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.
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?
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.
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.
Nvidia has 75% profit margins right now. That won't continue forever. It may take quite some time but it will normalize.
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.
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.
A stopped clock is right twice a day Even Elon is sometimes right.
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.
his name is Luigi Mangione :)
Some folks are in for a very rude awakening.
AI itself, the technology, isn't a scam
but the promotion of it certainly reeks of a pyramid scheme / scam
and the promises are pretty scammy in that they may be true at some point in time, but not today (one could say Tesla's FSD which some users paid for years ago, was/is a scam)
and there is one thing that is incontestable: AI, as wielded by large companies today, is a highly destructive force. you might be fine with that (one must tear down to rebuild approach), but many many other people are not.
You think the Frontier lab revenue reports are faked? [1]
[1]: https://cryptobriefing.com/anthropic-revenue-surge-10-billio...
They might be useful for some things in some situations and they are here to stay… for now. They won’t be the future though.
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.
One of my friends somehow convinced me to visit his friend who had a small startup that needed people.
...and it was in the extra bedroom of someone's dingy apartment. A bunch of folks were working on not-very-remarkable nonsense.
and the guy running the apartmen^h^h^h^h show said something to the effect of there's so much nonsense getting funded, why shouldn't I get in on it.
It was kind of depressing, I didn't get involved, got out quickly.
It's not that the dot com thing was a scam, it was that hype got money flooding into the market.
For every amazon or google or yahoo there were 1000 dumpster fires burning piles of cash.
Oh…you’re another “founder” at an “AI company”. One with a dead website on a Somalian TLD. Got it.
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.
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?
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.
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. Or is it 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 remember when IP laws were looked at like a form of oppression in the tech community...
This is not true. Otherwise, why is open source licensing so popular? Have you simply never read those licenses?
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
Is this denial in the room with us now?
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.
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.
A fair valuation of ~$5B each for Anthropic and OpenAI for the occasionally useful tools that they had created would be more reasonable.
This type of rhetoric is exactly why people think it's a scam
They do seem to be good at fooling people though.
That is the point under contention.
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
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
*charlatan
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.
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.
0 - https://www.trustwelllaw.com/resources/legal-term-faq/statut...
A win in any manner isn’t landing the same for observers as winning for a just reason.
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.
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.
