This is the real problem. We're looking at a future where those who control AI have an insurmountable advantage in everything. They can control the amount of intelligence the masses have access to -- for their own safety, of course -- and they will never, ever be able to close the gap.
They said "We're looking at a future". And if that future ends up developing the way these companies want it to then we're looking at extremely dystopian future where AI is essential to all work and people have to buy their "intelligence" from an oligopoly of large providers who have total control over the price and capabilities whilst simultaneously having unfiltered read/write access to people's stream-of-consciousness - their work life, their personal problems, their political opinions. This level of access and power is unprecedented in our society.
Yes. And for most applications it's more important that the open models get better in absolute terms and perhaps that they are competitive on a per-Watt basis.
- I think competitive open models are just an artifact of the AI race we're witnessing right now. What's the incentive for a company to spend billions researching, developing, and training a model, only to release it for free? Leading to the next point.
- Even if open models are good enough to be competitive, how are we going to run them? Doing so locally is next to impossible and I don't see that changing. The capabilities of models that you can run locally will always get better, of course, but the level of quality that is considered essential for work will always stay pinned at "near-frontier". Datacenters will always have better optimization and economies of scale, the industry will consolidate over time and eventually we'll end up with a handful of companies that operate the hardware serving 95% of all inference needs.
I'm not convinced that we can reach the fantasy world that they're trying to sell without killing the entire planet, but if we somehow do I don't see how we can avoid the world turning into a dystopian hellscape. We would need extremely radical interventions to avoid that scenario, such that these models and the hardware to run them would be owned and governed democratically, i.e. the end of capitalism.
At a certain point, you don't have a choice. Before China got into the game, the only way to avoid giving Luxotica money if you wanted a pair of glasses was to essentially not buy glasses. This is the same for many industries -- consolidation behind the scenes.
e.g. Zenni has sold $7 glasses for like 20+ years. They appeared shortly after Luxotica started buying retailers. If there's a problem, it's that advertising reduces consumer information (basically economic jamming) and distorts markets.
What is reasonably priced? Lenses are lenses so one vould debate the real cost, but the frames are incredibly overpriced for a piece of metal or plastic with two joints and those components that land on your nose.
Frames could literally cost 1 dollar (only happened after china entered this market), but good luck finding ones like this with good lenses.
You need to buy from one supplier who intentionally offers cheapest frames for 50+ dollars and those frames look like crap. The ones that look better (even if same plastic) cost 500+ dollars - and all due to price gouging.
For lenses I am not sure, but suspect something similar.
