ClosedAI scraped human content without asking and they explained why this was acceptable... but when the outputs of their training corpus is scraped, it is THEIR dataset and this is NOT acceptable!
Oh, the irony! :D
I shared a few screenshots of DeepSeek answering using ChatGPT's output in yesterday's article!
https://semking.com/deepseek-china-ai-model-breakthrough-sec...
Read the two following sections of my blog post:
1. "Distilled language models"
2. "DeepSeek: Less supervision"
Open source means two things in spirit:
(a) You have everything you need to be able to re-create something, and at any step of the process change it.
(b) You have broad permissions how to put the result to use.
The "open source" models from both Meta so far fail either both or one of these checks (Meta's fails both). We should resist the dilution of the term open source to the point where it means nothing useful.
That's why terms like "libre" were born to describe certain kinds of software. And that's what you're describing.
This is a debate that started, like, twenty years ago or something when we started getting big code projects that were open source but encumbered by patents so that they couldn't be redistributed, but could still be read and modified for internal use.
No, they also fail even that test. Neither Meta nor DeepSeek have released the source code of their training pipeline or anything like that. There's very little literal "source code" in any of these releases at all.
What you can get from them is the model weights, which for the purpose of this discussion, is very similar to compiler binary executable output you cannot easily reverse, which is what open source seeks to address. In the case of Meta, this comes with additional usage limitations on how you may put them to use.
As a sibling comment said, this is basically "freeware" (with asterisks) but has nothing to do with open source, either according to RMS or OSI.
> This is a debate that started, like, twenty years ago
For the record, I do appreciate the distinction. This isn't meant as an argument from authority at all, but I've been an active open source (and free software) developer for close to those 20 years, am on the board of one of the larger FOSS orgs, and most households have a few copies of FOSS code I've written running. It's also why I care! :-)
This debate is over and makes the open source community look silly. Open model and weights is, practically speaking, open source for LLMs.
I have tremendous respect for FOSS and those who build and maintain it. But arguing for open training data means only toy models can practically exist. As a result, the practical definition will prevail. And if the only people putting forward a practical definition are Meta et al, this is what you get: source available.
Completely, fully breaking the meaning of the term "open source" is causing collateral damage outside the AI topic, that's where it really hurts. The open source principle is still useful and necessary, and we need words to communicate about it and raise correct expectations and apply correct standards. As a dev you very likely don't want to live in a tech environment where we regress on this.
It's not "source available" either. There's no source. It's freeware.
"I can download it and run it" isn't open source.
I'm actually not too worried that people won't eventually re-discover the same needs that open source originally discovered, but it's pretty lame if we lose a whole bunch of time and effort to re-learn some lessons yet again.
We need to relearn because we need a different definition for LLMs. One that works in practice, not just at the peripheries.
Maybe we can have FOSS LLMs vs open-source ones, like we do with software licenses. The former refers to the hardcore definition. The latter the practical (and widely used) one.
> Maybe we can have FOSS LLMs vs open-source ones, like we do with software licenses.
Why not just call them freeware LLMs, which would be much more accurate?
There's nothing "hardcore" or "zealot" about not calling these open source LLMs because there's just ... absolutely nothing there that you call open source in any way. We don't call any other freeware "open source" for being a free download with a limited use license.
This is just "we chose a word to communicate we are different from the other guys". In games, they chose to call it "free to play (f2p)" when addressing a similar issue (but it's also not a great fit since f2p games usually have a server dependency).
Most of the public is unfamiliar with the term. And with some of the FOSS community arguing for open training data, it was easy to overrule them and take the term.
I get your overall take is "this is just how things go in language", but you can escalate that non-caring perspective all the way to entropy and the heat death of the universe, and I guess I prefer being an element that creates some structure in things, however fleeting.
I’d argue otherwise. (Familiar with, not know.) Particularly in policy circles.
> picking one that invites far more questions and needs for explanation
There wasn't ever a debate. And now, not even the OSI demands training data. (It couldn’t. It, too, would be ignored.)
The set of free/libre licenses (as defined by the FSF) is almost identical to the set of open sources licenses (as defined by the OSI).
The debate within FOSS communities has been between copyleft licenses like the GPL, and permissive licenses like the MIT licence. Both copyleft and permissive licenses are considered free/libre by the FSF, and both of them are considered open source by the OSI.
Also the training data is of a massive amount.
Additionally, what about human in the loop training, do you deliver humans as part of the source?
That's https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Source-available_software , not 'open source'. The latter was specifically coined [1] as a way to talk about "free software" (with its freedom connotations) without the price connotations:
The argument was as follows: those new to the term "free software" assume it is referring to the price. Oldtimers must then launch into an explanation, usually given as follows: "We mean free as in freedom, not free as in beer." At this point, a discussion on software has turned into one about the price of an alcoholic beverage. The problem was not that explaining the meaning is impossible—the problem was that the name for an important idea should not be so confusing to newcomers. A clearer term was needed. No political issues were raised regarding the free software term; the issue was its lack of clarity to those new to the concept.
[1] https://opensource.com/article/18/2/coining-term-open-source...
And French fries are anything that was fried in France?
But I think my argument still stands though? Users can run Deepseek locally, so unless the US Gov't wants to reach for book burning levels or idiocy, there is not really a feasible way to ban the American public of running DeepSeek, no?
It would be so much better if all models were trained with LibGen.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illegal_number
> An AACS encryption key (09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0) that came to prominence in May 2007 is an example of a number claimed to be a secret, and whose publication or inappropriate possession is claimed to be illegal in the United States.
This is a silly take for anyone in tech. Any binary sequence is a number. Any information can be, for practical purposes, rendered in binary [1].
Getting worked up about restrictions on numbers works as a meme, for the masses, because it sounds silly, but is tantamount to technically arguing against privacy, confidentiality, the concept of national secrets, IP as a whole, et cetera.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shannon%27s_source_coding_th...
Totally agree. But prompting debate or even further thought isn’t the point of the meme.
There is thought-stopping satire and thought-provoking satire. Much of it depends on the context. I’m not getting the latter from a “USA land of the ‘free’” comment.
> Any piece of digital information is representable as a number; consequently, if communicating a specific set of information is illegal in some way, then the number may be illegal as well.
That's not the same thing as a number being illegal at all. Here, watch this:
> I claim breathing is illegal in the United States
There, now breathing is claimed to be illegal in the United States.
> It depends on where you live. In many places, collecting rainwater is completely legal and even encouraged, but some regions have regulations or restrictions.
United States: Most states allow rainwater collection, but some have restrictions on how much you can collect or how it can be used. For example, Colorado has limits on the amount of rainwater homeowners can store. Australia: Generally legal and encouraged, with many homes using rainwater tanks. UK & Canada: Legal with few restrictions. India & Many Other Countries: Often encouraged due to water scarcity.
https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2023/11/01/2023-24...
>(k) The term “dual-use foundation model” means an AI model that is trained on broad data; generally uses self-supervision; contains at least tens of billions of parameters; is applicable across a wide range of contexts; and that exhibits, or could be easily modified to exhibit, high levels of performance at tasks that pose a serious risk to security, national economic security, national public health or safety, or any combination of those matters, such as by: ...
It orders the Secretary of Commerce to "solicit input from the private sector, academia, civil society, and other stakeholders through a public consultation process on potential risks, benefits, other implications, and appropriate policy and regulatory approaches related to dual-use foundation models for which the model weights are widely available".
Congress has never ceded power to anyone. They wield legislative authority and power of the purse, and wield it as they see fit. The special interests campaigning about this are extreme reactionaries whose stated purpose is to make government ineffective.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Export_of_cryptography_from_th...
Of course Joe Sixpack can throw their code up anywhere, but Joe Corporation gets wrecked if they try to sell it.
https://developer.apple.com/documentation/security/complying...
For example, this is enforced by Apple Store.
The max token output is only 8K (32K thinking tokens). O1 is 128k, which is far more useful, and it doesn’t get stuck like R1 does.
The hype around the DeepSeek release is insane and I’m starting to really doubt their numbers.
In practice I don’t think anyone can economically host the whole model plus the kv cache for the entire context size of 128k (and I’m skeptical of Deepseek’s claims now anyway).
Edit: a Kagi team member just said on Discord that they’ll be increasing max tokens next release
If an org consistently finds one model performs worse on their corpus than another, they aren't going to keep using it because it ranks higher in some set of benchmarks.
I invite anyone to post a chat transcript showing a successful run of R1 against this prompt (and please tell me which API/service it came from so I can go use it too!)
I'm talking about individuals and organizations making a decision on whether or not to use a model based on their own testing. That's what ultimately matters here.
I mean, couldn't that be because they're just overwhelmed by users at the moment?
> And the output is very bad - it mashes together the header and cpp file
That sounds way worse, and like, not something caused by being hugged to death though.
Aider recently stated DeepSeek is placed a the top of their benchmark though[1] so I'm inclined to believe it isn't all hype.
It’s just not as impressive as people make it out to be. It might be better than o1 on Python or Javascript thats all over the training data, but o1 is overwhelmingly better at anything outside the happy path.
I've also compared o1 and (online-hosted) r1 on Qt/C++ code, being a KDE Plasma dev, and my impression so far was that the output is roughly on par. I've given both models some tricky tasks about dark corners of the meta-object system in crafting classes etc. and they came up with generally the same sort of suggestions and implementations.
I do appreciate that "asking about gotchas with few definitive solutions, even if they require some perspective" and "rote day-to-day coding ops" are very different benchmarks due to how things are represented in the training data corpus, though.
My standard test is to ask the model to write a QSyntaxHighlighter subclass that uses TreeSitter to implement syntax highlighting. O1 can do it after a few iterations, but R1’s output has been a mess. That said, its thought process revealed a few issues that I then fixed in my canonical implementation.
I haven’t used their official chat interface or API for privacy reasons.
For instance Fireworks offers R1 with 164K/164K. They are far more expensive than DeepSeek though
> We will attempt to directly build safe and beneficial AGI, but will also consider our mission fulfilled if our work aids others to achieve this outcome.
> Our primary fiduciary duty is to humanity. We anticipate needing to marshal substantial resources to fulfill our mission, but will always diligently act to minimize conflicts of interest among our employees and stakeholders that could compromise broad benefit.
> We will actively cooperate with other research and policy institutions; we seek to create a global community working together to address AGI’s global challenges.
I now view any moralistic statement by any of these big tech companies as complete and total bullshit, which is probably for the best, because that is what it is. These companies now exist solely to amass power and wealth. They will still use moralistic language to try to motivate their employees, but I hope folks still see it for the complete nonsense that it is.
[1] https://semking.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/DeepSeek-1024...
[2] https://www.bestbuy.com/site/help-topics/privacy-policy/pcmc...
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/organic-growth_deepseek-the-o...
I welcome friction, so I'll be blunt: I disagree with you, not because what you are saying is wrong but because you only consider systematic data collection.
That's not the issue here.
There's a difference between democracies like the United States or European countries, no matter how IMPERFECT they are, and a dictatorship that does not allow dissenting opinions.
There's a difference in how the data collected will be used.
Freedom of speech, even when it is relative, is better than totalitarianism.
China considers industry to be completely subservient to government. Checks and balances are secondary to ideas like harmony and collective well being.
>There's a difference in how the data collected will be used.
>Freedom of speech, even when it is relative, is better than totalitarianism.
I don't disagree with "democracy is better than totalitarianism", but what does that have to do with collecting device information and IP addresses? Is that excuse a cudgel you can use against any behavior that would otherwise be innocuous? It's fine to be against deepseek because you're concerned about them getting sensitive data via queries, or even that their models be a backdoor to project chinese soft power, but hand wringing about device information and IP addresses is absurd. It makes as much sense as being concerned that the CCP/deepseek does meetings, because even though every other companies does meetings, CCP/deepseek meetings could be used for totalitarianism.
I admit I am concerned when I see blatant algorithmic manipulation of social platforms to favor any narrative that aligns with geopolitical objectives.
I also wrote about the TikTok algo a few days ago. You'll see what I think of user privacy violations (closed ecosystem + basically a keylogger in this case):
https://semking.com/likes-lies-untold-story-tiktok-algorithm...
I cannot stand when dissenting voices or opinions are shadow-banned.
And I have the same opinion regarding U.S. or EU companies.
Our privacy should be respected.
In the meantime: strong encryption at every corner, please!
I'm curious how robust this principle is for you, because China and Russia are not the first countries that come to mind when talking about the (actual, existing, documented) manipulation of US speech and media by a foreign government.
Yet it seems we can only have this discussion, ironically, when the subject is a US government-approved one like China. Anything else would be problematic and unsafe.
"We Don't See Things As They Are, We See Them As We Are"
— Samuel b. Nahmani
>Our privacy should be respected.
Characterizing device information and IP addresses as "privacy violations" is a stretch. If you showed a history railing against this sort of stuff, agnostic of geopolitical alignment, then you get a pass, but I think it's fair to assume the converse until proven otherwise.
>In the meantime: strong encryption at every corner, please!
Irrelevant. The data collection is done by first parties. Encryption doesn't do anything.
>I admit I am concerned when I see blatant algorithmic manipulation of social platforms to favor any narrative that aligns with geopolitical objectives.
>I cannot stand when dissenting voices or opinions are shadow-banned.
What does this have to do with privacy? Again, it's fine to be against "blatant algorithmic manipulation of social platforms" or whatever, but dragging seemingly unrelated topics in an attempt to amass as big pile of greviances as possible is disingenuous.
>I also wrote about the TikTok algo a few days ago. You'll see what I think of user privacy violations (closed ecosystem + basically a keylogger in this case):
>https://semking.com/likes-lies-untold-story-tiktok-algorithm...
Where's the keylogging? I skimmed the article and the only thing I could find was a passing mention about an article that you "was advised not to publish it and I didn’t". How much keylogging could possibly going on in a short video app? Is the "keylogging" just a way to make "we measure how engaged someone is with a video" as sinister as possible?
I agree: this is a characterization I never made. FYI, I also collect this type of data about you when you visit my website. That said, telemetry + totalitarianism = bad combo.
>Irrelevant. The data collection is done by first parties. Encryption doesn't do anything.
Even if data is collected by first parties, encryption is still highly relevant because it ensures that the data remains secure in transit and at rest. It does a lot.
>What does this have to do with privacy? Again, it's fine to be against "blatant algorithmic manipulation of social platforms" or whatever, but dragging seemingly unrelated topics in an attempt to amass as big pile of greviances as possible is disingenuous.
You are aggressive for no reason whatsoever. There's nothing disingenuous: when users are shadow-banned by platforms under dictatorships, they end up flagged, and their private data is often analyzed for nefarious reasons. There's a link with privacy but I'll stop at this stage if we cannot have a civilized discussion.
>Where's the keylogging? I skimmed the article and the only thing I could find was a passing mention about an article that you "was advised not to publish it and I didn’t". How much keylogging could possibly going on in a short video app? Is the "keylogging" just a way to make "we measure how engaged someone is with a video" as sinister as possible?
“TikTok iOS subscribes to every keystroke (text inputs) happening on third party websites rendered inside the TikTok app. This can include passwords, credit card information and other sensitive user data. (keypress and keydown). We can’t know what TikTok uses the subscription for, but from a technical perspective, this is the equivalent of installing a keylogger on third party websites.”
https://krausefx.com/blog/announcing-inappbrowsercom-see-wha...
Please note that this article is outdated (August 2022). Importantly, the article does not claim that any data logging or transmission is actively occurring. Instead, it highlights the potential technical capabilities of in-app browsers to inject JavaScript code, which could theoretically be used to monitor user interactions.
Not that we could ever see what the NSA, CISA, ASIS, GCHQ, and other 3/4-letter agencies are actually doing with the collected data.
But they pinky promised to use it properly (or something), so, yay.
This kind of person has a lot of cognitive dissonance going on.
Separately, I do think that now that the Chinese leadership saw this, that they have the chops to pull this off and then some, they are probably going to rein in future innovations; they'll likely demand that the big future discoveries remain closed-sourced (or even unannounced/unpublicized).
Edit: I am not defending OpenAI and we are all enjoying the irony here. But it puts into perspective some of the wilder claims circulating that DeekSeek was able to somehow complete with OpenAI for only $5M, as if on a level playing field.
Edit: Responding to your edit, Deepseek only claimed that the final training run was $5m, not that the whole process caught that (they even call this out). I think it's important to acknowledge that, even if they did get some training data from OpenAI, this is a remarkable achievement.
We don’t know that of course. OpenAI claim to have some evidence and I guess we’ll just have to wait and see how this plays out.
There’s also a substantial difference between training of the entire internet and one that very specifically targets your competitor's products (or any specific work directly).
https://scholar.google.com/citations?view_op=view_citation&h...
Basically all LLM can trace their origin back to that paper.
This was just a single example though. The whole point is that people build on the work from the past, and that this is normal.
Depends on whether they want these tools to be adopted in the wider world. Rightly or wrongly there is a lot of suspicion in the West and an open source approach builds trust.
If the allegation is true (we don't know yet), then what you've written perfectly proves the point everyone is making. ChatGPT wouldn't be here if it weren't for all the research and work that preceded it in terms of tons of scrapable content being available on the Internet, and it's not like OpenAI invented transformers either.
Nobody is accusing DeepSeek of hacking into OpenAI's systems and stealing their content. OpenAI is just saying they scraped them in an "unauthorized" manner. The hypocrisy is laughably striking, but sadly nobody has any shame anymore in this world it seems. Play me the world's tiniest violin for OpenAI.
> Separately, I do think that now that the Chinese leadership saw this, that they have the chops to pull this off and then some, they are probably going to rein in future innovations; they'll likely demand that the big future discoveries remain closed-sourced (or even unannounced/unpublicized).
How do we know that this is not already happening with OpenAI/Meta and the U.S. government at some level? The concept of power is equal, whether we wanted it or not. We don't have to pretend to be "better" all the time.
US AI folk were leading for two years by just throwing more and more compute at the same thing that Google threw them like a bone years ago (namely transformers). They made next to no innovation in any area other than how to connect more compute together. The idea of additional inference time compute, looping the network back on its own outputs, which is the only significant conceptual advancement of last years was something I, as a layman, came up with after few days of thinking why AI sucks and what can be done to make it able to tackle problems that require iterative reasoning. They announced it few weeks after I came up with the idea, so it was in the works for some time, but it shows you how basic idea it was. There was nothing else.
Suddenly when there comes a small company that introduced few actual algorithmic advancements which resulted in 100x optimization which is something expected with algorithmic optimizations, the big AI suddenly went into full "dog ate my homework" mode. Blaming everyone and everything around.
Let's not mention the fact that if full outputs of their models could enable them to train a better model at 1% cost then it puts them in even worse light that they didn't do it.
We have and apples and oranges thing here which deepseek is intentionally leaning into. They get very cheap electricity and are bragging about their cheap cost, and OpenAI etc typically brag about how expensive their training is. But it’s all pr and lies.
The cost of $5.5 million was quoted at $2/GPU-hour which is a reasonable price for on-demand H100s that anyone in the US could access, and likely on the high side given bulk pricing and that they are using nerfed versions. OpenAI might be all pr and lies but everything I've seen so far says that deepseek's claims about cost are legit.
Like the fact that US revolution was basically kickstarted by blatantly breaking the patent law (like there was this one mill specifically) , I think its a historic event. And now here we are ! The scam of national security.
To be honest. People seem to be really kind on the fall of USA. I am not that interested since the rise of China terrifies me. But the hypocrisy of USA / losing such soft power (like here I am , from random country critiquing USA based on facts , it really downplays it being a superpower) that would be the downfall of USA.
To me , the future terrifies me. In fact the present terrifies me. I think the world is running crazy or maybe its just me.
Hollywood also started by using non-regulation / non-licensed movie equipment when nobody was looking.
So, USA has all this "move fast, break things, and monopolize the new thing so hard that no one can get near" mentality since forever, and this moves in cycles.
It's now AIs turn, but it turned out that they democratized the world so hard, so everybody can act fast now.
In nature, nobody can stay at the top forever. People should understand this.
Plus of course for people within the tech bubble, plenty of research results on the value of synthetically augmented and expanded training data that put the impact past just regurgitating source data.
This whole episode is a failure of reporting what to expect next and projecting running costs etc. most of all.
Sorry for the Short: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/M0QyOp7zqcY
Well, I guess they really helped make this a reality!
And then where DeepSeek steal from next? Do they steal from themselves? Do they steal the stolen models they stole from the stolen data?
The AI Ponzi scheme...
It reminds me of 1984 in a sense. "Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it."
Unlike 1984 I don't see this winnowing of new concepts as purposeful, but on the other hand I keep asking myself how we can be so stupid as to keep doing it.
1. scraping the internet and making AI out of it
2. using the AI from #1 to create another AI
are not the same thing.
#2 makes a big corp a bit angry
Indeed not the same thing
You’re right. The second one is far more ethical. Especially when stealing from a thief.
Doesn’t Sam Altman keep parroting they’re developing AI “for the good of humanity”? Well then, someone taking their model and improving on it, making it open-source, having it consume less, and having a cheaper API, should make him delighted. Unless he *gasp* was full of shit the whole time. Who could have guessed?
“I don't want to live in a world where someone else makes the world a better place better than we do”
- Gavin Belson
So, if you really really care about ToS, then just never enter into a contract with OpenAI. Company A uses OpenAI to generate data and posts it on the open Internet. Company B scrapes open Internet, including the data from Company A [2].
[1]: Ownership of content. As between you and OpenAI, and to the extent permitted by applicable law, you (a) retain your ownership rights in Input and (b) own the Output. We hereby assign to you all our right, title, and interest, if any, in and to Output.
[2]: This is not hypothetical. When ChatGPT got first released, several big AI labs accidentally and not so accidentally trained on the contents of the ShareGPT website (site that was made for sharing ChatGPT outputs). ;)
2. scraping the AI from #1 and making AI out of it
But arguably these actions share enough characteristics that it’s reasonable to place them in the same category. Something like: “products that exist largely/solely because of the work of other people”. The nonconsensual nature of this and the lack of compensation is what people understandably take issue with.
There is enough similarity that it evokes specific feelings about OpenAI when they suddenly find themselves on the other side of the situation.
It's funny if OpenAI were to complain about this, but at least on Twitter I don't see that much whining about it from OpenAI employees. Sam publicly praised DeepSeek.
I do see some of them spreading the "they're hiding GPUs they got through sanction evasion" theory, which is disappointing, though.
#2 is taking advantages from closedAI.
they are indeed different
The best part is "their IP" was humanity's scraped content and they are angry that DeepSeek did their job for them and gave it away for free.
OpenAI is mad about d2 (not d1). I'm not sure using public data is "stealing". In summary, these are two different things & need to be separate.
It is unclear if someone breaking someone else's copyright to use A can claim copyright on a work B, derived from A. My point is that OpenAI played loose with the copyright rules to build its various models, so the legality of their claims against DeepSeek might not be so strong.
OpenAI asserts 1. d2 was used by DeepSeek 2. All d2 belongs to OpenAI exclusively
Both are debatable for large number of reasons.
I wonder if this is going to come to an end through a combination of social media fatigue, social media fragmentation, and open source LLMs just giving it all back to us for free. LLMs are analogous to a "JPEG for ideas" so they're just lossy compression blobs of human thought expressed through language.
It cannot die soon enough
They scraped literally all the content of the internet without permissions. And I won't even be surprised if they scraped the output of other LLMs as well.
https://blog.samaltman.com/trump
https://www.reddit.com/r/YAPms/comments/1i7ry5m/sam_altman_g...
Only a truly talented piece of shit can be as prolific as this.
"He is irresponsible in the way dictators are."
Chef's kiss.
Edit:
Kids, don't aspire to be like Altman. We as a community need to espouse more values than tech is gonna tech.
And don’t aspire to be like those who saw what he is but made peace with it in exchange for silver.
I could understand that from someone with an empty stomach. But so many people doing it when their pockets are already overflowing is exactly the kind of rot that degrades an entire society.
We're all just seeing the results so much better now that they can't even be bothered to pretend they ever more than this.
Later edit: The way this submission fell ~400th spots after just two hours despite having 1250 points and 550 comments, had its comments flagged and shuffled around to different submissions as soon as they touched too close to YC&Co is a good mirror of how today's society works.
Aspire to be like Aaron Schwartz.
edit: It appears I'm wrong. Will someone correct me on what he did?
Again, I'm not offering an opinion on it.
So, the argument goes that despite its intention, OpenAI has been one of the largest drivers of innovation in an emerging technology.
He didn't do it without authorization.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Swartz
> Visitors to MIT's "open campus" were authorized to access JSTOR through its network.
For which MIT can certainly have a) locked the door and b) trespassed him, but that's a very different issue than having authorization to access JSTOR.
Striving for good isn’t gonna be fun all the time, but when choosing role models I like to factor in how happy they seem. I’d like to spend some time happy.
(Since we are dreaming, can I add sane hours for medical doctors (like <= 8 per day)?)
And then later they go to the school to teach our future, working with high stress and low salary.
Same with medical school in many countries where healthcare is not privatized. Insane hours, huge responsibilities and poor pay for doctors and nurses in many countries.
Nowadays everyone wants to be an influencer or software developer.
And nurses - they work at minimal salary in Poland. Even in USA if you count hourly rates it will be quite poor salary for nurses.
But yes.
Kind of a cliche, but aspire to be the best version yourself every day. Learn from the successes and failures of others, but don't aspire to be anyone else because eventually you'll be very disappointed.
He was lovely. And a genius. Maybe he changed, but he was a truly nice person.
But survive. This too will pass.
The reason the flip flops are so laughable to me is because they attempt to couch them in some noble, moralistic viewpoint, instead of the obvious reason "We own big companies, the government has extreme power to make or break these companies, and everyone knows kissing up to Trump is what is required to be on his good side."
Profiles in Cowardice, every last one of them.
> After years of pretending to be Democrats, Big Tech leaders are now pretending to be Republicans, in hopes of currying favor with the new administration. Beware of the scummy monopoly campaign to vilify competition law as they rip off consumers and crush competitors.
This is exactly what OpenAI is trying to do with these allegations.
There is a fine line between cowardice and common sense.
The richest man in the world has a government office down the street from the white house, which the taxpayers are funding. He's rumored to sleep there.
What do you think?
For a contrast to the Bezos, Zuckerberg and Altman types, look at Tim Cook. Sure, Apple paid the 1 million inauguration "donation", and Cook was at the inauguration, and I'm not arguing he's winning any "Profiles in Courage" awards, but he didn't come out with lots of tweets claiming how massuh Trump is so wise and awesome, Apple didn't do a 180 on their previous policies, etc.
A community only espouses good values when it punishes bad behavior. How do we do this when those misbehaving are very rich, and attempting to punish the misbehavior has negative consequences on you? There just aren't many available tools that don't require significant sacrifices.
This is the "beauty" of the free market ideology (see e.g. https://a16z.com/the-techno-optimist-manifesto/ ). If all the transactions are voluntary, there is no way to punish anyone.
This is obviously untrue at face value. See: Cancel Culture, Bud Light, and Freedom Fries for examples.
Did you mean something more than what you stated here?
The first link is from mid-2016. The second link is from January 2025.
It is entirely reasonable for someone to genuinely change his or her views of a person over the course of 8.5 years. That is a substantial length of time in a person’s life.
To me a “flip-flop” is when one changes views on something in a very short amount of time.
That's the thing though right, that we all created this mess together. Like yeah, why don't you (and the rest of us) blame him?. We're all pretty warped and it's going to take collective rehab.
Super pretentious to quote MLK, but the man had stuff to say so here it is (on Inaction):
"He who passively accepts evil is as much involved in it as he who helps to perpetrate it"
"The ultimate tragedy is not the oppression and cruelty by the bad people but the silence over that by the good people"
Yes, the first mistake was a business leader in tech taking a public political position. It was popular and accepted (if not expected) in the valley in 2016.
Doing that then (and banking the social and reputational proceeds) created the problem of dissonance now. If he'd just stayed neutral in public in 2016, he could do what he's doing now and we could assume he's just being a pragmatic business person lobbying the government to further his company's interests.
I have a lot of respect for CEOs who just focus on being a good CEO. It's a hard enough job as is. I don't care about or want to know some CEO's personal position on politics, religion or sports teams. It's all a distraction from the job at hand. Same goes for actors, athletes and singers. They aren't qualified to have an opinion any more relevant than anyone else's, except on acting, athletics, singing - or CEO-ing.
Sadly, my perspective is in the minority. Which is why I think so many public figures keep making this mistake. The media, pundits and social sphere need them to keep making this mistake.
Also it helps to have sincere political views. GitHub's CEO at the time of #DropICE was too cynical and his image suffered because of it.
There are no neutral positions in today's political landscape. I'm not stating my opinion here, this is according to most political positions on the spectrum. You suggested "Progressive" (but without hot button issues) as a way of signaling a neutral position. That may be true in parts of the valley tech sphere but it certainly doesn't hold in the rest of the U.S. "Progressive" is usually defined being to the left of "Liberal", so it's hardly neutral. Over half of U.S. voters cast their ballot for the Republican candidate. Almost all those people interpret anyone identifying themselves as "Liberal" as definitely partisan (and negative, of course). Most of them see "Progressive" as even worse, slipping dangerously toward "Socialist". And the same holds true for the term "Conservative" on the other side of the spectrum, of course.
No, identifying as "Progressive" wouldn't distance you from political connotations and culture warring, it's leaping into the maelstrom yelling "Yipee-Ki-Yay!" You may want to update your priors regarding how the broad populace perceives political labels. With voters divided almost exactly in half regarding politics and cultural war issues and a large percentage on both sides having "Strong" or "Very Strong" feelings, stating any position will be seen as strongly negative by tens of millions of people. If you're a CEO (or actor, athlete, singer, etc) who relies on appealing to a broad audience, when it comes to publicly discussing politics (or religion), the downsides can be large and long-lasting but the upsides are small and fleeting. As was said in the movie "WarGames", the only winning move is not playing.
In 2016: Sam alluded to Trump's rise as not dissimilar to Hitler's. He said that Trump's ideas on how to fix things are so far off the mark that they are dangerous. He even quoted the famous: "The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing."
In 2025: "I'm not going to agree with him on everything, but I think he will be incredible for the country"
This is quite obviously someone who is pandering for their own benefit.
While most of the things affected are highly political situations, i.e. Trump's ideas or Biden's fitness. We also seem to have thrown out things that we used to consider cornerstones of liberal democracy i.e. our ideas regarding free speech and censorship, where we claim that it's not happening because it is a private company.
- Sam Altman - 2016
- Sam Altman - 2017
- Sam Altman - 2017
- Sam Altman - 2017 ( On his criticism of Trump )
- Sam Altman - 2020One of my most contrarian positions is I still like and support Altman, despite most of the internet now hating him almost as much as they (justifiably) hate Elon. Was a fan of Sam pre-YC presidency and still am now.
(I also am a big fan of DeepSeek and its CEO.)
Tesla accelerated us forward into the electric car age. SpaceX revolutionized launches.
OpenAI added some real startup oomph to the AI arms race which was dominated by megacorps with entrenched products that they would have disrupted only slowly.
So these guys are doing useful things, however you feel about their other conduct. Personally I find the gross political flip-flops hard to stomach.
I don't support the mafia, but I sympathize with the local store that pays the mafia its racket dues to avoid being ransacked.
Society will always have crazy sociopaths destroying things for their own gain, and now is Altman's turn.
I think DeepSeek’s strategy to announce a misleading low cost (just the final training run that optimizes a base model that in turn is possibly based on OpenAI) is also purposeful. After all, High Flyer, the parent company of DeepSeek, is a hedge fund - and I bet they took out big short positions on Nvidia before their recent announcements. The Chinese government, of course, benefits from a misleading number being announced broadly, causing doubt among investors who would otherwise continue to prop up American technology startups. Not to mention the big fall in American markets as a result.
I do think there’s also a big difference between scraping the Internet for training data, which might just be fair use, and training off other LLMs or obtaining their assets in some other way. The latter feels like the kind of copying and industrial espionage that used to get China ridiculed in the 2000s and 2010s. Note that DeepSeek has never detailed their training data, even at a high level. This is true even in their previous papers, where they were very vague about the pre training process, which feels suspicious.
Good for them! I hope this teaches Wall Street to not freak out about an unverified announcement.
Wall Street lost billions, and I hope they learned their lesson and next time will not crash the market when unverified news comes out.
Being a citizen of a western nation, I'm inclined to agree with the general sentiment here, but how can you definitively say this? You, or I, don't know with any certainty what interference the US government has played with domestic LLMs, or what lies they have fabricated and cultivated, that are now part of those LLMs' collective knowledge. We can see the perceived censorship with deepseek more clearly, but that isn't evidence that we're in any safer territory.
There are loads of examples on the internet of LLMs pushing (foreign) government narratives e.g. on Israel-Palestine.
Just because you might agree with the propaganda doesn't make it any less problematic.
There isn’t even a single example of that. If an LLM is taking a certain position because it has learned from articles on that topic, that’s different from it being manipulated on purpose to answer differently on that topic. You’re confusing an LLM simply reflecting the complexity out there in the world on some topics (showing up in training data), with government forced censorship and propaganda in DeepSeek.
The two aren’t the same, not even remotely close.
That's far more dystopian than a post-hoc "guardrailed" model (that you can run locally without guardrails).
Is corporate misinformation so much better? Recall about Tienanmen Square might be more honest but if LLMs had been available over the past 50 years, I would expect many popular models would have cheerfully told us company towns are a great place to live, cigarettes are healthy, industrial pollution has no impact on your health, and anthropogenic climate change isn't real.
Especially after the recent behaviour of Meta, Twitter, and Amazon in open support of Trump and Republican interests, I'll be shocked if we don't start seeing that reflected in their LLMs over the next few years.
These arguments always remind me of the arguments against Huawei because they _might_ be spying on western countries. On the other hand we had the US government working hand in hand with US corporations in proven spying operations against western allies for political and economic gain. So why should we choose an American supplier over a Chinese one?
> I think DeepSeek’s strategy to announce a misleading low cost (just the final training run that optimizes a base model that in turn is possibly based on OpenAI) is also purposeful. After all, High Flyer, the parent company of DeepSeek, is a hedge fund - and I bet they took out big short positions on Nvidia before their recent announcements. The Chinese government, of course, benefits from a misleading number being announced broadly, causing doubt among investors who would otherwise continue to prop up American technology startups. Not to mention the big fall in American markets as a result.
Why should I care about the stock value of US corporations?
> I do think there’s also a big difference between scraping the Internet for training data, which might just be fair use, and training off other LLMs or obtaining their assets in some other way.
So if training of copyrighted work scrapped of the Internet is fair use, how would the training of the LLMs not be fair use as well? You can't have it both ways.
Their failure is important at a minimum to the future of the United States if not the world.
You may not owe altmen better, but you owe this community better if you're participating in it.
I find your behavior repulsive and fervently wish you would quit.
It's not a borderline call—I'd post exactly the same thing regardless of who or what such a comment was about.
Not even close.
This guy is actively ruining society while enriching himself in the process, but we somehow can't call a spade a spade?
Pathetic.
HN's stated mandate is intellectual curiosity (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html, https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...).
Do you feel that your comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42866108 was curious (in that sense)? or was it rather that you feel something else is more important?
I had literally come to this post to say the same. You beat me to it.
USA is going crazy over deepseek and to me , it just shows that the world is a black swan , an AI bubble.
I am not saying AI has no use. I regularly use it to create something , but its just not recommended. I am going to stop using AI , to grow my mind.
And its definitely way overpriced. People are investing so much money without seeing the returns? , and I think people are also using AI because of a sense of FOMO , I don't know , to me its funny .
I really really want to create a index fund with strictly no AI companies. Since this doesn't feel diversified enough. Like sure nvidia gave a quarter of return the last year , but I mean , at this point , it almost feels the same as that of bitcoin. The reason I don't / won't invest in bitcoin is I don't want "that" risk.
This has been a boggling year.
I have realized that the world is crazy. Truly. Trump winning from going to the point of getting shot to deepseek causing nvidia / american stock market to go down , heck even bitcoin! , its so crazy , trump launching his meme coin. If the world is crazy. Just be the sane person around. You will stick around , that's my philosophy. I won't jump on AI wandwagon . But its still absolutely wild & horror seeing how a "sideproject" (deepseek) absolutely put american stock market in shambles.
I want more diversifaction. I am not satisfied with the current system. This feels like a bubble and I want no part in it.