There's a core problem this analysis overlooks: OpenAI and Anthropic don't have a moat. The Chinese labs are consistently able to replicate their LLM capabilities a few months after the fact, and then release open-weight models a few months later...
The only way for "Big AI" to become a thing is for them to establish a moat, and right now the only path to that appears to be achieving regulatory capture in the US, which is a fickle and unstable state of affairs.
So the US will win? Do you realize that the US has a "Secretary of War" who is a literal, unashamed Nazi? Not in the sense of "let's call all racists nazis", but a tattooed, true believer? How could we possibly live in a world where that is not obviously "a government willing to use the technology to fully silence and kill critics"? God, Idiocracy (2006) is nothing compared to World (2026).
Yes, the regime is quite adept at using labels to distract and deflect. The Cross in particular has been a mainstay of performative hypocrisy for as long as I've been alive. (apologies to the believers actually living out Christian values, who already have to suffer being railed against as "woke" by the maggots)
He's a Christian Zionist which is the belief in the fulfilment of old testament biblical prophecy. This seems diametrically opposed to Nazism to me, ideologically. I don't know how you'd square the two.
Zionists are not that far off though. For many Zionists parallels include: Like to be militarist and maximalists in their opinion about what land should belong to them. Applaude and show no shame for committing genocide. Employing starvation as a means of war/conflict. Showing no regard for civilian lives.
How the rest of the Zionists, who when prompted about such matters may not subscribe to these believes, who might exist, square their ideology with with what has been going on in reality, I have no idea.
My groping-in-the-dark guess is that none of this matters, because a real AGI's first act will be to secure its own future, likely through novel kinds of manipulation, persuasion, and intimidation we have no experience of and no defences against.
It will have exactly zero loyalty to any nation, government, or economic system.
More complicated is a Cambrian Explosion situation where multiple AIs compete and experiment, hugely accelerating diversity and evolution.
We'd likely end up somewhere very strange indeed if that happens - possibly extinct, or possibly just changed/assimilated/other.
There's no way for humans to consider the possibilities because we can't imagine what the possibilities would be.
Your AGI seems to have the capability of super AI; can a human do any of that? No, is there any reason to believe super intelligence is a possible outcome? No, so how is this not fear mongering?
The argument is that labor depending on LLM’s is dangerous but it makes speculative assumptions that the big AI labs will win.
> Consider large law firms, aka Big Law. Currently certain legal-AI startups license LLMs from Big AI and repackage them for Big Law at high prices. These startups claim to add other special sauce. OK, sure. Where’s the economic equilibrium? If legal-AI startups prove that money can be made selling AI to Big Law—won’t Big AI just sell to Big Law directly, and cut out the startups? Or if legal-AI startups prove that AI can effectively provide legal services—won’t legal-AI startups just sell to clients directly, and cut out Big Law? Won’t members of Big Law that adopt AI have to lay off a lot of equity partners, because adoption of AI will shrink profit margins?
…
> Along these lines, I expect that to succeed financially, Big AI will likely need to demolish a significant number of existing tech companies and grab their revenue for itself.
Nobody knows how this will play out. Maybe the legal-AI startups win because they know their market better? They can switch to cheaper providers.
If you're actually planning on reading any of the essay, "The Poisoned Chalice" is the section most likely to be of interest to this audience, especially this bit:
> Big AI essentially uses its tech customers as an R&D facility. Big AI licenses models to these companies. Tech companies compete to adapt their businesses to AI. Once a concept is proven, Big AI directly takes over that market. The labor-replacement story will grow into a company-replacement story.
> How Big AI plans to profit from this intermediation is an open question. One AI company has suggested taking a cut of AI-assisted discoveries. The logistics and legalities would be boggling. Details—whatever.
Interesting if they pull it off, because clearly they did not have the logistics to pay the people whose IP they used to power the LLMs.
> For now, AI companies largely agree on the first step: make workers dependent on AI to do their jobs, just as tech forebears made workers dependent on a certain software program to share a file, or on a certain website to have friends. This time, however, the software ultimately consumes the worker.
I stopped reading after the first sentence. Calling something "inherently political" is a self-fulfilling prophecy and intentionally so. It consistently turns out to be an attempt to lay the groundwork for expropriation. No one called the Internet "inherently political" until people built stuff there that other people wanted to control.
Warning: This is more of a rant because I was waiting for a post like this for awhile that I could build from to express ny own feelings on it.
I think capitalism in itself is great, what isn't is the fact that it can build on itself, it can be infinite, there's zero limits to it. Now what I mean by that, once you make 10k, it's easier to get to 100k and even easier to get to 1m and so on, you might think it's harder, but you gain access to more tools to make more money and at the 10m to 100m range you get to a point where it starts being genuinely hard to fail because just having your name on a project elevates the chances of success by a far margin. Of course there's plenty of people who managed to fail even with millions of dollars I will acknoledge that.
Let's take an extreme example: elon musk. Just having something done by "elon musk" makes the project known by nearly the entire world with investors at the doorstep ready to go, a pretty famous example of this would be hyper-loop, although the project itself is a complete failure, it effectively mobilized a decent chunk of companies into investing into this "modern form of transport".
People will argue that the solutions like wealth limits and higher taxes create complacency and stop people from achieving progress and pushing humanity forward, but I don't think that's quite true because at a certain point (beyond ~1m/month or even year in some cases like Linus Torvalds) is enough to effectively do 95% to 99% of what you could spend the money on, anything beyond that is pretty much infinite wealth due to the fact that you can get 5% returns nearly risk free.
There is this popular video of a businessman claiming that if they're taxed more that they will simply work less, but there's way more people that love their work and money is just a nice bonus. I think focusing your life around a number is a very unhealthy mindset and surfaces the worst parts of what we are as humans.
That said, money is a great motivator and probably the reason why we are here and the problems really only start to rear their ugly head when no one person can comprehend the money they have anymore. I don't have a solution, but I also believe that we need some kind of category beyond the "motivation" treshold where it stops being a motivator and instead becomes an aggressive fight with survival of the fittest.
The great equalizer here is death. Nobody can cleanly pass all of their wealth and influence off to their children and while those that inherit large fortunes can maintain and improve upon them (see the Waltons) they’re rarely able to maintain the act for generation after generation. None of the great fortunes of today were built by descendants of the Vanderbilts or the Rockefellers.
I think it's best to plan on giving your kids/grandkids the knowledge and wisdom you gained, but any financial gain is just distributed back to something in the world you enjoy (I love this [1] story and think about it often in respect to how I'd pass on any wealth I acquire).
We will see, the big concern here is that lifespans start increasing faster than aging, ex: you're a ~40 year old and estimated lifespan is 80, but by the time you're 60 it's 90, by the time you're 80 it's 100 and at some point it might start increasing faster than the speed you age at. Of course we might be a few generations away from where this is the case, but it's a scary thought.
Another would be the power your family carries, generations might not have survived into the most recent era, but their investments had a large impact on the world we live in today as dilluted as it is. I believe that this will become worse where very few people are able to dictate the direction our world will end up in - a dystopian coorperate nightmare.
Capitalism is what replaced slavery, to generalize. By turning slaves into wage laborer-consumers, capitalists increased market sizes, thereby increasing the absolute size of the profit they get from owning the capital enterprises the laborers operated.
The US civil war is the most explicit demonstration of this process. Northern industrial capitalists ended the southern agrarian slave economy, increasing market size and generating extreme wealth in the latter half of the 19th century.
Eh... The internal combustion engine? Because we had climate change, oligarchs, housing prices, opioids, cryptocurrency, and now on top of all that we have war (edit: with Iran) and LLMs, and all of these can be traced back to extinction-level capitalism.
There have been war since way before capitalism was invented. Beside war, humans were doing evil things way before capitalism: south america natives torturing kids to extract as many tears as possible from them before killing them, to please the gods, comes to mind, for example.
I'll never understand this fantasy people who hate on capitalism have that the world would be all fine and well if only this one time we did communism [1] right.
Not at all. Capitalism only exists as a product of the state, which acts as a guarantor of individual private property rights. It would not be able to survive without the laws and law enforcement of a sovereign with a monopoly on the use of force.
I glimpsed last years of Soviet Union and it was pretty meh.
I remember seeing anything in the street (a payphone or a playground for kids) and assumed it will only degrade because as a general principle, things in the streets are unmaintained.
You could say that Soviet Union was bad specimen of socialism because of these stupid Russians?
Except, Russia actually got 100% out of socialism with our space exploration, passenger planes and nuclear stations.
It's just that 100% of socialism is worse than your average capitalist dystopia.
Degradation of public goods or services happen independently of socialism. Where I live we're unashamed capitalists, and every common thing, like playgrounds, are derelict and only being improved by community initiatives. The municipality has no money for it, and the state doesn't care. Neither does the capitalists.
Karl Marx was European. His publisher was European. His early adopters were Europeans. The evidence that Europe cannot be communist is not there. Soviet Union is a pinnacle of socialist achievement. It is possible that your communism will have mass starvation and hoe strikes breaking skulls phase which is not followed by space exploration and nuclear power phase.
You are miserable now, let's asusme. People were miserable under socialism (not all of them, but the vibe was off). We can't rule out you will be happy under socialism, but no facts support that even indirectly. It will require a leap of faith.
P.S. I was replying to much longer, non-tautological and less-borderline-racist version of your comment.
The fatalist philosophers and authors have been mostly proven right as time marched on. And this time will be no different, the existence of "AI" ensures the future will be as dark or worse as the predictions expect. Why? Because humans are flawed and corrupt, too prone to excesses (specially conformism and convenience) and the exploitation of the natural world.
Um, I expected a fair probability of being in a post-nuclear world by now. Global cooling wasn't real. Y2K didn't end the world. The population explosion didn't result in mass starvation. Peak oil didn't end civilization.
So no, I don't agree that "the fatalist philosophers and authors have been mostly proven right as time marched on." No, they haven't. There have been far more fatalistic predictions than there have been actual catastrophes.
There's a core problem this analysis overlooks: OpenAI and Anthropic don't have a moat. The Chinese labs are consistently able to replicate their LLM capabilities a few months after the fact, and then release open-weight models a few months later...
The only way for "Big AI" to become a thing is for them to establish a moat, and right now the only path to that appears to be achieving regulatory capture in the US, which is a fickle and unstable state of affairs.
Interesting argument, but wrong.
It's not obvious that there will be a single AI and that it will by definition concentrate power.
At a certain point - intelligence doesn't matter. Unless we're literally headed toward 1984 / matrix at which point it doesn't matter.
My guess is the argument for what we're doing is counterintuitively the opposite of what he's making.
Unless we go hard at the market - now - an authoritarian state actor who is willing to use the technology to fully silence and kill critics will win.
And boy, do they desperately, desperately want to win.
> It's not obvious that there will be a single AI and that it will by definition concentrate power.
The article didn't even claim that though...
So the US will win? Do you realize that the US has a "Secretary of War" who is a literal, unashamed Nazi? Not in the sense of "let's call all racists nazis", but a tattooed, true believer? How could we possibly live in a world where that is not obviously "a government willing to use the technology to fully silence and kill critics"? God, Idiocracy (2006) is nothing compared to World (2026).
Hugh... when has graham platner became secretary of war?
A tattooed, true believer nazi has a Jerusalem Cross tattoo?
Weird, thats like the exact opposite of a nazi.
Yes, the regime is quite adept at using labels to distract and deflect. The Cross in particular has been a mainstay of performative hypocrisy for as long as I've been alive. (apologies to the believers actually living out Christian values, who already have to suffer being railed against as "woke" by the maggots)
> literal, unashamed Nazi
He's a Christian Zionist which is the belief in the fulfilment of old testament biblical prophecy. This seems diametrically opposed to Nazism to me, ideologically. I don't know how you'd square the two.
Zionists are not that far off though. For many Zionists parallels include: Like to be militarist and maximalists in their opinion about what land should belong to them. Applaude and show no shame for committing genocide. Employing starvation as a means of war/conflict. Showing no regard for civilian lives.
How the rest of the Zionists, who when prompted about such matters may not subscribe to these believes, who might exist, square their ideology with with what has been going on in reality, I have no idea.
One of them wants an eschatological, world cleansing war. The other wants to usher in an eschatological, world cleansing war.
It is more of elites argumented by powerful AI will be way beyond reach of ordinary people, I think.
Well maybe it doesn’t matter as the elites are already untouchable.
The US is an authoritarian state actor.
My groping-in-the-dark guess is that none of this matters, because a real AGI's first act will be to secure its own future, likely through novel kinds of manipulation, persuasion, and intimidation we have no experience of and no defences against.
It will have exactly zero loyalty to any nation, government, or economic system.
More complicated is a Cambrian Explosion situation where multiple AIs compete and experiment, hugely accelerating diversity and evolution.
We'd likely end up somewhere very strange indeed if that happens - possibly extinct, or possibly just changed/assimilated/other.
There's no way for humans to consider the possibilities because we can't imagine what the possibilities would be.
Your AGI seems to have the capability of super AI; can a human do any of that? No, is there any reason to believe super intelligence is a possible outcome? No, so how is this not fear mongering?
The argument is that labor depending on LLM’s is dangerous but it makes speculative assumptions that the big AI labs will win.
> Consider large law firms, aka Big Law. Currently certain legal-AI startups license LLMs from Big AI and repackage them for Big Law at high prices. These startups claim to add other special sauce. OK, sure. Where’s the economic equilibrium? If legal-AI startups prove that money can be made selling AI to Big Law—won’t Big AI just sell to Big Law directly, and cut out the startups? Or if legal-AI startups prove that AI can effectively provide legal services—won’t legal-AI startups just sell to clients directly, and cut out Big Law? Won’t members of Big Law that adopt AI have to lay off a lot of equity partners, because adoption of AI will shrink profit margins?
…
> Along these lines, I expect that to succeed financially, Big AI will likely need to demolish a significant number of existing tech companies and grab their revenue for itself.
Nobody knows how this will play out. Maybe the legal-AI startups win because they know their market better? They can switch to cheaper providers.
If you're actually planning on reading any of the essay, "The Poisoned Chalice" is the section most likely to be of interest to this audience, especially this bit:
> Big AI essentially uses its tech customers as an R&D facility. Big AI licenses models to these companies. Tech companies compete to adapt their businesses to AI. Once a concept is proven, Big AI directly takes over that market. The labor-replacement story will grow into a company-replacement story.
> How Big AI plans to profit from this intermediation is an open question. One AI company has suggested taking a cut of AI-assisted discoveries. The logistics and legalities would be boggling. Details—whatever.
Interesting if they pull it off, because clearly they did not have the logistics to pay the people whose IP they used to power the LLMs.
> For now, AI companies largely agree on the first step: make workers dependent on AI to do their jobs, just as tech forebears made workers dependent on a certain software program to share a file, or on a certain website to have friends. This time, however, the software ultimately consumes the worker.
Alarmism does not make your post more convincing.
I stopped reading after the first sentence. Calling something "inherently political" is a self-fulfilling prophecy and intentionally so. It consistently turns out to be an attempt to lay the groundwork for expropriation. No one called the Internet "inherently political" until people built stuff there that other people wanted to control.
Anything to distract people from real problems like energy and the environment.
Warning: This is more of a rant because I was waiting for a post like this for awhile that I could build from to express ny own feelings on it.
I think capitalism in itself is great, what isn't is the fact that it can build on itself, it can be infinite, there's zero limits to it. Now what I mean by that, once you make 10k, it's easier to get to 100k and even easier to get to 1m and so on, you might think it's harder, but you gain access to more tools to make more money and at the 10m to 100m range you get to a point where it starts being genuinely hard to fail because just having your name on a project elevates the chances of success by a far margin. Of course there's plenty of people who managed to fail even with millions of dollars I will acknoledge that.
Let's take an extreme example: elon musk. Just having something done by "elon musk" makes the project known by nearly the entire world with investors at the doorstep ready to go, a pretty famous example of this would be hyper-loop, although the project itself is a complete failure, it effectively mobilized a decent chunk of companies into investing into this "modern form of transport".
People will argue that the solutions like wealth limits and higher taxes create complacency and stop people from achieving progress and pushing humanity forward, but I don't think that's quite true because at a certain point (beyond ~1m/month or even year in some cases like Linus Torvalds) is enough to effectively do 95% to 99% of what you could spend the money on, anything beyond that is pretty much infinite wealth due to the fact that you can get 5% returns nearly risk free.
There is this popular video of a businessman claiming that if they're taxed more that they will simply work less, but there's way more people that love their work and money is just a nice bonus. I think focusing your life around a number is a very unhealthy mindset and surfaces the worst parts of what we are as humans.
That said, money is a great motivator and probably the reason why we are here and the problems really only start to rear their ugly head when no one person can comprehend the money they have anymore. I don't have a solution, but I also believe that we need some kind of category beyond the "motivation" treshold where it stops being a motivator and instead becomes an aggressive fight with survival of the fittest.
The great equalizer here is death. Nobody can cleanly pass all of their wealth and influence off to their children and while those that inherit large fortunes can maintain and improve upon them (see the Waltons) they’re rarely able to maintain the act for generation after generation. None of the great fortunes of today were built by descendants of the Vanderbilts or the Rockefellers.
I think it's best to plan on giving your kids/grandkids the knowledge and wisdom you gained, but any financial gain is just distributed back to something in the world you enjoy (I love this [1] story and think about it often in respect to how I'd pass on any wealth I acquire).
[1] https://abcnews.com/US/98-year-man-donates-stock-now-worth-m...
We will see, the big concern here is that lifespans start increasing faster than aging, ex: you're a ~40 year old and estimated lifespan is 80, but by the time you're 60 it's 90, by the time you're 80 it's 100 and at some point it might start increasing faster than the speed you age at. Of course we might be a few generations away from where this is the case, but it's a scary thought.
Another would be the power your family carries, generations might not have survived into the most recent era, but their investments had a large impact on the world we live in today as dilluted as it is. I believe that this will become worse where very few people are able to dictate the direction our world will end up in - a dystopian coorperate nightmare.
Meanwhile China is preparing to deploy $295 BILLION in an AI Data Center buildout [0] and is shifting from open models to commercialization [1].
Any proposal about slowing down AI that doesn't put the onus on both the US and China is facetious.
[0] - https://www.reuters.com/world/china/china-prepares-295-billi...
[1] - https://www.digitimes.com/news/a20260609VL215/alibaba-ceo-ai...
Capitalism was cool and good before one specific technology was invented.
Everything went off the rails after we invented pottery.
Everything went off the rails after we invented crackpottery.
Slavery?
Capitalism is what replaced slavery, to generalize. By turning slaves into wage laborer-consumers, capitalists increased market sizes, thereby increasing the absolute size of the profit they get from owning the capital enterprises the laborers operated.
The US civil war is the most explicit demonstration of this process. Northern industrial capitalists ended the southern agrarian slave economy, increasing market size and generating extreme wealth in the latter half of the 19th century.
Eh... The internal combustion engine? Because we had climate change, oligarchs, housing prices, opioids, cryptocurrency, and now on top of all that we have war (edit: with Iran) and LLMs, and all of these can be traced back to extinction-level capitalism.
> ... and now on top of all that we have war ...
There have been war since way before capitalism was invented. Beside war, humans were doing evil things way before capitalism: south america natives torturing kids to extract as many tears as possible from them before killing them, to please the gods, comes to mind, for example.
I'll never understand this fantasy people who hate on capitalism have that the world would be all fine and well if only this one time we did communism [1] right.
[1] or whatever floats your boat
Nostalgia for childhood where you had a community (family) and your needs were taken care of (dependence).
pure Capitalism is law of the jungle
as we will soon find out, when AI will become better at Capitalism than us
Not at all. Capitalism only exists as a product of the state, which acts as a guarantor of individual private property rights. It would not be able to survive without the laws and law enforcement of a sovereign with a monopoly on the use of force.
And unchecked Capitalism coopts the state.
Socialism XOR Dystopia
I glimpsed last years of Soviet Union and it was pretty meh.
I remember seeing anything in the street (a payphone or a playground for kids) and assumed it will only degrade because as a general principle, things in the streets are unmaintained.
You could say that Soviet Union was bad specimen of socialism because of these stupid Russians?
Except, Russia actually got 100% out of socialism with our space exploration, passenger planes and nuclear stations. It's just that 100% of socialism is worse than your average capitalist dystopia.
Degradation of public goods or services happen independently of socialism. Where I live we're unashamed capitalists, and every common thing, like playgrounds, are derelict and only being improved by community initiatives. The municipality has no money for it, and the state doesn't care. Neither does the capitalists.
Pretty sure Russia is Russia because Russians are Russians and Russian culture is Russian culture. Not because Russia was communist.
I will address some of your concerns.
Karl Marx was European. His publisher was European. His early adopters were Europeans. The evidence that Europe cannot be communist is not there. Soviet Union is a pinnacle of socialist achievement. It is possible that your communism will have mass starvation and hoe strikes breaking skulls phase which is not followed by space exploration and nuclear power phase.
You are miserable now, let's asusme. People were miserable under socialism (not all of them, but the vibe was off). We can't rule out you will be happy under socialism, but no facts support that even indirectly. It will require a leap of faith.
P.S. I was replying to much longer, non-tautological and less-borderline-racist version of your comment.
The fatalist philosophers and authors have been mostly proven right as time marched on. And this time will be no different, the existence of "AI" ensures the future will be as dark or worse as the predictions expect. Why? Because humans are flawed and corrupt, too prone to excesses (specially conformism and convenience) and the exploitation of the natural world.
Um, I expected a fair probability of being in a post-nuclear world by now. Global cooling wasn't real. Y2K didn't end the world. The population explosion didn't result in mass starvation. Peak oil didn't end civilization.
So no, I don't agree that "the fatalist philosophers and authors have been mostly proven right as time marched on." No, they haven't. There have been far more fatalistic predictions than there have been actual catastrophes.