Western capitalism’s cycle of booms and busts stretches all the way back to Amsterdam and the Tulip Mania of 1636. They all follow the same pattern, and we are living in the end stages of one now with AI. Every single time, there are detractors who say this time is different; however, they have a four century track record of getting it wrong.
This week, yet again, we see a small Chinese firm with a fraction of the spending and resources getting the near equal of the frontier models Big Tech investors are spending trillions to achieve. Not only that, they are offering theirs to the world for free, and it uses a small fraction of electricity/computing resources to run. Those Big Tech investors will never earn those trillions back.
It might be bleak and depressing to contemplate, but people need to think about what happens after the crash. This is no time for centrism, or putting your fingers in your ears and saying you don’t want to hear about politics. The very worst people in our cultures, many Big Tech leaders themselves, are looking forward to this destruction and making their plans for it, and the world they want afterwards is a 100 times bleaker.
No one will engage with the ideas behind your output while they’re so clearly processed by that machine. Especially on that subject! The poster I mentioned was very kind, gentle, and did a better job reaching out than I think I can right now. You absolutely do not have to engage with a tool at that level to study it any more than medical researchers have to infect themselves to study smallpox. Citing the “response” of an llm as an example here is… A lot to unpack.
Paper is deeply inconvenient and limiting in many ways, kinda the polar opposite of an llm. It’s also 100% incontrovertibly your unassisted organic output. I wasn’t suggesting you switch back entirely, or even necessarily share whatever you write, just that it might be a healthy exercise and provide some useful contrast. I don’t mean to confront you whatsoever and hope things are going well.