AI communism as proposed by Dean Ball

3. Open-weight models are inherently decelerationist, and I’m continually surprised to see the so-called “accelerationists” so excited about open-weight models. … Still, in the end, open-weight models deter further AI capex.
4. One probable outcome of an open-weight-model-dominant world is full AI communism, which is precisely what China proposes: rather than a market product, AI is a “public good” which will ultimately be provided by the state as a kind of “digital public infrastructure.” This future strikes me as a dystopian hellscape, but I’ve never met an open-weight models advocate who doesn’t ultimately concede this is where things end. You’d be surprised how many ‘accelerationists’ lobbied me, while I was in government, to support an eleven or twelve-figure federally funded data center so that startups could train models at a subsidy and then give them away for free. There was no other way for AI to progress, they said. Perhaps this is the logical end state of things. Nonetheless, I find myself surprised to see supposed accelerationists excited about such an outcome. I think many of them just don’t know what they’re doing. Many accelerationists do not view the creation and serving of frontier models as a legitimate business.
5. I would guess that the Trump Administration will at some point realize that their best strategy here would be to create large amounts of regulatory risk around the use of open-weight Chinese models. You don’t need to “ban open source” (one of the dumber motifs of AI policy discussion). You just need to direct every agency to issue soft law that creates FUD. “A Federal Reserve Advisory Bulletin found that there may be backdoors in Chinese AI models.” It needn’t be that well justified. You just create enough regulatory risk that every regulated enterprise backs off. You probably don’t want to create so much regulatory risk that you scare off the hyperscalers from serving Chinese models; this will just drive startups to sketchier providers. There’s a happy middle ground here. I’d assume they will do some version of this.

From a tweet by Dean Ball, OpenAI’s Head of Strategic Futures. What a delusional and un-American take. Imagine mapping this to other technologies:

1. One probable outcome of a right to bear arms is full gun communism, which is precisely what America proposes: rather than being controlled by the military, gun ownership becomes a “right” protected by the state as a kind of “final safeguard against despotism.” This future strikes me as a dystopian hellscape. We should create large amounts of regulatory risk around gun ownership!¹
2. One probable outcome of Linux becoming the majority operating system for servers is full OS communism, which is precisely what Linus Torvalds proposes: rather than a market product, operating systems become a kind of “digital public infrastructure.” This future strikes me as a dystopian hellscape, but I’ve never met any open-source advocates who don’t ultimately concede this is where things end. … Many open-source advocates do not view operating system development as a legitimate business. In the end, open-source operating systems deter further OS capex.
3. One probable outcome of a web-standard-dominant world is full web communism, which is precisely what the W3C and WHATWG propose: rather than Flash, which is a market product developed by Adobe, web technologies become a “public good.” This future strikes me as a dystopian hellscape. Who would bother making web apps or browsers if web standards become dominant?!! It’s unimaginable; the web must be destroyed to save the American tech industry.

Obviously these are all nonsensical takes that go against the very principles which led America to become what it is. Dean Ball’s argument makes sense if he just doesn’t like American values all that much, which is fine. In that case he should be honest about where he stands: for OpenAI and lining his own pockets, and against the American people.

If someone can make your product cheaper than you can, fair-and-square, and that means you have to lower your prices, that’s not called communism…

How did ML get to the point where LLMs could be developed? Was it because we banned academia from publishing papers on AI?

There are good organizations in America and other parts of the free world working on open source AI: the Allen Institute for AI, Project Marin out of Stanford, EleutherAI, and others I’m forgetting. Dean Ball alleges that people who support open source AI “concede” the dystopian hellscape of AI becoming something which is actually priced appropriately and/or treated as a utility like electricity or water or interstate highways. I cannot speak for any of these organizations, but I myself think there could be no better future for AI, and no alternative future compatible with a love of liberty.