I have seen people conduct business that doesn’t enshittify. Though rare, it is not an universal trait for conducting business.
The process of creating the AIs require mobilizing vast amount of energy, capital, and time. It is a product of capital with the expectation of locking down future markets. It is not orthogonal to enshittification.
Small web was still a thing through the 90s and early ‘00s. Web servers were not so concentrated as they are with hardware capable of running AI, let alone training them.
> I have seen people conduct business that doesn’t enshittify. Though rare, it is not an universal trait for conducting business.
Exception that proves some markets are still inefficient enough to allow people of good conscience to thrive. Doesn't change the overall trajectory.
> The process of creating the AIs require mobilizing vast amount of energy, capital, and time. It is a product of capital with the expectation of locking down future markets.
So are computers themselves. However free and open the web once was, or could've been, hardware was always capital-heavy, and it only got heavier with time. Cheap, ubiquitous computers and TSMC are two sides of the same coin.
> It is not orthogonal to enshittification.
That's, again, because business begets enshittification; it's one of those failure modes that are hard to avoid.
> Small web was still a thing through the 90s and early ‘00s. Web servers were not so concentrated as they are with hardware capable of running AI, let alone training them.
You can "run AI" on your own computer if you like. I hear Apple Silicon is good for LLMs this time of year. A consumer-grade GPU is more than enough to satisfy your amateur and professional image generation needs too; grab ComfyUI from GitHub and a Stable Diffusion checkpoint from HuggingFace, and you're in business; hell, you're actually close to bleeding edge and have a shot at contributing to SOTA if you're so inclined.
Of course, your local quantized Llama is not going to be as good as ChatGPT o3 - but that's just economies at scale at play. Much like with the web - most of it is concentrated, but some still find reasons to run servers themselves.
"So are computers themselves. However free and open the web once was, or could've been, hardware was always capital-heavy, and it only got heavier with time. Cheap, ubiquitous computers and TSMC are two sides of the same coin."
Ok, I can see that is true.
"Exception that proves some markets are still inefficient enough to allow people of good conscience to thrive. Doesn't change the overall trajectory."
That depends on what you are measuring to determine market efficiency. Social, political, knowledge, and natural capital are excluded from consideration, so of course we optimize towards financial efficiency at the expense of everything else.
Which comes back to: business does not have beget enshittification, and it isn't because of market inefficiencies.
I think we're going to have to agree to disagree on some of these points.
I don't think we need to agree to disagree just yet. I want to remark on:
> That depends on what you are measuring to determine market efficiency. Social, political, knowledge, and natural capital are excluded from consideration, so of course we optimize towards financial efficiency at the expense of everything else.
I'm taking a loose but classical definition of it, so obviously in financial terms. But there isn't really much choice to be made here: the market, as a system borne of aggregate human behavior at scale, is optimizing along a specific dimension for structural reasons. "Social, political, knowledge and natural capital" aren't excluded at all - on the contrary, they're converted into dollars and become part of the optimization, competing with other things that are also converted into monetary units.
It's just that, it turns out, those other forms of capital you mention tend to not have that much value, so they get optimized away, especially under strong competitive pressure.
The process of creating the AIs require mobilizing vast amount of energy, capital, and time. It is a product of capital with the expectation of locking down future markets. It is not orthogonal to enshittification.
Small web was still a thing through the 90s and early ‘00s. Web servers were not so concentrated as they are with hardware capable of running AI, let alone training them.