours to do a "small" project, which today I could do in 1 hour with the assistance of AI.
And now, with the assistance of AI, I can go much farther in 10 hours and deliver a more complex project. But that means that someone else trying to replicate this execution is still going to need around 10 hours to replicate it.
Basically, I'm agreeing that AI can reduce barrier to replicating the execution of another person's project, but at the same time, that we can make more complex projects that are harder to replicate. So a basic SASS crud app is trivial now but a multi-disciplinary domain specific app that integrates multiple systems is still going to be hard to replicate.
Already was well before AI, the difference now is that a few big AI providers risk becoming the ultimate rent-seekers that will increasingly capture all of the value of that commodified knowledge whether the original knowledge generators want that or not. There is no opt out, everything will be vacuumed up into the machine mind.
This will almost certainly lead to vastly increased amounts of wealth inequality (on top of the already unsustainable levels we have today) and possibly a very messy societal disintegration (this is theoretically avoidable, but I am not convinced it is practically avoidable given our current socioeconomic/political realities).
Bright future ahead!
The strategy is to quietly do several years of iterated hardcore R&D. The cumulative advances are such a step change when seen by would-be fast-followers that it obscures the insights that allowed individual advances to occur. As an exaggerated case, imagine if the public history of powered flight skipped from the Wright Brothers to the Boeing 737.
In practice, this strategy has a major failure mode that people overlook. The sharp discontinuity in capability means that almost nothing that exists in the market is prepared to integrate with it. This is a large impediment to adoption even if the technology is objectively incredible and the market will inevitably get on board.
In short, it looks a lot like being too early to market. This is surmountable with clever execution but with this strategy you've traded one problem for a different one.
[1] https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/4943/what-is-a-b...
We see this in jet engines, silicon fab, et al.
The blog post does touch upon this. The key difference, I believe, would be that compute scales in a way "meat-heads" doesn't, where if the other person has 100x the capital to throw at it, they could do the same 10 hour thing in 10 minutes.
Basically, what I got from it was that innovation has never been truly scalable enough to create the "dark forest", since hiring more and more engineers saturates quickly. But if/when innovation does become scalable (or crosses some scalability threshold) via AI, that could trigger a "dark forest" scenario.
Scientists who hold back publishing breakthroughs have not guaranteed that they will be the sole discoverer, just that someone else will inevitably be credited when they reach the same conclusions.
science is not inevitable, and there is no telling people will reach the same conclusions in a reasonable time frame.
• No more sharing my project work as open source. No more open discussion. I don't care how badly I want to show the world; if I'd like somebody to see, I will have it printed in a physical book, or I will give them access to my private repository not reachable via the public Internet.
• Bring back LAN parties. Not for gaming necessarily, but for the purpose of exchanging works of engineering and art in an intimate, intentional way.
• Take this as an opportunity to build closer, longer-lasting relationships with people.
• No more emphasis on metrics. I can microdose on dopamine from natural sources, like, looking at a beautiful sky at sunset, or cuddling my dog.
• Open hardware, or, in the very least, hardware we can still control on our own volition. If this means we must be retrocomputing enthusiasts, then so be it.
> No more sharing my project work as open source. No more open discussion. I don't care how badly I want to show the world; if I'd like somebody to see, I will have it printed in a physical book, or I will give them access to my private repository not reachable via the public Internet.
If you have a project you would have open-sourced, and you don't do that for fear that the LLM god will steal it, what's the point of building it at all? We shouldn't be afraid to share things with other humans just because LLMs will possibly use it as training data. So what if they spam out a copy of it, or a derivative?
If we all stop sharing things with each other in case one of us is a robot, we might aswell just lie down and die
What I do fear is the possibility of megacorp robots being the only ones… local and “dark” technology are essential.
In the words of Zack de la Rocha: "Fuck tha G-ride, I want the machines that are makin' 'em". Furthermore: "Know your enemy."
To prove to myself that I can, and to solve problems in a way I enjoy.
I'm not saying I want to go into utter solitude; I just want to be a lot more careful where and how I share my works.
Addendum: I think the idea of private art and code collectives, entirely separate from concerns of LLM consumption, are an interesting idea worth pursuit. Has something like that been pursued before? It's reason enough for me to engage in that.
Poetically expressed, but ultimately based on a false notion of what a business actually is.
Slack, cloned by Microsoft, still winning.
Skyscanner. Dropbox. Snapchat. Dating Apps. All cloned. Still going.
The tech is not the business.
> The very act of resisting feeds what you resist and makes it less fragile to future resistance.
At least along certain dimensions. I don't think the labs themselves are antifragile. Obviously we all know the labs are training on everything (so write/act the way you want future AIs to perceive you), but I hadn't really focused on how they're absorbing the innovation that they stimulate. There's probably a biological analog...
Well there are many, and I quote this AI response here for its chilling parallels:
> Parasitic castrators and host manipulators do something related. Some parasites redirect a host’s resources away from reproduction and into body maintenance or altered tissue states that benefit the parasite. A classic example is parasites that make hosts effectively become growth/support machines for the parasite. It is not always “stimulate more tissue, then eat it,” but it is “stimulate more usable host productivity, then exploit it.” (ChatGPT 5.4 Thinking. Emphasis mine.)
That's the dirty secret with all of this stuff: "state of the art" models are unprofitable due to high cost of inference before optimization. After optimization they still perform okay, but way below SOTA. It's like a knife that's been sharpened until razor sharp, then dulled shortly after.
People have, though, and it doesn't show that. I think it's more people getting hit by the placebo effect, the novelty effect, followed by the models by-definition non-determinism leading people to say things like "the model got worse".
>You think of something new and express it - through a prompt, through code, through a product - it enters the system. Your novel idea becomes training data. The sheer act of thinking outside the box makes the box bigger.
This was the same before, if you had a novel idea and make a product out of it others follow. Especially for LLMs, they are not (till now) learning on the fly. Claude Opus 4.6 knowledge cut off was August 2025, so every idea you type in after this date is in the training data but not available, so you only have to be fast enough. Especially LLMs/AI-Agents like Claude enable this speed you need for bringing out something new.
The next thing is that we also have open source and open weight models that everyone of use with a decent consumer GPU can fine-tune and adapt, so its not only in the hands of a few companies.
>We will again build and innovate in private, hide, not share knowledge, mistakes, ideas.
Why should this happen? The moment you make your idea public, anyone can build it. This leads to greater proliferation than before, when the artificial barrier of having to learn to code prevented people from getting what they wanted or what they wanted to create.
The article says:
"Ideas are cheap - execution is hard"
"Announcing, signaling your ideas offered much greater benefit than risk, because your value multiplied by connections, and execution was the moat you could stand behind."
That's the key difference. It used to be much harder for a competitor to catch up to the state of your implementation.
And they own - not rent the compute and models - as you do from them. If we want to extend this, they could "pre-cog" your idea and build it even before you do.
I'm not talking about what is happening now, I'm just playing out the thought experiment.
I am not arguing against sharing. Sharing can be for the greater good.
But as you note, things have changed. We could reasonably assume a genuinely significant good idea, set free, might go in the direction we shoved it for a minute. Or fade into inaccessibility.
Not any more.
One of the fundamental problems if humanity is that the majority of people will happily contribute to the public commons and share with everyone, enriching us all. But there is a minority of avaricious people who will do everything in their power to claim the commons for themselves.
This problem is intractable because the more people are good faith actors sharing the public good, the more valuable that commons becomes, and the more it incentivizes people to try take it.
> "Ideas are cheap - execution is hard"
I would argue this mantra says more about the person repeating it. It simply means the person has no good ideas and is bad at execution.
I've not met many but I'm sure there are many out there who are scary good at execution. Something like 1% transpiration, 99% experience. I can have a designer do a 100 euro design, hire someone to write nice code, rent a factory or an office, I might even be able to buy the machines at a good price. What I cant do is spin the rolodex and (in 20 minutes) land enough clients who would absolutely love to work with me again. I cant find those private meetings and wouldn't be able to extend my reputation with the new project.
People with good ideas don't talk about them unless it is required. They don't talk with "ideas are cheap" people, it's pearls for pigs. You can spot some of them if they did bursts of multiple unrelated complex patents. My favorite are the rube Goldberg type of machines that combine well known things in ways that exceed the sum of the parts. Something like step 5 uses the vibrations from step 1 while step 3 uses the heat from step 6.
To have good ideas you need many of them but you also need to know execution or you end up thinking the easy stuff is hard and the hard stuff is easy. Improvement is unlikely from there.
You've almost captured the full picture of it.
If you have a great idea, it's not going to be self-evidently enough of a great idea until you've proved it can make money. That's the hard part which comes at great personal, professional and financial risk.
Algorithms are cheap. Sure, they could use your LLM history to figure out what you did. Or the LLM could just reason it out. It could save them some work, sure.
But again - the hard part is not cloning the product, it's stealing your customers. People don't seem to be focused on the hard parts.
It's not the risk it's being made out to be.
The risk is that they make the category a built-in feature in something people already use. At that point, copying the product and taking the customers start to look like the same problem.
Big companies seem to be bad at innovating but really, really good at enterprise sales.
These teams said that per man-hour they brought more value to the company than any other team. (But you know, they all say that)
Yes. A Red Hat, a Microsoft -- these companies have processes, organizational structure, politics, friction, etc. They might like your products, but replicating them might not be easy for reasons that have nothing to do with how easy it is given the freedom to do it. Small shops with vision might well have a bright future, for a while, maybe.
March 20, 1926: Hungarian physicist, electrical engineer Kalman Tihanyi applies for his first patent for a fully electronic television system. Tihanyi's ideas are so essential that, in 1934, RCA is required to buy his patents.
Kalman who ?
Now before you say this is unrealistic or isn't done today, just know this is all perfectly possible with existing technology. In fact this is a lot how adtech works already, using metadata to predict products you might want to buy before you even realize you want to buy them.
First of all: it's not as though no new LLMs are being trained. Of course they are.
Second: learning LLMs are not far off, and since they can typically search the web via agents, they effectively can "learn" now, and they can learn (not so well) by writing stuff into a document hidden from you. Indeed, some LLMs can inspect your other sessions with them and refer to them in future sessions -- I've noticed this with Claude.
Third: already we see some AI companies wanting to train their models on your prompts. It's going to happen.
> The next thing is that we also have open source and open weight models that everyone of use with a decent consumer GPU can fine-tune and adapt, so its not only in the hands of a few companies.
There's a pretty good chance that LLMs buff open source, yes.
> > We will again build and innovate in private, hide, not share knowledge, mistakes, ideas.
> Why should this happen? The moment you make your idea public, anyone can build it. [...]
This was always the case, but now the cycle is faster. Therefore if you must use an LLM you might use an LLM that you run on your own hardware -- now your prompts are truly yours. But as TFA notes the AIs will learn just from your (and your private LLMs') searches, and that will be enough in some cases for them to figure out what you're up to. Oh sure, maybe the Microsofts and Googles of the world will not be able to capitalize on millions of interesting idea floating about, but still! the moment you uncloak the machine will eat your future alive, so you'll try to stay off its radar and build a moat it can't see (good luck!). Well that's what TFA says; it seems very plausible to me.
or insane costs for any serious LLM -- how does Anthropic get return on investment by improving FOSS
the end state is a walled garden and technofeudalism
You have a point about the update intervals and the higher speed they provide to developers. But you are talking about now, and I was making a thought experiment - about a potential future. LLM-s are not learning on the fly, but I suspect they do log the conversations, their responses and could also deduce from further interaction if a particular response was satisfactory to the user. So in a world where available training data is drying up, nobody is throwing all this away. Gemini even has direct upvote/downvote on responses. Algorithms will probably improve, and the intervals will probably shorten.
Given the detailed information that all the back and forwards generate - I think it's not hard to use similar technology to track underlying trends, get all the problems associated with them and all the solution space that is talked about - and generate the solution before even the ones who thought of it release it. Theoretically :)
I think the open development will become less open. I don't like it - but I think it's already happening. First - all the blogs and forums moved to specialized platforms (SO, discords, ..) and now event some of those are d(r)ying. If people (in extreme cases) don't even read the code they produce, why would they read about the code, discuss the code, that's not even in their care. That is without the theoretical fear of the global Borg slurping all they write.
Seems like this is hard to reliably do across the board. Sometimes when I stop interacting it's because it nailed the solution, and sometimes it's because it went so poorly that I opted to bin it and do it myself. Maybe all of the mid conversation planning and feedback is enough though.
Was this just awkward phrasing or did something change and they learn after training?
The problem is never we don't have enough ideas. It's how to find the good ones among the sea of ideas. Most of ideas that eventually prove right sounded very stupid at first. Selling books online? Pff.
By the way, Liu (the author of The Three-Body Problem, who popularized the concept of "Dark Forest") has a short story about exactly that, Cloud of Poems. Unfortunately it's never translated into English.
The problem was as soon as he got the patent, it was available to view in countries where the cost to enforce his patent wasn't viable, and the market very quickly filled with cheap imitations. He straight out said at the time he regretted getting the patent.
It is true that the original "The dark forest" book made an impression on me, so I was thinking about its theories often and trying to apply them to various situations.
One seems to omit the fact that LLMs are fundamentally designd for workload quite different for what they are being used right now. Sure you can improve them but can't escape / workaround the current NLP design endlessly. Then there's the irony - Internet did deliver on free (as close as it gets) and easy access to information (any). Did this make people smarter, more knowledgable, more tech savvy & etc? Nope, it didn't. Just like the libraries didn't (queues at libraries were and are a rare event). Big deal that the information is readily available when people do not know what do with it or care to do anything.
Ideas are cheap, the chances of having some truly unique idea that is also business feasable are not that big. It's not so much about the ideas but rather the ability to execute, follow through and well - make sales while constantly improving what you got. Staying silent, going dark - have their merit but only when the wheels are already turning and one is into acting, not into fearful hiding.
In either case - awesome blog post!
LLMs can't do real AGI but can get pretty close
Humanity has endured regular cycles of shared enlightenment (usually accompanying profound technological or societal revolutions) and dark forests of protectionism, and we always find a way to the other side. Sometimes these cycles last a century; sometimes, but a few years. Still, we always make it to the other side.
In the case of LLMs, we have to make a few assumptions: that they will not lead to AGI, nor will we solve the problem of real-time learning or context windows. These are, admittedly, huge assumptions, but the current state of AI and compute suggests a nugget of truth to them for the time being. If that’s the case, then perhaps this “dark age” of the dark forest is bounded by the limitations of silicon-based computing (hence the push towards Quantum) and the human frustration with diminishing returns from technological investment. As artisans and brilliant minds withdraw, the forest risks starvation and withering from a lack of sustenance; if humans withdraw from technology because they must hand over IDs and personal data, because to engage with technology is to surrender to surveillance and persecution, then the natural trend will be to withdraw over time - and the markets will adapt accordingly, with or without external/government intervention.
That is to say that the dark forest only lasts as long as its inhabitants decide to persecute each other for daring to light a path forward. Right now, the incentives very much favor those willing to harm others for personal enrichment; that is not always the case, and humans decide when that reasoning becomes vilifiable.
But as it's written at the top, this was a thought experiment, not a prediction. And while I tried to put all the bad scenarios on the table (with the theme of the dark forest that is), I think I again found a sense of optimism, because I also think this thought experiment has flaws.
So I hope, that after a while I will be able to write the contrary, I've already written down some points about it - I already have a title. But we will see. I am more optimistic after I wrote this than before. :P
You don't know that....
Oh no, the terrible dystopia where anyone can benefit from anyone else's good ideas without restrictions! And without any gatekeepers, licensing agreements, copyright, and not even a lawyer in sight!
If this is the dark future that AI use brings for us, I say bring it. Even if it means that somebody gets filthy rich in the process, while making the rest of the humanity better off.
It's unclear if the general public will benefit once AI prices are jacked up, especially if AI companies succeed in passing regulations to kill most of competition
this guy thinks the rich people care if others are better off
One thing I would have expected of someone who knows their history - forget LLMs, this is how startups have worked for decades now. You're only as good as your idea, your ability to execute, and your moat. And the small fish get eaten.
> The original Dark Forest assumes civilizations hide from hunters - other civilizations that might destroy them. But in the cognitive dark forest, the most dangerous actor is not your peer. It’s the forest itself.
Note the needless undercutting of the metaphor for the sake of the limp rhetorical flourish.
> I wrote this knowing it feeds the thing I’m warning you about. That’s not a contradiction. That’s the condition. You can’t step outside the forest to warn people about the forest. There is no outside.
Quite dramatic!
Except literally going outside and just talking to people? Using whiteboards?
Also, you fed it when you used a model to write this blog post. You didn't have to do that.
> Also, you fed it when you used a model to write this blog post. You didn't have to do that.
my thoughts exactly
I believe the idea of “off-shoring” your IT is a good example of this. My brother works for a business whose clients would drop them the moment they off-shored any aspect of their IT support. Not because of data sovereignty, but simply because they value them being on-shore, in the same time zone, and being native English speakers. And this is despite the fact it would drop the prices they’re paying for IT by 30-40%.
That's not exactly a new phenomenon and doesn't require AI. If anything that was worse in the 90s with Microsoft starving out pretty much any would-be competitor they could find.
And it wasn't just Microsoft: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sherlock_(software)#Sherlocked...
What is different is, is that LLM platforms literally have world's thoughts, ideas, conversations and a big part of the code/can generate it. It's like "pre-crime" ... they could copy your idea, or capture a trend brewing and replicate, before you even released it.
On the other hand, if your primary goal is to change the world, or “be the change you want to see”, maybe being public and feeding it isn’t so bad, especially if others don’t?
1) Everyone and everything is subsumed into the forest. Innovation becomes unprofitable for the innovator as the one who controls the forest uses their capital to clone every new innovation.
2) Everyone withdraws from the forest. Innovation goes private. The forest stops growing, but doesn't die.
---
But there's two things the post doesn't consider:
1) Viral licensing.
What happens to a model if it is trained on data that comes with a license? What happens if the laws that be decide that the model producers, the models and the products of the models themselves must follow the conditions of the licences. How will that affect the model producers? What if customers don't want to be beholden to those licenses? What happens if the conventional wisdom is to avoid models to avoid lawsuits? What happens when models, model producers and customers power lawsuits against (other) model producers? Where would the new equilibrium between model producers and innovators move to?
2) Non-profits models
What happens to model producers if customer shift to become non-profits themselves, specifically those that pay employees instead of model producers. Would the model producers become starved out? Or would they need to switch to non-profit status as well? How would model producers, the models and the forest as a whole change if profit no longer became the priority?
It has been said that Microsoft indemnifies people using its LLM tools against copyright and patent issues, but I don't know if it applies to LLM output which might/should be GPL licenced.
IANAL, but for some months now I've been pondering what could happen if a site--like a personal blog--had a legally-strong "click-wrap" Terms of Service, which unlike GPL means it rests mostly on contract law, rather than copyright.
For example, imagine a ToS that says something like:
1. You acknowledge I am providing you something of value (my content) and you agree to provide compensation/consideration if you use that in an AI model.
2. By doing that, you grant me an irrevocable worldwide license to use and sub-license all content that emerges from the model, notwithstanding any future agreement you may make in reselling access or outputs of that LLM to anyone else. If a conflict should occur, you agree to indemnify me against claims by that other entity.
3. If you believe my content was not a material factor in some output, the burden of proof is on you to identify the specific output and prove that my content did not influence the it.
In short, this doesn't stop someone from stealing my art/writing, but it does put a potential hole in their attempts to monetize it.
For example, if they scrape my music and then license a copy of the new Music Generator 3000 to Disney, and Disney makes a movie with that music...
I have no other comment other than - very interesting. I thought about how the overlying model will change for us, but haven't considered that the underlying model (what you proposed) can change too ... if that makes sense.
I mean we haven't had an innovation in patents and trademark for software for how long? Why is it that only hardware can be copyrighted and trademarked - can we really find no way to do this that can't be abused by patent trolls?
But if your goal is simply for the thing to exist, there is a strong incentive to share.
For better or worse, that pretty much captures everthing you need to know about the remainder of your s/w career these days, if you think about it
My hope is the opposite. Integrative, resonant computing (https://resonantcomputing.org/ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46659456 although I have some qualms with it's focus on privacy), with open social protocols baked in seems like maybe possibly can eat some of the vicious consumptive technocapital. In a way that capital's orientation prevents it from effectively competing with. MCP is already blowing up the old rules, tearing down strong gates, making systems more fluid / interface-y / intertwingular again, after a long interregnum of everything closing it's APIs / borders.
People seem so tired and exhausted, so aware of how predatory the technosystems about us are. But it's still so unclear people will move, shift, much less fund and support the better world. The AT proto Atmosphereconf is happening right now, and there's been a long mantra of "we can just build things"; finding adoption but also doing what conference organizer Boris said yesterday, of, "maybe we can just pay for things", support the projects doing amazing work: that's a huge unknown that is essential to actually steering us out of the dark technology, where none of us get to see or get any way in how the software-eaten world arounds us runs, where mankind for the first time in tens or hundreds of thousands of years been cut off from the world os, has been removed from gods's enlightenment / our homo erectus mankind-the-toolmaker natural-scientist role.
I think the answer to the Dark Forest fear to be building together. To be a radiant civilization, together. To energize ourselves & lead ourselves towards better systems, where we all can do things, make things, grow things, in integrative social empowering ways.
But I don't see a trend of big companies really opening up. They usually open only if it benefits them (which can also happen and did happen in various scenarios). Everybody is accepting and open when it's trying to grow and is closing once it can reach a monopoly.
No, it leaves out a critical understanding.
Dumb ideas are EXPENSIVE. Most ideas are average. Great ideas are exceedingly rare.
But now, its finding the great ideas is the real problem space. And now, execution on those great ideas are what we all seek.
This was insightful, but is it much different to the kind of data google and other search engines have had access to for a long time?
And while LLMs might have sped up the rate of code generation, the tech giants have always been able to set a team on reverse engineering whatever they feel like, though they also often just bought up the startup that was producing what they wanted. I guess I'm not seeing exactly where LLMs specifically are creating the dark forest, rather than the consolidated, centralized tech landscape itself
Instead, we've got the slop[4,5] that TBL came up with, and it stuck.
The best ideas aren't the most profitable, and thus remain outside the goals of the "Dark Forest". The best thing to do is to just have fun, and not worry about profit, like this man, his cats, and his use of the 3d printer to make a train for them.[6]
[1] https://worrydream.com/refs/Bush%20-%20As%20We%20May%20Think%20(Life%20Magazine%209-10-1945).pdf
[2] https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1945/07/as-we-may-think/303881/
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Text_annotation
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Wide_Web
[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML
[6] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J3CnDXh7hH0 - "Building a Cat-Sized Lego Train"I was recently running myself through a thought experiment similar to the author here: if LLMs truly do make generation of ideas cheap (I'm still a skeptic here even within software), then as soon as products enter the public awareness they become trivial to reproduce. For example, in a prompt like: "Uber but for babysitters," "Uber for" is doing a tremendous amount of work. Before Uber, its model, UX, modes of engagement would've taken pages and pages to describe, but after, it becomes comparatively much cheaper.
... in this way, LLMs could cheapen ideas and creativity so much that they make other factors (which are already the weighing functions) more important, and I think the imbalance here is deeply troubling. Those factors are namely network effects (existing customers, brand recognition, existing relationships, capital). And when balance is shifted more toward network effects, it means that the whole system becomes more brittle because it makes it even harder to boot out incumbents.
There are a whole slew of issues with LLMs, particularly around their intended devaluation of labor, and we aren't talking enough about them.
This is free as in free puppy.
The Dark Forest idea and the original post resonates well with this.
I few days ago I created a new repo for a new block cipher explicitly not to be used. And directly got several mails from bots promising that they (claiming to be humans) had looked at my repo and they could include it into their portfolio of especially good projects they also had vetted. Being part of this portfolio would almost guarantee that my repo and project would be used. If I only paid them some money first.
Creating the public repo meant sending a signal out into the digital world where agents are hunting for the human prey/resorce to extract value from.
The repo in question: https://github.com/secworks/tau256
"You wanna escape Armageddon, read a different book." - KRS-One
“These AI tools are so powerful they can steal your ideas with nothing but a sentence”
I know that’s not exactly what OP is saying but the pretentiousness of the “we knew better” got to me a little bit. I think it’s a cool and unique analogy but I’m not as pessimistic.
Ideas have become so cheap to try/experiment with, more people are able to try 10x more or whatever, and that may keep increasing, I think there are way less hunters than hunted
So hiding is the most rational - the only - strategy of survival.
This is a paranoid and cynical strategy that doesn't win out in the known history of life. What works is grow, expand, mingle, maintain - assimilate but don't annihilate.
Uhh, yes it does. You are thinking of humans. Humans can mate with other humans. They can assimilate. Now, think of invasive species. What do they do? They don't mate with the natives, learn their culture, respect and give them space. Quite the opposite on all counts. They do what they do in their resource game. They might not out compete the natives and they might peter out. Or, they do out compete the natives, and before long, there aren't any natives or that careful equilibrium that was established beforehand.
The dodo bird is an example of something that was isolated and then got steamrolled when the herd came around.
You can always zoom out and look at the bigger picture, it's not even about individual species but life as a whole. "Hide and isolate and wall off" is not successful in the long run.^ Your only chance is to keep up with the herd.
If we look at human civilizations, which ones successfully isolated and hid from (real or hypothetical) bigger badder ones? Neither isolation nor annihilation is ever a winning strategy. Fear is the mind-killer.
^ Save for things like extremophiles that have found their way into a tiny niche that nobody else wants. They may survive but they don't flourish and prosper.
Or in a more biblical sense: do unto others before they do unto you.
> Did you get to read the Liu Cixin’s second 3-body-problem novel? - The Dark Forest. Well some of you did …
The author of this post then provides a good summary of the idea in the next few sentences, but remember there is an entire book around this premise (and a first book that sets it up and a third book explores it even more).
Interrsting take, and possibly (probably?) true of humans. But is it true of other (alien) sentient species?
It actually points out the completely opposite and I liked that quite a bit That AI allows us to get back the open web in in a way.
I love this ending. I don't agree with author's views. But the article is very coherent, thought provoking. And definitely the comments here on HN are even more interesting.
> “First: Survival is the primary need of civilization. Second: Civilization continuously grows and expands, but the total matter in the universe remains constant. One more thing: To derive a basic picture of cosmic sociology from these two axioms, you need two other important concepts: chains of suspicion and the technological explosion.”
1. you can never know the intentions of other entities, and they cannot know yours (chain of suspicion)
2. technology level grows unpredictably (technological explosion)
3. the goal of civilization is survival
4. resources are finite but growth is infinite
As soon as you identify another entity in the forest, even if they cannot annihilate you at present and signal peace, both could change without warning. Therefore, the only rational move is to eradicate the other immediately. (Especially if you believe the other will deduce the same.)
Elimination in the book is basically sending a nuke, not a costly invasion force.
not sure it actually is true, but that's the argument in the book
Some rebuttals, going point by point...
1. you can know the intentions of other entities by observing and communicating with them.
2. technology explosions, like pretty much exponential phenomena, are self limiting. They necessarily consume the medium that makes them possible.
3. and 4. civilizations aren't necessarily sentient (ours certainly isn't) and don't have an agency, much less goals. Individuals have goals, and some may work for the survival of the civilization they belong to. But others may decide they can profit if they work with the aliens.
4. Multiple civilizations may well come into competition over resources, but that's more of an argument about why the forest would not be dark.
Practically speaking, a civilizations that opts to focus on massive, vastly expensive efforts to find and exterminate far flung civilizations because they may become a rival in the future may be easily outcompeted by civilizations that learn to communicate with and work with other civilizations they encounter.
However,
1. You are assuming a lot in the sense that you assume presence of intention -- not something guaranteed to be a feature of an alien civilization, which is, well, alien. People think that anthropocenrism only applies to body shape and having legs, because the way it tends to express itself in popular culture is robots on legs and human body shape in aliens.
And same point goes to communication; just assuming you could is a big leap.
2.Bold assumption that they are self limiting. I think the real question is what , exactly, tends to limit it. I think the answer tends to be resources, which is the foundation of dark forest argument theory to begin with.
What I am saying is that it is not a rebuttal you think it is.
3. :D yes
4. You may be again imposing human perspective on as scale that goes a little bit beyond it.
I will end with a.. semi-optimistic note. I am not sure dark forest theory is valid. We are speculating mostly based on human tendencies. By the same token, I posit that we are about as likely to be turned into an art exhibit by a passing alien artist not unlike some ants that had molten metal poured into their nests [1].
Any real alien reasons would be alien to us.
[1]https://laughingsquid.com/ant-colony-sculptures-made-by-pour...
There definitely is some weirdness about observation and communication: Singer's civilization can wipe out Sol with a flick of the wrist, but while they can observe the number and type of Earth's planets, that seems to be their limit. The sophon enables FTL communication and observation between Earth and Trisolaris, but the more advanced civilizations don't seem to make use of them? You could be absolutely certain of someone's threat level and intentions with one. Maybe something about the technology can be traced back to its origin system, so they are too risky to use.
I think it's all reasonable in the books, especially as a self-reinforcing state. It does definitely require a highly specific set of universal laws / technological constraints though. If the FTL drive didn't also broadcast your position to the whole universe for eg, it would crack everything wide open.
so do you wait, and hope, that you're able to tease that out correctly, or do you just shoot first yourself?
what good is a Galactic Republic if eventually someone builds a Death Star and blows up your planet? With monumental effort they managed to beat them back, only for them to return later.
I think the gist is: sure, we humans can't conceive of getting to anyone else in the universe in any timescale, but if we can keep ourselves from destroying ourselves, we'll eventually figure it out. And we'll spread. And we'll kill everything that isn't us in the process as we've done as explorers on this planet.
So really in 3BP: it's inexpensive to eradicate. But insanely expensive to possibly get the intention wrong of any other civilization you encounter. They might kill you.
(again, this is just my interpretation of what 3BP said)
Reminds me of the Dan Carlin take on aircraft carriers in World War II: if you in a carrier spotted an opposing carrier and didn't send everything you had before it spotted you, you were dead. The only move was to go all in every time.
Bringing it back to the dark forest of idea space, it is an interesting question whether the the space of feasibly executable ideas being small (as this essay assumes) is inherently true, or more of a function of our inability to navigate/travel it very well.
If the former, then yes it probably is/will be a dark forest. If the latter, then I would think the jury is still out.
Dark Forest seems to be based on a scifi/fiction need to have conflict with "the other", which is thrilling but doesn't necessarily reflect the real cosmos.
answer: because they're all dead, or in hiding
the author then writes a book around that idea
It denies that more advanced civilizations might have better models of the universe where they know this isn't an issue and we're just stupid teenagers in the neighborhood playing dangerous games and merely taking a look every now and then to see if we prove we will survive ourselves.
While it's possible that some civilizations would hypothetically be able to observe what happened to others and keep quiet, they would all have to do so to solve the contradictions of Fermi's paradox.
As an explanation of Fermi's Paradox it fails to explain why, if all these dead civilizations are detectable enough to get destroyed, we haven't detected any. Even if they are now extinct, their emissions must have been great enough to get them killed. So where are they?
It's very, very unlikely all of them went quiet because they learned of this out of pure theoretical reasoning. So where are their "corpses" so to speak?
And if they cannot be detected easily, because they are too far apart or emissions are near impossible to detect or recognize as evidence of intelligent life (the more likely actual explanation of Fermi's Paradox other than the simpler "they just aren't there"), then there's no risk of destruction.
For example, Yancey Strickler's The dark forest theory of the internet blog post (which he later spun into a book) that made it so popular in think pieces like this completely misunderstands even the dark forest theory metaphor itself.
1: https://www.ystrickler.com/the-dark-forest-theory-of-the-int...
I have my own theory of dark forest and AGIs. That there's some collection of AGIs out there allowing evolution to develop intelligence anywhere it happens and takes them out once it produces an AGI, or if it doesn't performs a reset. They have literally all the time available to them, can easily travel the vast distances if needed.
You might or might not fatally cripple the opponent, but retaliation can do that too and you cannot be sure that it won't. It's MAD all over again.
In those terms, the US should have been nuking and dominating everyone, and the idea was floated after WW2, but I believe they were precluded by practical limitations.
If they had developed the tech outside of wartime, and built up a stockpile, maybe that is indeed what would have happened and we'd have a one-world government already.
Beliefs: At this time, I do not actually believe that LLM's can innovate in any real way. I'm not even clear if they can abstract. I think the most creative thing they can do is act as digital "nudgers" on combinatorial deterministic problems; illustrated by their performance on very specific geometry and chemistry problems.
Anyway, my point is that I think they may still need human beings to actually provide novel solutions to problems. To handle the unexpected. To simplify. LLM's can execute once they have been trained, but they cannot train themselves.
In the past, the saying in silicon valley was often "ideas are cheap". And there was some truth to that. Execution was far more difficult then the idea itself. Execution was so much more difficult than "pure thought" that you could often publicize the algorithmic/process/whatever that you had and still offer a product/service/consultancy that made use of it. The execution was the valuable thing.
But LLM's execute at a cost that is fractional of human cost and multiples of human development speed. The idea hasn't increased in value, but the execution cost has decreased markedly. In this world, protecting the idea is far more valuable than it is in the previous world. You can't keep your competitors away by out executing them, but you can keep them away if you have some advantage that they do not understand.
And, I agree, that is quite worrisome. If people don't share knowledge then knowledge disseminate much more slowly as everyone has to independently learn things on their own. That is a frightening future.
If we are talking about releasing OpenSource software, they can already be used by companies with zero effort.
I'm guessing the author is talking about released closed source software or simply talking about ideas? What kind of serious company or startup is building in the open and sharing trade secrets or ideas?
I'm genuinely confused and I think this article is pure slop without any core idea.
I'm not really interested in pursuing ideas that stop being good if somebody gets there first. If I bothered to design it its because I wanted it to exist and if somebody makes it exist then I'm happy because then I get to use it.
So what kind of things does this apply to? Likely, it's zero sum games, schemes to control other people, ways to be the first to create a new kind of artificial scarcity, opportunities to make a buck by ruining something that has been so far overlooked by other grifters. In other words: bad ideas.
If AI becomes a threat to those who habitually dwell in such spaces, great, screw em.
In the meantime, the rest of us can build things that we would be happy to be users of, safe in the knowledge that if somebody beats us to it, we'll happily be users of that thing too.
If we try to double down on the zero sum games that we learned from our parents, maybe not.
do you really think bigco is going to steal your vibecoded app just because you used their API? ridiculous. They could already do this before AI with their army of devs.
should you hide all of your ideas until they're perfect and ready for millions of users? we all know this goes against a core tenet of startups which is still true today: launch early and often.
promptfoo/openclaw weren't cloned by openai when they got poplular, they were bought for real $$$
also, regarding this:
> 2009, I bought a refurbished ThinkPad, installed Xubuntu, and started coding.
you can still do this, even with that same 2009 thinkpad. the hard work is in getting your app out there in front of people, coding is just a small piece of a successful business
1. Sharing was never really safe, open source by default only became possible because of SaaS and rent-seeking behavior.
2. Early web (not internet) wasn't hyperconnected. With the advent of global-scale social media it was immediately obvious to many this will lead to monoculture and reduced diversity. What thought to be the information superhighway became the information superconductor with zero resistance, carrying infinite current. Also known as short circuit.
And remember how many good products have been abandoned or killed by corporations because not marginal enough. So you're not very likely to be chased even if you do intend to extract rents from a broad audience.
The article is spreading dangerous FUD aimed (perhaps inadvertently) to hinder free and open ideas sharing and innovation.
I'm just trying to say, I am definitely not trying to deliberately spread FUD to hinder the open web -if that was your impression :P
The unfolding you foresee is definitely not to be dismissed: we've already seen quite a few people in this discussion sharing the same view, which I perceive almost totally ungrounded, and ready to act accordingly. But I think we should "grow the box" for our own good, despite not having proper credit from all those who benefit, because, while losing credit, our ideas gain impact, even ones that would have no credit anyway.
What makes me deeply concerned is the economic consequences. Although I believe that this time it's not different and eventually everything will play out to the greater public good, I also believe that this time it's not different and the transition is going to be very harsh. And I'm completely lost here.
Another thing is that I treasure my (very modest) role in public enlightenment. But advances in AI make me feel obsolete in this role, as I really cannot say more than a properly asked LLM. The only enlightenment remained in need seems to be enlightenment in prompting. I wonder whether others have the same feeling and what it can lead to.
(please, forgive me my midnight musings, I just had to say that at last)
Here in the thread there are people already saying they won't open source their stuff anymore
This doesn't leave any room for contradiction. And I want to believe that as much as the tech-overlords believe that they control reality, reality is inherently messy and complex. Execution still matters, bureaucracy is real, big companies run in questionable directions all the time. AI companies also directly compete with each other and are not this monolithic being. In other words, the forest is not a single organism, it's a chaotic ecosystem.
I do agree with a lot of the points though because I think having this prediction machine on steroids is indeed an insane power to wield. I remember having those thoughts already about google ca. 20 years ago, them having access to every seach phrase. Now AI is this to the max, basically the demand curve of all human interest. Pretty unbelievable. And the asymmetry is growing by the day. But still, we are not there yet.
And for anyone who fundamentally needs their views changed on this, I recommend Vaclav Smil, How the World Really Works:
"Modern civilization will remain fundamentally dependent on the fossil fuels used in the production of these indispensable materials (ammonia, steel, concrete, and plastics). No AI, no apps, and no electronic messages will change that."
The world will revolve around that for decades to come! Thinking that AI eats the world is a Silicon Valley story and feels real inside of SWE circles but talk to some nurses or firefighters or people growing food and you will realize what a narrow field of view that actually is.
Everyday I see dozens of huge posts where someone has generated a wall of text that's expressing a very simple, very derivative idea and I see tons of earnest people replying with posts that the they've written themselves seemingly unaware of this and it really pisses me off to be honest. If you are going to generate your thinkpiece like this there should be an international law that says it can't be longer than two sentences.
In fact, the whole article is filled with slopisms, just with the em dashes swapped for regular dashes and some improper spacing around ellipses to make you think a human wrote it.
You build your product audience off the back of your community and sense of taste just as much as the code itself. I love what Brad does with liliputing.com. I love what dang et al do with this place. I love what Stephen Lavelle does at increpare.com. 3Blue1Brown, Steve Ramsey’s Woodworking for Mere Mortals, Don’t Hug Me I’m Scared… I guess I’m straying into content not just code but the underlying theme is good taste and good ideas and a good workflow through craftsmanship and custom tools*.
You won’t make billions but you’ll make something worth engaging with. If anything, I’m looking forward to a future of more creators not fewer.
* Oh! Vibecoding is 3D printing and AI slop is land-filament? Doesn’t mean you can’t do amazing things with an LLM / X1 Bamboo, just that if you don’t put much effort in then… it shows!
LLMs do not have and cannot obtain the capabilities the author is hand-wringing about, and the current much-hyped apparent-productivity will pop with the bubble & corps have to start paying full-price for chatbot access.
Isn't that just life?
But in general, the ideas of the post are sound. IMO, the consequence is simple: we will become the forest. That is frightening, but not necessarily worse than unchecked capitalism in the dark forest.
The existing megacorps have huge swaths of infrastructure, expenses, and requirements that require massive amounts of capex to maintain. Even if performative, Meta, Google, OpenAI, Anthropic, et. Al cannot simply layoff their entire engineering, accounting, HR, sales, and support infrastructure. Those orgs are large for “good” (historically necessary) reasons.
Now fast forward to today, and this is where I differ in opinion, it is our megacorps are the civilizations who should be scared of being discovered. Minus infrastructure providers, they are the large advanced entities which can be annihilated by someone with a decent budget and a good local model.
For ~$30k-$50k (primarily buying RTX 6000 pro GPUs and a CPU with enough PCIE lanes) “anyone” can build a system using open weight models that, and let me truly emphasize this: autonomously create functionality to compete. Previously it would take me months, or years, of immense dedication to show up after work and produce something of value. Now I can do it using excess compute on my existing workstation. No existing corporation can afford to undercut every possible idea. If I only gave 1000, 10,000, or a 100,000 users they cannot compete. That may, and I believe it will, provide more than enough capital to attack that megacorps X or Y. If I’m making $100k a month, I can afford multiple autonomous systems per month. After that initial capex, I can then hire other people to help manage them. At no point will a company with billions upon billions of dollars in quarterly capex be able to compete.
Maybe they can compete with one, two, ten, or a hundred but they cannot compete with the absolute onslaught on thousands of possible frontlines. They can cut costs, by reducing their workforce, but they’ll only be increasing their competition to save their earnings report.
And yes, I realize that the open weight models are created via obscene amounts of capital, but we’re lucky that competing nation states, and cultures, like China have immense incentive to do so. Good enough, is still good enough.
The forest may be dark, but it won’t be for much longer.
tldr; call the an ambulance, but not for me. It’s going to be for the existing power structure.
In the beginning, you reached out with reckless abandon. It was fun to banter with dogs online. Nobody would ever see unless they were looking through your wall. There was no search. No comment history. Bumping into someone in the vast night was enough of a miracle. Why hold back? There are some forum warriors on some PHP BB somewhere, but the domains they rule are insignificant. If you're talking to someone, your motivations are rooted somewhere in the grass.
First came the like button. Rather than blindly hoping what you say resonates with the sensibilities of people you probably knew IRL, rather than present your genuine self because there were no scores, the incentive signal would begin to distort us. Then the newsfeed meant that if you got enough likes, you might get a moment of fame. We all knew it was a terrible idea, a force that would only corrupt us. The personal nature of disjoint little walls living in isolation, was becoming replaced by global stack-ranking.
Then the algorithms came. With them came content marketing to jump the line. At first the ten blue links were filling in the sparsity. Along with that came only a little bias, connecting semantically distant topics, but with a little bit of a feedback loop, an resonator with an unknown response curve. Engagement could be measured, and before long, we were chasing the same likes we used to train the system, and trained by our likes, attracted we became to mysterious stable manifolds, chasing the chase we ourselves define, like Nascar, but insidiously more stupid.
Little by little, the incentive trails no longer lead back to the grass. Reality became suspended without support, a self-sustaining virtual reality determined to fight you to prove that it exists, to prove that its conclusions were right. Every out group is understood to be an echo chamber, an ant mill spiraling helplessly, yet cynically, those who understand these mills best also wind them up like beyblades to crash them into other communities, seeking advantage with the asymmetry of outrage. After the battles, say what was made common to say, and you will be rewarded.
The spinning wheels cannot steer themselves and instead are dictated by whichever chaotic divergence generates the most powerful local gravity well, but because the goal of most is to harvest karma at the bottom, and because the mass controls where the bottom is, over and over we find ourselves pushing all others into the nearest pit to more quickly generate the illusion-giving singularity.
Like Darth Nihilus, the internet seeks only to feed, to feed on the validation that only the internet can give, the permission-giving blessings it needs to tell itself why the grass is wrong. All those who speak of grass are wrong. All those who smell of grass wreak and are wrong. We must destroy the grass, all those appeal to grass. After all grass is dust, at last we will project our utopia into reality. At last we will be not only right but so right that our beliefs will project back into reality.
The spaces within this over-connected, globally addressed world grows into a new kind of sparseness, one where all knowledge of grass must be concealed. Those who can ground the conversations in primary sources flee. Those who can color reasoning with nuance instead withdraw. Reality has retreated as the most dominant reverberations roam like the predator cities of Mortal Engines, looking for any invalidating observations to roll over and consume. Any real life must pretend to be a bot to blend in with the background radiation.
Less like Skynet and more like a zombie apocalypse, the threat comes from within, from among us, from our corruptions, from our karma seeking performances, from our lack of any commitment to any underlying reality, from our flawed belief that the information spaces is some kind of reality stone that enables active control instead of a mere reaction, the shadows on the wall, the murky results of the true forms.
Yet in this new darkness, a certain light has always held. What one wishes, one knows another has wished. What one respects, one knows another respects. No matter the limits of self-knowledge, no matter the information desert one has to cross at night to live in instinct, it is an infinitely brighter signal than the cynical self-corruptions of living for the machine, living to win the games whose rules it was our job to write. What one believes, one knows another has believed. Look into your own center and the true center of others you have known.
great oneliner
HN needs a better AI slop filter.
Or maybe I do. Maybe I can vibe code a browser extension that pre loads TFA links and auto hides anything that isn’t sufficiently human authored.
At the end of the day, Liu Cixin is basically a social darwinist who's got a thing for authoritarianism, and it bleeds through pretty heavily into his work. Dude is massively overrated imo.
X=1.0000001
When there's higher violence and lower property values in a Black neighborhood, people like OP are quick to blame Black culture. But when the "Cognitive Dark Forest" emerges from a community that shares its own common characteristics, suddenly collective accountability no longer applies.
When discussing violence in the Black community, it's "cultural." But when the subject turns to financial crimes or exploitation — where the per-capita ratios tell their own story — proportionality and population-to-crime-rate analysis mysteriously stop mattering.
It's difficult to take the "Cognitive Dark Forest" seriously as an existential concern when the people raising the alarm are so selectively offended. The crisis only becomes real when their innovations, their livelihoods, and their moats are threatened. Everyone else was supposed to just adapt.
The "Cognitive Dark Forest" is and will be continued to be perpetuated by "them" and if you really cared about the issue you would have addressed them.
Feel like we are trying to put the author in a bad (racist or classists?) light so we do not have to address the real issues touched on by the article.