Stability AI buried the lede a little: open models specifically reduce the negative effects of mass structural unemployment. Public scrutiny is good, but not cutting the public out of the entire economy is better.
The US government should be giving Stability (and other open AI companies) research grants conditioned upon public model weight releases.
We already have the NSF and DARPA. They should just back up a truck or money at CMU, give the professors immunity for working the students to death, and you’d have an equal system in a week.
A lot of dead CMU students, but you have to be willing to sacrifice.
More realistically, give N hours of GPU cluster time to the top say dozen or few dozen university AI/ML labs, free rein to the grad students, you'll get LMMs in every other github repo in a year.
The unemployment statistics which are just about the lowest they've ever been. Technological productivity improvements reduce unemployment, not increase it. AI is just about the opposite of something that'd cause mass unemployment.
The US government should be giving Stability (and other open AI companies) research grants conditioned upon public model weight releases.