Hacker News Reader

Comment by machdiamonds | Hacker News Reader

Not sure why people on HN can't understand that companies actually need to make money to survive.

Sure, I understand people need to make money, but I draw the line at false or misleading advertising. They had open weights models in their page title man, I hold companies to higher standards than this. Also, I am not convinced open models would have precluded them from making money. There is nothing I've seen which says an open weights company cannot work. They may not become the first kajillionaire company in the world, but they can still make money.

I won’t eat at that restaurant anymore because the chef no longer publishes cookbooks. Oh, you say he will tell me the recipe as long as I agree not to use it to open a restaurant across the street? Well, f** him that’s not good enough. He built his career learning recipes from cookbooks who learned recipes from other cookbooks. He owes it to me to publish his recipes and let me do what I want with them.

The chef made his entire reputation by publishing cookbooks, and practically overnight pivoted from loudly proclaiming how important it was to share recipes to refusing to share anything and telling people to just eat at his restaurant.

Where this analogy falls flat, is the fact that I can take the "food", the model, and copy it an infinite amount of times, and use it to open my own, competing restaurant, who's food is as delicious as the original chef's. It'll differ some in presentation, but it's still gonna be a really really good cut of high end steak that was heated just right and melts in your mouth in all the right ways, without me having to put in any of the work it took to get there, which means my overhead is way lower. Suddenly, this chef has to compete with my fast food knock-off of their Michelin star restaurant. Some people like paying $400 for a meal for the experience, but it turns out more people just wanna be fed and are cheap, and can't or don't want to pay for the Michelin dining experience when the food is of equal quality in this tortured analogy. No one goes to the original chef's restaurant, and they go out of business.

The original chef probably shouldn't have told everyone their recipes were always gonna be available to the world for free in the first place, but we were all young and dumb and idealistic and didn't think things through at some point in our lives.

> The original chef probably shouldn't have told everyone their recipes were always gonna be available to the world for free in the first place, but we were all young and dumb and idealistic and didn't think things through at some point in our lives.

And if a person had a bunch of money/funding in their youth and made extravagant promises that they later reneged on because "oopsie actually I can't afford to do what I said I would", then they would be viewed as untrustworthy and we would expect them to be abandoned by the crowd that was hanging around them in the good times. And when it's not a person but a corporation, I see no reason to be at all sympathetic.

What do we think of the "friends" that hang around during the good times, and then abandon you when you're down?

But like you pointed out, it's a corporation and it's just business. If their next model is better but isn't made available, companies will still build an AI product on top of their model and give them money for a license or API access.

> What do we think of the "friends" that hang around during the good times, and then abandon you when you're down?

I deliberately didn't use the word "friends"; I'm well aware that neither the users nor the corporation really care about each other in this situation. That doesn't mean that you can go back on your entire claim to fame without consequence. And it's not that the company is "down" in some "did nothing wrong but suffered problems" sense; this situation is entirely of their own making.

> But like you pointed out, it's a corporation and it's just business. If their next model is better but isn't made available, companies will still build an AI product on top of their model and give them money for a license or API access.

Well... on the one hand, yes; just business. On the other, a sensible company wouldn't build it per-se on their API (especially now that they've shown how happy they are to change little things like "core values" and "entire business model"), they would build on a standardized API (probably OpenAI; that seems to be where the ecosystem is right now) and then... well, if this company happens to be competitive then good for them. But when they aren't, as you say, it's just business.

A systemic problem is still a problem.

I think people are disappointed that some of the huge amounts of tax they pay don't go towards keeping some of this world changing tech open.

OpenAI became closed, same with Mistral - why don't EU, Mozilla, or whatever org make it so some of this tech remains in the open? We can apparently send trillions towards war and the all encompassing corruption surrounding that but are never agile in any other context where money is not getting siphoned off to some complex, i wonder why.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com