🚨Exclusive: OpenAI used outsourced Kenyan workers earning less than $2 per hour to make ChatGPT less toxic, my investigation found (Thread)https://t.co/302G0z7vy3— Billy Perrigo (@billyperrigo) January 18, 2023
When OpenAI is valued at $29 billion for their electric parrot(a.) that runs on slavery (apparently), liberal economic hegemony teaches you to think that in terms of dollars this means OpenAI has made a thing that objectively has that much value. What's really happening though is that billionaires with that much control, $29 billion worth, of actual world economic production across the world, human labor productivity, capital ownership, etc. are making a bet that they can make more profit by investing into this thing. What the thing actually does doesn't matter. OpenAI is just another label to finance wonkery.
a. There has been mixed discussion about the importance of ChatGPT in terms of what it does. What I think it is is a more interesting way to search whatever is archived on forums like reddit and 4chan. It can pull together source code from stackoverflow and github, which is pretty neat in practice, but it'll also tell you that the age of consent is 14 or whatever because it's training on the string "age of consent" is all related to fucking libertarian incels on 8chan. Without better application, I think there is little interest in the diminishing returns of the current batch of ML spectacles. I realize that it looks like they're getting exponentially better, and in some ways they are, but they are also dependent on finicky and exponentially amassed tech infrastructure that requires continued u.s. consumer stability and militarily enforced supply chain stability, and I think most of us are doubtful about the medium term stability of american hegemony in the global south, where it matters most. If america can't get its cobalt and lithium, none of the rest really matters.
The real magic of all of this is this bit:
OpenAI’s outsourcing partner in Kenya was Sama, a San Francisco-based firm that employs workers in Kenya, Uganda and India to label data for Silicon Valley clients like Google, Meta and Microsoft. Sama markets itself as an “ethical AI” company and claims to have helped lift more than 50,000 people out of poverty.
What this means materially is that the people that are all being forced into this economic arrangement don't have to be working to produce food or other necessities to make capitalism keep turning. I think we underappreciate the extreme efficiency of current heavy industrial machinery. Perhaps this is the primary unknown known of a fundamentally Protestant capitalist empire at home: we enforce austerity while overproducing every material need, constantly. It also means that a little bit of what gets produced in excess is set aside to make impoverished people in the global south fuel all this tech stuff. At every level, the current technological revolution rests on an increasingly tenuous, purposefully impoverished class of skilled, information factory workers. These guys in Kenya literally are employed for poverty wages at an information factory. Materially, I see little difference between this and a customer service call center outsourced to India or Bangladesh.
When OpenAI is valued at $29 billion for their electric parrot(a.) that runs on slavery (apparently), liberal economic hegemony teaches you to think that in terms of dollars this means OpenAI has made a thing that objectively has that much value. What's really happening though is that billionaires with that much control, $29 billion worth, of actual world economic production across the world, human labor productivity, capital ownership, etc. are making a bet that they can make more profit by investing into this thing. What the thing actually does doesn't matter. OpenAI is just another label to finance wonkery.
a. There has been mixed discussion about the importance of ChatGPT in terms of what it does. What I think it is is a more interesting way to search whatever is archived on forums like reddit and 4chan. It can pull together source code from stackoverflow and github, which is pretty neat in practice, but it'll also tell you that the age of consent is 14 or whatever because it's training on the string "age of consent" is all related to fucking libertarian incels on 8chan. Without better application, I think there is little interest in the diminishing returns of the current batch of ML spectacles. I realize that it looks like they're getting exponentially better, and in some ways they are, but they are also dependent on finicky and exponentially amassed tech infrastructure that requires continued u.s. consumer stability and militarily enforced supply chain stability, and I think most of us are doubtful about the medium term stability of american hegemony in the global south, where it matters most. If america can't get its cobalt and lithium, none of the rest really matters.
The real magic of all of this is this bit:
What this means materially is that the people that are all being forced into this economic arrangement don't have to be working to produce food or other necessities to make capitalism keep turning. I think we underappreciate the extreme efficiency of current heavy industrial machinery. Perhaps this is the primary unknown known of a fundamentally Protestant capitalist empire at home: we enforce austerity while overproducing every material need, constantly. It also means that a little bit of what gets produced in excess is set aside to make impoverished people in the global south fuel all this tech stuff. At every level, the current technological revolution rests on an increasingly tenuous, purposefully impoverished class of skilled, information factory workers. These guys in Kenya literally are employed for poverty wages at an information factory. Materially, I see little difference between this and a customer service call center outsourced to India or Bangladesh.