This post is a lot, pretty off topic about politics, and whie I agree there are a lot of issues I’m not sure that you can really nail it down to one or two factors other than the original research that enabled the technology. Once that came out, it was kind of inevitable. No country on earth has a government that is tech savvy and fast enough to regulate this, particularly in a globalized society. I don’t like that that’s the case, but it is.
That said t I’m curious how you think Apple licensing peer reviewed studies would really be a large benefit because the replication crisis was never really solved, and every other model provider already has access to them (legally or not). An enormous corpus of data tends to lead to better outcomes for generalized tools, although for specifically focused and tuned models you can get by with millions of parameters rather than billions.
In the uS at least there is probably no going back as far as content crawling legality. Perhaps given cloudflare’s recent gatekeeping / blocking AI traffic upon request, which has its own issues, Apple could pay them off and possibly to bypass the firewall and create some service that crawls N times a day rather than ad-hoc hammering but that technology is not exactly impossible to implement and I’d expect others would quickly follow suit and it would reduce the server loads dramatically by caching. Apple does have a leg up here because they operate a huge CDN but so does Google, to probably an even greater degree.
There are a lot of factors pushing us toward a future where the internet is bifurcated into realID and non, but beyond that I think it’s a bit of a leap to think that advances and investment in this technology are funneling everyone toward one specific master plan of oligarchs. Like anything, they will exploit the system and technology to enable it, but I think it’s a little bit narrow-minded to assume that the research and technology itself as a whole is part of some larger thing.
There is a good research paper about LLMs being great capture devices for the surveillance state and that is undeniably true, but just as the vast, vast majority of people don’t care about the privacy cost vs. actually. paying for services that protect it, I think the same applies here.
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