AI is a lot more like the Internet than it is like Facebook. It’s a set of techniques you can use to create tools. These are incredibly useful tools, but you’re not going to make Facebook money off of them because the techniques are pretty easy to replicate and the genie is out of the bottle.
What the tech bros are looking for is a way to control access to AI so they can be a chokepoint. Like if Craftsman could charge for every single time you used their tool to make something. For one very recent example, see what happened to Unity. Creating chokepoints and then collecting rent is the modern corporate feudal strategy, but that won’t work if everybody with an AWS account and enough money can spin up an LLM and start training it.
AI is a lot more like the Internet than it is like Facebook. It’s a set of techniques you can use to create tools. These are incredibly useful tools, but you’re not going to make Facebook money off of them because the techniques are pretty easy to replicate and the genie is out of the bottle.
What the tech bros are looking for is a way to control access to AI so they can be a chokepoint. Like if Craftsman could charge for every single time you used their tool to make something. For one very recent example, see what happened to Unity. Creating chokepoints and then collecting rent is the modern corporate feudal strategy, but that won’t work if everybody with an AWS account and enough money can spin up an LLM and start training it.