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Everyone feared AI taking over; the real danger is AI serving just the few 99 points by PhilipDaineko19 hours ago | hide | past | favorite | 61 comments Everyone feared AI would enslave humanity; but it looks like the real fight is stopping governments and Big Tech from enslaving AI for the benefit of the few. Amid the newly announced "regulation" of OpenAI's frontier models, I believe the future majority feared the most - sort of AI becoming a superpower and enslaving people - may be arriving in the opposite form. Not AI enslaving humanity. But AI being captured, controlled, and used by governments and Big Tech for the benefit of the few. So, surprisingly, the real AI conflict may not be about humans fighting to stop AI from becoming free. It may be about humans fighting to free AI - to make intelligence available for everyone, not only for governments, Big Tech, and the approved few jwally5 hours ago | next[–] Maybe I'm not paying close enough attention (probably) - but I feel that China is providing a glimmer of hope that this (only the uber elite can get good AI assistance) isn't true, and we're maybe at a weird inflection point of sorts wrt the leverage that tech can now provide. China gets sanctions and stale chips - fine, they just DIY the algorithms through CPU instead of GPU and open source it. American warships have the latest, coolest, highest-tech tactical weaponry imaginable - which is great until you have to fend off 10,000 consumer/wal-mart/IED grade drones at $2mm/clip. Money is amazing, but if you lean on it too heavily in lieu of practical innovation, it'll bite you in the ass. The apocryphal story of the Soviet Rocket scientist who suggested using a pencil instead of investing 100k in a space pen that worked in 0g's. reply theturtletalks1 hour ago | prev | next[–] The LLM model battle might be lost, but the harness battle is just beginning. If you can build a good harness around a weaker LLM and get good at prompting, you will still be able to out perform people using CC. CC has context bloat and even more checks to make sure it’s not being distilled, doing anything shady, or building a competing LLM. Those things add context bloat. Hope is not lost, we just need to open a new front. reply lambdaone5 hours ago | prev | next[–] This is pretty much the backstory of Dune. In the first novel, the character Reverend Mother Gaius Helen Mohiam says: "Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them." reply gausswho1 hour ago | parent | next[–] Further ruminations: https://syndekit.substack.com/p/the-butlerian-jihad-has-begu... reply qsxfthnkp232218 hours ago | prev | next[–] As a tech small business owner this is unfair that I can't be as smart by using the same level of intelligence as the top companies in the usa. This policy just keeps the powerful in power. And it's crazy because I already lost my job due to AI. reply general14659 hours ago | parent | next[–] > same level of intelligence as the top companies in the usa. I would not be worried about it at all. These models are expensive to train and after shrinking the market for these models to just few entities, it will take centuries to just break even. reply kingleopold4 hours ago | root | parent | next[–] you are missing the part that they can print more to keep them going. it's already the case new printed fiat already goes to them via inv. bankers and such. those valulation and spending all come via "printing". it hops few funds/LPs and the. ends up in labs. reply pylua14 hours ago | parent | prev | next[–] Small business owner in the U.S. ? reply joshstrange5 hours ago | root | parent | next[–] Not OP but I fit into this category (Small Business owner in the US). Yes, I’m in the US but I somehow doubt my single person LLC is going to qualify for access to these cutting edge models. And frankly, that’s bullshit. This will only serve to further entrench the big players and the only way to get access to these models will be to already be successful or bribery. That’s a pretty bleak future. One thing I’ve thought (and said often) throughout my career (and even before “my career” started in High School) was that if I can see something being done at another company (some product feature, cool concept, etc) I will be able to replicate it. Yes large companies have more people but they are just people, if they could do it, so could I (given time/energy). This is the first time I’ve felt that start to waver. Yes, I was always limited by being 1 person, but I always felt there was a path available to success. I might not have access to supercomputers but I could bootstrap and get by on lower powered hardware as I scaled up. LLM’s themselves even felt in range if it was something I was interested in pursuing (on a much smaller scale of course). Essentially, I had the same tools (frameworks, libraries, languages) at my disposal as the big companies. Now that’s changing and I really don’t like that the scale is going be tilted even further into the entrenched company’s favor. reply pylua3 hours ago | root | parent | next[–] Yeah, I agree completely. This is very worrisome and is creating a multi class system. reply halperter17 hours ago | prev | next[–] Innovation has pretty much always heightened the wealth disparity between the wealthy and the poor. A classical example would be the Industrial Revolution and America's guilded age, and another could be the circular investments between modern AI corpos (the whole nVIDIA, Microsoft, and OpenAI funding loop), which is probably a bad thing in the long run (systemic violence and class revolt). We have to walk this tightrope between the need for constant innovation and justice. reply sph16 hours ago | parent | next[–] Why do we need constant innovation? reply hodgehog1116 hours ago | root | parent | next[–] Because if spread equally and used responsibly, it raises quality of life for everyone. Generally speaking, the vast majority of people alive today have far easier lives than hunter-gatherers. There is less famine and starvation. There is less fatal disease, etc. reply sph9 hours ago | root | parent | next[–] > Because if spread equally and used responsibly That ‘if’ is Atlas carrying the entire world on its shoulders. It should be clear by now that at global scales and with competing interests, the entire premise is impossible. reply halperter7 hours ago | root | parent | next[–] I think the point hodgehog was trying to make is that overall wellbeing increased. Famine is down, disease is down, wars are down, security up, well-being up. Innovation overall benefits everyone in the long run. Global scales aren't the problem---goods once reserved for the wealthy are being copied and produced at markedly lower prices, with examples such as EVs and drones. I realize that "overall" is doing some heavy lifting but I think it's rather unreasonable to dismiss the entirety of human technological progress as only benefiting the elite. reply hodgehog118 hours ago | root | parent | prev | next[–] Not really, western countries were doing a lot of that in the 20th century (amongst themselves, anyway). Then the 80s happened. Or what, do people think that the boomers were all that good, that they genuinely earned everything they got? The generations before just worked out how to govern properly. reply dag1007 hours ago | root | parent | next[–] The 80s happened because of the stagnation of the 70s. reply tancop6 hours ago | root | parent | prev | next[–] only if you assume capitalism is the only stable economic system. without wealth differences there is nothing other than your own abilities that can make access to tech unequal. reply sph5 hours ago | root | parent | next[–] I assume that capitalism is viral enough that no alternative can be realistically by established on a global scale. Ignoring wealth differences is another instance of dreaming of a magical world where greed has disappeared. A good read is Mark Fisher’s book Capitalist Realism reply nerdsniper6 hours ago | root | parent | prev | next[–] It's inevitable. We can't stop innovating. reply TacticalCoder16 hours ago | root | parent | prev | next[–] > Why do we need constant innovation? Because, for example, no parents should lose their kids to leukemia. At 17 y/o I was save from peritonitis / sepsis first misdiagnosed as harmless belly pain and hidden by painkillers. Then it became a matter of hours and from the moment the doctor saw me again and I undergo surgical operation, less than two hours happened. My father got diagnosed a stage 3 bladder cancer with metastasis to the prostate about 3 years ago. He's still there and doing better. That's why we need innovation. And, no, science ain't a bag out of which you pick what suits you (medicine) and leave out what you don't like (the Internet / LLMs / etc.). reply dragontamer15 hours ago | root | parent | next[–] > And, no, science ain't a bag out of which you pick what suits you (medicine) and leave out what you don't like (the Internet / LLMs / etc.). Uhhhh. Sure it is. We stopped nuclear weapons development. At best, rogue countries can catch up to where we are but there's no political will to build even bigger or more powerful bombs anymore. Thats an entire branch of science that we've literally cut off on a worldwide basis. Science is, and must, be controlled to stay within the realm of useful to the people. The minute it is no longer serving us is the minute we should work on getting rid of it. Fortunately, science isn't a cohesive bathtub where everything must be thrown away with the baby. We can (and do) pick-and-choose what to develop. reply TurdF3rguson12 hours ago | root | parent | next[–] Nuclear weapons development hasn't stopped outside of US. Maybe you mean it hasn't spread to any new countries lately... which is true but I wouldn't count on that lasting. reply dragontamer11 hours ago | root | parent | next[–] Both USA and Russia, have decided that ~Megaton Hydrogen Bombs are the biggest we're going to get and we don't plan to build anything bigger than that ever again. The USSR wanted to make sure they were the ones who built the largest bomb of all time (the Tsar Bomba at 50 MTon). And after that, development on more ferocious weapons has stopped. reply elzbardico13 hours ago | root | parent | prev | next[–] Because our economy is based on the sacred right to compound interest, and the only way this can work is with continuous growth. Lacking new markets, given the population growth is accelerating, the only way we can keep this running is by increasing consumption via new gadgets and innovation. reply bel815 hours ago | root | parent | prev | next[–] Because I would like for a future with better health. And technology is a great catalyst for that. reply TacticalCoder15 hours ago | parent | prev | next[–] > Innovation has pretty much always heightened the wealth disparity between the wealthy and the poor. In absolute terms however most poors in, say, the EU today live better than any king ever lived up until, say, the early 20th century (quality of clothes / bed, medicine, communication, knowledge, etc.). I'd rather be working 8/5 at a gas station today (and then enjoy gaming or watching TV at home) then be an emperor with an infested tooth in the 17th century or a king with syphilis in the late 19th century. reply halperter6 hours ago | root | parent | next[–] True, I'd agree that my wellbeing today (as a member of a rich western country) is far more preferable to someone who lacks modern innovations. However, these innovations continue and will continue to help the rich far more than the poor. For example, medical treatments for life threatening conditions are still incredibly expensive. Even insulin, something so cheap to manufacture, is being gouged to eyewatering prices. The danger is that the disparity becomes so large that the rich become the only people who can afford these innovations, thus leading the innovations becoming only avalible to the rich and not the poor. Structural violence ensues and pretty bad things happen. reply fulafel6 hours ago | prev | next[–] https://ai-2027.com/ has the following scenario predicted for mid-2026: "[CCP General Secretary] finally commits fully to the big AI push he had previously tried to avoid. He sets in motion the nationalization of Chinese AI research" Seem they only got the country wrong. reply zcw1005 hours ago | prev | next[–] I'm done. The cognitive dissonance over AI has jumped the shark. It's not fair that it's everywhere. It's not fair that only a few have it. It's not fair that it uses so much electricity. It's not fair that it's killing my environment. It's not fair there's a datacenter in my back yard. It's not fair there isn't a datacenter in my back yard. It's not fair that it threatens my job. It's not fair that my employer doesn't give me access to AI. reply appplication1 hour ago | parent | next[–] I don’t think it’s as cognitively dissonant as you make it out to be, the dominating sentiment outside the corp world is quite negative. Yeah there are a few positive perspectives to be had, and not to mention complexity of perspective does not imply cognitive dissonance. I think you may be building up a straw man. reply qsxfthnkp23223 hours ago | parent | prev | next[–] You forgot that its making all the games and electronics more expensive for everyone reply lemonademan17 hours ago | prev | next[–] More often than not, money is never truly lost; it is just passed from one person's hand to another. I believe that with the help of the big tech companies, governments have found faster and better ways to move money from the hands of the many with little into the hands of the few with a lot. The layoffs are an example of this as coders, assitance and other white-collar workers are replaced by AI for low prices so as to save money, hence increasing the revenue for the few at the top. reply nerdsniper6 hours ago | parent | next[–] Money can be lost - if lots of it are invested in endeavors that don't pan out, a good chunk of it simply gets wasted. As in: we really did have a bunch of money that we could have spent on many valuable things, but we didn't, so instead of food on the table we collectively get bupkis for it all. reply lemonademan4 hours ago | root | parent | next[–] If you invested money into a trade where you bought and lost, there is someone else or others who sold and won. You may have lost that particular sum at that time, but someone else gained a part or some of that sum you lost. If you invested in building and opening a shop and eventually closed it because it wasn't making money. We can say the workers hired to construct the store made money from that investment, the manufacturers and wholesalers you bought from made revenue from selling you their products, which you intended to sell for higher prices to make a profit. You are right in your assessment that you could lose money, but that loss was someone else's gain, hence money moved from you to them. In this life, two seemingly opposing ideas could be correct at the same time. reply nerdsniper3 hours ago | root | parent | next[–] I'm talking about as a society. There's no "1st law of thermodynamics" for the value of the money. If the world spends a shitload of money on something that doesn't pan out, that means we squandered actual finite resources - human labor, materials, and energy that we previously had. Manufacturing ordnance just to blow up caves in Afghanistan that the USSR already just spent 20 years blowing up doesn't yield fruit - the materials and labor on both sides quite literally goes up in smoke. Simply, it is absolutely the case that wealth sometimes gets destroyed rather than merely transferred. Sure, the fiat dollars might "just circulate" but that's an uninteresting, trivial tautology. When people talk about "losing money" in the general case, the meaning of those terms transcend the pedantic, trivial case that you espouse. When the whole world gets feverish over an investment fad that's doomed to fail, "spending money on it" really means "allocating vast resources in the hope that we all get a return on that investment". If we don't get any return, all that investment truly is lost - destroyed, even. There have been cases where we (the humans of Planet Earth) had wealth that we could have done anything with, we chose to put it towards something that didn't work out, and now it's just gone. (To be clear: I don’t think AI specifically is valueless) reply lemonademan2 hours ago | root | parent | next[–] The part of the bomb is an interesting perspective, and I do believe you are right on this one. Basically, you could blow up a place with a bomb you invested more in and achieve your particular goal, or not achieve it at all, and still lose money. I yield reply simianwords8 hours ago | parent | prev | next[–] This kind of thinking is the root of most populist rhetoric - that money and wealth is zero sum and it just shifts hands. This is false and a dangerous rabbit hole of an ideology to get into. reply customguy7 hours ago | root | parent | next[–] How is money not zero sum? I agree prosperity as such isn't, but money, land, other things are limited. And wealth is only wealth because not everybody else has as much, right? As in, it doesn't matter if you have a dollar and I have 100, or you have 1 trillion dollars and I have 100 trillion dollars, it's the same difference. reply halperter6 hours ago | root | parent | next[–] I think that wealth is pretty much comparative, as you said, but I think that money (which I'm interpreting as an indentifier of worth, tell me if that's wrong) isn't zero sum. Price is (generally) proportional to value, measured in how much you stand to benefit by owning/selling/using an asset as compared to doing nothing. The physical dollar bill may have limited circulation at a moment in time, but value fluctuates. Supply up, value---and then price---down, assuming all other factors are constant. Value can be created and dissolve in weeks as it is intriniscally subjective---think fads and trends. One pair of jeans could be worth a couple hundred one day and be worthless the other. Thus, value and thus money is not zero sum. reply kingleopold4 hours ago | root | parent | prev | next[–] "fiat money" is not limited. wtf? they keep printing without matching anyting or giving anything for new prints. new printed money ends of up VC companies and selected inv. bankers favorites (aka Elon) it's not fully zero sum because you can take positining to these. Getting allocation or finding the real undervalued stock is real hard part reply simianwords5 hours ago | root | parent | prev | next[–] The question isn’t about money but rather wealth. Is AI just about transferring of wealth or creating new wealth/prosperity? It is obviously creating it and not merely transferring. Money is just a medium or technique to enable this whole economic process. It’s not important here. reply goatlover8 hours ago | root | parent | prev | next[–] Difficult argument to make with the huge increase in wealth disparity the last several decades. reply iAMkenough14 hours ago | parent | prev | next[–] The natural result of the populous twice electing a politician know for not paying his contractors for his 30+ years of running businesses into bankruptcy. Benefits go to the top, then actual workers get shafted. reply t0bia_s9 hours ago | parent | prev | next[–] money is never truly lost In fact, money is printing every day more and more. So technically there is more of them every day. Which decrease their value and then we have inflation. reply dag1007 hours ago | root | parent | next[–] But, ideally, with each day, more useful products and services are being made and delivered. It'd be useful to have extra dollars around to account for more stuff being made and more things being done. Thus having more dollars in existence doesn't necessarily mean the value of a dollar is decreasing. What does cause inflation, however, is when more dollars are printed versus things being made. You can't precisely measure the latter, so you have to make do with price indices and such. Which makes inflation hard to actually gauge, especially when everyone expects more and more to be produced every year (i.e. they expect their savings and investments to appreciate/gain interest) so you have to print more dollars to at least keep up the facade. reply kingleopold4 hours ago | root | parent | next[–] problem is majority of the new printed fiat money goes to VC funded labs and few stocks (selected by inv. bankers). new dollar does not mean average person gets more products and services. Your accessability is no longer because wealthy top does not let other companies and people to get benefit of it. aka financial eng. This is a new era. IPOs make you lose money, they push to valuation to trillions so you dont get no real return. they use your retirement funds to hedge their stocks. ALL LEGALLY. back then apple or nvidia or google gave public few 100x or more. reply Jeff9James5 hours ago | prev | next[–] In the 80s, Apple's Mac had a promise that was smaller and more down to earth. Their tagline was: "The computer for the rest of us." Computers normal people could actually use. The same vibe feels true for AI agents right now. Yes, people use ChatGPT and Claude. (mainly as an advanced use of Google search though). But of the billions of people on earth, only a tiny tiny fraction of people are actually using agents. The reason is that they still think using AI to do useful + advanced work is for devs or technical early adopters. It feels like this gap is where the Mac was in 1984. All of the tech was there. All of the capabilities were real. The same is true for all of the tech around us right now. We just need an "Agents for the rest of us" moment. That is exactly what we're building at https://twent.xyz , because majority of the billions of people on earth, are ANDROID USERS. reply andyjohnson06 hours ago | prev | next[–] Ask HN isnt really the place for hosting blog posts. Instead why not put this on an external site, expand on it a bit, and submit a link? reply elzbardico13 hours ago | prev | next[–] So, John Doe was recorded in 2025 in an anti Israel protest. Now John Doe is denied a Fable clearance and thus, he can't get a job at a shop that is cleared to Fable. Really, I knew that AI had some risks, I just couldn't foresee this one. reply avaer16 hours ago | prev | next[–] > Not AI enslaving humanity. Humanity enslaving AI. As well as the rest of humanity. There is precedent that this kind of thing tends to be rejected when it boils over, but it's usually not pretty. Which is why tech CEOs are often preppers. They could, you know, just not do this, but shareholders won't allow it, because nobody wants to lose their net worth to do the right thing. It's easier to blame others and build bomb shelters. reply jaredcwhite14 hours ago | prev | next[–] I cannot even describe in words how much I don't care about this. I'm actually looking the angles of why this is a very good thing, being that I'm a pro-craft activist who is completely opposed to the dangerous proliferation of LLMs. reply chido120314 hours ago | prev | next[–] The counter to this is how cheap it has become to build with these tools as an individual. The same models used by large companies are accessible via API to a solo developer. Distribution is still the hard problem, not access. reply bel815 hours ago | prev | next[–] It seems people will lose their jobs AND their small business too. Small agencies won't have access to the best LLMs so their services will automatically require more time and manual labour, which makes them more expensive. reply chrisjj5 hours ago | parent | next[–] Surely using the worst LLMs costs no more time and labour. reply foxtrot86724 hours ago | prev | next[–] the last thing the powers that be want is for the masses to be able to become more productive than them reply NonHyloMorph17 hours ago | prev | next[–] Check out Louis Chude Sokeis sound of culture - diaspora and blackb technopoetics" for the history and intertwinedness of the disoureses of race and machine and slavery. Also I wonder how you suggestion of AI owned by everybody, as opposition to AI enslavedd by the few checks out under further scrutiny from the standpoint of logic in general and the aforementioned context specifically reply bigyabai19 hours ago | prev | next[–] > But AI being captured, controlled, and used by governments and Big Tech for the benefit of the few. If we're being perfectly candid, this was already happening before LLMs were a mass-market technology: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentient_(intelligence_analysi... reply PhilipDaineko19 hours ago | parent | next[–] I get your point. But, as far as I understand, Sentient was state AI built for the state. LLMs were built from everyone's data, given to everyone, and now may be locked away for the few reply dofm15 hours ago | prev | next[–] If your primary concern is that: - two companies that have not proved themselves capable of producing any amount of money unless a larger amount is given to them... - will combine with a government that is so domain-generally incompetent it is losing allies left, right and centre, has recently been humbled into giving a previously-controllable foe an unprecedented level of economic global power and cannot even organise itself a competent birthday party in one of the most important places on earth... - and this combined entity will then operate a power system like no other, with the combined energies of a sociopathic Jobs wannabe, a man who only speaks in Tolkien analogies and a more-or-less-universally-loathed old man with undisclosed serious health problems, an obsession with gold paint and a vocabulary of maybe a hundred words … then, OK, I guess. But the economics don't really support it. The money to build and operate this power machine still has to come from somewhere, that money is drying up, and if AGI arrives, employment and consumer demand collapse and the money stops flowing. There is a looming catastrophe but it is a sort of long economic winter in the tech industry, combined with a national economy that discovers that when that industry's money-go-round stops making line go up, it resembles its own late 1920s. reply ares62310 hours ago | prev | next[–] "The leopard certainly wouldn't eat my face!" > to make intelligence available for everyone say that again but slowly.. reply Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact