I want to say something that you would never expect to hear from More Perfect Union. Elon Musk is right about something. Elon Musk is suing the maker of ChatGPT, suing OpenAI, suing OpenAI for breach of contract by putting profit ahead of benefiting humanity. Elon's lawsuit against OpenAI, the most recognized developer of artificial intelligence, was big news. But when I heard it, I was a bit confused. When has Elon ever been against profit? So I dug in. I read and I watched far too much of these guys talking about AI. I think that AI will be a technological revolution on the scale of the agricultural, the industrial, the computer revolution. AI is about to revolutionize digital biology and genomics and transportation and retail. Artificial intelligence, this is, it is a renaissance. This is a world-changing set of advances. By the time these lawsuits are decided, we'll have Digital God. Digital God.

I noticed three things: that the rise of
AI is inevitable, that it will change everything about our lives,
and that there is a war brewing between a handful of billionaires
to seize control of it. NVIDIA
became one of the most valuable stocks of all time, producing chips for AI. Microsoft reached an over $3
trillion valuation based on its AI work, and OpenAI
tripled in value in just ten months. But where do we - You and I
and everyone other than the dozen or so billionaires
duking it out for control fit in? We're already seeing plans
to replace human nurses with AI, media magnates killing jobs
to focus on cost cutting with AI, AI-written drivel filling the internet,
and AI that does karaoke for you. Well, let's look at the possible
AI future through the rise of Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, and just one contender
in the billionaire battle for the future. Sam Altman
is the ruler of Silicon Valley startups.

And that's not me saying that
he thinks that. I think the president of YC is sort of the unofficial leader
of the startup movement. YC is Y Combinator, a significant venture
capital firm and tech incubator that Altman ran from 2014 to 2019. He originally connected with YC in 2008 when the firm funded his app Loopd when he was 19 years old
and wore two popped collars. It was a common Silicon Valley story. They raised a ton of money,
gathering a bunch of data, and got in trouble for texting everyone on your phone
when you downloaded the app. Altman sold the company,
and it all but disappeared. Altman landed at Y Combinator,
where he rose to president in two years. Under his leadership, 
Y Combinator invested in massive companies most people have heard of like Reddit,
Airbnb, Coinbase, Dropbox,
Stripe, Twitch, DoorDash, and Instacart.

In a lecture to Stanford computer science students on startups, Altman quoted Peter Thiel's advice: You want an idea that turns into a monopoly, but you can't get a monopoly in a big market right away. You have to find a small market in which you can get a monopoly and then quickly expand. Quick expansion is an inherent part of the way venture capital funded tech runs today. This is Tim O'Reilly. He's been in tech forever. And if you know phrases like 'open source' or 'Web 2.0', it's because he popularized them. One of the big problems with today's Silicon Valley is that it no longer really supports free market competition. Early days of VC, you were really talking about funding insurgent companies that had an experimental idea. Most companies didn't actually raise massive amounts of capital. But at some point that changed.

But then you fast forward to 2010.
In the wake of the super low interest rates,
is all this cheap capital, and companies are just buying
market share. And I call this the Uber problem. Yeah, we didn't see real competition
with different business models, different pricing. We see heavily capitalized companies
driving everybody else out of business by growing rapidly
with a bunch of capital. Uber created an ecosystem where
if you want a cab, you need to use Uber. The old system of car services
was pretty much pushed out of existence. Uber is not an Altman company,
but DoorDash, Airbnb, and other companies
that used similar strategies totally are. In 2015, we got our first hint of OpenAI. I actually just agreed to fund a company
that is not even really a company, sort of a semi-company, semi-nonprofit doing air safety research.
OpenAI is announced as not a company, but a nonprofit focused on air safety.

funded and supported by Y Combinator. Elon Musk, Reid Hoffman, the LinkedIn guy, Peter Thiel, Amazon, and Infosys,
basically a who's who of the people who built
the broken tech infrastructure of today. The stated goal of OpenAI
was to advance digital intelligence in the way that is most likely to benefit humanity as a whole, with no shareholders
to be beholden to. We wanted to build this
with humanity's best interest at heart. That doesn't sound too bad, right? A groundbreaking new technology, 
its power available to all without any responsibility
to shareholders. But let's dig a little deeper. They say they want
to make the world better and do it safely. But what does that mean to them? Most of what Altman talks about in regards
to what OpenAI products can do seems to center
on productivity, efficiency, and margins, boosting our ability
to have amazing ideas for our children, to like teach themselves more than ever
before, for people to be more productive.

How does that make life better
for the rest of us? Well, Altman claims to have the answer in
his essay, say Moore's Law
for everything. He explains it would require simply changing
the entire economic system. Altman claims A.I. would drive down labor costs,
so everything would get cheaper, and the lost jobs would be offset
by a universal basic income coming from corporate and property
tax rates, with no other taxes. Which sounds great. Maybe,
but how true is that? When corporations see falling labor costs and reduce prices,
or just keep the profits for themselves? Would a flat tax and UBI mean more money
for working people or more tax cheating by the rich, in social service
cuts for everyone else? And there was a running theme
through all of what Altman says: the inevitability
and the danger of artificial intelligence. Listen to this clip. You know, I think AI will probably, like most likely,
sort of lead to the end of the world.

People like Altman benefit
from the narrative that AI is this big, scary thing, even as they're the ones
trying to build and profit from it. Here's Tim O'Reilly again. It feels a little bit
like a kind of misdirection. They're basically calling for a kind
of regulation of an extreme right to avoid the regulation of the many proximate harms
we can see today. If they were really afraid of it,
they would stop doing their research. Instead, they're racing to accelerate it
so they get a monopoly. It's a lot like the famous line
from The Wizard of Oz. Pay no attention to the man
behind the curtain. And a lot of where I spent my time
in talking about regulation is this. There is a man behind the curtain
or a series of men who are making decisions
for their business advantage. And those are the things
that we need to be regulating. Why are they moving fast to break things?

I mean, in the Altman clip from before,
where he says the world-ending thing, he literally says this
right after, you know, I think AI will probably, like most likely,
sort of lead to the end of the world. But in the meantime, there will be great companies created
with serious machine learning. Companies... See, it's right back to profit. But hold on. Isn't OpenAI a nonprofit? Not anymore. Just three
years after the founding of OpenAI, they transitioned to something
they're calling mixed profit. To do what we needed to go do. We had tried and failed enough
to raise the money as a nonprofit. We didn't see a path forward there. So we needed some of the benefits
of capitalism, but not too much. And the new Board of OpenAI is rife
with the profiteers who've been extracting value
from working people for decades. They're also not open. None of this stuff is just simply
available. An old version of ChatGPT.

is free and kind of fun sometimes, but OpenAI's real product is enterprise
software, doing partnerships with other giant tech companies, and loads of stuff
we don't even know about. Defense contracts included. OpenAI has a product to sell, a product
they see as having inevitable near universal proliferation,
which is a pretty damn good business plan. But it's dangerous for the rest of us. Tim O'Reilly said about the Uber problem. Here's
how it applies to AI: all of the smaller AI firms are already starting to fall because there are a couple in
the far of OpenAI and Anthropic that are incredibly heavily funded,
that have tens of billions of dollars of capital. And we don't know that
they're the best companies. We just know that they're the ones
that big investors picked up early. And so we have a defective
kind of a market where if you really believe
in the wisdom of millions of people making independent decisions
based on optimal information.

to kind of work this free magic market,
we don't have that. And we have a central committee
of deep-pocketed investors. It all illuminates
Elon's lawsuit against OpenAI when he and Altman had once
been such good friends. I'm looking for any video game play.
Can you give me a recommendation? Overwatch for Overwatch? Yeah. That's great. Um, I named it OpenAI after open source. It is, in fact, closed source. It should be renamed. Super Closed Source for Maximum Profit AI. But he has his own for-sale
for-profit AI that he wants to be predominant. He made it open source
in a seemingly empty gesture. But meanwhile, Nvidia, Microsoft
and Google all want to take control of the tech that will change our future
and destroy our jobs. It doesn't matter that these guys say
they're doing it for good. It matters what they are actually doing. Look at the dawn of the internet itself
or web 2.0.

that's social media and user-generated content. All of that seems great. And yeah, the modern Internet has obviously had a lot of clear benefits, but it was also pretty quickly ruined by giant corporations and profit motive. We're already starting to see effects of the power grab. Nvidia, the main producer of the chips used for the AI, is partnering with a company that wants to replace nurses with an AI that costs $9 an hour. Look at anything from the history of the American medicine industry. Will a new low-cost tool actually help patients or just pad investor pockets? Companies are using AI to do job interviews, and it's shutting out applicants unfairly and on a simply annoying level. They were spitting out content that's making the Internet even more unusable than it already was. AI-generated LinkedIn comments. Why don't you just not post anything if you don't have anything to say? So what are we going to do about this?

Well, let's turn to Sam Altman for advice. He has what he calls
the more good guys than bad guys approach. He wrote in that Moore's Law essay,
There are bad humans, but all humans are within a magnitude
are as powerful as one another, and the good humans
and together to stop the bad humans. It's been that way through all of history
so far. What if the bad humans are actually
the people building the system, being built entirely on past profits and monopoly,
advancing as quickly as possible. Then we need more good guys. And we've got up there like 12 people. What if we all stand up and say no? When electricity was first becoming
widespread, it was still dangerous for the low-paid workers
who were setting up the systems. But those workers stood together
and formed the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers. That's the electrician's union,
to demand safer jobs and better wages. It worked.

And it didn't hamper progress. We clearly have electricity today, right? That same concept applies to AI: remember the writers
strike? The Screenwriters Guild stood up and said
no to taking their jobs. Senator Bernie Sanders just introduced
legislation for a shorter workweek. Do we continue the trend? The technology
only benefits the people on top. Or do we demand that
these transformational changes benefit working people? And one of the benefits
must be a lower workweek. If A.I. is going to make workers
more productive and labor cheaper, workers should be able
to take advantage of it. A.I. cannot exist without being trained on all
that humanity has done before. That's literally how the way most people interact with A.I. was built
by reading a bunch of stuff online and then synthesizing it so it can talk. If all of this is built on the labor
of all of humanity, then it should be all
of humanity that benefits.

The Secret Plan Behind Artificial Intelligence

More Perfect Union’s mission is to build power for working people. Here’s what that means:

We report on the real struggles and challenges of the working class from a working-class perspective, and we attempt to connect those problems to potential solutions.

We report on the abuses and wrongdoing of corporate power, and we seek to hold accountable the ultra-rich who have too much power over America’s political and economic systems.

We're an independent, nonprofit newsroom. To support our work, please follow us or contribute at the links below.
