Very well put, and people hating on this tech really need to understand that the rational thing to focus on is how to develop it outside corporate control. I wish there were more discussion regarding training models using distributed computing or optimizing local models to be more capable while using fewer resources.

The oligarchs aren’t debating AI ethics while they’re investing billions to own and control this technology, and they absolutely do not care that there’s a fringe left movement whinging about it. Our choice is to cower in nostalgia or fight to have a stake in our future. We should fight to have a say in how this technology is developed and who controls it. People who weren’t happy with proprietary operating systems didn’t just whinge about it incessantly, but rolled up their sleeves and built their own alternatives with things like Linux and BSD. That should be the guiding mindset today as well. And thanks to Chinese companies releasing open weights, we already have a good foundation to work from.

I very much agree with your argument regarding the nature of cognition and consciousness as well. People like to mystify the brain and claim there’s some intangible soul, but that’s just what we’ve always done trying to make ourselves feel special and separate from the rest of nature. The reality is that the more we learn about cognition, the more evident it becomes that it is an emergent phenomenon that exists on a gradient, from the most primitive biological feedback loops to the stunning complexity of the human mind. While LLMs are just a piece of the puzzle, they demonstrate how a lot of the things our brains are capable of can, in fact, be understood and replicated. There’s absolutely no reason to believe that we won’t be able to make systems that are capable of reasoning in the same way as us in the future.