A lot of the problems with the current direction of AI revolve around it being ultimately controlled by a small number of people with disproportionate power who mainly want to replace labor and accumulate wealth. One way to address this is shifting control of AI to cooperative collectives owned by the people who work on it. We already have a lot of hobbyists experimenting with self-hosting local LLMs but they could potentially build and share much more powerful systems if they banded together. I could imagine them pooling self-hosted resources (kind of like distributed computing projects like Folding@home) or even building out cooperative data centers, and running them with affordable API rates and monthly plans and policies that support the public interest. There’s already been some success doing this in other domains, e.g. with Drivers Cooperative and Fairbnb building cooperative alternatives to Uber and Airbnb. I recognize that top tier frontier models in their current form are really capital-intensive and difficult to democratize, but the gap is rapidly closing and open weight models are looking competitive in a lot of practical domains. And even training new models is getting more accessible over time. There are already some organizations working on this, like for example the Platform Cooperativism Consortium held an annual conference focused on cooperative AI last fall, and they ran an online course called “AI Without Bosses” with 200 students (their syllabus has a lot of good references on this topic). Has anyone else here heard of or worked on cooperative AI? I’d be interested in learning more about it and how practical it is as a way to try to solve some of the worst wealth concentration issues with AI as we know it. submitted by /u/ChiaraStellata
Originally posted by u/ChiaraStellata on r/ArtificialInteligence
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