"you're trying to rip off what I've already ripped off!"
Crawl the whole Internet to build a gargantuan sized LLM and then complain you're being copied...
"Well, Steve, I think there's more than one way of looking at it. I think it's more like we both had this rich neighbor named Xerox and I broke into his house to steal the TV set and found out that you had already stolen it."
0 - https://www.amazon.com/Dealers-Lightning-Xerox-PARC-Computer...
It's not clear to me how much it cost them to build the Star, but it might have been pretty close to that 20000 figure if they included all the R&D costs that went into it, and the fairly specialized high end hardware at the time like 20MB HDD. And it was being done in fairly low quantities so not much economy of scale.
Information really does want to become free, but AI companies want to be gatekeepers. Long term I bet on the open weights to win, as the more sustainable approach.
https://www.authorsalliance.org/2025/09/07/the-anthropic-set...
"One rule for thee, a different rule for me." - Dario
When Apple was accused of 'ripping off' PARC, Steve didn't seem keen to bring up this rather salient point. I suspect it may have been a combination of wanting Apple to continue receiving credit for these innovations from consumers and also the fact that, in retrospect, the million dollar stock deal could seem a bit like trading beads to Native Americans for Manhattan Island. Another point worth noting is that Apple's PARC visit was in December 1979 and the Xerox Star was publicly announced in April 1981, so Apple got a 15 month head start (the Apple Lisa shipped in Jan 83).
I've also heard that Xerox didn't hold on to the Apple stock for very long, so never gained the windfall they could have. As is well documented, Xerox senior management didn't understand what they had in PARC and also didn't understand how rapidly microcomputers would become ubiquitous. So, of course, they didn't think Apple's stock price would skyrocket either.
For more details on Apple's early UI evolution, Atkinson kept polaroids of a variety of prototypes and mockups: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qg0mHFcB510
But in both cases the value only existed because of the people offering the deal. XeroX doing nothing with a UI or native Americans doing nothing with some land would mean the UI and the land would continue to be worth nothing. It was the others coming with ideas and effort that made them valuable.
You just reveal your own ignorance by equivocating value with monetary value.
> ignorant by most of the inhabitants of the developed world
"developed world", ah yes the part of the world marked by sedentary lifestyle, obesity, mental illness, suicide, mass shootings, and vast disparities in power.
Only beasts are joyful in Hell. I can recognize the demons just in their happiness.
When did I do that? (Assuming by equivocating, you meant equating.)
> But in both cases the value only existed because of the people offering the deal. XeroX doing nothing with a UI or native Americans doing nothing with some land would mean the UI and the land would continue to be worth nothing. It was the others coming with ideas and effort that made them valuable.
Specifically, "XeroX doing nothing with a UI or native Americans doing nothing with some land would mean the UI and the land would continue to be worth nothing" is what I am getting at.