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Olivier Usher
@ojusher.com

This is a really excellent question, and I think the answer is that they would have loved it, for reasons that are not a great compliment either to Soviet economics or to AI.

Zach Weinersmith@zachweinersmith.bsky.social

Weird hypothetical: how do you think the USSR would've responded to the development of LLMs?

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Olivier Usher
@ojusher.com

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Olivier Usher@ojusher.com

Their entire economy was based on chasing bad metrics (because the good metric of supply/demand wasn’t allowed). So tokenmaxxing, production of huge volumes of information of questionable value, centralised pushes for AI adoption etc would be entirely in character. They would have loved it.

Olivier Usher
@ojusher.com

The Soviets loved computerised economic modelling too incidentally… turns out one of the less-bad ways to run a planned economy is to simulate a market economy in software, then plan production around what the simulation says the market would have demanded.