Tim Berners-Lee's Medium posts on the state of the web, its anniversaries, open letters, and the Solid project.
HN links it for his Solid announcement and open letters; one commenter says his letter misses whether public knowledge should be enclosed by private companies.
The letter misses out the key issue here.
Should the worlds public knowledge be enclosed by a few powerful private companies or should it be available to all?
The original vision for the web was a decentralized, open information sharing space designed to empower humanity. In my view the effort to privatise that via LLM distillation is the antithesis of that vision.
https://medium.com/@timberners_lee/marking-the-webs-35th-birthday-an-open-letter-ebb410cc7d42
In terms of the risks mentioned in the letter - I agree with the risk of AI enabling a powerful surveillance state - however I don't see that as a solely Chinese problem.
The other risk mentioned - that knowledge can be dangerous - sure - but ultimately here, as there are so many low tech ways to cause mayhem, the ultimate protection is to have a society where people don't want to do it.
And perhaps more importantly I'd note that the primary tool to justify a powerful surveillance state is the fear of terrorism ( and others ).
From his Medium post "In 2009, I said, “The web as I envisaged it we have not seen yet.” That was because people were using the web just for documents, not for the data of a big web-wide computer. Since then, we have seen a wave of open data, but not of read-write data. For example, much open government data is produced through a one-way pipeline, so we can only view it. With Solid, it becomes a read-write web where users can interact and innovate, collaborate and share."
https://medium.com/@timberners_lee/one-small-step-for-the-web-87f92217d085
His blog post announcing solid - https://medium.com/@timberners_lee/one-small-step-for-the-web-87f92217d085