GoKawiilThe Closing of the Frontier
The Anthropic Mythos announcement is the first time in my life I’ve felt truly poor. Maybe because I grew up on the internet and it was the one permissionless place where you could have leverage and a shot at uncapped exploration and ambition. That is now changing with the gap between models that are publicly available vs those reserved for the already wealthy and pre-established.
In 1893, Frederick Jackson Turner argued that much that is distinctive about America was shaped by the existence of free land to the West where anyone could start over, and that this condition infused America with its characteristic liberty, egalitarianism, rejection of feudalistic hierarchy, self-sufficiency, and ambition.
Since the days when the fleet of Columbus sailed into the waters of the New World, America has been another name for opportunity... But never again will such gifts of free land offer themselves... each frontier did indeed furnish a new field of opportunity, a gate of escape from the bondage of the past... And now, four centuries from the discovery of America, at the end of a hundred years of life under the Constitution, the frontier has gone, and with its going has closed the first period of American history. – Frederick Jackson Turner, The Significance of the Frontier in American History, 1893
We are witnessing the closing of yet another frontier in history. Even though the American dream is nearly dead, the one somewhat accessible escape hatch that offered economic mobility and cherished individual agency was the wired. Perhaps you would never own a house, but when it came to technology, a poor person and the wealthiest person in the world had access to the same internet, the same phone, the same encryption protocols (my TLS connection wasn’t using AES-ECB-quant-8 vs your AES-GCM-512).
A 16-year-old with no credentials and no capital could just do things. The world of bits offered the freedom to build without being drowned in arbitrary constraints, in a way that didn’t require assembling vast capital or prestige or connections, where your creativity and work could speak for itself, and you had agency. This is a precious thing and we should seek to preserve it for as long as it is possible, because there is still much possibility left. We’ve only just begun scratching the surface for what is possible to build and how best to harness the intelligence of powerful models.
I feel this most acutely in the cordoning off of frontier models from public access, though the logic also applies to the general replacement of labor and intelligence with capital. Rudolf Laine articulates this well in his essay, Capital, AGI and Ambition.
Those with significant capital when labour-replacing AI started have a permanent advantage. Upstarts will not defeat them, since capital now trivially converts into superhuman labour in any field. – Rudolf Laine, 2024
George Hotz more bluntly calls it neofeudalism.
This isn’t like nuclear weapons, this is intelligence itself. A nuclear weapon can only destroy; intelligence is the greatest creative force in the world. If a small group of people have a monopoly on it, you are the permanent underclass in the same way animals are. – George Hotz, 2026
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