The crybabies who freak out about *The Communist Manifesto* appearing on university curriculum clearly never read it - chapter one is basically a long hymn to capitalism's flexibility and inventiveness, its ability to change form and adapt itself to everything the world throws at it and come out on top:
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/ch01.htm#007
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If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
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Today, leftists signal this protean capacity of capital with the -washing suffix: #greenwashing, #genderwashing, #queerwashing, #wokewashing - all the ways capital cloaks itself in liberatory, progressive values, while still serving as a force for extraction, exploitation, and political corruption.
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A smart capitalist is someone who, sensing outrage at a world run by 150 old white guys in boardrooms, proposes replacing half of them with women, queers, and people of color. This is a superficial maneuver, sure, but it's an incredibly effective one.
In "Open (For Business): Big Tech, Concentrated Power, and the Political Economy of Open AI," a new working paper, @Mer__edith, @davidthewid and #SarahBMyers document a new kind of -washing: #openwashing:
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4543807
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Openwashing is the trick that large "AI" companies use to evade regulation and neutralizing critics, by casting themselves as forces of ethical capitalism, committed to the virtue of #openness. No one should be surprised to learn that the products of the "open" wing of an industry whose products are neither "artificial," nor "intelligent," are also not "open." Every word AI huxters say is a lie; including "and," and "the."
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So what work does the "open" in "open AI" do? "Open" here is supposed to invoke the "open" in "#OpenSource," a movement that emphasizes a software development methodology that promotes code #transparency, #reusability and #extensibility, which are three important virtues.
But "open source" itself is an offshoot of a more foundational movement, the #FreeSoftware movement, whose goal is to promote *freedom*, and whose *method* is openness.
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The point of #SoftwareFreedom was #TechnologicalSelfDetermination, the right of technology users to decide not just what their technology *does*, but who it does it *to* and who it does it *for*:
https://locusmag.com/2022/01/cory-doctorow-science-fiction-is-a-luddite-literature/
The open source split from free software was ostensibly driven by the need to reassure investors and businesspeople so they would join the movement.
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The "free" in free software is (deliberately) ambiguous, a bit of wordplay that sometimes misleads people into thinking it means "#FreeAsInBeer" when really it means "#FreeAsInSpeech" (in Romance languages, these distinctions are captured by translating "free" as "libre" rather than "gratis").
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The idea behind open source was to rebrand free software in a less ambiguous - and more instrumental - package that stressed cost-savings and software quality, as well as "ecosystem benefits" from a co-operative form of development that recruited tinkerers, independents, and rivals to contribute to a robust infrastructural commons.
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But "open" doesn't merely resolve the linguistic ambiguity of libre vs gratis - it does so by removing the "liberty" from "libre," the "freedom" from "free." "Open" changes the pole-star that movement participants follow as they set their course. Rather than asking "Which course of action makes us more free?" they ask, "Which course of action makes our software better?"
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Thus, by dribs and drabs, freedom leeches out of openness. Today's tech giants have mobilized "open" to create a two-tier system: the largest tech firms enjoy broad freedom themselves - they alone get to decide how their software stack is configured. But for all of us who rely on that (increasingly unavoidable) software stack, all we have is "open": the ability to peer inside that software and see how it works, and perhaps suggest improvements to it:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vBknF2yUZZ8
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In the Big Tech net, it's freedom for them, openness for us. "Openness" - transparency, reusability and extensibility - is valuable, but don't mistake it for technological self-determination. As the tech sector becomes ever-more concentrated, the limits of openness become more apparent.
But even by those standards, the openness of "open AI" is thin gruel indeed (that goes triple for the company that calls itself "#OpenAI," which is a *particularly* egregious openwasher).
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The paper's authors start by suggesting that the "open" in "open AI" is meant to imply that an "open AI" can be scratch-built by competitors (or even hobbyists), but that this isn't true. Not only is the material that "open AI" companies publish insufficient for reproducing their products, even if those gaps were plugged, the resource burden required to do so is so intense that only the largest companies could do so.
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Beyond this, the "open" parts of "open AI" are insufficient for achieving the other claimed benefits of "open AI": they don't promote auditing, or safety, or competition. Indeed, they often cut *against* these goals.
"Open AI" is a wordgame that exploits the malleability of "open," but also the ambiguity of the term "AI": "a grab bag of approaches, not... a technical term of art, but more ... marketing and a signifier of aspirations."
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Hitching this vague term to "open" creates all kinds of bait-and-switch opportunities.
That's how you get #Meta claiming that #LLaMa2 is "open source," despite being licensed in a way that is absolutely incompatible with any widely accepted definition of the term:
https://blog.opensource.org/metas-llama-2-license-is-not-open-source/
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LLaMa-2 is a particularly egregious openwashing example, but there are plenty of other ways that "open" is misleadingly applied to AI: sometimes it means you can see the source code, sometimes that you can see the training data, and sometimes that you can tune a model, all to different degrees, alone and in combination.
But even the most "open" systems can't be independently replicated, due to raw computing requirements.
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This isn't the fault of the AI industry - the computational intensity is a fact, not a choice - but when the AI industry claims that "open" will "democratize" AI, they are hiding the ball. People who hear these "#democratization" claims (especially policymakers) are thinking about entrepreneurial kids in garages, but unless these kids have access to multi-billion-dollar data centers, they can't be "disruptors" who topple tech giants with cool new ideas.
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At best, they can hope to pay rent to those giants for access to their compute grids, in order to create products and services at the margin that *rely* on existing products, rather than displacing them.
The "open" story, with its claims of democratization, is an especially important one in the context of regulation.
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In Europe, where a variety of AI regulations are proposed, the AI industry has co-opted the open source movement's hard-won narrative battles about the harms of ill-considered regulation.
For open source (and free software) advocates, many tech regulations aimed at taming large, abusive companies - like requirements to surveil and control users to extinguish toxic behavior - wreak collateral damage on the free, open, user-centric superior alternatives to Big Tech.
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This leads to the paradoxical effect of passing regulation to "punish" Big Tech that end up simply shaving an infinitesimal percentage off the giants' profits, while destroying the small co-ops, nonprofits and startups before they can grow to be a viable alternative.
The years-long fight to get regulators to understand this risk has been waged by principled actors working for subsistence nonprofit wages or for free.
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Now the AI industry is capitalizing on lawmakers' hard-won consideration for collateral damage by claiming to be "open AI" and thus vulnerable to overbroad regulation.
But the "open" projects that lawmakers have been coached to value are precious because they deliver a level playing field, competition, innovation and democratization - all things that "open AI" fails to deliver.
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The regulations the AI industry is fighting also don't necessarily implicate the speech implications that are core to protecting free software:
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/04/remembering-case-established-code-speech
Just think about LLaMa-2. You can download it for free, along with the model weights it relies on - but not detailed specs for the data that was used in its training.
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One of EFF's first major legal victories was Bernstein v. Department of Justice, a landmark case that resulted in establishing code as speech and changed United States export regulations on encryption software, paving the way for international e-commerce. We represented Daniel J. Bernstein, a...
And the source-code is licensed under a homebrewed license cooked up by Meta's lawyers, a license that only glancingly resembles anything from the #OpenSourceDefinition:
Core to Big Tech companies' "open AI" offerings are tools, like Meta's #PyTorch and Google's #TensorFlow. These tools are indeed "open source," licensed under real OSS terms.
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But they are designed and maintained by the companies that sponsor them, and optimize for the proprietary back-ends each company offers in its own cloud. When programmers train themselves to develop in these environments, they are gaining expertise in adding value to a monopolist's ecosystem, locking themselves in with their own expertise. This a classic example of software freedom for tech giants and open source for the rest of us.
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One way to understand how "open" can produce a lock-in that "free" might prevent is to think of #Android: Android is an open platform in the sense that its sourcecode is freely licensed, but the existence of Android doesn't make it any easier to challenge the mobile OS duopoly with a new mobile OS; nor does it make it easier to switch from Android to #iOS and vice versa.
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Another example: #MongoDB, a free/open database tool that was adopted by #Amazon, which subsequently forked the codebase and tuning it to work on their proprietary cloud infrastructure.
The value of open tooling as a stickytrap for creating a pool of developers who end up as sharecroppers who are glued to a specific company's closed infrastructure is well-understood and openly acknowledged by "open AI" companies.
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@pluralistic why is it that this paradox always seems to happen in #BigTech #Regulation? Public sentiment against tech companies gets channeled into laws that just entrench their position!
Cynically, it's convenient for governments to have a handful of big tech companies that they can convince to do their bidding.
But surely not all policymakers are this cynical. How do the well-intentioned rest supporting such bills not see that these laws will have the opposite to the intended effect?
Nothing new, government only handles the violence, outsource everything else to obedient servants that do the nitty-gritty stuff, like collecting taxes, ensuring the "legitimacy" of the ruling class.
Tech is just the latest frontier that has been regulated to death, to ensure no one gets any bright ideas that threatens the status quo.
Maybe we had an opportunity, and maybe some people have woken up to the Most Dangerous Superstition (that the State is needed)
@pluralistic thank you for sharing this talk, and thank you @mako for giving it in the first place.
I find it one of the most articulate comparisons between #OpenSource and #FreeSoftware. It really articulately explains the intuitive difference in feeling between using open source and free software projects.
Cory Doctorow
Matthew Fennell
Niclas Hedhman
LisPi