Arcades mostly failed to adapt to the advances of home consoles to provide experiences you couldn't get at home. That's on the dimwitted game suits of the 1990s who cared little about novel gameplay, networked gameplay, or better NPC AI and physics. Then mobile happened and there was a brief glorious Cambrian explosion of new ideas until the Zynga playbook and DLC. Evidence: lived through it as a small game studio developer trying to do original things. The fun experiment now and then is to break out your 1980s video game consoles and play through their libraries. Most of the games are objectively terrible but gems like Yar's Revenge are still gems today IMO.
That depends on whether "frontier" models can maintain an expanding frontier. If the frontier settles, they're dead, and it will be commoditized. Otherwise, there are still plenty of pathological behaviors of these things to address that will keep expanding that frontier (if that's possible and the limitation isn't the approach itself).
The reception of saying things like this is interesting. AI stans think I'm way too pessimistic but AI haters think I'm mindlessly optimistic.
Stupid obsolete laws that stay on the books forever is seemingly the American way and occasionally we refresh them with new even stupider laws that were obsolete before they were even proposed.
Despite really kicking our asses on their approach to an AI ecosystem, China has problems of its own. Too bad we can't just copy the parts that work but those are the rules I guess.
So, the course of AI is currently in the hands of ~10 billionaires. That seems like the root cause here to me. And I don't think AI made them terrible, other people agreeing with single every brain fart they uttered rotted any reasonable sense of self worth into narcissism and psychosis. But each and every one of them knows how to play power games: they build coalitions around themselves that make them nearly impossible to depose. Compare and contrast with Carly Fiorina who was not particularly good at this and never made it to three commas.
For the record, IMO AI and LLMs are amazing and magical technology. And they raise important existential questions about abilities we once considered hallmarks of conscience and sentience that can be reduced to floating point math. I think people find that threatening having invested quite a bit of ego in being the sole possessors of such abilities. I do not see them as a threat to art: go watch a live performance or visit an art museum. But boy can they create content. And most human content was slop to begin with, see photoslop.
But it's also a cop out to cite that to rationalize the billionaire situation as if everything is fine. It's absolutely 100% not. Musk's investments in Ken Paxton alone should be enough to drive a wealth tax on unrealized capital gains past $1B or so through Congress in 2027, but it likely won't because so many consider themselves temporarily embarrassed paper billionaires. Note that Meta and Zuckerberg have already blinked on this in California. Now if Musk could have just stuck to robots and spaceships, he wouldn't have made himself such a sore thumb, but nooooooo...
And a wealth tax won't solve the national debt. I know that. Duh. But it will start to erode the ridiculous level of influence the top 10 billionaires in tech have right now. The Dictator's Handbook argues that taxation is how leaders transfer money from people they don't like to people they like. Elect people who hate the billionaires and this will all happen organically. Wealth taxes on everyone are bad, that's a given. We're not talking everyone here. We're talking the top 2000 or so richest in America. And if their demographic has no problem going after "welfare queens" I do not see the problem in returning the favor.
Meanwhile, in autocratic China, the AI situation is somehow much healthier than in the states. Go figure.
> So, the course of AI is currently in the hands of ~10 billionaires.
Is it? It seems to be spreading around everywhere. There are tens of millions of users and hundreds of thousands of organizations on HuggingFace. How are the few of people running the merely most publicity-focused companies in the space in control of the whole ecosystem?
because powerful AI requires tons of compute for training, so training a frontier model requires billions of dollars.
if it weren't for China, half a dozen US billionaires would own the frontier, gatekeeping any model more powerful than Llama from the public. fortunately China is open-sourcing powerful models, but how long will they keep it up?
> because powerful AI requires tons of compute for training
What explains the prevalence of models being trained by small organizations, or even lone individuals, on relatively affordable hardware, then?
> so training a frontier model requires billions of dollars
The term "frontier" here almost makes this a tautology -- "the kinds of models that currently cost billions of dollars to train are only being trained by people who have billions of dollars". But things are moving so fast that the frontier of the immediate moment will be well-trodden ground a few months from now.
Ground-up models are emerging at an accelerating pace, and the FOSS community is producing distillations of proprietary models rapidly.
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