AI is a political matter: we need more activists, not consumers

I just stumbled upon the last post by Antirez titled "Don't fall into the anti-AI hype", and after reading it I found myself entrapped in a maze of mixed feelings.

While I almost never use LLMs for coding¹, as they don't really play well with my way of learning things – I always needed to write or type things to properly memorise concepts: this is true for coding, where I absorb very little by reviewing or reading code, but it was true even at school or university, where I had to write down concepts and diagrams from books or lessons in order to stick things into my brain – it would be quite hard and naive to disagree with his premise: "AI" has changed – and keeps doing so – the programming landscape. While the effects might be good or bad, lowering the barrier to produce code is a huge change and innovation.

However, and while Antirez correctly lists several political² thoughts in his piece, it's quite hard for me to agree with the conclusions he draws.

Open source is not that successful

LLMs are going to help us to write better software, faster, and will allow small teams to have a chance to compete with bigger companies. The same thing open source software did in the 90s.

This would be nice to see, but it's hard to believe it will ever happen. First of all, because open source nowadays is one of the mostly unsuccessful economic examples of writing software we have. There are very few examples of economically viable open source projects, teams or companies, while we have a ton of examples of broken people, burnouts and companies failing in that regards³. The competition was very quickly annihilated by big corporations, exploiting the projects run by few passionate people and profiting billions of dollars without contributing back a dime. Hell, this is especially funny to read from the creator of Redis, given the different situations we witnessed during the years with Redis Labs.

It's very hard to imagine a landscape where a small team using Claude Code or Codex can compete with bigger companies, especially when every bit of code you generate through these tools is at disposal of OpenAI and Anthropic, at any time. What prevents these billion dollars corporations to launch a competitor of whatever you're doing, except with infinite money leverage compared to a few people trying to start a business?

To have actual competition you need to democratize access to technology, for real.

Society is politics

There is a sufficient democratization of AI, so far, even if imperfect.
[...] But I'm worried for the folks that will get fired.

You see, it might sound strange, but I'd say if AI was sufficiently democratized, and like Sam Altman likes to say, the whole humanity will benefit from AI, then we shouldn't be worried about people getting fired.

But the hard reality looks quite different: where's the democracy in having few mega-corporations serving almost the whole entirety of AI services out there? Where's the democracy in having to spend thousands of dollars to run a scaled down version of an LLM locally – with prices of the hardware increasing out of control?

I don't see democracy in any of the recent advancements in the AI landscape, more like the opposite. And how could it be different? The whole thing is controlled by a five trillion dollar company – yes, NVIDIA – which holds the destinity of an insane financial market, market which was never so faraway from society. And thanks to who? The society itself. Society which, by the way, is the market.

Blaming politicians for this is exceptionally dumb, 'cause – guess what? – society put those politicians in charge. Politics starts from society, as the whole process that put politicians in charge – at least in democratic countries – is democratic. Thus, the only way to make AI more – or completely – democratic is for society – and thus, people – to work in that direction.

We need more activism in the AI landscape

What is the social solution, then? Innovation can't be taken back after all. I believe we should vote for governments that recognize what is happening, and are willing to support those who will remain jobless.

I have a different proposal in mind: stop consuming the bad products. Stop promoting stuff from the companies that created the problem and keep profiting from it.

Maybe it's just because I work daily in a landscape where four mega corporations run 90% of the whole fucking internet, but I have great respect for someone like PewDiePie: out of nowhere the guy moved to Linux, bought several GPUs and started experimenting with open weights LLMs locally. Imagine if Antirez, Armin Ronacher and Simon Willison would join forces to improve the landscape around these open models and the relative toolchains, providing the communities with guides on how to use this technology outside of the land of mega corporations. It would be so damn cool.

And guess what, there's a lot you can do as well. In a time in which US capitalism reached its worse moment in recent history, you can say: no, fuck you. That's what I'm doing, and I'll keep doing.

I won't contribute to forage OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, xAI and Microsoft by paying monthly subscriptions to their services.
I won't contribute to the narrative LLMs need to be so big we can't run them on consumer hardware.
I won't contribute to the next financial crisis approving circular money exchanges between few mega-corporations.
I won't contribute to a market in which a stick of RAM costs like an entire damn computer, while Satya Nadella piles up unused silicon in warehouses.
I won't contribute to empower companies like Micron, that took billions in US tax payers' money to then fuck them all by leaving the consumer space.
I won't contribute to lay-off people so that companies' C-levels get – even more – rich to the detriment of the rest of the planet.
I won't contribute to disrupt people from drinking water to build datacenters.
I won't contribute to suck every possible bit of energy on this planet to power rooms full of GPUs.
I won't contribute to invade Venezuela and other countries so that US can fix its rotten economy by stealing oil and other resources.

You can do this too.

It's actually quite easy, and it will probably be more effective than waiting for governments to catch up with technlogy in general. We don't need politicians to create change in the AI landscape. We just need people. We need people to push for open AI technologies, to push to have these technologies to work on consumer hardware, and to push for that hardware to be accessible, both in price and availability.

LLMs can truly be a revolution for society only if society is involved and able to use such technology. Otherwise it will be just another cloud moment, just way more expensive and destructive for the planet.