I don't want to spoil it for you, but ...

But cyberpunk is the best kind of dystopia!

Manufactured Scarcity is the new post-scarcity

What? In what way does companies becoming dependent on AI chatbots will solve the world-spanning problem of resource scarcity?

The hell?

Just a year ago, Elon Musk was gleefully destroying the US government agency that provides food and medicine for many of the poorest, most desperate people on earth. He was literally tweeting about missing out on great parties to put USAID into the "wood chipper".

The tech overlords don't even want to spend a minuscule percentage of the federal budget helping starving people, even when it benefits the US. They are not going to give us a post-scarcity society.

Weird predicament you've set for yourself there.

Good luck with whatever you got going on.

IMHO this is only temporary, china buying themselves some time and want to make sure none of US models get entrenched in their position in the next few years (also putting pressure on US AI companies bleeding them)

The same way like Windows got entrenched everywhere even though linux desktop is pretty good even for non-tech savvy people and free.

Downward pressure on proprietary model pricing until a lab can catch up. Also good for hiring talent (who love OSS).

Cultural influence is another benefit. China is securing its sphere of influence as well as keeping us ai in check.

It's analogous to open-source software, which never had an obvious economic incentive either, although training an LLM necessary costs money whereas developing an OSS project might only cost time, which people are probably more likely to give up.

Balaji's "AI OVERPRODUCTION" post is the most compelling thesis that I've come across

They are making the hardware and commoditizing the complement.

Big AI labs are losing money. Open Models is making the pricing equation a lot trickier for them.

There are some short term ones but I doubt this will continue, especially for the more powerful models.

I mean, this is straight out of chinas playbook, it should not be surprising that China is making an inferior derivative product at an artificially lower price point: state subsidies to massively drive up internal scale and supply chains leading to artificially lower priced goods which then suffocate the competition has lead to *gestures vaguely at everything* being made in china.

Right now it’s so the Chinese can undermine the frontier models in the US. In areas they’re doing well like video generation (ie seedance) they won’t open source anything.

> What is the advantage to their companies to release them?

It's a distribution strategy. It costs something to serve the models - let's say $5/1M tokens.

If Qwen required $5 from anyone who was curious so you could even begin to test it out, a lot of people just wouldn't.

Now Qwen could offer a "free" tier, but it's infinitely cheaper to provide the weights and let people run it themselves including opening up the ability for anyone else on the planet to test it against other (open weight) models.

The costs to build the open weight models are sunk, but the costs to serve them, get them tested are not.

It's also precisely why the .NET SDK is free or the ESP32 SDK is free - they sell more Microsoft or ESP32 products.

People use their model otherwise they would not.

The majority are released by socialists, and by socialist I mean the People's Republic of China. Which everyone seems to forget is a socialist country working towards world communism.

They are a prestige propaganda tool on par with the space race. On top of that they insert a subtle pro-socialist bias in everything they touch.

Ask deepseek about the US economic system for a blatant example.

Now think what something as innocent seeming as the qwen retrieval models are doing in the background of every request.

If you want the neoclassical version:

What happens when there is an oligopoly in the supply of labor?

Same answer. Nothing good for the consumers of labor.

"Observation of how economies actually work has upended 150 year of economics."

True for both Marxist and neoclassical economics.

The reason why labor is weak relative to capital is that there is a huge number of somewhat fungible suppliers, viz. humans, and that they all need to work constantly to keep themselves alive.

If we assume that ai makes humans obsolete then you end up in a situation where your workforce is effectively perfectly unionised against you and the only thing you can do is choose which union you hire.

If you think you can bring them to the negotiation table by starving them all the providers are dozens to thousands of times bigger than you are.

This is a completely new dynamic that none of the business signing up for ai have ever seen before.

The human labor just said:

"Losing access to GPT‑5.5 feels like I've had a limb amputated.”

How well would an assembly line of quadriplegics work?

Also this isn't a Marxist analysis. Underneath all the formulas neo-classical economics makes the same assumptions about labor.

Nobody is a Marxian economics expert if it helps

Hopefully 1.

Labor replacing devices means nobody works in those fields anymore. If AI can do this for every field, nearly no one will need to work in any field. We'll have a giant fully automated resource-extraction machine.

A lot of people already did. All their children and descendants now are staunch capitalists because they saw first hand the horrors of communism.

I am from India and have friends who are immigrants from Russia, China and Cuba. We don't take lightly to being lectured about communism. We didn't move to the U.S., the bastion of capitalism, because communism had worked well for our grandfathers and parents and continues to do wonders for its society.