The Cowbird

What if every person had equal distribution of compute power for LLM usage?

That question was posed to me on X. It's interesting, but not all that dissimilar from a socialistic imperative. The same could be said of wealth or intellect or output.

Let's explore the positives first. If everyone had equal access to compute, the friction that has long plagued our world of randomly distributed intellect would be liberated. The savant who happens to be a villager in the Pacific isles or in the war-torn Congo would emerge, and the world would benefit from the creative output of his or her genius. That would clearly be a net benefit. However, there's an assumption about the innate good of LLM compute that has to be wrestled with first.

My family has a ranch in west Texas. I've been going there my whole life. The desert hillsides collide with an oasis along the Devils River, where oak, willow, cottonwood, and sycamore trees shade out the sun and cast long shadows on crystal clear water.

Overhead, songbirds of every variety swarm and sing. They nest in the trees surrounding the water. One bird among them is not like the others. Though I suspect it has a more formal name, we've always called it a cowbird.

The cowbird is peculiar. It hardly sings, and its brown color and rough feathers make it an odd participant in the symphony of lights the other birds radiate. It also has an identifying behavior that sets it apart. It does not care for its own.

When it comes time to lay eggs, the mother cowbird descends on a songbird's nest, removes an egg, and replaces it with her own. The songbird raises the cowbird as its own, the bigger chick crowds out the rest, and the cycle repeats. Left to itself, the rich ecosystem descends into a monoculture.

The presence of AI in our world has a similar disorganizing effect. Anyone who uses it constantly knows the pull. It relentlessly pushes the average at the expense of the extraordinary.

Take writing, for example. Anyone who writes knows the symbiotic relationship between the writing process and the mind's ability to process complex thinking. And yet anyone who writes wants to write well.

This presents an issue. No writer, however advanced, can hope to create as perfect a specimen as an LLM. And yet the output is not the goal. The process is the goal, and the LLM has no place in the process. Sure, it can help hone, prompt, shape and the like. But each of those subprocesses is part of the same symbiotic relationship, and each represents a loss of capacity if ceded to the LLM.

So there's a real question whether access to LLM compute for the brightest among us is a net benefit. Assuming they know how to leverage their genetic blessing, then sure, access to compute can compound and expand their impact. But developing that muscle is still a manual process, and one that gets weaker when the LLM is introduced too early.

Now the negative side. There is something in the human psyche that wants hierarchy. We want it for the safety it provides, the scapegoats it delivers, and the urge to succeed it promises. It also gives us a feedback mechanism that tells us whether our behaviors are right or wrong. As it turns out, this is essential, because our behaviors are downstream of our values and thoughts, and we're programmed to act against our own self-interest.

The so-called classical virtues, extolled by nearly all religions and cultures, are virtues because they are aspirational. We aspire to humility, service, and charity not because those are default modes but precisely because they are not. The force quietly shaping our conformance to those norms is the presence of hierarchy. Hierarchy has its good side and its bad side, and we get both.

And since we've established that the presence of an LLM might have a deleterious effect on genius, access to an LLM is therefore a luxury good rather than a necessity. It satiates our desire to be God. It delivers deific properties, if in name only. And it propels the top of the hierarchy with additional reach.

I do not think that equal worldwide access to LLM compute results in a better world. It might result in a far worse one.