Posted by spenvo 7/1/2025
Many employers want employees to act like cult members. But then when going gets tough, those are often the first laid off, and the least prepared for it.
Employers, you can't have it both ways. As an employee don't get fooled.
It was supremely interesting to me that he thought the company cared about that at all. I couldn’t get my head around it. He was completely serious, he kept arguing that his loyalty was an asset. He was much more experienced than me (I was barely two years working).
In hindsight, I think it is true that companies value that in a way. I’ve come to appreciate people who just stick it out for awhile. I try and make sure their comp makes it worth their while. They are so much less annoying to deal with than the assholes who constantly bitch or moan about doing what they’re paid for.
But as a personal strategy, it’s a poor one. You should never love or be loyal to something that can’t love you back.
To a lot of tech leadership, it is. The belief in AGI as a savior figure is a driving motivator. Just listen to how Altman, Thiel or Musk talk about it.
AGI is their capitalist savior, here to redeem a failing system from having to pay pesky workers.
Now they think they can automate it away.
25+ years in this industry and I still find it striking how different the perspective between the "money" side and the "engineering" side is... on the same products/companies/ideas.
It’s surprising how little they seem to have thought it through. AGI is unlikely to appear in the next 25 years, but even if, as a mental exercise, you accept it might happen, it reveals it's paradox: If AGI is possible, it destroys its own value as a defensible business asset.
Like electricity, nuclear weapons, or space travel , once the blueprint exists, others will follow. And once multiple AGIs exist, each will be capable of rediscovering and accelerating every scientific and technological advancement.
AGI isn’t a moat. AGI is what kills the moat.
Their fantasies of dominating others, through some modern day Elysium, reveal far more about their substance intake than rational grasp of where they actually stand... :-)
I mean, even on HN, which is clearly a startup-friendly forum, that tendency among startup leaders has been noted and mocked repeatedly.
Exactly. Though you can learn a lot about an employer by how it has conducted layoffs. Did they cut profits and management salaries and attempt to reassign people first? Did they provide generous payouts to laid off employees?
If the answer to any of these questions is no then they're not worth committing to.
When it comes down to it, you’re expendable when your leadership is backed into a corner.
The rest of us are mercenaries only.
At least if you work in a functional democracy where state bureaucrats can't be fired at a dictator's whim.
#6: Never allow family to stand in the way of opportunity.
#111: Treat people in your debt like family… exploit them.
#211: Employees are the rungs on the ladder of success. Don't hesitate to step on them.
The best thing about work is the focus on whatever you're doing. Maybe you're not saving the world but it's great to go in to have one goal that everyone goes towards. And you get excited when you see your contributions make a difference or you build great product. You can laugh and say I was part of a 'cult', but it sure beats working a misearble job for just a slightly higher paycheck.
I'm all for having loyalty to people and organizations that show the same. Eventually it can and will shift. I've seen management changed out from over me more times than I can count at this point. Don't get caught off guard.
It's even worse in the current dev/tech job market where wages are being pushed down around 2010 levels. I've been working two jobs just to keep up with expenses since I've been unable to match my more recent prior income. One ended recently, and looking for a new second job.
That said it seems like every worker can be replaced. Lost stars replaced by new stars
On the other hand, AGPL continues to be the future of F/OSS.
Even the most unscrupulous lawyer is going to look at the MIT license, realize the target can defend it for a trivial amount of money (a single form letter from their lawyer) and move on.
It's too late at this point. The damage is done. These companies trained on illegally obtained data and they will never be held accountable for that. The training is done and they got what they needed. So even if they can't train on it in the future, it doesn't matter. They already have those base models.
That said, AGPL as a trend was a huge closing of the spigot of free F/OSS code for companies to use and not contribute back to.
If I can reproduce the entirety of most books off the top of my head and sell that to people as a service, it's a copyright violation. If AI does it, it's fair use.
Pants-on-head idiotic judge.
Assuming you're referring to Bartz v. Anthropic, that is explicitly not what the ruling said, in fact it's almost the inverse. The judge said that output from an AI model which is a straight up reproduction of copyrighted material would likely be an explicit violation of copyright. This is on page 12/32 of the judgement[1].
But the vast majority of output from an LLM like Claude is not a word for word reproduction; it's a transformative use of the original work. In fact, the authors bringing the suit didn't even claim that it had reproduced their work. From page 7, "Authors do not allege that any infringing copy of their works was or would ever be provided to users by the Claude service." That's because Anthropic is already explicitly filtering out results that might contain copyrighted material. (I've run into this myself while trying to translate foreign language song lyrics to English. Claude will simply refuse to do this)[2]
[1] https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/69058235/231/bartz-v-an...
[2] https://claude.ai/share/d0586248-8d00-4d50-8e45-f9c5ef09ec81
Now, Anthropic was found to have pirated copyrighted work when they downloaded and trained Claude on the LibGen library. And they will likely pay substantial damages for this. So on those grounds, they're as screwed as the 12 year olds and their parents. The trial to determine damages hasn't happened yet though.
Agreed
> the Sony Betamax case, which found that it was legal and a transformative use of copyrighted material to create a copy of a publicly aired broadcast
Good thing libgen is not publicly aired in broadcast format.
> So on those grounds, they're as screwed as the 12 year olds and their parents.
Except they have deep enough pockets to actually pay the damages for each count of infringement. That's the blood most of us want to see shed.
You cannot have trained the model without possession of copyrighted works. Which we seem to be in agreement on.
Is the hinge that the tools can recall a huge portion (not perfectly of course) but usually don't? What seems even more straight forward is the substitute good idea, it seems reasonable to assume people will buy less copies of book X when they start generating books heavily inspired by book X.
But, this is probably just a case of a layman wandering into a complex topic, maybe it's the case that AI has just nestled into the absolute perfect spot in current copyright law, just like other things that seem like they should be illegal now but aren't.
I daresay the difference with AI is that pretty much no human can do that well enough to harm the copyright holder, whereas AI can churn it out.
Now there's precedent for future cases where theft of code or any other work of art can be considered fair use.
It’s an EULA trying to pretend it’s a license. You can’t have it both ways.
https://www.gnu.org/licenses/agpl-3.0.en.html
Could you expand on why you think it's nonfree? Also, it's not that hard to comply with either...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30495647
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30044019
GNU/FSF are the anticapitalist zealots that are pushing this EULA. Just because they approve of it doesn’t make it free software. They are confused.
Free software refers to user freedoms, not developer freedoms.
I don't think the below is right:
> > Notwithstanding any other provision of this License, if you modify the Program, your modified version must prominently offer all users interacting with it remotely through a computer network (if your version supports such interaction) an opportunity to receive the Corresponding Source of your version by providing access to the Corresponding Source from a network server at no charge, through some standard or customary means of facilitating copying of software.
>
> Let's break it down:
>
> > If you modify the Program
>
> That is if you are a developer making changes to the source code (or binary, but let's ignore that option)
>
> > your modified version
>
> The modified source code you have created
>
> > must prominently offer all users interacting with it remotely through a computer network
>
> Must include the mandatory feature of offering all users interacting with it through a computer network (computer network is left undefined and subject to wide interpretation)
I read the AGPL to mean if you modify the program then the users of the program (remotely, through a computer network) must be able to access the source code.
It has yet to be tested, but that seems like the common sense reading for me (which matters, because judges do apply judgement). It just seems like they are trying too hard to do a legal gotcha. I'm not a lawyer so I can't speak to that, but I certainly don't read it the same way.
I don't agree with this interpretation of every-change-is-a-violation either:
> Step 1: Clone the GitHub repo
>
> Step 2: Make a change to the code - oops, license violation! Clause 13! I need to change the source code offer first!
>
> Step 1.5: Change the source code offer to point to your repo
This example seems incorrect -- modifying the code does not automatically make people interact with the program over a network...
"free software" was defined by the GNU/FSF... so I generally default to their definitions. I don't think the license falls afoul of their stated definitions.
That said, they're certainly anti-capitalist zealots, that's kind of their thing. I don't agree with that, but that's besides the point.
And yes, it is an EULA pretending to be a license. I'd put good odds on it being illegal in my country, and it may even be illegal on the US. But it's well aligned with the goals of GNU.
[0] https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/abs/preaching-the-crusa...
I like open source. I also don't think that is where the magic is anymore.
It was scale for 20 years.
Now it is speed.
A world without open source may have given birth to 2020s AI but probably at a slower pace.
The "good guy" is a competitive environment that would render Meta's AI offerings to be irrelevant right now if it didnt open source.
When any scheme involves some grand long-term goal, I think a far more naive approach to behaviors is much more appropriate in basically all cases. There's a million twists on that old quote that 'no plan survives first contact with the enemy', and with these sort of grand schemes - we're all that enemy. Bring on the malevolent schemers with their benevolent means - the world would be a much nicer place than one filled with benevolent schemers with their malevolent means.
That doesn't feel quite right as an explanation. If something fails 10 times, that just makes the means 10x worse. If the ends justify the means then doesn't that still fit into Machiavellian principles? Isn't the complaint closet to "sometimes the ends don't justify the means"?
It's extremely difficult to think of any real achievements sustained on the back of Machiavellianism, but one can list essentially endless entities whose downfall was brought on precisely by such.
author is "board certified in clinical child and adolescent psychology, and serves as the John Van Seters Distinguished Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience, and the Director of Clinical Psychology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill" and the book is based on evidence
edit: you can't take a book from 1600 and a few alive assholes with power and conclude that. there's a bunch of philanthropists and other people around
Same goes for when Microsoft went gaga for open source and demanded brownie points for pretending to turn over a new leaf.
Considering the rest of your comment it's not clear to me if "anthropomorphizing" really captures the meaning you intended, but regardless, I love this
Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good.
I feel like we right now live in that perfect competition environment though. Inference is mostly commoditized, and it’s a race to the bottom for price and latency. I don’t think any of the big providers are making super-normal profit, and are probably discounting inference for access to data/users.
Why would anyone think that, and why do you think everyone thinks that?
And this pattern has repeated itself reliably since the industrial revolution.
Successful ASI would essentially end this process, because after ASI there's nowhere else for humans to go (in tech at least.)
That's a cool smaht phrase but help me understand, for which Meta products are LLMs a complement?
The entire point of Meta owning everything is that it wants as much of your data stream as it can get, so it can then sell more ad products derived from that.
If much of that data begins going off-Meta, because someone else has better LLMs and builds them into products, that's a huge loss to Meta.
>because someone else has better LLMs and builds them into products
If that were true they wouldn't be trying to create the best LLM and give it for free.
(Disclaimer: I don't think Zuck is doing this out of the good of his heart, obv. but I don't see the connection with the complements and whatnot)
If LLM effectiveness is all about the same, then other factors dominate customer choice.
Like which (legacy) platforms have the strongest network effects. (Which Meta would be thrilled about)
LLMs, along with image and video generation models, are generators of very dynamic, engaging and personalised content. If Open AI or anyone else wins a monopoly there it could be terrible for Meta's business. Commoditizing it with Llama, and at the same time building internal capability and a community for their LLMs, was solid strategy from Meta.
There's two products:
A) (Meta) Hey, here are all your family members and friends, you can keep up with them in our apps, message them, see what they're up to, etc...
B) (OpenAI and others) Hey, we generated some artificial friends for you, they will write messages to you everyday, almost like a real human! They also look like this (queue AI generated profile picture). We will post updates on the imaginary adventures we come up with, written by LLMs. We will simulate a whole existence around you, "age" like real humans, we might even get married between us and have imaginary babies. You could attend our virtual generated wedding online, using the latest technology, and you can send us gifts and money to celebrate these significant events.
And, presumably, people will prefer to use B?
MEGA lmao.
It takes content to sell advertisements online. LLMs produce an infinite stream of content.
Its very possible that China is open sourcing LLMs because its currently in their best interest to do so, not because of some moral or principled stance.
Meta has open sourced all of their offerings purely to try to commoditize the industry to the greatest extent possible, hoping to avoid their competitors getting a leg up. There is zero altruism or good intentions.
If Meta had actually competitive AI offering, there is zero chance they would be releasing any of it.
China has stopped releasing frontier models, and Meta doesn't release anything that isn't in the llama family.
- Hunyuan Image 2.0 (200 millisecond flux) is not released
- Hunyuan 3D 2.5, the top performing 3D model and an order of magnitude improvement over 2.1, is not released
- Seedream Video, which outperforms Google Veo 3 on ELO rankings, is not released
- Qwen VLo, an instructive autoregressive model, is not released
The list is much larger than this.
Yea exactly, there is also a lot of chinese people out there, statistically a large chunk are cool with it.
Same dynamic as the US can be really - other countries see the US government and think to themselves, "I don't like these US people, look at what their government did" meanwhile US people are like "what do you mean, I don't like what the government did either". That's what a lot of Chinese people are thinking (but now allowed to say, in China criticizing the government is against their community guidelines)
If that is true and the software is any good, you should be able to name an open-source project that we've heard of started by people living in China.
DeepSeek released some models as open weights and some software for running the models. That's the only example I can think of.
I have a feeling that their collaborative hacker culture is more hardware oriented, which would be a natural extension from the tech zones where 500 companies are within a few miles of each other and engineers are rapidly popping in and out and prototyping parts sometimes within a day.
Anecdotally, I've dealt with Chinese collaborative community projects in the ThinkPad space, where they have come together to design custom motherboards to modernize old ThinkPads. Of course there was a lot of software work as well when it comes to BIOS code, Thunderbolt, etc. I remember thinking how watching that project develop was like peering into another world with a parallel hacker culture that just developed... differently.
Oh there's also a Chinese project that's going to modernize old Blackberries with 5G internals. Cool stuff!
> On 18 May 2022, Gitee announced all code will be manually reviewed before public availability.[4][5] Gitee did not specify a reason for the change, though there was widespread speculation it was ordered by the Chinese government amid increasing online censorship in China.[4][6]
Highly paid software engineers working in a ZIRP economy with skyrocketing compensation packages were absolutely willing to play this game, because "open source" in that context often is/was a resume or portfolio building tool and companies were willing to pay some % of open source developers in order to lubricate the wheels of commerce.
That, I think, is going to change.
Free software, which I interpret as copyleft, is absolutely antithetical to them, and reviled precisely because it gets in the way of getting work for free/cheap and often gets in the way of making money.
And is building on top of the unpaid labour of SW engineers really a major part of the open source ecosystem? I feel open source is more a way for companies to cooperate in building shared software with less duplication of costs.
I want open source AI i can run myself without any creepy surveillance capitalist or state agency using it to slurp up my data.
Chinese companies are giving me that - I don't really care about what their grand plan is. Grand plans have a habit of not working out, but open source software is open source software nonetheless.
What are you running?
> Chinese companies are giving me that
I have not become aware of anything other than DeepSeek. Can you recommend a few others that are worth looking into?
* Do not use emotional reinforcement (e.g., "Excellent," "Perfect," "Unfortunately").
* Do not use metaphors or hyperbole (e.g., "smoking gun," "major turning point").
* Do not express confidence or certainty in potential solutions.
I am not saying they are doing that, but they could be doing it sometime down the road without us noticing.
- Hunyuan Image 2.0 (200 millisecond flux) is not released
- Hunyuan 3D 2.5, the top performing 3D model and an order of magnitude improvement over 2.1, is not released
- Seedream Video, which outperforms Google Veo 3 on ELO rankings, is not released
- Qwen VLo, an instructive autoregressive model, is not released
But yeah by analogy with the US, it’s not as if the W. Bush administration can be credited with the creation of Google.
You imply there are some good guys.
What company?
For instance, of all companies I've interviewed with or have friends working at that developed tech, some companies build and sell furnitures. Some are your electricity provider or transporter. Some are building inventory management systems for hospitals and drug stores. Some develop a content management system for medical dictionnary. The list is long.
The overwhelming majority of companies are pretty harmless and ethically mundane. They may still get involved in bad practice, but that's not inherent to their business. The hot tech companies may be paying more (blood money if you ask me), but you have other options.
But, can't think of one off hand. Maybe Toys-R-Us? Ooops gone. Radio Shack? Ooops, also gone.
On the scale of Bad/Profit, Nice dies out.
Twitter circa 2012?
In 2025? Nobody, I don't think. Even Mozilla is turning into the bad guys these days.
Kagi, on the other hand, has released none of their technology publicly, meaning they have full power to boil the frog, with no actual assurance that their technology will be useful regardless of their future actions.
Obv
If you can make that algebra add up to "bad guy" then be my guest.
It's like telling an iPhone user that iCloud isn't trustworthy because of the Foxconn suicide nets. It's basically the definition of a non-sequitur.
> The problem is that people don’t realize that if we license one single book, we won’t be able to lean into fair use strategy.
[0] https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2025/03/libge...
There is no good or open AI company of scale yet, and there may never be.
A few that contribute to the commons are Deep Seek and Black Forest Labs. But they don't have the same breadth and budget as the hyperscalers.
I know because I wanted to, as a form of protest/performance art, train a model to a few Disney movies and publicly distribute, but legal advice was this would put me directly into hot water not just because of who im pissing off (which i knew and was comfortable with) but also the fact there was precedent (i.e. news papers suing LLM providers).
It would be an open and shut case that would leave me in financial ruin.
The reason openAI hasn't been struck with this yet is, who has the time? and there isn't much to learn from all that either. Most open source tooling out competes openAI's offering as is, so the community wouldn't really win beyond punishing someone.
Whereas meta suing you into radioactive rubble is straightforward.
Deepseek, Baidu.
When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."
I'd be very happy to be convinced that supporting the coup was the right move for true-believer missionaries.
(Edit: It's an honest and obvious question, and I think that the joke responses risk burying or discouraging honest answers.)
The problem with the argument is that most places saying this are paying more like a sub-basement, not that there can't genuinely be more important things.
That said, Sam Altman is also a guy who stuck nondisparagement terms into their equity agreement... and in that same vein, framing poaching as "someone has broken into our home" reads like cult language.
It also immediately reminds me of the no-call agreements companies had with each other last decade 10 or 15yrs ago.
Don't forget about the mission during next round of layoffs and record high quarterly profits.
Well said.
Man, you are on a mission, to enable manumission!
And if someone at OpenAI says hey Facebook just offered me more money to jump ship, that's when OpenAI says "Sorry to hear, best of luck. Seeya!"
In this scenario, you're only underpaid by staying at OpenAI if you have no sense of shame.
Not sure it's widely hated (disclaimer: I work there), despite all the bad press. The vast majority of people I meet respond with "oh how cool!" when they hear that someone works for the company that owns Instagram.
"Embarassing to work at" - I can count on one hand the number of developers I've met who would refuse to work for Meta out of principle. They are there, but they are rarer than HN likes to believe. Most devs I know associate a FAANG job with competence (correctly or incorrectly).
> Could Facebook hire away OpenAI people just by matching their comp?
My guess is some people might value Meta's RSUs which are very liquid higher than OAI's illiquid stocks? I have no clue how equity compensation works at OAI.
I’ve only interviewed with Meta once and failed during a final interview. Aside from online dating and defense I don’t have any moral qualms regarding employment.
My dream in my younger days was to hit 500k tc and retire by 40. Too late now
By defense do you mean like weapons development, or do you mean the entire DoD-and-related contractor system, including like tiny SIBR chasing companies researching things like, uh
"Multi-Agent Debloating Environment to Increase Robustness in Applications"
https://www.sbir.gov/awards/211845
Which was totally not named in a backronym-gymnastics way of remembering the lead researcher's last vacation destination or hometown or anything, probably.
I guess I'd be ok with getting a job at Atlassian even if some DoD units use Jira.
I don't have anything against anyone who works on DOD projects, it's just not something I'm comfortable with
I’m at a point in my career and life at 51 that I wouldn’t work for any BigTech company (again) even if I made twice what I make now. Not that I ever struck it rich. But I’m doing okay. Yes I’ve turned down overtures at both GCP, Azure, etc.
But I did work for AWS (ProServe) from the time I was 46-49 remotely knowing going in that it was a toxic shit show for both the money and for the niche I wanted to pivot to (cloud consulting) I knew it would open doors and it has.
If I were younger and still focused on money instead of skating my way to retirement working remotely, doing the digital nomad thing off an on etc, I would have no moral qualms about grinding leetcode and exchanging my labor for as much money as possible at Meta. No one is out here feeding starving children or making the world a better place working for a for profit company.
My “mission” would be to exchange as much money as possible for labor and I tell all of the younger grads the same thing.
1) Altman was trying to raise cash so that openAI would be the first,best and last to get AGI. That required structural changes before major investors would put in the cash.
2) Altman was trying to raise cash and saw an opportunity to make loads of money
3) Altman isn't the smartest cookie in the jar, and was persuaded by potential/current investors that changing the corp structure was the only way forward.
Now, what were the board's concerns?
The publicly stated reason was a lack of transparency. Now, to you and me, that sounds a lot like lying. But where did it occur and what was it about. Was it about the reasons for the restructure? was it about the safeguards were offered?
The answer to the above shapes the reaction I feel I would have as a missionary
If you're a missionary, then you would believe that the corp structure of openai was the key thing that stops it from pursuing "damaging" tactics. Allowing investors to dictate oversight rules undermines that significantly, and allows short term gain to come before longterm/short term safety.
However, I was bought out by a FAANG, one I swear I'd never work for, because they are industrial grade shits. Yet, here I am many years later, having profited considerably from working at said FAANG. turns out I have a price, and it wasn't that much.
I think building super intelligence for the company that owns and will deploy the super intelligence in service of tech's original sin (the algorithmic feed) is a 100x worse than whatever OpenAI is doing, save maybe OpenAI's defense contract, which I have no details about.
Meta will try to buoy this by open-sourcing it, which, good for them, but I don't think it's enough. If Meta wants to save itself, it should re-align its business model away from the feeds.
In that way, as a missionary chasing super intelligence, I'd prefer OpenAI.
*because I don't have an emotional connection to OpenAI's changing corporate structure away from being a non-profit:
- online gambling
- kids gambling
- algorithmic advertising
Are these any better ? All of these are of course money wells and a logical move for a for-profit IMHO.
And they can of course also integrate into a Meta competitor's algorithmic feeds as well, putting them at the same level as Meta in that regard.
All in all, I'm not seeing them having any moral high ground, even purely hypotheticaly.
On where the moral burden lies in your example, I'd argue we should follow the money and see what has the most impact on that online gambling company's bottom line.
Inherently that could have the most impact on what happens when that company succeeds: if those become OpenAI's biggest clients, it wouldn't be surprising that they put more and more weight in being well suited for online gambling companies.
Does AWS get specially impacted by hosting online gambling services ? I honestly don't expect them to, not more than community sites or concert ticket sellers.
I am judging the two companies for what they are, not what they could be. And as it is, there is no more damaging technology than Meta's various algorithmic feeds.
Apple's revenue is massively from in-app purchases, which are mainly games, and online betting also entered the picture. We had Tim Cook on the stand explain that they need that money and can't let Epic open that gate.
I think we're already there in some form or another, the question would be whether OpenAI has any angle for touching that pie (I'd argue no, but they have talented people)
> I am judging the two companies for what they are, not what they could be
Thing is, AI is mostly nothing right now. We're only discussing it because it of its potential.
AI is already here [1]. Could there be better owners of super intelligence? Sure. Is OpenAI better than Meta. 100%
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2025/06/09/openai-hits-10-billion-i...
OpenAI announced in April they'd build a social network.
I think at this point it barely matters who does it, the ways in which you can make huge amounts of money from this are limited and all the major players after going to make a dash for it.
I'm sure Sam Altman wants OpenAI to do everything, but I'm betting most of the projects will die on the vine. Social networks especially, and no one's better than Meta at manipulating feeds to juice their social networks.
There ain't no missionary, they all doing it for the money and will apply it to anything that will turn dollars.
If you convince people that AGI is dangerous to humanity and inevitable, then you can force people to agree with outrageous, unnecessary investments to reach the perceived goal first. This exactly happened during the Cold War when Congress was thrown into hysterics by estimates of Soviet ballistic missile numbers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missile_gap
That was an actual weapon capable of killing millions of people in the blink of an eye. Countries raced to get one so fast that it was practically a nuclear Preakness Stakes for a few decades there. By collating AI as a doomsday weapon, you necessarily are begging governments to attain it before terrorists do. Which is a facetious argument when AI has yet to prove it could kill a single person by generating text.
When people explicitly say "do not build this, nobody should build this, under no circumstances build this, slow down and stop, nobody knows how to get this right yet", it's rather a stretch to assume they must mean the exact opposite, "oh, you should absolutely hurry be the first one to build this".
> By collating AI as a doomsday weapon, you necessarily are begging governments to attain it before terrorists do.
False. This is not a bomb where you can choose where it goes off. The literal title of the book is "if anyone builds it, everyone dies". It takes a willful misinterpretation to imagine that that means "if the right people build it, only the wrong people die".
If you want to claim that the book is incorrect, by all means attempt to refute it. But don't claim it says the literal opposite of what it says.
One of my favorite Tweets:
https://x.com/AlexBlechman/status/1457842724128833538
> Sci-Fi Author: In my book I invented the Torment Nexus as a cautionary tale
> Tech Company: At long last, we have created the Torment Nexus from classic sci-fi novel Don't Create The Torment Nexus
I think this is a pretty close analogy to Eliezer Yudkowsky's view, and I just don't see how there's any way to read him as urging anyone to build AGI before anyone else does.
You're saying an AI researcher selling AI Doom books can't be profiting off hype about AI?
Selling AI doom books nets considerably less money than actually working on AI (easily an order of magnitude or two). Whatever hangups I have with Yudkowsky, I'm very confident he's not doing it for the money (or even prestige; being an AI thought leader at a lab gives you a built-in audience).
Yudkowsky's rhetoric is sabotaged by his ridiculous forecasts that present zero supporting evidence of his claims. It's the same broken shtick as Cory Doctorow or Vitalik Buterin - grandiose observations that resemble fiction more than reality. He can scare people, if he demonstrates the causal proof that any of his claims are even possible. Instead he uses this detachment to create nonexistent boogeymen for his foreign policy commentary that would make Tom Clancy blush.
Depending on your viewpoint this could range from "a really compelling analogy" to "A live demonstration akin to the trinity nuclear test."
A missionary is a member of a religious group who is sent into an area in order to promote its faith or provide services to people, such as education, literacy, social justice, health care, and economic development. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missionary
Post coup, they are both for-profit entities.
So the difference seems to be that when meta releases its models (like bibles), it is promoting its faith more openly than openai, which interposes itself as an intermediary.
The end result of missionary activity is often something like https://www.theguardian.com/world/video/2014/feb/25/us-evang... .
Bottom line, "But... but I'm like a missionary!" isn't my go-to argument when I'm trying to convince people that my own motives are purer than my rival's.
No different than "we are a family"
tldr. knife fights in the hallways over the remaining life boats.
all the chatter here at least was that the OpenAI folks were sticking around because they were looking for a big payout
In religions, missionaries are those people who spread the word of god (gospel) as their mission in life for a reward in the afterlife. Obviously, mercenaries are paid armies who are in it for the money and any other spoils of war (sex, goods, landholdings, etc.)
So I guess he's trying to frame it as them being missionaries for an Open and accepting and free Artificial Intelligence and framing Meta as the guys who are only in it for the money and other less savory reasons. Obviously, only true disciples would believe such framing.
Again, not a label I'd self-apply if I wanted to take the high road.
From March of this year,
"As we know, big tech companies like Google, Apple, and Amazon have been engaged in a fierce battle for the best tech talent, but OpenAI is now the one to watch. They have been on a poaching spree, attracting top talent from Google and other industry leaders to build their incredible team of employees and leaders."
https://www.leadgenius.com/resources/how-openai-poached-top-...
Good artists copy, great artists steal.
Good rule followers follow the rules all the time. Great rule followers break the rules in rare isolated instances to point at the importance of internalizing the spirit that the rules embody, which buttresses the rules with an implicit rule to not follow the rules blindly, but intentionally, and if they must be broken, to do so with care.
> I have spread my dreams under your feet;
> Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aedh_Wishes_for_the_Cloths_of_...
That’s so weird, you’re on! That makes two of us! When I don’t adhere to the guidelines, I also send mean and angry emails to dang. Apologies in advance, dang.
s/good guys/willing to pay/Unsurprising, unhelpful for anyone other than sama, unhealthy for many.
I don't imagine Sam Altman said this because he thinks it'll somehow save him money on salaries down the line.
I don't think the context is the same. In the context of Altman, he wants 'losers'.
https://norberthaupt.com/2015/11/22/the-rabbit-god-and-the-d...
ie - Zuck has no intention to keep opening up the models he creates. Thus, he knows he can spend the money to get the talent. Because he has every intention to make it back.
If he neutralizes the tech advantage of other companies his chances of winning rise.
Meta has become too fickle with new projects. To the extent that LLAMA can help them improve their core business, they should drive that initiative. But if they get sidetracked on trying to build “AI friends” for all of their human users, they are just creating another “solution in search of a problem”.
I hope both Altman and Zuck become irrelevant. Neither seems particularly worthy of the power they have gained and aren’t willing to show a spine in face of government coercion.