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My honest question, isn't simonw one of those people? It feels that way to me

You mean having a financial stake?

Not really. I have a set of disclosures on my blog here: https://simonwillison.net/about/#disclosures

I'm beginning to pick up a few more consulting opportunities based on my writing and my revenue from GitHub sponsors is healthy, but I'm not particularly financially invested in the success of AI as a product category.

Thanks for the link. I see that you get credits and access to embargod releases. So I understand that's not financial stake, but seems enough of an incentive to say positive things about those services, doesn't it? Not that it matters to me, and I might be wrong, but to an outsider it might seem so

Yeah it is, that's why I disclose this stuff.

The counter-incentive here is that my reputation and credibility is more valuable to me than early access to models.

This very post is an example of me taking a risk of annoying a company that I cover. I'm exposing the existence of the ChatGPT skills mechanism here (which I found out about from a tip on Twitter - it's not something I got given early access to via an NDA).

It's very possible OpenAI didn't want that story out there yet and aren't happy that it's sat at the top of Hacker News right now.

Of course he is

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