GoKawiilI think from this blog you may misunderestimate how absolutely giddy I am about AI. I did hacking from 2007-2014, after that my whole career has been devoted to AI. I love the progress. I’m so excited for the new LLMs, self driving cars, video generation models, and coding agents. I set up a Linux box with opencode on my local GLM-5.2 last week and wow like just saying install tmux with the geohot configuration works; the Year of the Linux Desktop is finally here!
What I don’t like is two things. One, this constant bullshit about some window closing, or the perpetual underclass, or falling hopelessly behind. This is negative valence hype, not only is it not true, it’s mostly designed to make you feel bad about yourself and move to shitty San Francisco where everything really does suck like how these people claim.
And two, this strawman jump from, oh hey, it’s a fancy autocomplete, smart compiler, better search engine, to it’s gonna like own the whole light cone bro like if you aren’t in SF and at the right parties there’s gonna be like a flash of light in the sky one day and you’re not even gonna know what happened but everything just Changed. I’ll bet you everything I have that this doesn’t happen. The people perpetuating this are terrible people, but the justice is that this is how they feel inside all the time themselves.
Here’s a cool presentation from 2016 about superintelligence. Here’s a movie from 1991 about machines taking over the world. A certain cult likes to claim credit for things that are happening with or without them, and this is my main argument against the valuation of frontier labs. It’s not that AI won’t create that much value, it’s that they won’t capture it.
They try to dress it up with some high minded safety or China bullshit, but the core of the anti open source arguments is a fear of commodification. AI is something that’s happening mostly due to Moore’s law and general progress in computing, not something that they are doing. Of course they have a strong incentive against you finding this out, because then you might not want to give them billions of dollars.
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