Daron Acemoglu: belief

Transcript context

…There are so many large American corporations that are using open-source AI, very often from China. Some will claim it’s only nine months behind the best proprietary models. That’s debatable, but it’s not that far behind. With open-source out there, why worry so much about AI centralizing power? It seems to me an extraordinarily competitive market, and it almost cannot stop being so. Fantastic question. Look, I go back and forth on this. On the one hand, if I do scenario planning for the future, one very important scenario is that indeed the AI stack is not going to empower the foundation models, but is either going to create much bigger profit and monetization opportunities for those that go before the foundation models, like the chips like Nvidia, or the applications. The reason for that is exactly what you say. It’s actually becoming easier and easier to distill these models. There’s going to more competition, et cetera. That, I think, is definitely a nonzero and probably 30 percent or so probability in my mind, just making it up. It’s impossible to have objective probabilities here. The large language model approach is centralizing. Both the philosophy and the practice of it is that you take all of the data that you can, and one model rules it all. Now, that model can be copied, so perhaps you cannot monetize it that well, but there is a centralizing element to it. Maybe to the knowledge, but not the power, right? The gains will go to the users, just as they have for electricity, antibiotics, fire.…

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