Monthly Archives: January 2023

ChatGPT: Super Rentier

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I have avoided writing about ChatGPT as one might hurriedly walk past a group of co-workers, gathered around a box of donuts who’re talking about a popular movie or show; to avoid being drawn into the inevitable.

In some circles, certainly the circles I travel in, ChatGPT is the relentless talk of the town. Everyone from LinkedIn hucksters who claimed to be making millions from the platform, only moments after it was released, to the usual ‘AI’ enthusiasts who take any opportunity to sweatily declare a new era of machine intelligence upon us – and of course, a scattering of people carefully analyzing the actually existing nuts and bolts – everyone seems to be promoting, debating and shouting about ChatGPT.

You can imagine me, dear reader, in the midst of this drama, quietly sitting in a timeworn leather chair, slowly sipping a glass of wine while a stream of text, video and audio, all about ChatGPT, that silicon, would-be Golem, washes over me

What roused me from my torpor was the news Microsoft was investing 10 billion dollars in OpenAI, the organization behind ChatGPT and other ballyhooed large language model systems (see: “Microsoft’s $10bn bet on ChatGPT developer marks new era of AI”). Even for Microsoft, that’s a lot of money. Behind all this, is Microsoft’s significant investment in what it calls purpose built, AI supercomputers such as VOYAGER-EUS2 to train and host platforms such as ChatGPT. Although tender minded naifs believe corporations are using large scale computation to advance humanity, more sober minds are inclined to ask fundamental questions such as, why?

The answer came from the Microsoft article, “General availability of Azure OpenAI Service expands access to large, advanced AI models with added enterprise benefits.” Note that phrase, ‘enterprise benefits.’ The audience for this article is surely techie and techie adjacent (and here, I must raise my hand) but even if neither of these categories describes you I suggest giving it a read.  There’s also an introductory video, providing a walkthrough of using the OpenAI tooling that’s mediated via the Microsoft Azure cloud platform.

Microsoft Video on OpenAI Platforms, Integrated with Azure

As I watched this video, the purpose of all those billions and the hardware it bought became clear to me; Microsoft and its chief competitors, Amazon and an apparently panicked Google (plus, less well known organizations) are seeking to extend the rentier model of cloud computing, which turns computation, storage and database services into a rented utility and recurring revenue source for the cloud firm that maintains the hardware – even for the largest corporate customers – into the ‘AI’ space, creating super rentier platforms which will spawn subordinate, sub-rentier platforms:

Imagine the following…

A San Francisco based startup, let’s give it a terrible name, Talkist, announces it has developed a remarkable, groundbreaking chat application (and by the way, ‘groundbreaking’ is required alongside ‘next generation’) which will enable companies around the world to replace customer service personnel with Talkist’s ‘intelligent’, ‘ethical’ system. Talkist, which only consists of a few people (mostly men) and a stereotypical, ‘visionary’ leader, probably wearing a thousand dollar t-shirt, doesn’t have the capital, or the desire to build the computational infrastructure required to host such a system.

This is where the Azure/OpenAI complex of systems comes to the rescue of our plucky band of well-funded San Franciscans. Instead of diverting precious venture capital into purchasing data center space and the computers to fill it, that money can be poured into creating applications which utilize Microsoft/OpenAI cloud services. Microsoft/OpenAI rent ‘AI’ capabilities to Talkist who in turn, rent ‘AI’ capabilities to other companies who think they can replace people with text generating, pattern matching systems (ironically, OpenAI itself is dependent on exploited labor as the Time Magazine article, “OpenAI Used Kenyan Workers on Less Than $2 Per Hour to Make ChatGPT Less Toxic” shows).

What a time to be alive.

Of course, the uses (and from the perspective of profit-driven organizations, cost savings) don’t end with chatty software. We can imagine magazines and other publications, weary of having to employ troublesome human beings with their demands for salaries, health care and decent lives (The gall! Are there no workhouses? Are there no prisons?) rushing to use these systems to ‘write’ – or perhaps we should say, mechanistically assemble,  articles and news stories, reducing the need for writers who are an annoying class (I wink at you dear reader for I am the opposite of annoying – being a delightful mixture of cologne, Bordeaux and dialectical analysis). Unsurprisingly, and let’s indulge our desire for a bit of the old schadenfreude, amusingly there are problems such as those detailed in the articles “CNET Is Reviewing the Accuracy of All Its AI-Written Articles After Multiple Major Corrections. and, “CNET’s AI Journalist Appears to Have Committed Extensive Plagiarism.”

…

Of all the empires that have stalked the Earth, the tech imperium is, perhaps, the bullshitiest. The Romans derived their power from myths, yes, but also, roads, aqueducts and organized violence – real things in a real world.  The US empire has its own set of myths, such as a belief that sitting in a car, in traffic, is the pinnacle of freedom and in meritocracy (a notion wielded by the most mediocre minds to explain their comforts). Once again however, real things, such as possessing the world’s reserve currency and the capacity for ultra-violence lurk behind the curtain.

The tech empire, by contrast, is built, using the Monorail maneuver detailed in this Simpsons episode, on false claims prettily presented. It has inserted itself between us and the things we need – information, memories, creativity. The tech industry has hijacked a variety of commons and then rents us access to what should be open. In its ‘AI’ incarnation, the tech industry attempts to replace human reason with computer power, a fool’s errand, which computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum dissected almost 50 years ago,  but a goal motivated by a desire to increase the rate of profit in an era of creeping stagnation by reducing the need for labor.

Rather than being a refutation of Marx and Engel’s analysis as some, such as Yanis Varoufakis with his ‘cloudalist’ hypothesis bafflingly claim, we are indeed, still very much dealing with the human grinding workings of capitalist logics, wearing a prop, science fiction film costume, claiming to have come in peace.

ChatGPT isn’t a research platform or the herald of a new age of computation; it is the embodiment of the revenue stream dreams of the tech industry, the super-rentier.

Twitter – Agonistes

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There’s a temptation, if you are, or were, a Twitter user (and perhaps, even if you aren’t since we all must comment on everything, everywhere all the time now) to have an opinion about that platform and its current state.

For some, it’s a tale of paradise lost, of all yesterday’s parasocial parties, ruined by the jarring arrival of an off-putting, racist weirdo who, while lacking nearly all social skills, demands everyone’s attention. For others, there’s a deeper sense of impending loss; of online communities that were built against the odds and against the objections of a hostile world. And so, we have the agonies and ecstasies of Black Twitter and Philosophy Twitter and Literary Twitter and Trans Twitter and a universe of other groupings which came together (while also remaining open to other communities) as it all seems to be burning down.

Of course, I have my own Twitter story to tell which involves gaining some small degree of notice for my efforts dissecting the tech industry’s dangerous fantasies from a materialist, and indeed, Marxist perspective. For me, however, the larger concern, or really, observation, is that all of it – the good, the bad and the ugly of Twitter was built, like so many modern beliefs, upon a foundation of unreality.

What do I mean by unreality, what am I driving at? Here, we must take a detour to the past, borrowing a moment from Edward Gibbon´s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, (1782):

“To resume, in a few words, the system of the Imperial government; as it was instituted by Augustus, and maintained by those princes who understood their own interest and that of the people, it may be defined an absolute monarchy disguised by the forms of a commonwealth. The masters of the Roman world surrounded their throne with darkness, concealed their irresistible strength, and humbly professed themselves the accountable ministers of the senate, whose supreme decrees they dictated and obeyed.”

This fascinates me – the use of democratic forms to obscure tyranny; an “absolute monarchy disguised by the forms of a commonwealth.” When I think of the tech industry which, until very, very recently, was almost universally hailed as a sun kissed road to ‘The Future’, that vaguely defined territory, always just over the horizon, this potent phrase comes to mind.

When Elon Musk took command of Twitter, arriving at the company’s San Francisco office carrying a sink in a typically poor attempt at humor, we recoiled in keyboard-conveyed horror, waiting for the bad times to come. We all know what happened next: the mass firings of key people in moderation, compliance, software and data center infrastructure, and also, anyone who knows what to do with a bathroom fixture. This sort of anti-worker action, common in most other sectors (though not always quite so haphazardly) came as a shock to those in, and observers of, that shiny Mordor, the tech sector’s Silicon Valley heartland (particularly those who forgot, or weren’t around for the dot com crash of 2000).

As Musk smashed his way through a complex system and tweeted like the synthesis of an angrily divorced uncle and a 14 year old manifesto writer, revealing in near real time his unsuitability for the role of CEO (or even to lead a bake sale) some of us thought: if only another, more competent and nicer person took the reigns; if only the terrible billionaire with his Saudi funders and sweaty style of presentation, could be replaced by that most hallowed of modern types, a professional, a good CEO who cared about Twitter as a ‘town square.’

Given the severe limitations of our barbarous era, a time in which we’re told that it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism, it’s not surprising that our most commonly proposed solution to the problem of bad, even destructive management of a social media platform is its replacement by good management – still within the framework of privately owned companies – that is, a capitalist solution to a capitalist problem.

At the heart of the Musk problem (and the Dorsey problem before it, and the Google problem, and on and on) is the reality these platforms are not subject to democratic control and not answerable – except in a crude market feedback sense – to the needs of the people using them. We cry out for a better CEO, a better billionaire because the actual solution, that these platforms not be private at all but public utilities we control as citizens, not as consumers, has been purged from our minds as a possibility, let alone a goal (we’ll talk about Mastodon another time).

We have been trained, to borrow once again from Gibbon, to accept “absolute monarchy disguised by the forms of a commonwealth”. The ‘commonwealth’ disguise in this case, being the idea of a tech industry which, alone amongst capitalist sectors, somehow has our best interest at heart because… well, one isn’t sure; perhaps all the nice words about inclusion, expensive t-shirts, and California sunshine, shining down on the forgotten bones of the murdered indigenous population, oil rigs and hidden industrial waste.