Two speakers warn that concentrating AI power in a few tech companies creates dangerous control structures. Running advanced AI requires massive compute resources most people can't own, eroding personal autonomy. Diverse, independent research groups are essential for innovation, and centralizing AI development risks stifling breakthroughs and inviting power-seeking actors.
If we're creating this super powerful technology, everybody should have some kind of access to it, right? Otherwise, even if you have a benevolent overlord, you have an overlord, right? That's right.
There's a power asymmetry right now. If you need a big supercomputer to run an AI, you can't have like a personal AI supercomputer, right? Maybe they'll reserve a few racks, you know, fraction of the time for you. But really, you don't own your own weights. You don't own the extension to your cognition. And right now we don't even have like that many personalized models. Like one big blob, and we're slowly kind of deferring our cognition to it. And in a way, we're converging to like a Borg-like mind. We all share one common extension of our cognition. We're kind of losing our individuality. And I think like individuality, it's fundamentally important. I view the search over the space of technologies and innovation and progress as, yeah, as a sort of, it's an explore-exploit problem. But to explore the landscape, you need different groups of people exploring different things to find new ways of doing things. And if you converge onto a handful of tech companies that, you know, technically they all train employees between them, we're kind of stuck in one way of thinking, in one cluster. And there's a risk that there's a totally better way of doing things and we're totally missing out on it. And if we kind of crown winners too early and say, actually, only they are responsible enough to run AI at all and nobody else should have access to AI, that's just really bad for progress overall. And like you said, it creates this sort of risk of tyranny, right? Like, even though right now While you might trust whoever is in power, eventually, if you over-concentrate power, it becomes a target to the power seeking.
