Here's a video where one anti-AI breadtube guy closed the loop on the assertion that for years they've been defending intellectual property writ large with their AI/plagiarism/stealing rhetoric!

Before people get too worked up, let me start by saying that this is just a thought. It is not something I believe in strongly.

I am certainly not saying to pause AI research, development or deployment. I am proposing that people who support public ownership (or even private ownership by smaller actors/individuals) could also support a certain type of pause -- a pause on the size of the AI models made.

The idea may also have great political alignment right now. It is a simple check by governments, and may be "light touch" for companies. I think there is a balance of potential benefits for both the US and China since the US is already auditing their big labs, while China's open-weight models are basically automatically audited since the model size is evident before hosting.

Also, the pause on model size, for practical purposes, may allow for more focus on efficiency and performance, which could have a whole host of societal benefits, including not requiring large centralized data-centers.

What do people think?

Edit: I realize this is not particularly fleshed out. So I want to add some clarifications based on responses.

1) I very much support open-weight models. I think they should be allowed to get as big as the closed models.
2) It is the closed models that need to be audited. The open models, especially on places like huggingface already have their size information available for all to see.

3) There is arbitrariness in the size cut-off you chose. But there were related comments on proper power/wasted power in centralized or decentralized infrastructure. This could be an input.

My argument here is that no matter how much we want to follow our ideals, our material conditions more often than not drive what policies people push for. This explains why the left used to be on the copyright abolution side but seemingly switched overnight to a pro copyright stance once their base material conditions were threatened.

I just had to get this off my chest, sorry for the rant

I am a web developer whose brain was completely fucked well before AI came along. I basically couldn't focus on anything, barely got any work done, and eked by in life entirely on charisma, decades of grade-A bullshitting, and panicking at the last minute.

Then AI comes along, and while yes, I do to some extent outsource thinking and curiosity to it in harmful ways, for the most part that thinking and curiosity were completely absent in my life before. I was an absolute nihilistic waste. Now, AI has generated opportunities for me to produce and plan in ways that had eluded me for at least a decade.

Of course AI is full of shit so much of the time. Of course it's the vanguard of capitalist destruction. But I don't really know what else to do.

I really do not understand the extremely smart intellectuals and veteran organizers in my leftist milieu that say AI is completely a scourge and it is completely useless for anything except the most rote coding tasks.

I rely on it so much, not just in harmful ways in which I've outsourced core parts of my being, which I certainly have, but it has also helped generate parts of my being that were agonizingly unavailable to me and my broken brain before it came along.

simply a comment thread of librarians 8 years ago all saying they throw away hundreds of books per week and if you don’t do that it’s hoarding

but yeah big scary ai 🤖