Will wealthier people access better AIs?

[parisivy]

Today, billionaires and middle-class everyday people use the same phones. Will that be the case with AIs?

[Nevermark]

An interesting exercise, is to flip that question upside down:

Assuming everyone gets access to the same quality of AI, how will rich people maintain their compounding advantages over the non-wealthy?

The first way, is by having more computing resources. The same AI, but with more computing resources, is going to come up with equal or higher quality results.

The second, is being able to requisition more physical resources. The same AI can help a wealthy person set up a business, by quickly acquiring physical and IP assets, or labor, vs. someone without the wealth to do that.

The third, is by having better information. Small differences in information, such as having a market's trading history just a fraction of a second before someone else, can translate into a lot of economic power. Wealthy people can pay for better information, or put systems into place to get better information.

The fourth, is risk tolerance. Even with an AI helping someone making choices, some choices with the highest expected return also come with the highest volatility or risk. Someone with resources can tolerate a lot of individual risks. But a low resource person will have to play it safe and forgo those opportunities.

Conclusion: The efficiencies delivered by AI will intensify existing compounding effects, and the inequality those already generate.

Even if AI access was somehow kept even.

[stuven]

I love that you added a conclusion at the end of your list. Adding conclusions to the end of lists is one of ChatGPT's favorite things to do.

[ElijahLynn]

One of the reasons OpenAI released ChatGPT when they did was to do the opposite of this, per Sam Altman, co-founder of OpenAI.

source: https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2023/03/on-with-kara-swisher...

Swisher: One of the excuses that tech always uses is you don’t understand it, we need to keep it in the back room. It’s often about competition.

Altman: Well, for us it’s the opposite. I mean, what we’ve said all along — and this is different than what most other AGI efforts have thought — is everybody needs to know about this. AGI should not be built in a secret lab with only the people who are privileged and smart enough to understand it. Part of the reason that we deploy this is, I think, we need the input of the world, and the world needs familiarity with what is in the process of happening, the ability to weigh in, to shape this together. We want that. We need that input, and people deserve it. So I think we’re not the secretive company. We’re quite the opposite. We put the most advanced AI in the world in an API that anybody can use. I don’t think that if we hadn’t started doing that a few years ago, Google or anybody else would be doing it now. They would just be using it secretly to make Google search better.

[splatzone]

Interesting. Looked at this way, OpenAI is perhaps less ‘closed’ that I thought, since they’re making LLMs available cheaply to so many people, not just the elite with access to the computing power.

[layer8]

This could change very quickly once AI has become an established industry and the markets are captured, and the familiarity argument above doesn't fully apply anymore.

[takinola]

Possibly, probably.

Technology does not, in itself, create all the advantages. I likely have the same model iPhone as Bezos but his contact list probably includes much more powerful people. Similarly, we could have access to the same AI but he’d be positioned to derive much more leverage from it

[nomel]

As always, knowing what to do with a tool is more important than having the tool in front of you. If the value is in having the tool itself, then it will quickly lose its value, because everyone else will be using it.

[summerlight]

Baseline models are going to be commoditized for sure. But when you need to tune it on your specific demands, it will needs more data and expertise. That's going to be luxury that only those wealthy people can enjoy.

[smt88]

AIs are already incredibly expensive. There's no reason to think the current best AIs will be democratized across economic classes. M

[adam_arthur]

You can use chatgpt and many others for free. Doesn’t seem expensive at all actually.

I’m sure a super premium category will emerge, but the 80-20 rule likely applies here.

[qrio2]

was said about computers only 50 years ago, it's worth thinking about (tho probably too speculative at this point)

[codpiece]

I think you will see private, maybe even self-hosted AI. Think about using online stock trading versus having a Bloomberg terminal.

[wsgeorge]

Ask yourself the same question but for web services, games, etc. A wealth gap will exist wrt access to better AI.

[chatmasta]

Is that the analogy you're choosing? I'm not sure much of a wealth gap exists in software in general. In many ways software is the most egalitarian product in history, since it costs nothing to copy it. Sure, not everyone can afford a $60 game, but there are no $6,000 games.

I think a better analogy (or perhaps a more specific one, since you did mention "web services") would be computing services, i.e. rich startups with hundreds of thousands in credits and funding vs. single bootstrapped founder with a little bit of cash.

[Ekaros]

A 200 and 2000 computer has power difference of a few times for example for gaming. And that is single machine where scaling is hard. With AI you can and actually have to throw more resources at.

[DANmode]

Select few will pay for premium access, many or most will "pay" with their data.

Trading your private info for societal gain is a proven model, it'll now extend to your..voice patterns?, and so on.

[akomtu]

There is a naive assumption that AI will be one of the tools at our disposal and that the rich will own better versions of that tool. The rich people merely control the money flow, and they are only useful because the state cannot do it better. With the "eye of sauron" that AI will likely become, the state will know better how to shape the money flow and so it won't need rich or wealthy people. Everyone will be on a subsistence wage, while the state-AI is building the next gen AI with transecendent capabilities.

[Sevii]

Considering that the cost of training these things is in the millions of dollars. And the cost per request is on the order of cents. It's likely that AI will operate much like Alexa or the iPhone in that you can't buy a better one than anyone else gets.

Software doesn't really lend itself to custom elitism because the marginal costs are usually close to zero.

[coxomb]

> Today, billionaires and middle-class everyday people use the same phones

Don't assume the rich have just one phone. It is common to compartment with several different phones for different purposes. One you only give to family/friends, another for strictly business topics, another for social media, another for giving out publicly on business cards, and the list goes on.

[thfuran]

You seem to be conflating phones and phone numbers. I guess I don't know for certain that is not common to be juggling half a dozen physical phones, but it seems unhelpful and easily avoided.

[infamousclyde]

This is the premise of "Two Phones" by Kevin Gates. The lyrics are more or less just paraphrasing this comment.

[ftxbro]

I think it's a great question "What are the social-political-economic ramifications of the dawn of superhuman machine cognition?" It's too big a question for me I am not smart enough to imagine! I hope at least some humans survive and I hope it's not in some horrible dystopia.

[giantg2]

"Today, billionaires and middle-class everyday people use the same phones."

Do they? I assume they would have at least additional security features and security monitoring given they're a higher profile target than the average person.

[thefrozenone]

It may also be that poor people have their services (drivers license renewal, K-12 school, apartment maintenance requests, welfare, job interviews) "improved" by AI while the affluent get to talk to a human

[fuzzfactor]

The jetsetters could very well have their personal assistants decide whether/how to interact personally with AI in the wild, or rather to have one of their own local personal AI sub-assistants take care of it.

[flemhans]

Wealthier people will have more AI compute power available to them to continuously take care of their interests, and "defend" against attacking AIs that will try to work against their interests.

[mitchellpkt]

Arguably this is the case now. I don’t think there’s any way to access chatGPT-4 unless you have the financial bandwidth to allocate an extra $20/month for an OpenAI subscription.

[fdgsdfogijq]

Once trained, incremental inference costs are very cheap. Instead, everyone will have access

[alfonmga]

I would pay millions for an uncensored AI if I were super wealthy.

[s1k3s]

Seriously, why?

[UncleOxidant]

Signs point to yes!

[ExploreKitchens]

Yes

[shams93]

In california the social safety net is so shredded that basically if you cannot create a profit for a company as a human you're dead. They'll pay half the population to kill off the other hald until police can be automated and then they'll use machines to kill the remaining half.