OpenAI Grove

Isnt that a good thing? The comments here are not sponsored, nor endorsed by YC.

OpenAI had a lot of goodwill and the leadership set fire to it in exchange for money. That's how we got to this state of affairs.

Their messaging is just more drivel in a long line of corporate drivel, puffing themselves up to their investors, because that’s who their customers are first and foremost.

I’d do some self reflection and ask yourself why you need to carry water for them.

Big tech (not just AI companies) have been viewed with some degree of suspicion ever since Google's mantra of "Don't be evil" became a meme over a decade ago.

Regardless of where you stand on the concept of copyright law, it is an indisputable fact that in order for these companies to get to where they are today - they deliberately HOOVERED up terabytes of copyrighted materials without the consent or even knowledge of the original authors.

Skepticism is healthy. Cynicism is exhausting.

Thank you for posting this.

Because our views are our own and not reflective of the feelings of the company that hosts the forum?

This is true for governments, corporations, unions, and even non-profits. Large organizations, even well-intentioned ones, are "slow AI"[1]. They don't care about you as an individual, and if you don't treat everything they do and say with a healthy amount of skepticism and mistrust, they will trample all over you.

It's not that being openly hostile towards OpenAI on a message board will change their behavior. Only Slow AI can defeat other Slow AI. But it's our collective duty to at least voice our disapproval when a company behaves unethically or builds problematic technology.

I personally enjoy using LLMs. I'm a pretty heavy user of both ChatGPT and Claude, especially for augmenting web search and writing code. But I also believe building these tools was an act of enclosure of the commons at an unprecedented scale, for which LLM vendors must be punished. I believe LLMs are a risk to people who are not properly trained in how to make the best use of them.

It's possible to hold both these ideas in your head at the same time: LLMs are useful, but the organizations building them must be reined in before they cause irreparable damage to society.

[1]: https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2018/01/dude-yo...

I find this disturbing. How can someone be useful to others without an idea of what that even means? How can one provide a novel offering without even caring about it? It's an expression of missing craft and bad taste. These aspirations are reactive, not generated by something beautiful (like kindness, or optimism).

Fortunately it is not hopeless; aspiring entrepreneurs can find deeper motivation if they look for it.

(I like to give the following advice: it is easier to first be useful to others and become rich than it is to be rich and then become useful to others. This almost certainly requires sufficient empathy and care to have a hypothesis and be "post-idea".)

The thing that makes me continually have ideas is the same thing that makes me not want to dedicate my life to implementing just one of them. It would be like picking a favourite child if I were producing offspring like a queen bee.

I think there is value in the effort to develop something and frequently implementing something well is worth as much and sometimes much more than just a simple proof of concept. Someone has to build the things, It should be the people who are good at that and feel rewarded by a job done well more than a job done differently.

I do think that there isn't enough perspective of the lives that other people lead that can cause odd side-effects. Some people keep their ideas secret, or overvalue the idea because it was the one they had. This is a perspective I find hard to relate to. Most of the creative people I know are much happier someone knowing about their creations. They're like grains of sand, each one with their own details and can be evaluated many different ways. A lot of intellectual property feels like watching a man jealously protecting their grain of sand while standing on a beach.

I believe that is why the intent of things like copyright is to not protect ideas themselves. You cannot copyright an idea, and as an ideas person (a rather horrid term) that feels appropriate. The thing that you have built around the idea is the valuable thing you have contributed to the world. I think that is why items that are copyrightable are referred to as work. The value you bring comes from the from the work you did, not the idea you had, ideas just come to you (often at inconvenient times).

Mass media causes a bit of an aberration because of this. The thing that makes someone wealthy from a popular work is not proportional to the work done to produce it or even the quality of the work. Works that can be easily reproduced and distributed receive a disproportionate reward to their quality. A median quality work in many fields can receive next to no reward. The most popular works receive a masssive reward. The mechanism allowing a control of supply to provide reward for work ends up influencing a supply demand curve that gives massive rewards to a very few and very little to the majority. There is still an element of merit to the successes, the popular things are popular for a reason, some of those things really are the best. The question is would they have still been the best if everyone who worked to create stuff were rewarded more linearly to quality, would that support enough development of ability and opportunity that the pool from which the best can be selected becomes much larger.

[this might have gone off topic, but obviously my brain has things that have to come out]

Spoiler: it didn't go anywhere. The story on HN is still here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3700712

but the link is 404

https://www.ycombinator.com/noidea.html

I don't think there is any money given, except travel costs for first and last week.

I think everyone is starting to see this as a middle man problem to solve, look at ERP systems for instance when they popped up it had some growing pains as an industry. (or even early windows/microsoft 'developers, developers, developers' target audience)

I OpenAI see it will take a lot of third party devs to take what OpenAI has and run with it. So they want to build a good developer and start up network to make sure that there are a good, solid ecosystem of options corporations and people can use AI wise.

- OpenAI needs talent, and it's generally hard to find. Money will buy you smart PhDs who want to be on the conveyer belt, but not people who want to be a centre of a project of their own. This at least puts them in the orbit of OpenAI - some will fly away, some will set up something to be aquihired, some will just give up and try to join OpenAI anyway

- the amount of cash they will put into this is likely minuscule compared to their mammoth raises. It doesn't fundamentally change their funding needs

- OpenAI's biggest danger is that someone out there finds a better way to do AI. Right now they have a moat made of cash - to replicate them, you generally need a lot of hardware and cash for the electricity bill. Remember the blind panic when DeepSeek came out? So, anything they can do to stop that sprouting elsewhere is worth the money. Sprouting within OpenAI would be a nice-to-have.

Imagining one negative spin doesn’t an imagination make. Imagine harder.

Exactly what I read between the lines on this.

Isn't that how we got (and eventually lost) most Google products?

What better than companies whose central purpose is putting their API to use creatively? Rather than just waiting and hoping every F500 can implement AI improvements that aren't cut during budget crunches.

but what, exactly, makes you believe this internship program is not an idea generated by the big bag of words?

I'm highly capable of building some great things, but at my dayjob I'm filled to brim with things to do and a non-ending list of tasks in front of me.

I've built cool stuff before, and if given a little push and some support could probably come up with something useful - and I can implement much of it myself.

Put me in the room with cool people, throw out some conversation starters, shake it up and I'll come up with something.

I think I had ideas when I started. Naïve ideas, but still ideas, but I think having no idea yet is fine.

As of 19 hours into the post, this is the only comment that explains what's actually behind this sort of program.

Precursor thinking from Altman (mentions YC): https://stratechery.com/2025/an-interview-with-openai-ceo-sa...

This is how it begins. You make sure you're under the hood of everything. Everyone is "building on" you. You see all the action.

While this can be how it ends: https://techcrunch.com/2023/01/19/twitter-officially-bans-th...

But not always. For an example that ended differently, Amazon opened to third party sellers, on the side, earlier than people might remember, 1999: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/amazoncom-in-a-bazaar-move/

And how that went: https://theconversation.com/amazon-is-no-longer-a-retail-sit...

This is how you put Multivac to work, and profit.

Most will submit the app with a dime a dozen ideas. (Or, at internet scale, a dime a few hundred thousand I guess?) No need to even consider those guys.

But it will be a pyramid. There will likely be 20-30 submissions that are at once, truly novel, and "why didn't I think of that!"-type ideas.

Finally, a handful of the submissions will be groundbreaking.

Et voilá. Right there you've identified the guys and gals thinking outside the LLM box about LLMs. Or even AI in general.