From the Manifesto
Contradictions
What they say. What it means. The gap between the press release and the balance sheet.
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№ 01
Claim
AI is built to free humanity from drudgery.
Reality
It is trained on the unpaid labour of everyone who has ever written a sentence online, and its first deployment is to fire the person who writes the next one.
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№ 02
Claim
AI companies are losing money, so how can they be monopolies?
Reality
The losses are a moat. Only a firm with access to infinite venture capital can afford to run a compute bill that size until everyone else is dead.
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№ 03
Claim
Regulation will slow progress.
Reality
The loudest voices calling for deregulation are the ones who already have the biggest models. The ladder is pulled up behind them.
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№ 04
Claim
AI is just the next industrial revolution.
Reality
The first industrial revolution eventually produced unions, the weekend, public education, and a middle class. It took 150 years and a lot of blood. Nobody has that kind of runway twice.
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№ 05
Claim
AI will create more jobs than it destroys.
Reality
Every hand-waving study saying this assumes the profits of the new jobs will be shared. Nothing in the current ownership structure suggests they will be.
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№ 06
Claim
Open-source models democratise AI.
Reality
The weights are free. The 30,000 H100s needed to fine-tune them are not. Democracy with an entry fee is an auction.