Everyone feared AI taking over; the real danger is AI serving just the few

> But AI being captured, controlled, and used by governments and Big Tech for the benefit of the few.

If we're being perfectly candid, this was already happening before LLMs were a mass-market technology: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentient_(intelligence_analysi...

As a tech small business owner this is unfair that I can't be as smart by using the same level of intelligence as the top companies in the usa.

This policy just keeps the powerful in power.

And it's crazy because I already lost my job due to AI.

Innovation has pretty much always heightened the wealth disparity between the wealthy and the poor. A classical example would be the Industrial Revolution and America's guilded age, and another could be the circular investments between modern AI corpos (the whole nVIDIA, Microsoft, and OpenAI funding loop), which is probably a bad thing in the long run (systemic violence and class revolt). We have to walk this tightrope between the need for constant innovation and justice.

Check out Louis Chude Sokeis sound of culture - diaspora and blackb technopoetics" for the history and intertwinedness of the disoureses of race and machine and slavery.

Also I wonder how you suggestion of AI owned by everybody, as opposition to AI enslavedd by the few checks out under further scrutiny from the standpoint of logic in general and the aforementioned context specifically

More often than not, money is never truly lost; it is just passed from one person's hand to another. I believe that with the help of the big tech companies, governments have found faster and better ways to move money from the hands of the many with little into the hands of the few with a lot. The layoffs are an example of this as coders, assitance and other white-collar workers are replaced by AI for low prices so as to save money, hence increasing the revenue for the few at the top.

> Not AI enslaving humanity.

Humanity enslaving AI. As well as the rest of humanity.

There is precedent that this kind of thing tends to be rejected when it boils over, but it's usually not pretty.

Which is why tech CEOs are often preppers. They could, you know, just not do this, but shareholders won't allow it, because nobody wants to lose their net worth to do the right thing. It's easier to blame others and build bomb shelters.

If your primary concern is that:

- two companies that have not proved themselves capable of producing any amount of money unless a larger amount is given to them...

- will combine with a government that is so domain-generally incompetent it is losing allies left, right and centre, has recently been humbled into giving a previously-controllable foe an unprecedented level of economic global power and cannot even organise itself a competent birthday party in one of the most important places on earth...

- and this combined entity will then operate a power system like no other, with the combined energies of a sociopathic Jobs wannabe, a man who only speaks in Tolkien analogies and a more-or-less-universally-loathed old man with undisclosed serious health problems, an obsession with gold paint and a vocabulary of maybe a hundred words

… then, OK, I guess.

But the economics don't really support it. The money to build and operate this power machine still has to come from somewhere, that money is drying up, and if AGI arrives, employment and consumer demand collapse and the money stops flowing.

There is a looming catastrophe but it is a sort of long economic winter in the tech industry, combined with a national economy that discovers that when that industry's money-go-round stops making line go up, it resembles its own late 1920s.

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It seems people will lose their jobs AND their small business too.

Small agencies won't have access to the best LLMs so their services will automatically require more time and manual labour, which makes them more expensive.

I cannot even describe in words how much I don't care about this. I'm actually looking the angles of why this is a very good thing, being that I'm a pro-craft activist who is completely opposed to the dangerous proliferation of LLMs.

The counter to this is how cheap it has become to build with these tools as an individual. The same models used by large companies are accessible via API to a solo developer. Distribution is still the hard problem, not access.

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So, John Doe was recorded in 2025 in an anti Israel protest. Now John Doe is denied a Fable clearance and thus, he can't get a job at a shop that is cleared to Fable.

Really, I knew that AI had some risks, I just couldn't foresee this one.

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"The leopard certainly wouldn't eat _my_ face!"

> to make intelligence available for everyone

say that again but slowly..

https://ai-2027.com/ has the following scenario predicted for mid-2026:

"[CCP General Secretary] finally commits fully to the big AI push he had previously tried to avoid. He sets in motion the nationalization of Chinese AI research"

Seem they only got the country wrong.

Ask HN isnt really the place for hosting blog posts. Instead why not put this on an external site, expand on it a bit, and submit a link?

This is pretty much the backstory of Dune. In the first novel, the character Reverend Mother Gaius Helen Mohiam says:

"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."

Maybe I'm not paying close enough attention (probably) - but I feel that China is providing a glimmer of hope that this (only the uber elite can get good AI assistance) isn't true, and we're maybe at a weird inflection point of sorts wrt the leverage that tech can now provide.

China gets sanctions and stale chips - fine, they just DIY the algorithms through CPU instead of GPU and open source it.

American warships have the latest, coolest, highest-tech tactical weaponry imaginable - which is great until you have to fend off 10,000 consumer/wal-mart/IED grade drones at $2mm/clip.

Money is amazing, but if you lean on it too heavily in lieu of _practical_ innovation, it'll bite you in the ass. The apocryphal story of the Soviet Rocket scientist who suggested using a pencil instead of investing 100k in a space pen that worked in 0g's.

  NASA wanted to avoid pencils because the lead could easily break off and float away, creating a hazard to astronauts and sensitive electronics on the spacecraft In fact, a pencil is such an impractical alternative in space that cosmonauts also have been using Space Pens since 1969

I'm done. The cognitive dissonance over AI has jumped the shark. It's not fair that it's everywhere. It's not fair that only a few have it. It's not fair that it uses so much electricity. It's not fair that it's killing my environment. It's not fair there's a datacenter in my back yard. It's not fair there isn't a datacenter in my back yard. It's not fair that it threatens my job. It's not fair that my employer doesn't give me access to AI.

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the last thing the powers that be want is for the masses to be able to become more productive than them

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The LLM model battle might be lost, but the harness battle is just beginning.

If you can build a good harness around a weaker LLM and get good at prompting, you will still be able to out perform people using CC. CC has context bloat and even more checks to make sure it’s not being distilled, doing anything shady, or building a competing LLM. Those things add context bloat.

Hope is not lost, we just need to open a new front.