It is important that the democratic process remains more powerful than companies. Laws and norms are going to change, but we have to work within the democratic process, even though it will be messy and slower than we’d like. We want to be a voice and a stakeholder, but not to have all the power.

This only ends up in one place. A continued climbing of the vertical. Why are you still in the loop at all? Don’t think voting will save you. You’ll have 0 earning potential. You’ll have no money to buy stuff, this is the way capitialism ends. There’s only one way to prevent this, and it’s preventing anyone from monopolizing compute, the resource needed to train and run models. Make sure it stays distributed. Oh wait, it’s already too late for that. 60% of the global compute is owned by the 5 US hyperscalers.

When one person (or company) has all the money, do you see how the money would be worthless?

A economic system is only good in so much as it effectively deploys capital for real growth. If real economic growth is only 3 percent, any time you are earning beyond that, somebody else is losing. And yet somehow, today, you can put your money in money market accounts and earn a “risk-free” 5 percent…hmm something doesn’t make sense. Who is losing? You will eventually be unable to squeeze the productive people any further.

Stop worrying so much about the distribution of the pie. Start thinking about how to make the pie bigger. With exponential (what 3 percent year over year is) growth, the latter outstrips the former by so much. The right distribution is simply: From each according to his ability, to each according to his ability to effectively deploy capital to achieve real economic growth. Communism is dumb cause it goes to the poor (who routinely demonstrate that they poorly deploy capital). Capitalism is dumb cause it goes to the rent-seekers (who frequently deploy capital to increase or maintain their moat). Acceleration is the way.

Considering that ByteDance has been on the forefront of algorithmic recommendation systems since before ChatGPT (consider how much more addictive TikTok has been than all previous forms of social media), it makes me somewhat doubtful of the estimates of how behind China is on AI development compared to US models? I don't think anyone doing evals here has access to the Chinese frontier model!