LLMs Pre-Commodify Ideas

9 hours ago

LLMs lead to pre-commodified ideas where many people independently arrive at similar conclusions, reducing the 'alpha' or unique advantage of new thoughts.
The analogy of the 'Sooners' and 'Boomers' from the Oklahoma Land Run illustrates how in the AI era, some front-run ideas while others claim them legitimately, similar to historical land disputes.
Productivity gains from new technologies like electricity took decades to realize due to initial misuse; similarly, AI deployment may require rethinking processes rather than just replacing old tools.
LLMs compress historical data into a synchronic latent space, causing multiple users to pull forward the same 'sticky ideas' when working on similar problems, leading to simultaneous epiphanies.
As ideas become commodified, distribution becomes less valuable, shifting the complement to establishing provenance—either through consistent quality (Boomer method) or front-running models (Sooner method).
Propaganda may evolve by poisoning LLM training data, prediction markets could align with latent space gradients, and advertising benefits from making desires seem natural via pre-commodified ideas.
The 'liveness' of the world diminishes when ideas are pre-configured, risking jagged, unrefined ideas affecting the environment at scale before they are ready.
Diversifying reading and interests can counteract homogenized thinking, and developing alternative AI 'instruments' trained on different knowledge could foster more unique ideas.

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