This is a weird fantasy among the literati that AI is a "scam", that we can "expose" them with lots of palace intrigue coverage and SBF or Elizabeth Holmes them away and then everything will be right in the world. Some of the best models are Chinese and Open-source and so-so good and Sam Altman is wholly irrelevant to them.
"This is a fantasy among the literati that AI is a "scam", that we can "expose" them..."
Who is "them"
Is it "AI" that the literati are trying to "expose" or is it certain individuals
"Some of the best models are Chinese and Open-source and so-so good and Sam Altman is wholly irrelevant ot them."
Made with a small fraction of the budget available to Altman
But is this article about "AI" models. No, it's about Altman
"Some folks are in for a very rude awakening."
Who are the folks and what is the awakening
Is it "AI" investors
Once Altman starts taking the public's money, then it is possible he could end up like Holmes or SBF
If that happens, journalists ("literati") will publish stories about it, these stories will be submitted to HN and HN commenters ("??????") will complain
I've noticed the disconnect between tech moguls and enthusiasts and the rest of the media in AI coverage.
AI can invoke existential dread for writers, educators, and artists just as much as for software developers and engineers, although on perhaps a more delayed schedule.
I think public sentiment among journalists will eventually catch up with the pros and cons of AI in a nuanced way, but it's a bit harder to appreciate how impactful it already is if you're not using it to write software every day.
Well yes, there is tons of AI bullshit about and all sorts of scammy behavior, but I don’t think that says anything at all either way about whether the core technology is a “scam”, theranos-style. In fact I’m not sure how it could be otherwise: of course there’s going to be all sorts of hype and scamming around a novel, rapidly-progressing and potentially transformative tech like this, even if it works.
If you want an analogy, look at the history of the early railroads. Full of hype, bullshitters, scammy investments, robber-barons, unrealistic promises, and with their own legion of naysayers at the time. Yet the core technology worked and it did transform the world in the end.
Jargon isn't a scam. I get more and better work done with AI, to my own satisfaction and to the benefit of my employer. People using dumb terms to describe this doesn't make it less true.
AI has real benefits, that are game-changing in some areas, even if AI never improve from their current capabilities.
People are claiming (whether they truly believe it or not) that AI has incredible capabilities and benefits that they don't currently have, and may never have.
There's plenty of scamming going on. The fact that AI has real game-changing capabilities just makes the scams harder to detect. People tend to like to see things as more black-and-white than they actually are, and scammers take advantage of that.
> I get more and better work done with AI, to my own satisfaction and to the benefit of my employer
In the short run, because Anthropic and other providers are heavily subsidizing coding agents to maximize user base. Will your employer still benefit and be satisfied in a couple of years when Anthropic jacks up the price by 5x and dumbs down Opus to the point where 50% of changes are easier to do manually than via an agent?
To me, the problem is when IP laws are stretched and abused by big corporations (like, say Disney) or by patent trolls. If IP laws could work in a way that gave limited and reasonable protections to actual creators and innovators, then I don’t have a problem with them.
It still is oppression. What many of us object to now is how starkly it's revealed the 2 tier illegitimate judicial system that on the one hand ruins grandmas and teenagers, but gives multinationals a free pass for charging everyone to get access to the human corpora. Anna's Archive, while equally illegal in a sense, but at least operates itself in a way compatible with uplifting everyone is getting more backlash than these tech companies that are dead set on "renting out access to intelligence". At this point, if you can't see the absurdity of the System as it functions past the "bing bing wahooness" of AI, I don't know what to tell ya.
I'd say both are equally soulless, dualism is a little bit of a philosophical dead end.
Frankly, I don't particularly care much for the moral panic around capitalism. Capitalism has it's downsides for sure, but it's the system our society has chosen to motivate people, and it seems to work okay for many things. Does it matter if the AI model that solves your diagnosis, creates a life saving drug or solves an Erdös problem is made by a corporation or not? It bothers me none, progress is progress. As long as the authors of Textbooks everywhere wouldn't have otherwise invented LLMs a decade ago if they only had been given a little bit more money, then I'd say the money is going to the right place.
The fact that Chinese open weight models are useful does not really say anything about whether AI is hyped well beyond its actual worth, or whether the technology will be used for benevolent or nefarious purposes by American oligarchs.
"AI is hyped well beyond its actual worth, or whether the technology will be used for benevolent or nefarious purposes by American oligarchs."
This article is asking none of those questions. It's mostly a high school gossip column about what was said and with what tone and who used Butt pillows by The New Yorker, it reeks of desperation. If they could just find something nefarious on Sam Altman or show him in a bad light that sticks, they could fix it all and make AI go away.
These companies are selling subscriptions for what is basically AGI, yet you think they should have the same valuation as Crocs (yes, the footwear company) ?
What they can do was not science fiction, these things are all based on papers that were written decades ago, with the caveat that there's simply not enough compute power. Now there is. That's what changed. Everything on top of that is an incremental improvement.
It doesn't change the fact that LLMs are not, and never will be, AGI.
Exactly. Here I am sitting talking to my freaking computer, arguing with it, whatnot. And people just dismiss it as if it's not a science fiction. We were not there two, three years ago. Now we are. It's amazing and scary, scary mostly because the society that we operate in. I bet it's less scary in Norway or elsewhere where govt is more biased towards people not corps.
Yes. I think cutting-edge LLM products obviously have what nearly anyone in 2020 would have called "artificial general intelligence".
The shape of the intelligence frontier has turned out to be much more jagged than anyone at the time expected, so I can imagine reasonable objections from someone who has a specific, concrete benchmark of AGI that wasn't invented 6 months ago and isn't yet met. If someone just has a subjective sense that they're not smart enough, I think they're wrong.
If LLMs were configured to be deterministic, instead of the current "small amount of randomness to provide the illusion of a thinking machine", they would be much more useful in exchange for being less exciting to laypeople.
While I have a great deal of sympathy for this point of view, I think the article makes an interesting observation that suggests it actually doesn't matter whether these people are intentionally trying to screw everybody or not--the actual problem is much bigger even than that:
To claim that OpenAI’s mission of cultivating beneficial A.I. was compromised by Sam Altman is to let the entire industry off the hook. Yes, Altman seems to have a rather casual relationship with the truth. But it is far more interesting, complicated, and useful to take his self-defense at face value—to interpret the many sins of OpenAI, and its competitors, as the result of a good-faith exercise in futility. What if we imagined that he did in fact set out to do good? And discovered—or, perhaps better, failed to discover—along the way that this was structurally impossible?
I don't know that the hypothetical I described requires that the open source part was sincere. The article focuses on Altman's belief that someone was going to develop AI and he thought it would be bad if Google did it first--meaning, by implication, that it would be good if an organization that he started did it first. But what if it turns out to be bad no matter who did it first?
To the extent that that's true, it's true because Sam Altman did it at all.
It is not that hard to construct a scenario wherein an alternative version of Sam Altman pushed really hard for a genuinely ethical LLM—one trained only on data that he had full unclouded rights to, either because it was public domain or because he had bought or otherwise explicitly received the rights, among other measures—and had then made that competitive in the market with the rest of the existing crop of LLMs. In a scenario like that, whether his LLM did well or not, one could clearly see that Alt-Altman, as it were, was genuinely making an effort.
The reality doesn't look anything like that. In this reality, it doesn't matter whether Altman thought he was trying to get there first because others would make it worse: he made it worse, and his actions match up very, very well with what one would expect the actions of a man who just wanted money, control, and power to be.
I'm not sure I agree that Altman has made the AI situation worse. I think Altman was right that Google, and Microsoft and others for that matter, were going to pursue AI no matter what. Even if OpenAI had never existed and Altman had never pursued AI at all, we'd still have much the same situation we have now.
Even if it's true that, if OpenAI had never existed and Altman had never pursued AI at all, we wouldn't have had the spectacle of a supposed nonprofit trying to do "ethical" AI and then pivoting to a for-profit company, that actually might be something that was worth learning: that it's not possible to do AI as a private nonprofit with an explicit commitment not to do certain things.
Sorry, my phrasing there was kind of poor: I didn't mean that he had made the overall AI situation worse, but rather that the AI he made was worse for the public than a hypothetical AI that was made with a deliberate eye to ethical or at least neutral behavior.
> But it is far more interesting, complicated, and useful to take his self-defense at face value—to interpret the many sins of OpenAI, and its competitors, as the result of a good-faith exercise in futility. What if we imagined that he did in fact set out to do good? And discovered—or, perhaps better, failed to discover—along the way that this was structurally impossible?
But that is not what happened. It is neither complicated or interesting, it is just an alternative timeline sci-fi exercise. It can be fun to engage in, but it is not anything that would had anything to do with the current world as it is.
A people interested in good faith attempt to do good dont end up in Sam Altman position. They do good and focus on doing good rather then lie to get more investments so that they can corner the market and become powerful.
> A people interested in good faith attempt to do good dont end up in Sam Altman position.
I strongly disagree. Human history is full of examples of people who made good faith attempts to do good that backfired tremendously. A good faith desire to do good isn't enough: you also need to be in a domain where your beliefs and intuitions about what doing good actually is are reasonably trustworthy. And you need to have some way of getting feedback from reality that pushes back on you if you start crossing certain lines.
None of this proves that Altman was making a genuine good faith attempt to do good. That wasn't my point. My point was that, in a domain like AI, it doesn't matter whether the people involved have good faith intentions to do good or not, because this domain is not one where any human has reasonably trustworthy beliefs and intuitions about what doing good actually is. And the current AI bubble shows that it's also a domain where nobody can get feedback from reality that pushes back when they start crossing certain lines. In other words, just as the article says, it's "structurally impossible" to do good in this domain, no matter what your intentions are, at least with the humans we have now.
It’s ridiculous to accuse someone of having a “somewhat loose relationship with the truth” when Elon Musk is sitting right across from him, accusing him of dishonest behavior.
There is nothing implausible about two known liars accusing each other of lying and both being truthful this one time - though extremely hypocritical, of course.
It's too valuable of a tech to remain in the control of any corporation. Open models will find a way. Compute requirements will go down and there will be many of us making it a priority to transform the tech into something open like the Linux kernel vs a closed cloud tech.
Nvidia has 75% profit margins right now. That won't continue forever. It may take quite some time but it will normalize.
Unfortunately, there's really no clear path to viable local models for the common folk, the hardware requirements are just too extreme. I say this as someone with a pair of A100s that is absolutely delighted by what the open source models are capable of, but even with the best harnesses, tiny quantized models are just not even close to the same league as something like Kimi-k2.
Of course, here on HN it's easy to find folks who get a lot out of tinkering with tiny models, but the masses don't want to tinker with toys, they want something fast with a large context and approximating at least Opus 4.6 level reliability and capability, which simply can't be squeezed into a quantized 60b model.
Right now, yes but I am fairly confident this will change. Not only do I truly believe we will see massive efficiency gains in inference, I also believe the cost of hardware will come down. Again Nvidia's getting a 75% margin on this hardware. Usually hardware margins are significantly smaller. More supply will come online even if that takes years.
> There's really nobody for normal people to root for in this battle.
I believe the reports that Sam Altman is an egomaniacal liar. But I haven't been privy to any of it other than seeing him hype his company's tech in a clearly dishonest manner. That's not great.
I've seen Elon be an active piece of shit, white nationalist, conspiracy promoter, etc, for years. I don't root for Sam Altman. I root against Elon.
In a dystopian world where everything is terrible (the one we live in), I can at least take some pleasure in seeing a person I dislike have a bad time. It still makes me angry that he can just waste the time of the courts out of spite. Can't prevent it, might as well find the silver lining.
Not being an US citizen, I have not been affected by any action of Elon Musk, even if I despise many of the things done by him in USA, like the results of DOGE.
On the other hand, I have much more reasons to hate Sam Altman, who has stolen a significant amount of money from my own pocket and from a very great number of other people around the world, by causing the huge increases in the prices of DRAM, SSDs and HDDs.
Moreover, Elon Musk has some positive achievements, even if it is hard to put them in balance with his bad actions, while I see absolutely nothing good done by Sam Altman. Successfully luring fools to invest hundreds of billions in AI does not count as something good.
E.H. promised her investors a magic cure -> sharlatan
Sam B. stole money from everyone -> thief
Sam A. did what?
And Musk wanted to do the same thing. Both agreeded, that a non profit will not make enough money to push the frontier. He is only pissed that he didn't get control of openai and he is now pissed again because he apparently should have done the lawsuite a few years back. Despite him having unlimited money and probably very good laywers
I'm not here to defend the richest of the richest, but E.H. and S.B. are complet different storries to OpenAI
Non-profits are not the property of their donors, but of the general interest, with obligations to the public. It is part of the legal and social obligations of the legal structure of non-profits.
It wasn't illegal so there is some reason why the USA allowed it.
And as mentioned, they agreeed that they will not get the capital openai needs, so what did the USA people loose? A company which whouldn't have been able to do what they are known for anyway.
Again i'm not protecting the rich, i just don't think there is a real scandal and its not the same as the other 2 the newyorker mentioned
Their stated non-profit goal was to benefit all of humanity. Changing OpenAI to benefit their financial backers in a formal sense could be a loss of nearly unbounded value.
Which is probably why they created another, for-profit, entity.
You can argue that it's unlikely the for-profit conservatorship of the non-profit is incompatible with that goal, but legally that becomes very much grey area.
The word used will be toll. Basically the clock measuring the statute of limitations can be stopped/paused for certain things. It could be that the victim was under the age of 18 and therefore couldn't sue until they hit 18. Or the incident was concealed, so the victim couldn't take action until the concealment was gone.
The substantive point of law will most likely be that OpenAI's salami slicing tactic for becoming a for-profit does not properly fall under the statute of limitations. To think otherwise is basically no different than arguing that you can rob a person twice and not be prosecuted for the second robbery because of "double jeopardy".
It's rare that judge's overturn jury verdicts, compared to other judge's verdicts. The constitution leans a lot on jury verdicts, and judges tend to respect that.
What do you mean? Pandoras box has already been opened. Even if OpenAI disappears, there will be another one to take its marketshare. The tech is too useful to die
That Musk couldn't even get over the first stumbling block which is the statute of limitations, does not make the win any lesser. It makes it more decisive, since Musk now has to overcome that hurdle before even having a shot at the meat of the case.
I think parent probably means winning on merit or a sense of justice. As in won for a deserved reason rather than a technicality. The technicality here is exceeded the statute of limitations.
A win in any manner isn’t landing the same for observers as winning for a just reason.
There is no "sense of justice" that will sway an appeal, it's all about the law. And this jury just found that there was zero merit under law.
Appeals are for finding legal technicalities or edge cases. They do not overturn findings of fact from a jury.
That is, it used to be that way in the US, when the courts were ruled by law. In the modern US, the Supreme Court is a partisan political body, so perhaps people are confident it will get overturned because Musk is now political enough for the Supreme Court to give Musk personal favors for all his massive political contributions.
That sort of rank corruption is the only reason to be confident that Musk could ever win this silly case.
I'm clarifying and drawing the distinction related to the following because the responder wasn't responding to what was meant, but what they heard:
> Sam didn't "win" the case in the sense that most people will think of when reading this headline.
There are 2 senses of "win" here. You're talking about the "win" (A) where it is achieving victory regardless of reason.
The second type of "win" (B) that is being called out in quotes is one based either on the merits of the law (verses a technicality) or a sense of justice.
I'm not highlight the first sense of win (A) which parent of my comment and you seem to be talking about I'm pointing out grandparent is talking about (B).
Juries issue findings of fact, they don't issue rulings about the law. The issue of whether the statute of limitations applies to any given factual situation is one of law.
This case should have never made it to a jury, there is no case here.
The judge was cowed by Musk's fame to even bring this to trial, I think. It's an example of how the justice system works differently for this with more wealth and power. There is no case, just massive ego from a person with massive wealth.
I believe an upset to Altman and a re-characterization of OpenAI to a charitable stance would have left investors scrambling, and would likely have hastened an unwinding of the AI bubble to some degree. It feels like we'll be on this merry-go-round a good deal longer now.
Did an elon stan invoke being obedient to billionaires? Besides the one we all know, there is no other billionaire dickridden harder than elon. There's no terrible behavior that can't be justified as long as the memes keep flowing I guess. Although in this particular round sama is worse...
This is a weird fantasy among the literati that AI is a "scam", that we can "expose" them with lots of palace intrigue coverage and SBF or Elizabeth Holmes them away and then everything will be right in the world. Some of the best models are Chinese and Open-source and so-so good and Sam Altman is wholly irrelevant to them.
Some folks are in for a very rude awakening.
"This is a fantasy among the literati that AI is a "scam", that we can "expose" them..."
Who is "them"
Is it "AI" that the literati are trying to "expose" or is it certain individuals
"Some of the best models are Chinese and Open-source and so-so good and Sam Altman is wholly irrelevant ot them."
Made with a small fraction of the budget available to Altman
But is this article about "AI" models. No, it's about Altman
"Some folks are in for a very rude awakening."
Who are the folks and what is the awakening
Is it "AI" investors
Once Altman starts taking the public's money, then it is possible he could end up like Holmes or SBF
If that happens, journalists ("literati") will publish stories about it, these stories will be submitted to HN and HN commenters ("??????") will complain
I've noticed the disconnect between tech moguls and enthusiasts and the rest of the media in AI coverage.
AI can invoke existential dread for writers, educators, and artists just as much as for software developers and engineers, although on perhaps a more delayed schedule.
I think public sentiment among journalists will eventually catch up with the pros and cons of AI in a nuanced way, but it's a bit harder to appreciate how impactful it already is if you're not using it to write software every day.
This is a point made by Andrej Karpathy.
On a certain level it is a scam. AI slop, vibe coding, tokenmaxxing, blaming employee layoffs on AI, pretty much any comment CEOs make about AI, etc.
Well yes, there is tons of AI bullshit about and all sorts of scammy behavior, but I don’t think that says anything at all either way about whether the core technology is a “scam”, theranos-style. In fact I’m not sure how it could be otherwise: of course there’s going to be all sorts of hype and scamming around a novel, rapidly-progressing and potentially transformative tech like this, even if it works.
If you want an analogy, look at the history of the early railroads. Full of hype, bullshitters, scammy investments, robber-barons, unrealistic promises, and with their own legion of naysayers at the time. Yet the core technology worked and it did transform the world in the end.
Jargon isn't a scam. I get more and better work done with AI, to my own satisfaction and to the benefit of my employer. People using dumb terms to describe this doesn't make it less true.
We're in a "both are true" situation here.
AI has real benefits, that are game-changing in some areas, even if AI never improve from their current capabilities.
People are claiming (whether they truly believe it or not) that AI has incredible capabilities and benefits that they don't currently have, and may never have.
There's plenty of scamming going on. The fact that AI has real game-changing capabilities just makes the scams harder to detect. People tend to like to see things as more black-and-white than they actually are, and scammers take advantage of that.
But none of what OP said was jargon. All except one of those terms are things that are either harmful to employer or kind of fraud.
> I get more and better work done with AI, to my own satisfaction and to the benefit of my employer
In the short run, because Anthropic and other providers are heavily subsidizing coding agents to maximize user base. Will your employer still benefit and be satisfied in a couple of years when Anthropic jacks up the price by 5x and dumbs down Opus to the point where 50% of changes are easier to do manually than via an agent?
why would anthropic do that?
Using unlicensed intellectual property to build a plagiarism machine that is wrong 10% of the time, could be interpreted as a scam by many folks.
Is there anyway to build intelligence that doesn't meet the definition of plagiarism you are using here?
I remember when IP laws were looked at like a form of oppression in the tech community...
Yes, it is called paying for the use of copyrighted material which people put a lot of time and money into creating. Is this not obvious?
To me, the problem is when IP laws are stretched and abused by big corporations (like, say Disney) or by patent trolls. If IP laws could work in a way that gave limited and reasonable protections to actual creators and innovators, then I don’t have a problem with them.
It still is oppression. What many of us object to now is how starkly it's revealed the 2 tier illegitimate judicial system that on the one hand ruins grandmas and teenagers, but gives multinationals a free pass for charging everyone to get access to the human corpora. Anna's Archive, while equally illegal in a sense, but at least operates itself in a way compatible with uplifting everyone is getting more backlash than these tech companies that are dead set on "renting out access to intelligence". At this point, if you can't see the absurdity of the System as it functions past the "bing bing wahooness" of AI, I don't know what to tell ya.
ahh yes the perfect world fallacy
That sentence could easily be applied to the human baseline.
Yes, if you're equating same rights to soulless corporations and humans as well as their motives.
I'd say both are equally soulless, dualism is a little bit of a philosophical dead end.
Frankly, I don't particularly care much for the moral panic around capitalism. Capitalism has it's downsides for sure, but it's the system our society has chosen to motivate people, and it seems to work okay for many things. Does it matter if the AI model that solves your diagnosis, creates a life saving drug or solves an Erdös problem is made by a corporation or not? It bothers me none, progress is progress. As long as the authors of Textbooks everywhere wouldn't have otherwise invented LLMs a decade ago if they only had been given a little bit more money, then I'd say the money is going to the right place.
What exactly is your complaint about Anna's Archive?
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> wrong 10% of the time
that doesn't sound nearly as bad as you think it does; I don't see how ethics are relevant here either, unless oil is also somehow a scam
regardless, one must be delusional to deny the fact that it's useful tech
"but they're evil" is not an argument
Rude how?
The fact that Chinese open weight models are useful does not really say anything about whether AI is hyped well beyond its actual worth, or whether the technology will be used for benevolent or nefarious purposes by American oligarchs.
"AI is hyped well beyond its actual worth, or whether the technology will be used for benevolent or nefarious purposes by American oligarchs."
This article is asking none of those questions. It's mostly a high school gossip column about what was said and with what tone and who used Butt pillows by The New Yorker, it reeks of desperation. If they could just find something nefarious on Sam Altman or show him in a bad light that sticks, they could fix it all and make AI go away.
My point stands, they're in for a Rude awakening.
Trying to justify current valuations by misrepresenting current model capabilities is a scam.
A fair valuation of ~$5B each for Anthropic and OpenAI for the occasionally useful tools that they had created would be more reasonable.
$5B valuation on a $30B run rate for Anthropic?
40B ARR and profitable next month.
It's always profitable next month.
Lol. What exactly have you based this "fair valuation" off of? Vibes?
Come on. LinkedIn was bought for 6B.
These companies are selling subscriptions for what is basically AGI, yet you think they should have the same valuation as Crocs (yes, the footwear company) ?
> These companies are selling subscriptions for what is basically AGI
This type of rhetoric is exactly why people think it's a scam
It’s nowhere near AGI, and LLMs are not going to lead to it either.
They do seem to be good at fooling people though.
> nowhere near AGI, and LLMs are not going to lead to it either.
Nevermind what they can do was pure science fiction just 3 years ago?
What they can do was not science fiction, these things are all based on papers that were written decades ago, with the caveat that there's simply not enough compute power. Now there is. That's what changed. Everything on top of that is an incremental improvement.
It doesn't change the fact that LLMs are not, and never will be, AGI.
Exactly. Here I am sitting talking to my freaking computer, arguing with it, whatnot. And people just dismiss it as if it's not a science fiction. We were not there two, three years ago. Now we are. It's amazing and scary, scary mostly because the society that we operate in. I bet it's less scary in Norway or elsewhere where govt is more biased towards people not corps.
They are good at fooling people.
Are you claiming they have AGI or are "close" to it?
Yes. I think cutting-edge LLM products obviously have what nearly anyone in 2020 would have called "artificial general intelligence".
The shape of the intelligence frontier has turned out to be much more jagged than anyone at the time expected, so I can imagine reasonable objections from someone who has a specific, concrete benchmark of AGI that wasn't invented 6 months ago and isn't yet met. If someone just has a subjective sense that they're not smart enough, I think they're wrong.
Regardless of the marketing material, LLMs are still just using probabilities to guess what the next token is.
you think it should be deterministic?
If LLMs were configured to be deterministic, instead of the current "small amount of randomness to provide the illusion of a thinking machine", they would be much more useful in exchange for being less exciting to laypeople.
In other words, scam.
you know you can set the temperature to zero and get exactly that, right?
> These companies are selling subscriptions for what is basically AGI
That is the point under contention.
... where can I get a subscription to this AGI?
"When elephants fight, it is the grass that suffers."
There's really nobody for normal people to root for in this battle. They're fighting over who gets to wield the dick that is going to screw us all.
While I have a great deal of sympathy for this point of view, I think the article makes an interesting observation that suggests it actually doesn't matter whether these people are intentionally trying to screw everybody or not--the actual problem is much bigger even than that:
To claim that OpenAI’s mission of cultivating beneficial A.I. was compromised by Sam Altman is to let the entire industry off the hook. Yes, Altman seems to have a rather casual relationship with the truth. But it is far more interesting, complicated, and useful to take his self-defense at face value—to interpret the many sins of OpenAI, and its competitors, as the result of a good-faith exercise in futility. What if we imagined that he did in fact set out to do good? And discovered—or, perhaps better, failed to discover—along the way that this was structurally impossible?
Leaked emails I think showed the open source part at the heart of the concept of OpenAI was never serious and was just to help recruit.
I don't know that the hypothetical I described requires that the open source part was sincere. The article focuses on Altman's belief that someone was going to develop AI and he thought it would be bad if Google did it first--meaning, by implication, that it would be good if an organization that he started did it first. But what if it turns out to be bad no matter who did it first?
To the extent that that's true, it's true because Sam Altman did it at all.
It is not that hard to construct a scenario wherein an alternative version of Sam Altman pushed really hard for a genuinely ethical LLM—one trained only on data that he had full unclouded rights to, either because it was public domain or because he had bought or otherwise explicitly received the rights, among other measures—and had then made that competitive in the market with the rest of the existing crop of LLMs. In a scenario like that, whether his LLM did well or not, one could clearly see that Alt-Altman, as it were, was genuinely making an effort.
The reality doesn't look anything like that. In this reality, it doesn't matter whether Altman thought he was trying to get there first because others would make it worse: he made it worse, and his actions match up very, very well with what one would expect the actions of a man who just wanted money, control, and power to be.
I'm not sure I agree that Altman has made the AI situation worse. I think Altman was right that Google, and Microsoft and others for that matter, were going to pursue AI no matter what. Even if OpenAI had never existed and Altman had never pursued AI at all, we'd still have much the same situation we have now.
Even if it's true that, if OpenAI had never existed and Altman had never pursued AI at all, we wouldn't have had the spectacle of a supposed nonprofit trying to do "ethical" AI and then pivoting to a for-profit company, that actually might be something that was worth learning: that it's not possible to do AI as a private nonprofit with an explicit commitment not to do certain things.
Sorry, my phrasing there was kind of poor: I didn't mean that he had made the overall AI situation worse, but rather that the AI he made was worse for the public than a hypothetical AI that was made with a deliberate eye to ethical or at least neutral behavior.
These are Dr. Doom morals.
> But it is far more interesting, complicated, and useful to take his self-defense at face value—to interpret the many sins of OpenAI, and its competitors, as the result of a good-faith exercise in futility. What if we imagined that he did in fact set out to do good? And discovered—or, perhaps better, failed to discover—along the way that this was structurally impossible?
But that is not what happened. It is neither complicated or interesting, it is just an alternative timeline sci-fi exercise. It can be fun to engage in, but it is not anything that would had anything to do with the current world as it is.
A people interested in good faith attempt to do good dont end up in Sam Altman position. They do good and focus on doing good rather then lie to get more investments so that they can corner the market and become powerful.
> A people interested in good faith attempt to do good dont end up in Sam Altman position.
I strongly disagree. Human history is full of examples of people who made good faith attempts to do good that backfired tremendously. A good faith desire to do good isn't enough: you also need to be in a domain where your beliefs and intuitions about what doing good actually is are reasonably trustworthy. And you need to have some way of getting feedback from reality that pushes back on you if you start crossing certain lines.
None of this proves that Altman was making a genuine good faith attempt to do good. That wasn't my point. My point was that, in a domain like AI, it doesn't matter whether the people involved have good faith intentions to do good or not, because this domain is not one where any human has reasonably trustworthy beliefs and intuitions about what doing good actually is. And the current AI bubble shows that it's also a domain where nobody can get feedback from reality that pushes back when they start crossing certain lines. In other words, just as the article says, it's "structurally impossible" to do good in this domain, no matter what your intentions are, at least with the humans we have now.
It’s ridiculous to accuse someone of having a “somewhat loose relationship with the truth” when Elon Musk is sitting right across from him, accusing him of dishonest behavior.
There is nothing implausible about two known liars accusing each other of lying and both being truthful this one time - though extremely hypocritical, of course.
It is an extremely common thing to see 2 liars accusing each other of lying, thus telling the truth in this special occasion.
I think Elon had the moral high ground in principle, but him waiting so long makes me think it was never about the moral high ground to begin with.
It's too valuable of a tech to remain in the control of any corporation. Open models will find a way. Compute requirements will go down and there will be many of us making it a priority to transform the tech into something open like the Linux kernel vs a closed cloud tech.
Nvidia has 75% profit margins right now. That won't continue forever. It may take quite some time but it will normalize.
Unfortunately, there's really no clear path to viable local models for the common folk, the hardware requirements are just too extreme. I say this as someone with a pair of A100s that is absolutely delighted by what the open source models are capable of, but even with the best harnesses, tiny quantized models are just not even close to the same league as something like Kimi-k2.
Of course, here on HN it's easy to find folks who get a lot out of tinkering with tiny models, but the masses don't want to tinker with toys, they want something fast with a large context and approximating at least Opus 4.6 level reliability and capability, which simply can't be squeezed into a quantized 60b model.
Right now, yes but I am fairly confident this will change. Not only do I truly believe we will see massive efficiency gains in inference, I also believe the cost of hardware will come down. Again Nvidia's getting a 75% margin on this hardware. Usually hardware margins are significantly smaller. More supply will come online even if that takes years.
I read this quote from a bottle cap of Honest Tea. I’ve used it so many times since then because it speaks so much truth about life today.
Oddly enough, the normal people you’re forgetting, who I think not only will win but already have won, are the Chinese.
How so?
> There's really nobody for normal people to root for in this battle.
I believe the reports that Sam Altman is an egomaniacal liar. But I haven't been privy to any of it other than seeing him hype his company's tech in a clearly dishonest manner. That's not great.
I've seen Elon be an active piece of shit, white nationalist, conspiracy promoter, etc, for years. I don't root for Sam Altman. I root against Elon.
In a dystopian world where everything is terrible (the one we live in), I can at least take some pleasure in seeing a person I dislike have a bad time. It still makes me angry that he can just waste the time of the courts out of spite. Can't prevent it, might as well find the silver lining.
You don't have to root for or against anyone in this fight. It's perfectly valid to oppose both actors and both outcomes, and the stakes of the fight.
> I've seen Elon be an active piece of shit, white nationalist, conspiracy promoter, etc, for years. I don't root for Sam Altman. I root against Elon.
A stopped clock is right twice a day Even Elon is sometimes right.
Not being an US citizen, I have not been affected by any action of Elon Musk, even if I despise many of the things done by him in USA, like the results of DOGE.
On the other hand, I have much more reasons to hate Sam Altman, who has stolen a significant amount of money from my own pocket and from a very great number of other people around the world, by causing the huge increases in the prices of DRAM, SSDs and HDDs.
Moreover, Elon Musk has some positive achievements, even if it is hard to put them in balance with his bad actions, while I see absolutely nothing good done by Sam Altman. Successfully luring fools to invest hundreds of billions in AI does not count as something good.
I think paul graham needs to really come clean about why he did this
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41034829
> There's really nobody for normal people to root for in this battle.
his name is Luigi Mangione :)
E.H. promised her investors a magic cure -> sharlatan
Sam B. stole money from everyone -> thief
Sam A. did what?
And Musk wanted to do the same thing. Both agreeded, that a non profit will not make enough money to push the frontier. He is only pissed that he didn't get control of openai and he is now pissed again because he apparently should have done the lawsuite a few years back. Despite him having unlimited money and probably very good laywers
I'm not here to defend the richest of the richest, but E.H. and S.B. are complet different storries to OpenAI
Non-profits are not the property of their donors, but of the general interest, with obligations to the public. It is part of the legal and social obligations of the legal structure of non-profits.
It wasn't illegal so there is some reason why the USA allowed it.
And as mentioned, they agreeed that they will not get the capital openai needs, so what did the USA people loose? A company which whouldn't have been able to do what they are known for anyway.
Again i'm not protecting the rich, i just don't think there is a real scandal and its not the same as the other 2 the newyorker mentioned
Their stated non-profit goal was to benefit all of humanity. Changing OpenAI to benefit their financial backers in a formal sense could be a loss of nearly unbounded value.
Which is probably why they created another, for-profit, entity.
You can argue that it's unlikely the for-profit conservatorship of the non-profit is incompatible with that goal, but legally that becomes very much grey area.
As i wrote in my prev argument, they assumed that as non profit, they wouldt' get the capital needed to even be a frontier lab.
So nothing to loose if their model wouldn't have worked anyway.
And at the current state, its better anyway that China is pushing the non-profit/humantariy aspect of open models.
> E.H. promised her investors a magic cure -> sharlatan
*charlatan
A favorite quote: "The dubiousness of Altman’s character is [...] priced into his reputation."
Sam didn't "win" the case in the sense that most people will think of when reading this headline.
In the 20th paragraph of the linked article, finally getting to the actual reason:
> On Monday, the jury took only two hours to reach its verdict. Musk’s complaint, the panel found, had indeed exceeded the statute of limitations
Musk is appealing. This fight is far from over.
What is the substance of the appeal? IANAL, but AIUI, it's pretty hard to appeal a finding of fact from a jury.
The word used will be toll. Basically the clock measuring the statute of limitations can be stopped/paused for certain things. It could be that the victim was under the age of 18 and therefore couldn't sue until they hit 18. Or the incident was concealed, so the victim couldn't take action until the concealment was gone.
0 - https://www.trustwelllaw.com/resources/legal-term-faq/statut...
The substantive point of law will most likely be that OpenAI's salami slicing tactic for becoming a for-profit does not properly fall under the statute of limitations. To think otherwise is basically no different than arguing that you can rob a person twice and not be prosecuted for the second robbery because of "double jeopardy".
So, the illegal activity continued, so the clock did not start?
It's rare that judge's overturn jury verdicts, compared to other judge's verdicts. The constitution leans a lot on jury verdicts, and judges tend to respect that.
or it is pretty much over before it even began, because he sued way too late...
Lawsuit filed in 2024. Too late for it. AI boomed in 2023. And elon exited in 2021. I hate to say it but Elon lost. And we all lost.
What do you mean? Pandoras box has already been opened. Even if OpenAI disappears, there will be another one to take its marketshare. The tech is too useful to die
That Musk couldn't even get over the first stumbling block which is the statute of limitations, does not make the win any lesser. It makes it more decisive, since Musk now has to overcome that hurdle before even having a shot at the meat of the case.
I think parent probably means winning on merit or a sense of justice. As in won for a deserved reason rather than a technicality. The technicality here is exceeded the statute of limitations.
A win in any manner isn’t landing the same for observers as winning for a just reason.
There is no "sense of justice" that will sway an appeal, it's all about the law. And this jury just found that there was zero merit under law.
Appeals are for finding legal technicalities or edge cases. They do not overturn findings of fact from a jury.
That is, it used to be that way in the US, when the courts were ruled by law. In the modern US, the Supreme Court is a partisan political body, so perhaps people are confident it will get overturned because Musk is now political enough for the Supreme Court to give Musk personal favors for all his massive political contributions.
That sort of rank corruption is the only reason to be confident that Musk could ever win this silly case.
I'm clarifying and drawing the distinction related to the following because the responder wasn't responding to what was meant, but what they heard: > Sam didn't "win" the case in the sense that most people will think of when reading this headline.
There are 2 senses of "win" here. You're talking about the "win" (A) where it is achieving victory regardless of reason.
The second type of "win" (B) that is being called out in quotes is one based either on the merits of the law (verses a technicality) or a sense of justice.
I'm not highlight the first sense of win (A) which parent of my comment and you seem to be talking about I'm pointing out grandparent is talking about (B).
Juries issue findings of fact, they don't issue rulings about the law. The issue of whether the statute of limitations applies to any given factual situation is one of law.
This case should have never made it to a jury, there is no case here.
The judge was cowed by Musk's fame to even bring this to trial, I think. It's an example of how the justice system works differently for this with more wealth and power. There is no case, just massive ego from a person with massive wealth.
An entertaining and scathing writeup.
I believe an upset to Altman and a re-characterization of OpenAI to a charitable stance would have left investors scrambling, and would likely have hastened an unwinding of the AI bubble to some degree. It feels like we'll be on this merry-go-round a good deal longer now.
The kicker on this story is glorious
Will we become Musk's slave or Altman's slave?
musk sued long after the statute of limitations because what openai did was only objectionable to musk once he decided to become their competitor.
and in this scenario, i’m supposed to root for musk who tried to use the court to harm a competitor who’s winning in the marketplace against xAI?
no thanks. if you can’t compete in the marketplace, the court isn’t your backup plan. there’s nothing. positive about the weaponization of the courts.
Dude has 800+ billion net worth. I think he'll be okay.
It's about pride at this point.
Exquisite prose merely to call two billionaires insufferable.
Are there any more noble uses for exquisite prose?
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no recaptcha / works on tor, unlike archive.is:
https://removepaywalls.com/https://www.newyorker.com/news/le...
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Did an elon stan invoke being obedient to billionaires? Besides the one we all know, there is no other billionaire dickridden harder than elon. There's no terrible behavior that can't be justified as long as the memes keep flowing I guess. Although in this particular round sama is worse...
Elon isn’t fighting for the users, that’s absolute nonesense.
"We"? Who "We"?
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