I’ve recently been thinking about LLM tokens and what it would mean if the only way that software could be written was through the use of tokens sold by an AI company (we’re not there, yet, and we might never get there, so this is just a thought experiment). In my head, this made tokens basically means of production, as they would be “the resources […] that workers [would] use in order to produce goods” to quote prolewiki. I would like to know more about this, see if it’s an idea that holds any weight, but I know very little about economics and Marxist theory, and I struggle to reason about what this could mean (or if it’s correct to begin with), so I was wondering if any of you had come across this idea or similar analysis before and could point them out to me.
I hope this is the right community to ask this, if not please redirect me!
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I’m no expert on means of production definitions, but my intuition would be that you’d want to go past the abstraction layer of tokens. The means of production in this hypothetical would be the GPUs that power the LLMs, or more specifically, the data centers of GPUs that mass power the LLMs (sorta like a factory). In other words, thinking about it as a concrete, physical place/thing where control can be wrestled over. Everything has to drill down to that layer at some point, else it’s something that human beings can’t dictate control over / access to. For a fuzzier edge case of this principle, consider control over thoughts; it’s not a physical space and it’s not something people outside of you can directly wrestle for control over. However, people can dictate control over speech, over institutions of learning, over design and choice of languages, and this can in its way influence how a person thinks.
Thanks for the insights! Yeah I think what you’re saying makes sense, specifically in regards to the non physical nature of the tokens compared to the physical nature of the datacenter, where ownership turns out to be something more tangible.
LLM tokens are marginally less valuable than those of Charles Entertainment Cheese, and far more harmful to the environment.
Please abandon this line of thought for your own sake.
Comrade the same could have been said of coal back in Marx’s day, or even its use today in the global south. And refusing to think about it or entertain contemporary questions doesn’t solve them, it’s putting our heads in the sand (the ostrich technique) and hoping the rolling storm passes over us unscathed. LLMs are means of production, many professionals are using them already in many different ways. Whether they lower the socially necessary labor time and rate of profit is not entirely calculated yet, but this isn’t necessary to count as MoP. And AI has entered our relations of productions already.
I have an essay here on the question https://en.prolewiki.org/wiki/Essay:Intellectual_property_in_the_times_of_AI.
