Asimov theorized such an AI as Multivac (a joke from Univac) and wrote a number of short stories exploring how it would change the world. He had one short story in particular where one citizen would be called in front of Multivac and, based on their answers to Multivac's questions, Multivac would (accurately) infer who the winner of the presidential election should be, obviating the need for expensive elections to be run. The whole concept wasn't unlike that Kevin Costner movie Swing Vote.
Most companies now sell user data to wherever. It wouldn't be particularly hard to tie user data to individual people given that phone numbers are required for most of the most useful applications (Discord, Facebook, WhatsApp, etc). Given that, you could feed in identifiable user input to an AI, let it develop a model of the US, and then ask it questions about the state of the country, even filtered by identifying characteristics. It would both take much less effort and be more accurate than manual polling or manual outreach. You could have leaders asking which direction they should take the country just by having a quick conversation with their baby-Multivac.
> He had one short story in particular where one citizen would be called in front of Multivac and, based on their answers to Multivac's questions, Multivac would (accurately) infer who the winner of the presidential election should be, obviating the need for expensive elections to be run.
Everyone is of course entitled to their own opinion but my interpretation of Franchise is that the depicted government is a dictatorship. I would say the the end of the story seems pretty sarcastic:
> Suddenly, Norman Muller felt proud. It was on him now in full strength. He was proud.
> In this imperfect world, the sovereign citizens of the first and greatest Electronic Democracy had, through Norman Muller (through him!) exercised once again its free, untrammeled franchise.
Besides, it's obvious that the process is not transparent, denies its citizens their free will by treating them as statistically predictable objects, and requires an amount of personal data that can only be provided by a surveillance state.
It’s going to have to be a “labor of love”. Once the model is out there it will be shared and available, but this only works if there’s no company to litigate against and no chance of making money off the thing (other than possibly going the crypto route).
why can't crowdfunding work for this stuff? I'd gladly chip in like, $1K or something, to fund the training of a ChatGPT-like LLM, on the condition that it's publicly released with no fetters.
We are currently at "mainframe" level of AI. It takes a room sized computer and millions of dollars to train a SOTA LLM.
Current models are extremely inefficient, insofar as they require vast internet-sized data, yet clearly we have not gotten fully human-quality reasoning out. I don't know about you, but I didn't read the entire Common Crawl in school when I was learning English.
The fundamental bottleneck right now is efficiency. ChatGPT is nice as an existence proof, but we are reaching a limit to how big these things can get. Model size is going to peak and then go down (this may already have happened).
So while we could crowdfund a ChatGPT at great expense right now, it's probably better to wait a few years for the technology to mature further.
