Why You Need to Become a Neuro-Punk Right Now | by Artem X | Jun, 2026 | MediumSitemapOpen in appSign up<br>Sign in

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Why You Need to Become a Neuro-Punk Right Now

Artem X

6 min read·<br>12 hours ago

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A short essay on why the developer community should invest as much effort as possible into LLMs that are free from corporations and states.<br>ML researchers and hardware engineers both need to contribute here. The latter may even be more important, because whether users can run advanced LLMs on personal hardware depends on breaking NVIDIA’s monopoly.

This essay is highly political, especially in the opening sections. Keep that in mind.

Corporate AI Will Be Closed and Unaccountable by Default<br>The other day, almost at the same time as the release of Fable 5, Anthropic’s Dario Amodei published an article called “Policy on the AI Exponential”, where he discussed what the world should do with powerful AI-based systems. All sections except the first contain fairly reasonable proposals, or at least proposals worth discussing. I will not consider them here. The real core is in the first section.<br>In that first section, he effectively proposes a system in which the state would be required to license advanced AI systems, measured by the amount of compute used, and even ban the release of models that are not considered safe for society.<br>In practice, this repeats a story as old as the world: a large corporation wants to regulate the market so smaller companies do not interfere with its ability to earn mountains of money, all under noble-sounding pretexts.<br>And the point is not that Amodei is some villain. He is simply an entrepreneur who wants to earn as much money as possible. Any large corporation would prefer not to let smaller companies near the feeding trough in its field. Anthropic is merely saying this openly, and that is all.<br>In effect, AI Big Tech wants a future where all non-AI companies become its serfs, mortally dependent on intelligence delivered through Anthropic’s API, or OpenAI’s, or Google’s, and so on. In practice, those AI companies would hold the revenue of all these other companies in their hands. Without them, the whole economy around those companies would crumble into dust.<br>What we get is a neo-feudal system where ordinary people occupy the lowest rung of the newly formed social ladder, while the highest rung belongs to corporations fused with the state.<br>Technological Independence for People, Not for the Stationary Bandit<br>Now let us cross the ocean and look at what is happening in China. For an AI enthusiast, there is a lot of interesting activity there. Over the last half year, Chinese Big Tech has flooded the market with powerful open-source LLMs, which is of course good and welcome.<br>But let us think about why the Chinese government, which de facto supervises the entire AI sector in the PRC, would promote this field so actively and intensely. Economic dominance? I think that is an important factor, but the main reason is probably elsewhere: regime stability and total control.<br>Chinese authorities already actively use AI for social credit and surveillance of the population, while many other applications remain behind the scenes because Chinese security agencies are closed to outside observation. The Chinese government wants to build a system where resistance is impossible by definition.<br>But followers of Confucius are not the only ones moving in that direction. Many other countries, including European ones, are also gradually tightening the screws and restricting the internet.<br>And the most visible example for many Russian-speaking readers is Russia itself. The Russian government is currently destroying the internet piece by piece: throttling services, blocking platforms, criminalizing speech, building censorship infrastructure, and trying to turn the network from a public space into a controlled pipe. This is not some abstract authoritarian tendency somewhere far away. It is happening right now, in plain sight.<br>All these actors would be immensely happy to have an extremely powerful and advanced AI in their hands, one that could identify dissidents in advance, monitor them, and repress them.<br>That is exactly the future they are moving toward. Do you personally want it? Or let me ask differently: do you like where the world has gone over the last four years because of well-known events? Modern states brought the world there. And they create this darkness without any especially advanced technical tools. What happens when advanced AI falls into their hands?<br>To Avoid a Paperclip Maximizer, We Need Thousands of Eyes, Not a Closed Lab<br>The problem is not only that states and corporations fused together are screening a live-action version of 1984 for all of us. That is a very bad scenario. But there is also a catastrophic one.<br>Everyone probably knows the thought experiment about the paperclip maximizer. It describes a situation where there is exactly...