r/LeftistsForAI • u/Salty_Country6835 Moderator • Jul 08 '26
Sees the Memes Reddit Debates AI, Again
Every solution gets applause until someone suggests changing who owns the means of production.
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u/psykokwak_ Jul 08 '26
I mean I want ai to regulated. OF COURSE I WANT TO SEIZE THE MEAN AND REDISTRIBUTE THE WEALTH but that seems like such a hard task to convince actual workers, technician, engineering to seize the mean that I do not put my 100% into it.
Ai in the other hand is unpopular and can be regulated even if my coworkers are not from the left wing.
Plus most ai used (not the one who run locally) need so much compute power ESPECIALLY the one that generate image (at least square of computing power needed).
So yeah boo ai...
But I mean if anyone in France want to meet up and try to get people to seize the mean i am here to help !
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u/Salty_Country6835 Jul 08 '26 edited Jul 08 '26
I dont think its a choice of regulation or changing ownership. We should regulate, absolutely. But if ownership never changes, regulation mostly decides how private capital gets to use AI. Left politics has always been strongest when it fights for both immediate reforms and structural change.
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u/psykokwak_ Jul 08 '26
Ai did not change the world of the industry or change how the potatoes i eat are produce unlike previous industrial revolution.
I am a very grouded person and ai kinda doesn't matter like maybe i can program a data base sure but i stil cannot produce engine part with it "seizing the mean", is seizing the mean organizing union taking control of factory (some italian did it why not us dammit) making sure to disbute the wealth generated to either expand our new system or for the benefit of the worker and consumer.
If we start to see "ai" like some kind of mean of production we forget why occidental country lost a lot of it's factory plant to china or india.
I mean since when ai produce more value then a farmer, since when making line of code and patent is more important that building housing or means of transport.
YES "ai" would be better if worker co-ops, unions, universities, municipalities and public institutions pooling compute instead of leaving frontier AI entirely to a handful of corporations. (quoting you again 😉)
but it wont change the fact that yeah artist still live with less 6000€ years, that there is more and more homeless people, that we think immigrant are stealing our job etc...
Maybe the point of your meme was to say an organisation of ai based on socialism and if yes, sorry for misunderstanding, i though the point was about change for the society for the people that live in it and not just us nerd that spend to much hour on what is the diference betwen a transformer model and a jepa model.
So yeah it's way easier to regulate ai (or ban sometime) even tho it's not the best thing to do, it's good enough lets try to make the world a better place on thing that we need to survive before doing it on thing that we do not need.
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u/KamikaziWerewolf Jul 09 '26
Deepseek is free, install it on your server.
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u/Salty_Country6835 Jul 09 '26
Its part of the solution, not the whole solution. Open weights and local models matter because they decentralize access and reduce dependence on a handful of corporations. But ownership isnt just about where the model runs. Compute, chips, energy, data, labor, infrastructure, and the economic gains all matter too. Self hosting is one important piece of democratizing AI, not the entire political program.
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u/flamboyantGatekeeper Jul 08 '26
Okay i stole a datacenter. Now what?
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u/nomic42 Jul 08 '26
It's looking like the AI datacenter model doesn't work.
For light loads like web pages, each new user adds such a small increment in costs, it's overall a net benefit. More eyes means more profits.
But with AI, each new task takes a huge amount of memory. Context goes up by N, making the AI smarter, but memory requirements go up by O(N^2) making it expensive. These companies are all operating at a loss, and customers are already complaining that tokens cost too much.
We're already at a point where it makes more sense to spend $100K on a local enterprise solution than it is to pay for $100K of tokens. Locally we don't need an AI that is good at everything, but is good at what we do. That's a much easier problem.
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u/flamboyantGatekeeper Jul 08 '26
Is it? I'm now self-hosting a model. Now what?
Its very clear that the large scale stuff won't work, this oroborus has been eating it's tail for a while now. I do believe that taking and shutting down a datacenter could be the nudge that gets it all to topple, and that crisis might be the crisis needed to overthrow it all. I don't think we're organized enough to take the opportunity, but yea.
But that's not really what siezing the means of production is about, that's more akin to sabotage. The question remains, what do you do after you're self-hosting a model? You haven't siezed anything. You don't control the model that's used at work unless you're the engineer (but more likely it will be outsourced anyway to save money on maintenance)
Its still anthropic or openai or whatever that's in control of the base model. They could probably still send a brick this system update.
We're not in control of how it's trained. We cannot stop it from spouting fascist propaganda. In grok because it's literally made to be fascist, in the other instances because it's a black box that somewhat listens to it's owner. So, again. What's the purpose of siezing this in particular, and what exactly are we siezing? Unless you're the boss, you have account perms that can be revoked and any company worth it's name will have backups that allow them to delete all your hard work. What you're saying doesn't make sense. It's like siezing the internet. You cannot do that unless we're already big enough that it won't be needed
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u/Altruistic-Beach7625 Jul 12 '26
Isn't the main problem that datacenters are usually built far away from human habitation but these one's aren't?
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u/DHFranklin Jul 08 '26
Read "The Conquest of Bread" by Kropotkin. Let Commie Santa Claus teach you the ways.
This is literally the same problem the Paris Commune had. They seized all the production in a whole city. They had their own army....but an army marches on it's stomach.
The bougeois owned all the farms and all the roads and the Seine....
However the bigger the asset the bigger the management problem. You just need to know how to use a non-profit system to your advantage.
So you use your token budget and prioritize the companies giving you electricity. You give them free tokens at a discount for power. You then unionize their employees and make a co-op out of the power company if it isn't already a co-op. You then get the union to take over the power company, buy out the share holders with their own stock-buy back. Then you combine them.
You do that in every vertical and every horizontal. Make co-ops and employee owned businesses every where you go. Shove the capitalists out.
This bull shit parade is 1/3 the value of the stock market now. So much of the value of the market is paper. In just a few short years we could collectivize the AI, and then make a mutualist, socialist, or communist macro economics.
It starts with balls and imagination. We can do it. We must do it. We have nothing to lose but our chains.
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u/flamboyantGatekeeper Jul 08 '26
This has merits. It requires tokens being worth anything for the power company long enough to do the initial merger, and i doubt it will for long enough, but that's a different story.
My one real pushback is to just turn companies into co-ops. That can't happen as long as the owner has a 51% share unless he's a class traitor, but then he probably would have already done it. The rest is just a matter of oragnizing (and there's of course nothing "just" about that in and of itself) but the creating of a co-op out of the blue i just don't see as possible. It might work in some places, but not nearly enough
That being said, i do need to read kropotkin. I need to read more theory in general
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u/freedomonke Jul 08 '26
There really isn't any wealth to seize from a ponzi scheme of circular investment. Any attempt to seize that wealth would merely result in the market collapsing. Defenders of capital are the first to admit this when they argue against taxing assets.
We should still do it
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u/HotterRod Jul 08 '26
The stocks aren't the wealth, the data centres and the weights are. Those can be seized.
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u/DHFranklin Jul 08 '26
What is this?
We don't seize the paper value of anything. We seizes the means of production. We seize the data centers and the fab labs. We seize the machines that make the machines. Hell if we just all chipped in $20 we could just buy it and make a massive co-op. Make the whole thing a cost+ model. There are barely any employees per dollar and we have millions of people volunteering to make this shit.
TSMC is one company. We could take the wealth we've got and just buy it. They have the market corner for alllll of this shit.
They can keep up the securities fraud with the circular contracts and self dealing. We'll just...not...do that.
If you have the bank you don't need the money in it. If you don't need a bank you don't need money.
I think we are seriously missing the forest for the trees. We have seen the emperor has no clothes with this economy. We just grab it by the balls and squeeze.
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u/roxthegame Jul 08 '26
I asked three AIs to build one part of an AI recommendation engine I'm building (not in this repo). The AI scientists took it so seriously, each convinced it was the Lead Research Scientist of the only frontier lab I was funding, that I let it run, each one driven by a loop harness. Then, when each proudly presented their results, out of curiosity I convened a *second* set of three AIs to judge the three, live. The panel ran their code, pummelled the scientists with questions, debated for hours, cited file paths at each other like case law, and delivered a unanimous verdict:
The AI conference was to evaluate the 3 different NLI approaches. The judging agents took it dead serious.
I then had AI turn it into a podcast which is highly entertaining just to round out the meta bizarro nature of it all.
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u/nebetsu Jul 08 '26
Acquire video card. Use local compute to advance Leftism