Some folks are in for a very rude awakening.
AI itself, the technology, isn't a scam
but the promotion of it certainly reeks of a pyramid scheme / scam
and the promises are pretty scammy in that they may be true at some point in time, but not today (one could say Tesla's FSD which some users paid for years ago, was/is a scam)
and there is one thing that is incontestable: AI, as wielded by large companies today, is a highly destructive force. you might be fine with that (one must tear down to rebuild approach), but many many other people are not.
They might be useful for some things in some situations and they are here to stay… for now. They won’t be the future though.
You think the Frontier lab revenue reports are faked? [1]
[1]: https://cryptobriefing.com/anthropic-revenue-surge-10-billio...
AI can invoke existential dread for writers, educators, and artists just as much as for software developers and engineers, although on perhaps a more delayed schedule.
I think public sentiment among journalists will eventually catch up with the pros and cons of AI in a nuanced way, but it's a bit harder to appreciate how impactful it already is if you're not using it to write software every day.
This is a point made by Andrej Karpathy.
In the short run, because Anthropic and other providers are heavily subsidizing coding agents to maximize user base. Will your employer still benefit and be satisfied in a couple of years when Anthropic jacks up the price by 5x and dumbs down Opus to the point where 50% of changes are easier to do manually than via an agent?
AI has real benefits, that are game-changing in some areas, even if AI never improve from their current capabilities.
People are claiming (whether they truly believe it or not) that AI has incredible capabilities and benefits that they don't currently have, and may never have.
There's plenty of scamming going on. The fact that AI has real game-changing capabilities just makes the scams harder to detect. People tend to like to see things as more black-and-white than they actually are, and scammers take advantage of that.
If you want an analogy, look at the history of the early railroads. Full of hype, bullshitters, scammy investments, robber-barons, unrealistic promises, and with their own legion of naysayers at the time. Yet the core technology worked and it did transform the world in the end.
One of my friends somehow convinced me to visit his friend who had a small startup that needed people.
...and it was in the extra bedroom of someone's dingy apartment. A bunch of folks were working on not-very-remarkable nonsense.
and the guy running the apartmen^h^h^h^h show said something to the effect of there's so much nonsense getting funded, why shouldn't I get in on it.
It was kind of depressing, I didn't get involved, got out quickly.
It's not that the dot com thing was a scam, it was that hype got money flooding into the market.
For every amazon or google or yahoo there were 1000 dumpster fires burning piles of cash.
Oh…you’re another “founder” at an “AI company”. One with a dead website on a Somalian TLD. Got it.
Who is "them"
Is it "AI" that the literati are trying to "expose" or is it certain individuals
"Some of the best models are Chinese and Open-source and so-so good and Sam Altman is wholly irrelevant ot them."
Made with a small fraction of the budget available to Altman
But is this article about "AI" models. Or is it about Altman
"Some folks are in for a very rude awakening."
Who are the folks and what is the awakening
Is it "AI" investors
Once Altman starts taking the public's money, then it is possible he could end up like Holmes or SBF
If that happens, journalists ("literati") will publish stories about it, these stories will be submitted to HN and HN commenters ("??????") will complain
Frankly, I don't particularly care much for the moral panic around capitalism. Capitalism has it's downsides for sure, but it's the system our society has chosen to motivate people, and it seems to work okay for many things. Does it matter if the AI model that solves your diagnosis, creates a life saving drug or solves an Erdös problem is made by a corporation or not? It bothers me none, progress is progress. As long as the authors of Textbooks everywhere wouldn't have otherwise invented LLMs a decade ago if they only had been given a little bit more money, then I'd say the money is going to the right place.
China and EU are somewhat doing the right thing though. Not at the scope yet.
My point about "moral panic" is that it leads to statements like "giving back nothing"... which are objectively untrue. They might not reward every person that contributed to the tokens they are training on, but doing so is extremely practically difficult, and hard to do fairly, and is also probably a waste of limited resources in terms of net human progress. All these companies are doing is exactly what society has set up as the capitalist methodology to get work done: gather investors, pay people, sell products, etc... As opposed for example to the communist party deciding that the state should fund your project, or to fight for a research grant, or some other methodology, which might or might not work as well.
The only curious part about capitalism is that some individuals get a disproportionate amount of the reward for work done. At a societal level, this is essentially a soft power redistribution system, but often also leads to obnoxious individuals with supercar collections. Whether this is an overall good or bad thing for human progress is really, really hard to say for sure. However, it has a tendency to promote a lizardbrain response evolved to promote resource sharing in tribal societies, which was the best overall strategy in that setting. Or in other words, it makes people jealous.
Let's start with the fact that payroll and subscription tier can't be "giving back". That's just running a business. Whisper was a fig leaf when it was an open-everything era. Where are frontier weights now? Anthropic's papers describe how they did it, not who they did it to. That methods section isn't a royalty check for millions of people whose work is baked into those weights.
"Too hard to compensate fairly" is demonstrably false. If ASCAP figured out fractional royalties with paper ledgers, so can high tech. It's not _hard_, it's expensive which is _the actual reason_, but it's dressed up as logistics.
"Lizardbrain jealousy" bit is reducing critique to tribal envy and that's a move in the debate when your on the positive side of the curve and you'd prefer the conversation to end there. It's stupid, come on.
What I wanted to contrast it with is the non-capitalist version you kind of waived off. Publicly funded research, open initiatives, public private partnerships.. that's literally how we got transistor, the internet, GPS, mRNA, hell even math underneath the transformer. Capitalist layer didn't invent any of that, it wrapped subscription around it. The actual productive parts of the stack came from exactly the model you're mocking. OTOH, credit where it's due for Google's research arm that actually contributed back at the foundational level. An exception to the rule, if anything.
And I just want to be absolutely clear on one thing, I am in no way shape or form mocking science. I am part of academia, and I see science as the one most valuable thing humanity is doing. And I am not convinced at all that the capitalist way things are organized are the best overall, but this is mostly because it incentivises locking down knowledge behind intellectual property. Personally, I am for radical openness of knowledge, with no pay walls, and that the reward structures for producing knowledge should be separate from how that knowledge is being used. Even the publication system is too greed-based in my opinion, if it was up to me, every lab would live stream their work and publish every thought and idea as it happens (with the possible exception of biosecurity adjacent stuff), and 10-20% of taxes going to science would be international law.
This issue is not what I was discussing, what I perceived us to be discussing was whether or not Jonas Salk should have been pissed at the pharmaceutical companies profiting of his vaccine. As it happened, Jonas Salk was charitable, and believed in the openness of science, and understood the fact that someone actually had to produce and distribute the polio vaccine, and that this costs money. And as it happened, society had given this mandate to private companies, that operate with profit margins. And if him insisting on having a cut, if doing so would result in even a single additional person dying that wouldn't have otherwise, which it probably would have, then he didn't insist. Also he was too busy doing science, he even commented later that his fame was partially an unwelcome distraction from that.
To me, this is the ideal of a scientist. Someone who knows they stand on the shoulders of giants, and doesn't fret about the fact that the people who are standing on his are closer to the sun. The difference between Jonas Salk and everyone complaining about not being rewarded for training tokens, is that Jonas Salk made the choice to not patent his invention, and here the labs made the choice for everyone else. Jonas Salk and many others are charitable, but not everyone is, hence the complaining. But if everyone is forced to be Salk against their will, is that really so bad?
I see the LLM labs as the pharmaceutical companies, occupying a societal mandate to actually produce, and all the perils that come with it. But "giving back" is not part of that mandate, and unfortunate as that might be, that is not their fault. They are tasked with production, competition and progress, and that is already so expensive that they are struggling to meet demand.
And, you know, if redistribution truly is as easy as you say, at this thought my brain also produces a tinkle of anger at the injustice of it. And if I look for somewhere to direct that anger, I even have a name and a face! Look at Sam Altman, that smug supercar driving bastard, profiting of the hard work of Stackoverflow commenters everywhere. Eat him! Like, not in a gay way, but like in eat the rich! Out with the guillotines!
To me, that's my lizardbrain talking. The reality of our more complex non-tribal society is that the corporate structures we have created were not tasked with distributing rewards fairly, they were tasked with competing no matter the cost. And so successful companies do that, because the ones that don't disappear.
And like it or not, this methodology seems to work, on the whole. Even though it also offends my scientist sensibilities, it turns out that humans are greedy, and so incorporating that impulse into a structure that is limited to soft power is a good idea (unlike classic communism, where the same powers that produced products could also kill you). And it's not Sams fault that this is how it is. "Just running a business" is the reward structure society has created, and it's not part of Sam's job description to break that mold and start rewarding people he doesn't have to. In fact it might even be illegal for him to do so if it doesn't reward investors somehow also (like PR-wise).
And the overall fact is that the labs are doing what they need to do in order to produce something entirely new, that no one was even sure would be useful before they created it. And they are the representatives of the capitalist way of doing things, and if a publicly funded LLM undercuts them, that is fine. But maybe you do actually need a trillion dollars to make useful LLMs. Overall it's a good thing that someone is at least trying with funds, because there was no one lining up to buy 200k H100 for even the most prestigious of publicly funded academic institution, and certainly not for sending a check to all authors on arXiv.
And so overall, capitalism seems to me to be doing a fine job, and I pay my subscription fee gladly. And when my lizardbrain provides it's hateful opinion, I think of Jonas Salk, and it doesn't seem so bad after all.
that doesn't sound nearly as bad as you think it does; I don't see how ethics are relevant here either, unless oil is also somehow a scam
regardless, one must be delusional to deny the fact that it's useful tech
"but they're evil" is not an argument
Is this denial in the room with us now?
I remember when IP laws were looked at like a form of oppression in the tech community...
This is not true. Otherwise, why is open source licensing so popular? Have you simply never read those licenses?
Attribution from an LLMs output is nearly as infeasible as attribution of where I learned the words I'm using to talk to you right now. I mean, AGI is incompatible with that kind of attribution, so saying we have to do it is equivalent to saying "AI not allowed".
It's a valid opinion, but, IMO kind of a wolf-in-sheeps-clothing argument.
The fact that Chinese open weight models are useful does not really say anything about whether AI is hyped well beyond its actual worth, or whether the technology will be used for benevolent or nefarious purposes by American oligarchs.
This article is asking none of those questions. It's mostly a high school gossip column about what was said and with what tone and who used Butt pillows by The New Yorker, it reeks of desperation. If they could just find something nefarious on Sam Altman or show him in a bad light that sticks, they could fix it all and make AI go away.
My point stands, they're in for a Rude awakening.
A fair valuation of ~$5B each for Anthropic and OpenAI for the occasionally useful tools that they had created would be more reasonable.
That is the point under contention.
This type of rhetoric is exactly why people think it's a scam
They do seem to be good at fooling people though.
Nevermind what they can do was pure science fiction just 3 years ago?
The shape of the intelligence frontier has turned out to be much more jagged than anyone at the time expected, so I can imagine reasonable objections from someone who has a specific, concrete benchmark of AGI that wasn't invented 6 months ago and isn't yet met. If someone just has a subjective sense that they're not smart enough, I think they're wrong.
If it was obvious I don't think there would be disagreement.
This is not a convincing argument.
How about "will" and "desire"? These seem like things an actual intelligence would have.
> it’s clear to me that the remaining holdouts have religious objections at this point
From where I sit, it sure seems like claims of having achieved AGI are religious in nature.
- The very definition of AGI is not agreed upon, much less definitions of god
- Despite the burden of proof being on those claiming AGI, every request for proof is spurned with a "no u"
> Despite the burden of proof being on those claiming AGI, every request for proof is spurned with a "no u"
I think you're misunderstanding the dynamics here. I genuinely don't understand what people mean when they say cutting-edge AI is not generally intelligent. To my ears it's like saying that an electric car isn't really capable of driving. In order to even begin to engage in that discussion, I'd have to understand where the person saying it is coming from and why they don't consider every EV on the road to be a counterexample.
That is your will and desire. They are following your instructions. There is no "intelligence" there.
> I genuinely don't understand what people mean when they say cutting-edge AI is not generally intelligent
I don't really know where to go either. From my perspective you are too far down the rabbit hole and I don't think we can come to a meaningful shared understanding.
Good luck with that.
Honestly I don't know what to say. Good luck to you.
It doesn't change the fact that LLMs are not, and never will be, AGI.
In other words, scam.