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Comment by stale2002 | Hacker News Reader

stale2002

Well RIP Stability AI.

I love their models and I love how they have changed the entire open source AI ecosystem for the better, but the writing was always on the wall for them given how unprofitable they are.

I don't think much of the AI startup scene or socials groups like e/acc would have existed if it weren't for the tech that they just gave away for free.

Its interesting how Stability AI and their VC funding have done a much better job of acting effectively as a non-profit charity (because they don't have profits. lol) to speed up AI development and open source their results as compared to other companies that were supposed to have been doing that from the beginning.

They really were the true ActuallyOpenAI.

Related to this, if you are an aspiring person who wants to improve the world, tricking a bunch of VC investors to fund your tech and then giving away the results to everyone free of charge is the single best way to do it.

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Huggingface are also the real actual openAI

How? What models have they put out that are relevant?

Zephyr: https://huggingface.co/HuggingFaceH4/zephyr-7b-beta

Their platform for easy distribution and management of models has sped up the ecosystem more so.

> socials groups like e/acc

Good riddance.

Hey, let me know when the doomers have built anything that has mattered because they choose to, and not because they are forced to my market forces.

At least the open source AI people have code that you can use, freely without restriction.

The doomers, on the other hand, don't do anything but try and fail to prevent other people from releasing useful stuff.

But, in some sense I should be thanking the doomers because I rather that people with such incompetence were the enemy as opposed to people who might have a chance of succeeding.

Not being e/acc doesn’t make one a doomer. It means being someone with a healthy relationship with technological progress, who hasn’t given up on the prospect of useful regulation where it’s helpful.

The US is great but the best AI researchers aren’t gonna want to live here if it becomes a hyper libertarian hellscape. They want to raise a family without their kids being exploited by technologies in ways that e/accs tell us we should just accept. It’s not sustainable.

> if it becomes a hyper libertarian hellscape.

Releasing cool open source AI tech doesn't turn the world into a libertarian hellscape.

You are taking the memes way too seriously.

Mostly people just joke around on twitter while are also building tech startups. e/acc isn't overthrowing the government.

>You are taking the memes way too seriously.

Exactly. There are two groups of people: ones that defend Effective Accelerationism online with a straight face, and ones that take memes too seriously

You may want to read Marc Andreessen’s manifesto. E/acc isn’t just about “releasing cool AI tech”.

It means unrestricted technological progress. Unrestricted, including from annoying things like consumer protection, environmental concerns, or even national security.

If e/acc was just about making cool open source stuff and posting memes on the Internet, you wouldn’t need a new term for it, that’s what people have been doing for the past 30 years.

Ok, thats nice and all. But the actual results of all of this is memes and people making cool startups.

Regardless of whether a couple people who are taking their own jokes too seriously truly believe that they are going to, I don't know, create magic AGI, the fact remains that the actual measurable results of all this is only:

1: funny memes

2: cool AI startups

Anything other than that is made up stuff in either your head, or the heads of people who just want to pump up the valuation of their startups.

> Marc Andreessen’s manifesto

Yes, I'm sure he says a lot of things that will convince people to invest in companies that he also invests in. It is an effective marketing tactic. I'm sure he has convinced other VCs to invest in his companies because of these marketing slogans.

But regardless of what a couple people say to hype up their startup investments, that is unrelated to the actual real world outcomes of all of this.

> you wouldn’t need a new term for it

The fact that me and you are talking about it, actually proves that yes some marketing terms both make a difference and also don't result in, I don't know, the government being overthrown and replaced by libertarian VCs or whatever nonsense that people are worried about.

If Marc writes something it doesn’t become the definition of e/acc. Marc is hyperbolic and he gets a lot of clicks and eyeballs. As a VC though, he does it for his interest.

E/acc has many interpretations. In the most basic sense it means “technology accelerates growth”. One should work on better technology and making it widely distributed. Instead of giving away money, one can have the biggest impact on humanity with e/acc.

we’ve been effectively accelerating for the past 200 years.

Nothing hyper libertarian there.

"Let me know when the people who think AI will destroy the world actually build cool AI toys for me to play with."

Yeah uh.

Are you aware of smth called criminal code? This is one of the worst advices I've ever seen. Tricking people to obtain money? How's this not fraud?

> This is one of the worst advices I've ever seen.

Really? Because stability AI caused a very large amount of good in the world.

It arguably kicked off the entire AI startup industry.

> Tricking people to obtain money? How's this not fraud?

Its not fraud because you don't have to lie to anyone. You can tell VCs exactly what you plan on doing. Which is to open source all of your code... and... uhhh... yeah that will totally make the company valuable.

There are lots of ways of making sales pitches about open source, or similar, that will absolutely pass regulatory scrutiny and are "honest", and yet still have no hope of commercial success and also provide a huge amount of value to the public. Like what stability AI did.

The crux is that I doubt they intended this.

A company that sets out to obtain VC money and blow it all on open source software without turning a profit, is going to leave behind smoking guns. Those will turn up in discovery and make one's life rather difficult.

> The crux is that I doubt they intended this.

Sure they did. They have been open from the start that they were releasing everything open source. They have been very up front about that!

> is going to leave behind smoking guns. Those will turn up in discover

No it won't, and it didn't. The VCs all hopped on board onto a very transparent open source giveaway. Good on them! Nobody lied to anyone about their open source plans.

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