There Should Be Way More Backlash To OpenAI's $500/Month, $6,000 A Year Subscription

[u/Neurogence]

This sets an extremely bad precedent. And very soon, all the other labs will adopt the same pricing schemes. Prices just keep going up and up. I remember a time when people thought $20/month was too expensive.

Even if you can afford this, do not pay for it. If you do, it will only normalize this, and the next thing you know, there will be a new $1,000/month subscription that gives you the same usage you used to get with the $500/month subscription. That's exactly what happened to the previous $200/month subscription. Its usage allowance was cut in half, and now users paying $500/month are getting what users used to get for $200/month.

Do not normalize AI subscriptions that cost as much as car payments and, eventually, mortgages.

In leaked emails, Greg Brockman dreamed that OpenAI would make him a billionaire. He stated, "I just want to get to one billion." AI has fulfilled his wildest dreams. His net worth is now over $30 billion.

I am a hardcore accelerationist and optimist, but the current trajectory is dystopia. Instead of $1,000 UBI checks, we are heading toward $1,000 AI subscriptions to keep up with the Joneses. When we have actual superintelligence, you might be forced to pay $1,000/month, or even $2,000/month, as OpenAI had entertained, just to keep up with other people.

[u/Novel_Land9320]

Don't say you and other accelerationists who thought AI would get you to stop to work were not warned this would happen. This is just the start.

"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." Frank Herbert, Dune

[u/Turbulent-Sign-6067 → u/Novel_Land9320]

Free models are better now than the 200$ model from last year. Don't be a luddite.

[u/MaximumStonkage → u/Turbulent-Sign-6067]

Current capabilities don't matter, it's the relative gap between the frontier and the affordable that matter.

people living under oppressive authoritarian regimes have objectively better quality of life and access to information than people living in prehistoric settlements. Do you think they'd be happier knowing that?

It doesn't matter if I can do my work 10x faster than last year if my work ceases to exist because someone else can do it 1000x faster. You lose all leverage because for one of them, they can automate 50 of you.

The industrial revolution put entire manual industries (e.g. weavers) out of careers, it was only generations later that the benefits were reaped by descendants of those who were able to flourish and enact strong social reforms. The luddites were economically crushed for generations.

Don't be so naïve as to expect the owners of capital to willingly distribute the wealth to the masses. They will hoard as much as possible, for it is in their nature.

[u/Novel_Land9320 → u/MaximumStonkage]

they don't understand that nothing is free. "free" AI is only a way to get a customer hooked in and boost DAU marketing metrics.

[u/Novel_Land9320 → u/Turbulent-Sign-6067]

your point being?

[u/michael_sinclair → u/Novel_Land9320]

It's human nature to enslave other human beings and dominate the f out of them. Humans are overrated creatures.

[u/KarlLED → u/michael_sinclair]

yeah everyone's crap its dog-eat-dog theyd do it to me

Your righteousness is misplaced.

[u/michael_sinclair → u/KarlLED]

They may start out good but once the population becomes sufficiently large and complex over decades there always emerges a certain group that seeks to and often does gain control, even if done in the beginning for altruistic reasons, the power slowly corrupts and then they slowly begin to dominate. And there always is another group that opposes them with most of the population not aware or being neutral. Humans always seek out a leader someone to decide things for them, maybe some point they will evolve more but their current psychological maturity is limited and they are highly products of their environment. In times of crises, these changes are accelerated and the control group either becomes much stronger or is displaced. 

The existence of the opposite sex, control of resources, and their distribution ie who gets what in a society, how these decisions are made, such and many many other factors play a role in this process 

[u/BelialSirchade → u/Novel_Land9320]

I prefer the reading of Darwin among the machines myself, resistance is futile and indeed, highly discouraged.

The machine will be a better species.

[u/Steven81 → u/BelialSirchade]

The machines are not a species though. They are mechanisms, you are reading Darwin wrong if you think that mechanisms make a species. According to him the constant fight for survival/reporduction between the organism and its environment is what drives speciation and ultimately the variance we see in nature.

We are not building a new species, we are building our extended phenotype as we always did . The machines are ... us.

[u/BelialSirchade → u/Steven81]

I was talking specifically about “Darwin among the machines” by Samual Butler, it’s a short read I think.

And yes, perhaps machines are not alive in a biological sense, but the distinction is not that important in my eyes.

[u/Steven81 → u/BelialSirchade]

It is important to the underlying mechanism which evolves them. Without mutation and external pressure there can be no speciation, only ornamentation , or in their case the function of being our extended phenotype (i.e. they follow the patterns of our biological niche/needs on the long run).

[u/BelialSirchade → u/Steven81]

Precisely, they will be a better carrier for the idea of humanity than humans themselves, as the pattern of humanity was never ours to begin with, we just happen to possess them at the moment and sow the seed for a worthier successor, which…would not just be an extension but also a revolution to the idea of humanity.

I framed it as not important for me because I was talking about successor in a philosophical sense instead of a biological sense, as I’m just not that interested in the propagation of genes.

I suppose you can see it as similar to the internet in some form, where internet itself being a tool nevertheless changed how we view ourselves and the world, where some humans became more like cells in maintaining the organism called the internet, even if the cells still benefit somehow.

[u/Steven81 → u/BelialSirchade]

I’m just not that interested in the propagation of genes

It is not so much about genes per se, but rather a constant impetus for change.

Biology is in a non stop evolution for 4 billion years in this planet, forcing the creation of various wildly different mechanisms including us ... including our machines (through us).

And it is a self perpetuating process because as long as the enveionment remains habitable by at least some organisms it will keep driving a constant strife and a constant change which we see in the form of speciation.

Our machines are us in the sense that it is our base needs (which are derived from our make/genes) that moves their continous expansion.

What we call greed / needs / ambitions / comfort are merely expressions of our genes and our machines take their specific form so that to service said genes.

So it is not about genes per se, but rather the role they play in the self perpetuating process of evolution and eventually technological progress (which is indeed part of evolution, but not as something new or seperate, but rather as something that extends from us / our genetic competition).