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Comment by zamfi | Hacker News Reader

Is any company still like this?

I was at Google in ‘06-07, and again ‘09-11, and already there were obvious differences. You just can’t scale “total internal transparency” when the company doubles in size every year.

And at some point you need just plain-old-“good” engineers to make the A/B tests happen and all the other stuff that doesn’t excite the PhDs. And at some point you need product people too, because you start to build products you’re not in the target audience for. And at some point your employees aren’t all going to be fabulously wealthy from an upcoming IPO, and so they’ll start playing political games for coveted titles and $1M+ comp so they too can have their house in Tahoe.

At some point the real world just gets in the way.

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I wonder if there's a way to prevent the growth at all costs that is demanded by the financial markets.

Maybe become profitable and pay off the VCs then don't go public?

Then you can resist the pressure for growth quarter by quarter, and remain the 'right size' that your internal culture demands.

Did Valve corporation do something like that?

I'm really surprised that SideFX has only 169 employees.

It's biggest competitor, Autodesk, has 13,700 employees.

Of course Autodesk has a lot of products and SideFX has practically one so it's not a very fair comparison. But my point is that SideFX is a living evidence that if you want to stay reasonably small you can. SideFX was been existed for 28 years, so we can safely assume it has a positive cash flow.

I agree, I'm in awe of SideFX and have a lot of respect.

They've proven you can do a lot by being in touch with your users and being half-decent at what you're doing.

I think Valve does have a reputation for having this type of model. They've famously expressed an intention to not go public or sell the company to anyone else. This is also what leads to them being a fairly small and selective company that can afford to cherry-pick employees, and that also has an allegedly more employee-friendly culture than others. Just like the recollection in the original post, they might have that "infinite abundance" mindset - their initiatives in game development, hardware and VR are probably subsidized by Steam many times over.

I would argue that they made a really good early bet with Steam which rakes in enough profit that they can keep this (or whatever) mindset. They never really had competition in the PC space. If they would need to come up with new and better products each fiscal year they would look very different.

I feel like you could have said the same about google or facebook. They made a dominant early platform and could have comfortably lived off that success?

There are a bunch of companies trying to compete with valve. They are not behind any more of a moat than anyone else.

For some reason steam is really just better than anything else combined. Maybe except gog as it's drm free

Did Google or Facebook do anything that is not "living comfortably off early success"? AFAIK they had a very poor track record in monetizing anything they built in the last ten years or so.

I think that's their point. If Google or Facebook had stayed with a Valve-sized team and stuck to their knitting, would they really have made any less money?

Would this preclude buying Instagram? That was considered expensive at the time, but I think was a great buy for them and is a significant part of keeping Facebook competitive now and for the next half-decade.

Facebook marketplace and groups are other successful (IMO) sub-products that might not get built if "stick to your knitting" was the mantra.

both had slump but I think Facebook has been much better shape after Zuck did layoffs and pivoted away from metaverse. Llama and Meta Smart Glasses both feel like groundbreaking products.

I'd dare to say that Google is very bad at doing products. They tried so many times and almost always failed, the list of products killed by Google is huge, They really succeeded in search, maps and gmail; all of these products are engineering-first products, created in the early days.

One might argue that YouTube and Android should go in that list, but I disagree. YouTube was acquired and it never managed to become something really big (it failed to compete with Netflix for video streaming, with Spotify for music and with TikTok for social network). Android also, was acquired and without a pletora of hardware vendor supporting it, it would have failed too (I'd say that Android without Samsung is nothing -- of course, it's big on embedded things, like cars or TVs, but it's not a world-wide product like gmail).

And likewise it is failing in AI, against OpenAI, which looks like another engineering-first product.

> YouTube was acquired and it never managed to become something really big

Before YouTube there was Google Video, which was moderately successful (it was just that YouTube was more successful, so it got acquired).

I strongly believe that Google Video would have been killed by Google long ago. They bought YouTube because they couldn't create it themselves. And they never managed to turn that into a real product, IMO.

But there are just my opinions, of course.

Youtube failed to become something big? I think you've lost yourself in your argument a bit.

It's not that it's not big. It's that it's not as big as it could be. It's not gmail-big or maps-big, at least for me. It is outclassed by many other, in their respective niches (video streaming, music, and social networking), and despite the huge efforts, Google never managed to turn it into a subscription-based service.

It's not that it's not big, it's that it is not on the same level than maps or gmail, IMO.

Atleast according to average daily watch time reported in 2019, Netflix was at 164 million hours and YouTube was at 1 billion. I doubt that ratio has changed much since then

I think YouTube is bigger (by profit, revenue, customers, or total hours used) than Netflix, Spotify, and Tik Tok.

See: https://mannhowie.com/youtube-valuation

Also see: https://www.cnbc.com/2021/07/28/youtube-is-a-proven-juggerna..., https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/digital/youtube-a...

How do you think YouTube failed? If you tried to get someone to name a search engine that's not Google, they could maybe think of Bing or DuckDuckGo or something. If you tried to get someone to name a email service that's not Gmail, they could maybe say Outlook or Yahoo if they're older. But try to get someone to name a user-generated video platform that's not YouTube? YouTube has comparable revenue to Netflix. And Netflix has direct competitors -- such as Hulu, Amazon Prime Video, Disney+ to name a few that are pretty big on their own right.

I don't know about that, they made some good products, or invested in ones that already existed.

I don't consider creating a product, and then retiring a product after many years a failure myself. Its more like a nuanced then, some producdts don't change with the times, and others dont work.

I did watch that TV series on how some people at google did some unethical things to incorporate the maps idea from a German company. Not sure how true that is, but if it is, then google is just like any other corrupt establishment, willing to do shady things at the expense of the original inventors.

But then they did nothing to sell their infrastructure because it was seen as a competitive advantage.

Google3/Borg ecosystem should have been productized but that'll never happen now the way things are evolving.

> There are a bunch of companies trying to compete with valve.

What strikes me as a bit odd with relation to specifically competitors to the Valve client (essentially a game library and store rolled together), the competitors that come to mind are...

* EA/Origin

* Epic

* Ubisoft

EA and Ubisoft are only selling games they publish, IIRC. Epic sells games from other publishers, but always gives Fortnite preferential treatment (and has the Unreal Editor in its own tab in the client, or did last I paid attention).

Valve is still by a large margin the only one that comes to mind that feels as close to a neutral store/library as you can find (even when they released Artifact and Alyx, neither of those were permanently pinned to the top like Fortnite is in the Epic store). Of course, developers can still buy preferential treatment, but it at least feels like you're competing with other developers and not "the house".

I'm not making an argument that Valve's being anti-competitive here, just it's surprising to me how hard these competitors -aren't- trying to be a real competitor. I expect due to internal pressures from their respective game publishing branches.

There’s GOG, but they seem more niche for retro/hardcore gamers.

Ah, of course, I knew I was forgetting one. They did start that way although they've branched out since then. For example they sell Everspace 2, which is a much newer game.

They actually might be my favorite since all the games they sell are DRM-free. You can download the installer of every one of their games locally and they'll run "forever" without any dependency on GOG or their Galaxy library app (unlike Steam). Though their selection is more limited since IIRC they manually review every game they list.

However, even they tend to favor their "in-house" games (they're a sibling company of CDPR which developed the Witcher games and Cyberpunk 2077 and you'll frequently see those featured prominently there). Not as bad as Epic, though. More in the style of how Steam advertised Half Life 2 and Portal in the early days of Steam.

And yet they crank out new and innovative "products" every 4 years. So much so that they were essentially doing 90% of what Meta is trying to do now with 100x less people and budget.

I think the real answer lies in the fact that at a public company, you will need to answer to shareholders, but at Valve, you actually need to answer to the whims of benevolent dictator Gabe Newell.

Valve also has much better hackers than Facebook.

Since VR was mentioned tangentially, how many 'Valve hackers' is one John Carmack worth?

Zero, right now, as he’s not working with Facebook any more.

I guess everyone takes everything seriously now and there is no light banter anymore...

Not only not working there, but distinctly said he left because he complained that too much money was being sent down the money hole and productivity per capita was abysmal

I don’t know, how many combined are worth -500 million? Think just one is worth literally hundreds of million more than him all things considered

To play devil's advocate for my own point, Michael Abrash was swiped from Valve by Facebook. The dude is a hardcore hacker. Even the rendering code in Age of Empires II owes him credit for performance optimizations!

> yet they[Valve] crank out new and innovative "products" every 4 years. So much so that they were essentially doing 90% of what Meta is trying to do now with 100x less people and budget.

Innovative products every 4 years? Lol, if Facebook waited that long at any point in time it'd have died.

Comparing Valve to Meta head-to-head is simply ridiculous. I'm not even sure which specific products you had in mind. Did you mean "Meta Quest"? Literally, each division within Meta is fighting in a different sector

Valve has been operating in the same market for 27 years and has consequently built a loyal and enthusiastic fan base.

Even if you believe Meta is directly competing with Valve, it's embarrassing for Valve, as someone in their position should be undisputed in their niche and have the market in deadlock.

I think he’s talking about the Index and their new Linux console

> Even if you believe Meta is directly competing with Valve, it's embarrassing for Valve, as someone in their position should be undisputed in their niche and have the market in deadlock.

Meta can tap a billion people to play social games.

People don’t care to.

From a customer perspective Valve is undisputed. Nobody opens any other marketplace unless they have to.

Same can be said for a company like Microsoft or Google. They have their core products and milk cows for years.

And Valve had plenty of competition and they knew their audience pretty well to make digital purchases something to consider for many. Plus, they simply have the better product.

Steam doesn’t exist without Valve’s catalog of games and especially Half-Life 2. Its continued success can’t be simple luck given how much competition they have, although at times it does seem like Microsoft, Google (Stadia), Epic, Ubisoft simply want Steam to win.

Valve had the advantage of Newell/Harrington starting the company with a pile of money from being former MS staff, which gave them the ability to say "when it's done" for their first game. As the resulting first game was a hit and they didn't owe much (if anything) to their publisher Sierra [1], from that point on they've kept rolling the success forwards. Being a private company there's no details I'm aware of on how much has been taken out of the business, although Harrington left not long after Half-life.

[1] I vaguely remember a legal dispute when Valve did release steam years later as Sierra were being cut out.

There's a classic tweet I remember about Valve, about someone who finally learned who his boss was the day he fired him.

I remember the forums (and slashdot comments) just hammering valve for thinking of creating steam and introducing DRM to their games, and that they would never, ever use it because of that.

But Valve has had an awesome record of using it responsibly, and its kind of amazing I can log in, click and 60 seconds later be playing a game I bought in 2003.

Mullvad ( a much smaller company) seems to have a similar set of goals and values. Not everything needs to be under the umbrella of a 800lb gorilla multinational. I hope that some of those entities can learn to be more creative rather than trying to reduce everything to something bean counters who need to report quarterly gains or get fired. It disincentivises taking risks at all.

> I wonder if there's a way to prevent the growth at all costs that is demanded by the financial markets.

If you go public, no way to prevent it.

You have to stay private. But if you took a lot of VC money (and gave them board positions) that's going to be difficult.

> I wonder if there's a way to prevent the growth at all costs that is demanded by the financial markets.

Google (and Facebook etc) are controlled by their founders (some even as majority shareholders). There's no blaming financial markets here.

Facebook was even happy to set fire to a giant pile of cash in pursuit of the 'metaverse', a project that approximately no investors wanted, but that was dear to the heart of their founder.

> Facebook was even happy to set fire to a giant pile of cash in pursuit of the 'metaverse'

I always saw it more as priming the market. Throw out this idea, with the apparent weight of Meta behind it, and see how the market jumps on it (or not). If it goes well, Meta as initiator can easily ensure they stay in the lead, gobble up startups and such.

That's plausible, and perhaps what Mr Zuckerberg had in mind?

But investors, or at least their opinion aggregated via the share price, had a different opinion at the time.

(Investors are often happy to bet on speculative things, as long as they have a positive expected value.)

I see it them taking a risk and while I thought it was a silly idea, I applaud them for trying. It's hard to imagine Google taking a risk like this, which is the crux of this post and these threads.

Their employees and executives make the majority of their income from RSUs. You can't exactly run a company if your entire workforce gets a huge pay cut each year from a poorly performing stock.

That’s a great point as well. People blame investors but at FAANGs the workforce itself are investors and very important ones since they’ll bail if the stock stops going up.

When I was working for Google, only a minority of my income came from RSUs.

You might be right about some executives, or people who have been with the company for a very long time.

> I wonder if there's a way to prevent the growth at all costs that is demanded by the financial markets.

Yes, just don't hire MBAs with fetish for shareholder value

You think employees will stick around when their vested options are underwater?

It’s not the MBAs alone that demand an increasing stock price.

> I wonder if there's a way to prevent the growth at all costs that is demanded by the financial markets.

Growth and private investment are part and parcel.

There is actually evidence that the market doesn't demand growth - https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=JpB4 suggests that the market is chasing the base rate of monetary creation.

If a company isn't "growing" at ~5% p.a nominal, it isn't tapping into the money hose. What would be the point of owning it?

>I wonder if there's a way to prevent the growth at all costs that is demanded by the financial markets.

Many companies used to do that both in the US and other countries. Some probably still do.

SAS Institute (well-known maker of statistical and other software) did, for many years, last I checked. Don't know if they still are that way.

Update: Looks like they are:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAS_Institute

[ In July 2021, the Wall Street Journal reported that the semiconductor giant Broadcom was in talks to acquire SAS.[37] In a July 13, 2021 email, SAS CEO Jim Goodnight stated that the company was not for sale.[38] ]

If SAS is the paragon of a company not pursuing growth at all costs, then maybe we do need to start looking at quarterly metrics. As a customer their business model sucks and they are doubling down on "either we're a solution for your whole enterprise or else."

Why does their business model suck for you as a customer? Interested to know.

Little capacity for code sharing and lack of reasonable tools to do so. That and the fact that newer statistical / ML techniques are extremely expensive mean that if you wanted to do e.g. a transformer you'd have to either pay out the nose or roll your own from scratch.

That and my department of about a dozen can't justify the cost to upgrade to their more enterprise focused, cloud ready new version Viya, but there's not really an upgrade path for 9.4 other than minor maintenance releases. Since no young new hires come in with SAS experience and the whole thing seems like a ticking clock, we decided just supporting Python for new development is a better plan.

>I wonder if there's a way to prevent the growth at all costs that is demanded by the financial markets.

>>SAS Institute (well-known maker of statistical and other software) did, for many years, last I checked. Don't know if they still are that way. Update: Looks like they are:

No... SAS Institute actually wanted to go public earlier in 2020 and then 2024 but they've now pushed the timeline back again to 2025 because of market conditions: https://www.google.com/search?q=SAS+Institute+ipo+2025

Instead of a "no growth" philosophy, the founders Goodknight and Sall have been trying to spread the narrative about SAS's "recent growth" after losing money in 2020 so potential investors will be receptive to an IPO. : https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/sas-charts-path-to-...

Part of the reason they are going public is Goodknight is getting up there in years and something about a succession plan.

> I wonder if there's a way to prevent the growth at all costs that is demanded by the financial markets.

the way i understand it the problem is the product and the market that you’re selling into.

for example: Renaissance Technologies LLC has $130Bn AUM with 310 employees.

> pay off the VCs then don't go public?

The massive return on investment that VCs aim for comes from the public market valuing the VCs shares of the company much higher than what the VCs paid for it when they invested. How do you replicate that without going public?

Unpopular opinion - avoid taking VC cash at all costs?

Financial markets in general do not demand this. As someone else said, the return expected is just a basic risk-free rate plus some compensation for the added risk of owning equities instead of treasuries, which isn't nothing but it doesn't mean you need to double in size every year indefinitely.

The problem for FAANGs and Tesla is their valuation was predicated on indefinite rapid growth. Once you have that valuation, the only way to keep it is to actually grow at the rate the valuation priced in. If you don't, the price will drop and all of the various directors and high-level employees whose compensation is largely in the already heavily-priced stock will lose a lot of net worth. This isn't a problem for all publicly-traded companies. It's a problem specific to a very small number of extremely highly-valued companies whose value was based upon the expectation that they would grow very rapidly.

Venture capital is another matter entirely. Being far riskier than owning publicly-traded equity shares, they do demand outsized growth from every investment. But venture capital is hardly ubiquitous. Outside of software devs, all small business owners I've ever known would not have even tried to consider it. If they need money, they ask their parents or a bank.

It’s not the “growth at all costs” mindset at all.

It’s growth period.

It’s easy to have a “hire smart people to do whatever” culture when the money is coming in hand over fist. Your investors don’t care.

But when the goose that lays the golden egg dies, nobody is going to hand over money to get a 2% return. Might as well just buy treasuries with zero risk and a higher return.

You’re flipping the cause and effect. It’s not the demand for growth that changes a company, it’s the companies business changing such that the money doesnt come in via fire hose any more.

That demands culture change to show that you actually are doing something productive.

> I wonder if there's a way to prevent the growth at all costs that is demanded by the financial markets.

My grandfather founded a construction company that became quite successful and remained privately owned by him. When it was time for him to retire, he sold the company to the employees who turned it into a worker cooperative. They have since seen wild success and many dozens of people have made some incredible amounts of money. The culture my grandfather established remains present. I believe the key was never going public and therefore avoiding being controlled by external investors with no stake in the company’s culture.

Bingo - you hit the nail on the head. Keeping the investor pool small and close-in is how you avoid this. If you go public, eventually you will succumb to this "growth above all" mindset, even if your culture was set up to resist it.

I appreciate all that publicly-traded companies have contributed to society, but rarely is "going public" ever not the first sign of an objectively downward trend of the company trajectory.

I think you have to have a separate entity(ies) that is strictly eggheads trying new shit. They need a big budget and have to keep the bean counters away, otherwise they will steal all the soul out of the enterprise. That's why so many thing come out of places like universities and NASA, you don't have bean counters killing the soul of the engineers/scientists. I'm not saying that situation is always possible, just putting out a theory. Also a lot of the low hanging fruit in science and math has already been discovered/invented, so it gets harder. This is where I hope AGI comes in, even if it's risky.

It takes a super special set of conditions to be able to bootstrap a >10 billion dollar company like Valve. Most >10b companies need immense capital injections to work

I don't think it's possible to be Google ca. '06, but there are companies that I think are a little like Google ca. 2012.

Meta is the obvious one, but people are all "no, not like that." Those people IMO have rose-tinted glasses. Early Google was a pretty fast-moving place with founders who would breathe down your neck and expect you to deliver. It also had a lot of speculative projects that amounted to nothing much in the end. Around 2011, Larry had a brain wave and fired, IIRC, every product manager at the company. If you squint, modern Meta is pretty close, both in good ways and bad.

The AI companies are not like this. Most of the ones I know about resemble Amazon more than early Google. Other places tried to be like Google, but without to revenue to make that work, and they're mostly in trouble now.

You don't remember it correctly, or there is a typo. All manager firing happened at 2001 not 2011. And it was not PMs but people managers.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Page

Yes, and there's no good way around this - no human organisation can scale beyond a certain (quite early) point without becoming an immoral profit machine. I wish society would better understand this, and governments would add caps. Of course no one on the world political stage would handicap their economy like this.

This is because, states at some size become immoral power machines deeply distrusting one another.

This just straight up doesn't make sense to me—states aren't monolithic entities or rational actors. I think it's easier to say that the modern state exists at the behest of capital, at least in the west.

States are rational actors though

You're confusing "rational" with "competitive", which is neoliberal sleight of mind.

There is absolutely nothing rational about terraforming your own planet to make it less able to support you.

Your politics are bleeding through here and it’s clearly fogging your mind of reality. I made a statement considered factual by political science/international relations and you’re strawmanning about “neoliberalism” and bringing up climate change. Do better, be less emotional. If you can’t do that you have no business making statements about nations and their relations with one another which are rational.

> I made a statement considered factual by political science/international relations

This is typically termed a "belief".

when in the history of anything was that the case? democracies make terrible choices, with voters often voting against their interests all the time.

dictators make dumb-ass calls often, like Erdogan of Turkey making random (randumb) pronouncements about the currency and causing terrible inflation (or Saddam's "let just fight all our neighbors, Suharto's random evil, etc.).

It’s generally accepted in international relations that it’s always the case long term. States can make bad calls in the short term but you’ll often find they are rational decisions regardless of if they don’t turn out well. Erdogan has greatly expanded turkeys influence in the region and been relatively successful in playing the west and russia off each other for instance.

Saddam I’ll give you but that also led to his removal and it can be argued Iraq didn’t have many good options as historically it’s been controlled by one or more of the surrounding nations so it may just not working realistically due to geography and ethnic strife

> States can make bad calls in the short term but you’ll often find they are rational decisions regardless of if they don’t turn out well.

This line of reasoning only makes sense when compared with counterfactuals, which seems like a waste of everyone's time. It's easy enough to justify an arbitrary action as rational if you have no basis of comparison.

Anyway, "rational self-interest of the state" is not the same thing as "rational". There are other ends other than self-interest of the state—for instance, self-interest of the constituents of the state, or self-interest of humanity. All states put their own existence before the welfare of their people. A state is not a natural thing outside the vying of capital to institute economic stability for the ends of its own empowerment.

I have yet to see evidence of this lol

That sounds like it is true, but is it really? I'd love to read a well written hypothesis which goes through a cause and effect and is backed up by at least some peer reviewed research.

Beau of The Fifth Column (Justin King) emphasizes ... states/countries don't have friends, they have interests. He delves into specific cases all the time and is one of the clearest-eyed political commentators out there.

> no human organisation can scale beyond a certain (quite early) point without becoming an immoral profit machine

I think a more general point is that when human organisations scale beyond a certain size, the organisations often become more focussed on self-sustainment (and preservation) than the original function they provided. Sometimes known as the iron law of bureaucracy, in commercial situations. For nation states, this entails preservation of the ruling classes, be they ostensibly profit focussed or not.

Thread from yesterday on this question: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39035569

I think the usual case is that product people displace engineers. I guess Google has selected here for quite some time by now because not every engineer likes the advertising and surveillance industry. Compensation and new tech can alleviate some issues, but not everything.

> You just can’t scale “total internal transparency” when the company doubles in size every year.

_total_ internal transparency is trivial to scale. partial and no transparency is difficult to scale.

Not really. Total transparency requires effective communication. Effective communication requires a shared context* to be efficient. The larger the organization, the less shared context, the more overhead is spent catching people up on things they are not involved in.

*By shared context, I mean there is certain background knowledge and assumptions that all parties involved have. Since they already have this context, they don't have to explain any of this and can skip ahead. Compare a theoretical physicist explaining their work to other physicists (lots of shared context) to them explaining it to a reporter (little shared context) -- in the second case it takes a lot more work to convey the same information.

If you want to stop internal transparency from accidentally becoming external transparency (or leak), it becomes extremely hard to scale.

I feel like the mistake is not having more local zones of total internal transparency but idk what my org is even thinking nowadays.

Man I wish I could be infected with this disease

This is the argument for biasing the economy against large companies

> This is the argument for biasing the economy against large companies.

It's also an argument to break large companies into smaller ones. This has to cut both ways, not just to fire people by cutting off whole org branches.

just make the corporate income tax proportional to the sqrt of headcount and let the market sort it out

Market sorting it out: "Lots of Employees, Inc licenses our key technology from [and pays large royalties to] Just One Employee, Limited."

So the real answer is to join the next Google.. :)

OpenAI?

What is the company culture of OpenAI like? How does it compare to early Google?

I didn't see Google's board fire it's CEO and then he gets reinstated and basically fires the board.

Instead Google had more drama with the inappropriate behavior kind.

To be fair one could argue that was still in vogue at the time…

To clarify, this was a sarcastic remark. I wasn't trying to actually imply that it was okay just because everyone else was doing it. I suppose that little /s really can do a lot of work.

That we know of, at least.

Well, it seems like it's got some cool tech based on providing access to everybody else's copyrighted content in novel ways, a bunch of promise to make a lot of money without knowing 100% what the plan is, messy politics at the top, and it's around the San Francisco area, so....

> providing access to everybody else's copyrighted content in novel ways

That's a very biased characterization that downplays a debate that people have right now as basically being already solved. It's simply not truthful, unless they started a side business in developing a torrent tracker or something.

> In Washington, DC, though, there seems to be a growing consensus that the tech giants need to cough up.

> Today, at a Senate hearing on AI’s impact on journalism, lawmakers from both sides of the aisle agreed that OpenAI and others should pay media outlets for using their work in AI projects. “It’s not only morally right,” said Richard Blumenthal, the Democrat who chairs the Judiciary Subcommittee on Privacy, Technology, and the Law that held the hearing. “It’s legally required.”

> Josh Hawley, a Republican working with Blumenthal on AI legislation, agreed. “It shouldn’t be that just because the biggest companies in the world want to gobble up your data, they should be able to do it,” he said.

https://www.wired.com/story/congress-senate-tech-companies-p...

I'm not sure whether you think I'm being unfair to Google or to OpenAI.

Everybody and their brother sued Google early on for a huge variety of their products. Google News got sued for showing headlines from news websites. Google Books got sued for copyright violations for, y'know, making a copy of everybody's books. Back in 2007, Google would've been in the middle of the the Viacom vs YouTube lawsuit. The whole idea of a search engine is fundamentally about taking all of the useful and mostly copyrighted content out there owned by others and profiting off of it by becoming the gateway to it.

OpenAI, similarly, works by taking all of the text and art and everything in the world, most of it owned by others, then copying it, collating it, and compressing it down into a model. Then they provide access to it in novel ways. I make no representation about whether it's legal or ethical. It's transformative, useful, novel, and really cool, but it's clearly taking other people's data, and then making it useful and accessible in a novel way.

I think the characterization is unfair to generative AI, because the information that is retained in the model is a very lossy and rough generalization of the training data - that situation is a lot less direct than what it's like with search engines. In my mind, the lawsuits against search engines have a lot more ground to stand on. Saying that something "provides access to copyrighted content" almost implies that there's some mechanism that allows the user to wholesale download complete, unedited and exact copies of some copyrighted material - I could see that argument with a search engine, but not really with a text or image generator.

Well, you certainly have right to your opinion, as do others to theirs. Law is the ultimate arbiter as usually.

"Possession is nine-tenths of the law"

Physical force, the ability to wipe something (or someone) out of existence, is the ultimate arbiter. Law just an upstream proxy.

It's a nitpick that's becoming increasingly relevant as we see institutions that support that proxy collapse or transform.

It's 100% dependent on copyrighted material at least, even though you can't access an exact copy of it without access to the material it wouldn't exist. It's a messy issue, I have no idea how it will be solved since it's a rather new development for humanity, in the past when humans would collect knowledge from different sources to use them in a novel way there would be at least some kind of attribution, recognition of the sources, either being cited or acknowledged in a preface. With GenAI there's nothing, and probably not even a way for GenAI to tell us where it got "inspired" from to generate something.

It's going to be a very messy landscape for copyrights and intellectual property in the next years.

You should look up the definition of "derivative work."

I agree that Google should have been forced to pay licensing fees, and OpenAI should too.

We know from history that's unlikely to happen.

A big difference in my view is that OpenAI doesn't meaningfully "provide access" to all the text and art and everything in the world; rather, they suck the marrow out of all the text and art and everything in the world and use it to sell their own replacement service for all the text and art and everything in the world. Google has done some questionable things to become a gateway to the world's work, but they're (mostly) still a gateway, not a copy.

Maybe we can agree they are still _mostly_ at gateway. But their ambition to answer your question through zero-clicks (i.e., show the answer right in their search results) does make them profit from direct copying. The copyright owner will not get any clicks, show any adds, or get any other kind of feedback to their work, in those cases.

Yeah, for sure, Google wants to show the answer on the results page, and for many search queries they're able to achieve this in one way or another -- either through the knowledge graph, the question-answering slop, or in the snippets of text pulled from the search results themselves. They do, at least, show links to sources in these cases, which is better than ChatGPT (or Bard, to the extent that it's used). But I agree that there's not a lot of short-term incentive for Google to cite sources in a prominent way, and there is a lot of incentive for them to develop features that replace the websites that made them valuable in the first place. There's always been an uneasy bargain between Google and webmasters, and there's always been a tension between what's best for the Google user, best for Google, and best for the Web. If there's a similar bargain with OpenAI, I don't see them approaching it with nearly as much respect: source attribution has not been prioritized in any meaningful way.

> A big difference in my view is that OpenAI doesn't meaningfully "provide access" to all the text and art and everything in the world

They do, juste look at all the art being generated that uses well known brands and characters.

> basically being already solved.

Whats the solution ?

> providing access to everybody else's copyrighted content in novel ways

This is a cartoonish interpretation of what Generative AI does. You might be coming from a good place trying to defend the "little guy" who supposedly is getting ripped off by GenAI (they aren't), but in practice you are helping copyright trolling and big rusty corporations that live off the perpetual copyright scam.

Is the NYT lawsuit cartoonish too?

How is calling out violations of the GPL license helping copyright trolling?

If someone publishes GPL licensed code on github, and OpenAI then modifies that code in some answer it provides to someone asking a coding question, then OpenAI is in violation of the GPL license if they don't also license their stuff under GPL.

Citation very much needed, in particular if you're claiming that OpenAI would need to GPL license the OpenAI code ("their stuff") in order to provide the answer (as opposed to the lesser question of whether the code in the text of that answer ought to be covered by GPL).

GPL stipulates that derivative works must be licensed under GPL.

Just because an entire industry has their entire future riding on courts eventually deciding that "Yeah, but copyright doesn't apply to AI", that doesn't make it so.

Indeed; I think there's a genuine question as to whether the output of ChatGPT is a derivative work under the law or under our feelings of what's moral.

I've read a lot of code in my career, much of it GPL. When I now write code, it's based in part on that previous code reading. I think most people agree that doesn't mean that all code that I write must be licensed under GPL. In other words, they agree it's not derivative. Even if I write a C strcpy implementation that's functionally identical to one in glibc, I think most of us agree it's not derivative, even if I've read glibc's implementation before. Or if someone asks me "how can I write strcpy in terms of memcpy and strlen?" and I answer them with code I write that's very close to glibc's implementation.

Is AI-written code fundamentally different from bio-intelligence-written code in that regard? (I think the answer is uncertain in terms of "how should it work?", not that it's clearly one way or the other.)

Notably Google is currently doing layoffs while simultaneously paying Deepmind / Brain MLEs $1-$10m counters to keep them from OpenAI https://seekingalpha.com/news/4055187-google-said-to-use-spe...

Is that bad?

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