Sort of, kind of. Most decisions you'd see him make would quickly cause his control over Amazon to disappear, without actually improving anything for Amazon workers.

That's one part of the bad mental model of organizations and markets (and thus societies) people have. The people at the top may be richer and more powerful, but they're not actually free to do whatever. They have a role to play in the system they ostensibly "control", but when they deviate too far from what the system expects them to do, they get ejected.

Never mistake the finger pointing at the Moon for the Moon itself. Also, never mistake the person barking orders for the source from which those orders originate.

Jeff Bezos is a product of the system, not a driver of it. Bezos, Musk, Zuckerberg, Thiel, etc, are outputs, not inputs.

Their decisions are absolutely constrained by the system's values. They have zero agency in this, and are literally unable to imagine anything different.

The CEO might have more control of Amazon than Jeff.

> I'm not going to read that hack, but in either case, the metaphysical monster of the market you're proposing is not what is propping up LLMs. It's the decisions of actors at major tech companies and VCs. These are people, not magical entities.

Your loss. The article is actually talking about the thing you're saying. And so am I. These are all people, not magical entities, and that is exactly why the near-term future of "AI being the new electricity" is inevitable (short of a total collapse of civilization).

The article spells out the causal mechanism 20 different ways, so I still recommend reading it if the dynamics are not blindingly apparent to you yet.

> They're preparing for it by blocking it off completely.

No we don't. Quite the opposite. Several dams have been made into movable mechanic contraptions precisely to NOT stop the tide coming in.

A lot of the water management is living with the water, not fighting it. Shore replenishment and strengthening is done by dropping sand in strategic locations and letting the water take care of dumping it in the right spot. Before big dredgers, the tide was used to flush sand out of harbours using big flushing basins. Big canals have been dug for better shipping. Big and small ships sailed and still sail on the waters to trade with the world. A lot of our riches come from the sea and the rivers.

The water is a danger and a tool. It's not stopped, only redirected and often put to good use. Throughout Dutch history, those who worked with the water generally have done well. And similarly, some places really suffered after the water was redirected away from them. Fisher folk lost their livelihoods, cities lost access to trade, some land literally evaporated when it got too dry, a lot of land shrunk when water was removed, biodiversity dropped...

Anyway, if you want to use the Dutch waters as a metaphor for technological innovations, the lesson will not be that the obvious answer is to block it. The lesson will be to accept it, to use it, to gain riches through it: to live with it.

As the other commenter noted, you are simply wrong about that. We control the effects the tide has on us, not the tide itself.

But let me offer you a false dichotomy for the purposes of argument:

1. You spend your efforts preventing the emergence of AI

2. You spend your efforts creating conditions for the harmonious co-existence of AI and humanity

It's your choice.

Your concern is the environmental impact? Why pick on LLMs vs Amazon or your local drug store? Or a local restaurant, for that matter?

Do the calculations for how much LLM use is required to equal one hamburger worth of CO2 — or the CO2 of commuting to work in a car.

If my daily LLM environmental impact is comparable to my lunch or going to work, it’s really hard to fault, IMO. They aren’t building data centers in the rainforest.

I broadly agree with your point, but would also draw attention to something I've observed:

> LLMs will NEVER become true AGI. But do they need to? No, or course not!

Everyone disagrees about the meaning of each of the three letters of the initialism "AGI", and also disagree about the compound whole and often argue it means something different than the simple meaning of those words separately.

Even on this website, "AGI" means anything from "InstructGPT" (the precursor to ChatGPT) to "Biblical God" — or, even worse than "God" given this is a tech forum, "can solve provably impossible task such as the halting problem".

There are two different groups with different perspectives and relationships to the "AI hype"; I think we're talking in circles in this subthread because we're talking about different people.

See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44208831. Quoting myself (sorry):

> For me, one of the Beneficiaries, the hype seems totally warranted. The capability is there, the possibilities are enormous, pace of advancement is staggering, and achieving them is realistic. If it takes a few years longer than the Investor group thinks - that's fine with us; it's only a problem for them.

> it's the environmental impact of MINDLESSLY using one.

Isn't much of that environmental impact currently from the training of the model rather than the usage? Something you could arguably one day just stop doing if you're satisfied with the progress on that front (People won't be any time soon admittedly)

I'm no expert on this front. It's a genuine question based on what i've heard and read.

Overinvestment isn't a bug. It is a feature of capitalism. When the dust settles there'll be few trillion-dollar pots and 100s of billion are being spent to get one of them.

Environmental impacts of GenAI/LLM ecosystem are highly overrated.

The article is wrong though :). It's because people make choices, that this future is inevitable - enough people are independently choosing to embrace LLMs because of a real or perceived value. That, as well as the (real and perceived) reasons for it are plain and apparent, so it's not hard to predict where this leads in aggregate.