Never did realize how the ChatGPT butthole logo looks a bit like three chain links intertwined…
When you hear someone slandering “scary” “dystopian” communism, they talk about how the government will own everything, even everything you make and the tools you use to make it. A lack of freedom or choice or individuality. But look at the society capitalism has built. Look at how little ownership or time for creativity we have left.
You don’t own the software, music, or other media you purchase digitally, you just own the temporary right to play it, which can be revoked at any time. You rent your home. You essentially rent your car through a loan. “Acceptable” ideas are fed to you by the same algorithm held by the same billionaires with the same agenda who also own all of your news and entertainment. They deliver hate because it drives engagement and protects the interests of the ultra wealthy. The people you can vote for are decided by billionaires and their donations. You can’t even say whatever you want online because your employer could fire you, strip you of the money you need to survive and the healthcare you need to stay healthy because of an opinion.
You are owned. Your leash goes as far as the corporation holding it says it should. Sam Altman’s latest comments seem to reveal to some that corporations and those who prioritize them believe your leash should be tighter.
In an interview, OpenAI CEO, Sam Altman, let slip another way the billionaire class could own you. It’s not just your critical thinking skills they want to take from you with their AI, pumping you full of their own ideas. It’s ownership itself.
What if you had to rent technology? What if ownership is a luxury we’re priced out of? It won’t matter if you buy physical media if you can’t play or archive it. We’re already there, with RAM prices as high as they are, due to AI hogging it all. Altman stated it’s “terrible” that you’re able to waste RAM by having it in your personal machine at all.
A datacenter in your back yard and a subscription to use what should be yours. Ownership is dying, and with it, any freedom you might have left.
Sam Altman’s Comments
Sam Altman was on an interview with YouTuber Cheeky Pint when they got to talking about the RAM crisis. Every single piece of tech is far more expensive this year because AI companies are hogging up all the memory to build the data centers no one wants built. But, apparently, Sam Altman doesn’t see it that way. Instead, he stated that you, using all that RAM for your own personal reasons, are the real problem.
“A lot of people want local inference. And somehow, they assume that the problem is solved now because we are going to have open-source models, we’re going to be able to run them on our computers, and so we’re not going to need all the stuff in the data center”
– Sam Altman
Sam Altman was mostly referring to “local inference,” the idea that you can run models on your own machine so it doesn’t need the data centers OpenAI is trying to sell. Small models that don’t waste resources, dry up wells, destroy communities, and are built with consensually-provided data are obviously better for everyone. Everyone but companies like OpenAI. While people want something that could improve their lives, corporations want to destroy your backyard to sell their bloated products.
Someone’s looking worried. That bloated bubble’s looking awfully poppable.
Altman’s comments are likely coming from a place of fear. The obvious solution is for RAM to be general purpose, people only using what they need, and being free to make what they want, and use smaller data models that do exactly what they need without wasting resources. That may be where the market’s going, as even more enthusiastic AI users are moving to running local models and agents on their own machines. No one wants their neighborhood destroyed or to die of thirst, but many people can’t give up the AI. They’ll move to local models, open source models, and data that wasn’t stolen from creators, programmers, artists, and journalists. That would likely scare someone whose entire fortune depends on people using large models that only they sell.
Of course Altman and everyone else shilling giant AI models would speak out against private computing.
“But from a global allocation perspective, actually, it’s quite terrible to have everybody have a bunch of the world’s limited supply of DRAM sitting in their own computer and being used 5% of the time. You want maximum utilization in the cloud if you’re trying to deal with this very supply-constrained environment. And somehow many people’s intuition is the opposite of that.”
– Sam Altman
The real solution is to use the hardware you have with smaller models, not use much larger models that destroy communities. We didn’t have a RAM crisis until AI started using every bit of hardware the world could provide, regardless of the labor costs. Altman has since stated that his comments were taken out of context, but, what context is there, and why can’t he better explain what he meant? It seems a CEO stated that he wants his business model to be successful, forgetting that his business model screws over everyone else.
To create a problem to sell a solution and blame people for not buying it enough to excuse continually stripping the world of its resources is a level of evil that anyone who has dealt with a narcissist knows about. It’s basic DARVO. Deny, attack, reverse victim and offender. AI isn’t the problem, despite the RAM crisis starting because of and solely due to it, it’s us for not buying his product more and instead using our own machines for creativity and work. Thankfully, no one’s buying it.
Righteous Condemnation, Not Enough
The internet is abuzz with people outraged by what seems to be Altman’s attack on their individuality. He’s incurred the wrath of perhaps the most vocal—and often dangerous—part of the internet: Gamers™. Gamers need memory for their games, and have been feeling the crunch of both the GPU crunch, first from crypto miners and now from AI, as well as the memory shortage. Everything’s more expensive. I know I’ll need a new pro-level MacBook for work soon enough. I also know I can’t afford it. Even the MacBook Neo, with only 8GB of RAM, not nearly enough, has become too expensive for what it is.
Everyone’s mad about AI. Gamers, software engineers, artists, journalists, musicians, people who drink water (think that’s all of us), and those concerned with the unjust labor practices that go into creating AI. But you can rage all you want. As long as you’re still using AI, you’re contributing to the problem.
Anger isn’t enough. Think and work for yourself.
If You Own Nothing, You’re Owned Too
If you own nothing and have no say in how resources are allocated, you’re owned too. AI companies drove up the price of RAM and now blame you for needing it instead of renting access to their computational power. You don’t own so many things in your life, do you really want the ability to earn a paycheck to be another thing you can’t afford to own anymore?
Your landlord owns your house. The bank owns your car. Digital game stores own your games. Big tech companies own your media. Your employer controls your healthcare. Now CEOs of huge AI companies want to own your computer. They want you trapped in debt to them. You won’t even be able to get a job without being in debt to someone else. There’s no escape from the cycle of poverty if you can’t own the tools you need to work or the output of your labor.
AI companies have already made the claim that we don’t own our labor. That they can steal our work, our stories, our art, repackage it, and sell it back to us. Now they want to own the tools we need to make things without them. These capitalists won’t be happy until they have cemented a slave class of people below them.
Resist AI. Read books. Buy art. Pay for journalism. Use critical thinking skills and analyze the media you participate in. Reduce your reliance on algorithmic feeds. There are ways to claw back control of your own life, your own mind. If you don’t start doing it now, you won’t get the opportunity later. Fight for your right to think and make for yourself now, or you’ll have no choice later.
Sources:
- Stevie Bonifield, The Verge
- Andrew E. Freedman, Tom’s Hardware
- Ethan Gach, Kotaku
- Tom McKay, Gizmodo
- Mariella Moon, Engadget
- Jowi Morales, Tom’s Hardware
- David Nield, TechRadar
- Jacqueline Thomas, IGN