The amount of hate this tech gets is phenomenal, and most of it is completely misdirected. The problems that people ascribe to it aren’t inherent in the technology, but are simply symptoms of underlying social problems in a capitalist society.

For example, people complain that it takes jobs away, but the whole idea that we have to work for the sake of work is idiotic to begin with. Technology that frees up people from work should create more free time for people to enjoy. The reason that’s not happening is because capitalism is not a rational economic system.

Another common argument is that it’s very resource intensive and wastes energy. This is true, but there’s no reason to believe this won’t be optimized. In fact, we’ve already seen a lot of optimizations happen in just a few years that now make it possible to run models that used to require a data centre to run on a laptop.

However, more fundamentally, wasting energy is once again an aspect of the capitalist system itself. Before AI we saw stuff like crypto, NFTs, and so on. Much of the technology that’s developed under capitalism ends up being frivolous or even actively harmful. So, it’s not generative AI that’s the problem, but the social system that guides allocation of labour and resources.

In particular, artists are still clinging to an artisan model focusing on individual exceptionalism and intellectual property rights. These reactions, rooted in petty-bourgeois ideology, ultimately serve to reinforce inequality and empower corporations rather than protect artists.

The core contradiction here is between the increasingly socialized nature of artistic production in a globalized, digital world and the continued emphasis on private ownership. It's a symptom of capitalist development that leads to the proletarianization of artists as they are displaced by industrial competition.

The real solution lies in worker solidarity, unionization, and ultimately, the socialization of property. The enemy is not AI itself but the capitalist market that shapes its deployment, a system that already produces formulaic, profit-driven art. The focus on the underlying class struggle is how we get a future where technology serves the collective good rather than further entrenching existing power structures. This was a brilliant write up on the subject incidentally https://redsails.org/artisanal-intelligence/

It's a real game changer, and the trick of using window into a larger token space is pretty clever. This kind of stuff is precisely why I don't take arguments that LLMs are inherently wasteful and useless very seriously. We're just starting to figure out different techniques for using and improving them, and nobody knows what the actual limits are. I'm also very optimistic that open source models are consistently catching up and surpassing closed ones, meaning that the tech continues to stay available to the public. This was a pretty fun write up for a little while back, but still holds up well today https://steve-yegge.medium.com/were-gonna-need-a-bigger-moat-478a8df6a0d2

Ah that's a neat use case actually. I've been using an app on the phone for learning, but haven't tried using a model to practice chatting with.