I believe PornHub is a bigger company than most of today’s AI companies (~150 employees, half software engineers according to Glass Door)? If Brave AI is to be believed, they have $100B in annual revenue and handle 15TB of uploads per day.
If this is the benchmark for the limits of an AI company in a world where AI research is stigmatized, then I am of the opinion that all that stigmatization will accomplish is to make it so people who are OK working in the dark get to make decisions on what gets built. I feel like PornHub sized companies are big enough to produce AGI.
I agree with you that Porn is a very distributed industry overall, and I do suspect that is partially because of the stigmatization. However, this has resulted in a rather robust organization arrangement where individuals work independently and these large companies (like PornHub) focus on handling the IT side of things.
In a stigmatized AI future, perhaps individuals all over the world will work on different pieces of AI stuff while a small number of big AI companies perhaps do bulk training or coordination. Interestingly, this sort of decentralized approach to building could result in a better AI outcome because we wouldn’t end up with a small number of very powerful people deciding trajectory, and instead would have a large number of individuals working independently and in competition with each other.
I do like your idea about comparing to other stigmatized industries! Gambling and drugs are, of course, other great examples of how an absolutely massive industry can grow in the face of weak stigmatization!
The PornHub example raises something a lot of people seem not to understand very well about the porn industry. PornHub and its associated sites (owned by MindGeek) are ‘content aggregators’ that basically act as free advertising for the porn content produced by independent operators and small production companies—which all make their real money through subscription services. PornHub is a huge aggregator site, but as far as I know, it doesn’t actually produce any content of its own. So it’s quite unlike Netflix in this regard—Netflix spent about $17 billion in 2022 on original content, whereas PornHub spent roughly zero on original content, as far as I can tell.
So, one could imagine ‘AI aggregator sites’ that offer a range of AI services produced by small independent AI developers. These could potentially compete with Big Tech outfits like OpenAI or DeepMind (which would be more analogous to Netflix, in terms of investing large sums in ‘original content’, i.e. original software).
But, whether that would increase or decrease AI risk, I’m not sure. My hunch is that the more people and organizations who are involved in AI development, the higher the risk that a few bad actors will produce truly dangerous AI systems, whether accidentally or deliberately. But, as you say, a more diverse AI ecosystem could reduce the change that a few big AI companies acquire and abuse a lot of power.
I believe PornHub is a bigger company than most of today’s AI companies (~150 employees, half software engineers according to Glass Door)? If Brave AI is to be believed, they have $100B in annual revenue and handle 15TB of uploads per day.
If this is the benchmark for the limits of an AI company in a world where AI research is stigmatized, then I am of the opinion that all that stigmatization will accomplish is to make it so people who are OK working in the dark get to make decisions on what gets built. I feel like PornHub sized companies are big enough to produce AGI.
I agree with you that Porn is a very distributed industry overall, and I do suspect that is partially because of the stigmatization. However, this has resulted in a rather robust organization arrangement where individuals work independently and these large companies (like PornHub) focus on handling the IT side of things.
In a stigmatized AI future, perhaps individuals all over the world will work on different pieces of AI stuff while a small number of big AI companies perhaps do bulk training or coordination. Interestingly, this sort of decentralized approach to building could result in a better AI outcome because we wouldn’t end up with a small number of very powerful people deciding trajectory, and instead would have a large number of individuals working independently and in competition with each other.
I do like your idea about comparing to other stigmatized industries! Gambling and drugs are, of course, other great examples of how an absolutely massive industry can grow in the face of weak stigmatization!
Micah—very interesting points.
The PornHub example raises something a lot of people seem not to understand very well about the porn industry. PornHub and its associated sites (owned by MindGeek) are ‘content aggregators’ that basically act as free advertising for the porn content produced by independent operators and small production companies—which all make their real money through subscription services. PornHub is a huge aggregator site, but as far as I know, it doesn’t actually produce any content of its own. So it’s quite unlike Netflix in this regard—Netflix spent about $17 billion in 2022 on original content, whereas PornHub spent roughly zero on original content, as far as I can tell.
So, one could imagine ‘AI aggregator sites’ that offer a range of AI services produced by small independent AI developers. These could potentially compete with Big Tech outfits like OpenAI or DeepMind (which would be more analogous to Netflix, in terms of investing large sums in ‘original content’, i.e. original software).
But, whether that would increase or decrease AI risk, I’m not sure. My hunch is that the more people and organizations who are involved in AI development, the higher the risk that a few bad actors will produce truly dangerous AI systems, whether accidentally or deliberately. But, as you say, a more diverse AI ecosystem could reduce the change that a few big AI companies acquire and abuse a lot of power.