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Comment by stego-tech | Hacker News Reader

And to think I got warned in another post that I need to be nicer/more professional in discussing this topic.

Yeah. Nah.

Bringing out the same drum I’ve been banging for years now, these companies have never actually cared about ensuring safe AI, regulation, or ensuring it benefits all humanity. It has always, always, been about control and their profit margins. Their actions have never reflected any sort of positive, shared human benefit since OpenAI released ChatGPT, and they’ll never actually provide said shared benefit when it comes down to benefitting everyone versus benefitting themselves.

The technology is built off wholesale theft of protected works without compensation; at least China gives most of those models back, for free, in the form of open-weights.

It’s the Princess Bride meme but for AI: “you’re trying to take what I’ve rightfully stolen!” I’m tired of having to put on some sort of mask of decency and professionalism to discuss a topic whose counterparty gets to wallow in toxic waste without recourse, and these sorts of stories only reinforce that despite being a glib jerk about it, I’m still on the high road, here.

More folks should join us in open mockery of hypocritical whinging from technological robber barons.

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> I got warned in another post that I need to be nicer/more professional in discussing this topic

If you're talking about https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49016842, that's inaccurate, as anyone who follows the link can see. It has nothing to do with being professional, and doesn't relate to any specific topic. It has to do with the site rules at https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html, which you're plainly breaking.

We want curious conversation here, not indignant fulmination. These are incompatible, because the latter destroys the former the way wildfires destroy parks.

Since we don't want HN to turn into scorched earth, we have no choice but to ban accounts that repeatedly post like this. I don't want to ban you, but flagrantly doing again exactly what we just asked you to stop suggests that you don't want to use HN as intended. If that's wrong, and you actually do want to use HN as intended, please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and take the intended spirit of the site more to heart.

The thing about screaming and waving your arms is it makes it hard for people to connect with the argument.

A quick scan shows a lack of rigor that usually points towards zealotry rather than a reasoned position: you imply that models are only trained on copyrighted work, you don’t address the ridiculous “copyright forever, nothing goes public domain” policies that got us to this place, you don’t distinguish between training on an 80 year old copyrighted work whose author is dead and rights are just in a company portfolio, and you assert that neither OpenAI nor Anthropic has ever done anything altruistic.

If you enjoy the screaming, have at it. If you want to persuade people, dialing it down a few notches and at least giving token acknowledgement that nuance exists would help.

The latent space must have property boundaries as real and respected as those in the physical domain, lest we lose our ability to capitalize on them.

For now, and into the future, I hope that we protect that unique and novel idea of an anthropomorphic mouse, which should be expanded to cover all forms of anthropomorphism, if we're being honest with ourselves.

And, to that point, the protection of that idea should also extend to the (clearly infringing) hit 90s YA book series Animorphs, as it somewhat sounds like anthropomorphism.

Protect their rights! Anything produced within the conceptual acreage that has been clearly marked and claimed is theft!

have you considered that you're not the person this argument is trying to convince?

So who is this trying to convince? All of this is bog-standard anti-AI argument that you can find on reddit. It's closer to preaching to the choir than actually trying to convince anyone.

> The thing about screaming and waving your arms is it makes it hard for people to connect with the argument.

The question is whether people like Altman, Amodei, Musk are part of the common case in Hanlon's razor or they want to trigger emotional responses to gain agency in the mess.

> If you enjoy the screaming, have at it. If you want to persuade people, dialing it down a few notches and at least giving token acknowledgement that nuance exists would help.

You’re not going sufficiently far back in comment histories (or using AI summaries of it from existing search tooling), or viewing the entire body of work I’ve written, shared, or discussed about all of those topics for the past twenty years.

I scream and wave my arms because nobody cared for decorum. I cut to the meat of the argument because nobody cares for context. Hell, this is the comments section for crying out loud; nobody is expecting a nuanced treatise about systemic interactions of multiple market and policy forces that resulted in this specific outcome in the comments section, even on HN.

Further, I suspect most folks here don’t actually care. I scream and wave my arms because it’s actually had the best results in outreach thus far - people see the flailing, read the bullet point, check the history, and somehow decide to reach out to me for more context (which I am always happy to give). When greeted with a wall of plaintext on an algorithmic site, the trained human response is to basically fuck off and go find a dopamine hit elsewhere, not stick around and read someone’s shoulda-been-a-blog-post on a social media comment page.

For all the crowing about “decorum” and “professionalism” and “intelligent debate”, the grim reality is that such concepts can actually detract from arguments by making it seem like we have time to discuss these further, that things aren’t that bad yet, that we can really think this through.

To which I say: no, we cannot. This language is a dire threat, it is a crimson red flag of intent to deliberately cause harm. You do not make an impassioned and polite argument about the nature of market forces or copyright policy with a mugger brandishing a gun, you do something about it.

> you don’t address the ridiculous “copyright forever, nothing goes public domain” policies that got us to this place

1. You're mischaracterizing and exaggerating the policies to falsely support your point. Things go into the public domain all the time: https://web.law.duke.edu/cspd/publicdomainday/2026/.

2. It's not like the model companies had the attitude "oh copyright is too long, we disagree on the term." Their attitude was precisely: "We want it and we don't give a fuck about you. Published yesterday, published 50 years ago? We will take it, we won't pay for it, and we will use it to replace you and make ourselves rich. Don't like it? Suck my data center."

>We will take it, we won't pay for it, and we will use it to replace you and make ourselves rich

The whole point of fair use (which courts have so far ruled AI training is) is that you don't have to ask for permission or pay them for it.

When you realize that LLMs are “just” extremely efficient lossy data compression, it’s hard for me to see how it’s anything other than taking people’s shit, putting it into a gigantic zip file, and letting people search against it.

Wait till you hear about Perfect 10, Inc. v. Amazon.com, Inc. (2007) and Authors Guild, Inc. v. Google, Inc. (2015), both of which ruled that lossy and verbatim copies (respectively) are allowed for for-profit use.

Too late. Authors Guild, Inc. v. Google, Inc. is a good one too because Internet Archive got the exact opposite outcome in court for doing the exact same thing. I recognize the bullshit, I just call it out to keep myself sane.

>Internet Archive got the exact opposite outcome in court for doing the exact same thing

No, it's not the same thing. Contrary to what many people think, "fair use" isn't something you can invoke to do whatever copyright infringement you want. The judge is supposed to consider several factors, one of which is whether the work was "transformative". In google's case it was offering search results. Internet archive was operating a "digital library" (aka. a filesharing site). Whatever you hate about AI companies sucking up electricity and displacing jobs, they're certainly more transformative (and arguably more transformative than even google search) than whatever the internet archive was doing.

That’s not true. 1. Libraries have used Authors Guild as legal cover to lend out ebooks for paper books that they own. 2. Google provided access to the whole book, that’s why they got sued.

If I run a book through AES, that’s pretty transformative too!

>1. Libraries have used Authors Guild as legal cover to lend out ebooks for paper books that they own

And has this been tested in court? After all, you see people uploading tv shows on youtube, then pasting a snippet of fair use in the description. That doesn't make it true. If anything, the unfavorable ruling for internet archive suggests libraries were incorrect with their interpretation of the law.

>2. Google provided access to the whole book, that’s why they got sued.

No it didn't. From wikipedia:

"For works still under copyright, Google scanned and entered the whole work into their searchable database, but only provided "snippet views" of the scanned pages in search results to users."

> The whole point of fair use (which courts have so far ruled AI training is) is that you don't have to ask for permission or pay them for it.

Is that settled law? I doubt it.

And IMHO, AI training violates the spirit of fair use. It's not really a method of criticism or commentary. It's a system to use people's own work to undermine their ability to economically subsist on that work.

Though how about this for a proposed exception: you can AI train on anything as fair use: only if release your model and weights public domain open source.

>Is that settled law? I doubt it.

That just seems like a cope unless you have actual evidence that the lower/appellate courts have misruled. And no, "I don't like the ruling because [all the reasons AI is bad]" doesn't count, you need actual legal justifications, preferably from legal experts. Not to mention that even if the supreme court ruled on it, it's not really "settled", eg. Roe. v. Wade and Humphrey's Executor v. United States being overturned

> That just seems like a cope unless you have actual evidence that the lower/appellate courts have misruled.

No, it means lower court judges get overruled all the time and it's not like the courts and law always functions as some dispassionate applicators of some fixed framework. It's not settled until the process gets worked much farther than it probably has.

> Is that settled law?

It seems to be the fairly consistent approach of trial courts addressing the question under different soecific fact patterns in different contexts; its not “settled law” in the sense of nationally binding precedent (which would take either a Supreme Court ruling kr separate appellate rulings in every circuit).

> And IMHO, AI training violates the spirit of fair use. It's not really a method of criticism or commentary.

Plenty of transformative uses that have been held to be fair use are not criticism or commentary, and AI training is a transformative use where, for any individual work used, the end product is both a very different class of work and the used work indiviudally has very small impact on the final work.

> It's a system to use people's own work to undermine their ability to economically subsist on that work.

Courts seem to disagree that this is generally the case with AI training as such. (And AI training being fair use would not make the use of models to create works that would otherwise be infringing copies with that function through inference any less infringing.)

> Though how about this for a proposed exception: you can AI train on anything as fair use: only if release your model and weights public domain open source.

You are, of course, free to try to convince Congress to amend copyright law to apply that rule (though since the current statutory form of the fair use rule is itself a legislative adoption that follows pre-existing court rulings on fair use as a Constitutional limit on the copyright power stemming from the First Amendment, Congress may not actually have the power to narrow it that way.)

Thank you for this bit of well-grounded reasonableness.

They're attitude is more "this is fair use" which, according to all precedent, is probably true in most cases (unless the models actually start regurgitating huge parts of the Copyrighted material without a license).

Of course, distillation is also fair use under Copyright law.

Copyright was never meant to be a moral framework. It was always a practical framework designed to incentivize publishing that would ultimately pass into the public domain. Everybody seems to want to attribute some sort of moral weight to it though; the idea that people are naturally entitled to certain rights over things they've published. That idea would be totally alien to the people who designed the Copyright system in the first place.

Certainly in Europe there is view that author has moral rights over their work. And the view has affected how international copyright framework operates.

What a soulless take. Morality is determined socially and does not exist in a vacuum. Stealing the livlihood of artists and creators so that you can offer competing products is not an act of neutrality. It is a deeply immoral act akin to theft. Stealing does not magically become "distillation" once you've stolen from enough people that it becomes difficult to match provenance.

The law may see this as no issue, as the law cares more about protecting power, but that does not mean it isnt immoral.

Was it really "designed to incentivize" anything? Or was it introduced to protect a powerful, influential business model? Looking at how laws are passed now, I know which explanation I find more congruent.

It's literally in the constitution:

> [the United States Congress shall have power] To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Clause

It literally predates the United States Constitution by hundreds of years: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_copyright

Also, I'd be careful at taking the reasoning of political documents at face value. Many items in the Constitution are post-hoc, Lockeian/liberal justifications for a social order that was in fact largely copied over wholesale from English parliamentary monarchy, with surprisingly few tweaks.

I think the expansion of terms over time is a bit damning, but originally the term was very pro-public-domain (sometimes as low as 7 years): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_copyright#/media/Fi...

I think we have to consider the origin of it as a concept, which predates the United States entirely and is quite a lot more damning. From the same Wikipedia page you linked:

"The first copyright privilege in England bears date 1518 and was issued to Richard Pynson, King's Printer, the successor to William Caxton. The privilege gives a monopoly for the term of two years. The date is 15 years later than that of the first privilege issued in France. Early copyright privileges were called "monopolies," particularly during the reign of Queen Elizabeth, who frequently gave grants of monopolies in articles of common use, such as salt, leather, coal, soap, cards, beer, and wine. The practice was continued until the Statute of Monopolies was enacted in 1623, ending most monopolies, with certain exceptions, such as patents; after 1623, grants of letters patent to publishers became common...

As the "menace" of printing spread, governments established centralized control mechanisms,[19] and in 1557 the English Crown thought to stem the flow of seditious and heretical books by chartering the Stationers' Company. The right to print was limited to the members of that guild, and thirty years later the Star Chamber was chartered to curtail the "greate enormities and abuses" of "dyvers contentyous and disorderlye persons professinge the arte or mystere of pryntinge or selling of books." The right to print was restricted to two universities and to the 21 existing printers in the city of London, which had 53 printing presses. The French crown also repressed printing, and printer Etienne Dolet was burned at the stake in 1546. As the English took control of type founding in 1637, printers fled to the Netherlands. Confrontation with authority made printers radical and rebellious, and 800 authors, printers and book dealers were incarcerated in the Bastille before it was stormed in 1789.[19]"

So, to summarize: the principle of copyright came from monarchic economic protectionism and censorship. I will freely admit I didn't know this piece of history before this thread - I simply predicted it, correctly, from first principles.

"This is fair use" is just their public defense, but obviously they have never given a thought about this when hoarding data, as shown by the modest 1.5B fine of Anthropic, which they can now write off as a normal business cost.

I am completely willing to accept that "this is fair use" for any company that publishes the LLM weights, i.e. the result of processing all the copyrighted work, because they have performed a public service with this.

But when the so-called "fair use" was a method to transform public data into private data that they guard and claim that any access to it would now be IP theft and which they use to obtain huge profits, that does not look like fair use to me.

So, how do you feel about phone books?

> Copyright was never meant to be a moral framework. It was always a practical framework designed to incentivize publishing that would ultimately pass into the public domain.

A practical framework that model training breaks. Why publish a resource if it'll just get ingested by a model, and the model maker will get your customers/users instead of you? You're already seeing that with Google, which uses AI Overviews to cannibalize more and more traffic that would have once passed to a website.

Huh? I’ve bought maybe 100 books this year. They’ve probably all been trained on. How, exactly, did my purchases somehow go to the model companies?

I’m always astounded when someone literally argues against nuance.

I think that AI companies should, and often don’t, pay for training material. I also think that perpetual copyright has so weakened IP holders’ moral position that especially the larger IP-centric corporations have nobody to blame but themselves.

And sure, a tiny dribble of stuff enters public domain, either because estates don’t work to maintain copyright or because the duration is so ridiculous that even megacorps can’t tilt the playing field further (see: Steamboat Willie, released 1928, public domain 2024).

Sorry, but 96 year copyright terms are insane.

Now, come back with support for returning copyright to its original max of 28 years, or even the extended 42 years, I’ll argue for harsher treatment of violations for recent works.

It’s a complex system. And I’m not willing to demonize one side when the other has been so abusive for so long, no matter how many times you say “suck” and “fuck” as if that somehow strenghens an argument (hint: it doesn’t)

> A quick scan shows a lack of rigor that usually points towards zealotry rather than a reasoned position

You're doing the same thing:

> you imply that models are only trained on copyrighted work

Actually, they said "The technology is built off wholesale theft of protected works without compensation". The word "only" never appears here, nor is it really implied.

> you don’t address the ridiculous “copyright forever, nothing goes public domain” policies that got us to this place

This is pure "whataboutism". Both things can be bad.

I mean, you didn't address wealth inequality or global warning.

"Quick scan"? It's a few paragraphs. You can't read a few paragraphs? What's the point of replying when you don't even know what you're replying to?

Many apologies for giving the impression you got.

I should have said: after reading the screed, a quick scan of its assertions and rhetorical techinques made it clear that it’s it serious thinking.

I am sure a rigorous analysis would turn up even more hand waving and lack of nuance. But who has the time to read zealots deeply?

I don’t see any screaming and waving arms in the parent. It’s a passionate but well reasoned and carefully presented case. If that is to be dismissed as zealotry we’ll all need to stick to writing journal papers to avoid the label.

If anything your “copyright forever” drumbeat and incorrect read of “only being trained on copyrighted works” are more hyperbolic than anything you’re responding to.

Also, the models from China are only being released open weights as competitive positioning against the globally more used competition. If the Chinese companies had a dominant market position they’d be falling prey to the same forces that have caused OpenAI and Anthropic to behave the way they do.

Such investment in technicalities to undermine the above post could itself speak of zealotry to a certain side in itself if one was prone to cynicism.

Not to mention that those nuances, as you state, mean very little. To say it was trained solely on copyrighted material or to say it was trained in large part on copyrighted material doesn't much move the needle over the fact it was done, a lot. Making a distinction between an "80 year old copyrighted work" or a recent one is also moot as it a matter of public record they themselves didn't make that distinction and happily fed on both kinds.

On to not being able to say they didn't ever do anything altruistic, well animal rights and welfare had great strides under the Nazi regime, not sure it evens out the rest. The same logic can be applied to the current state of affairs, doing a little good does not even out a lot of bad.

In closing, nuance is relevant when its relevant, after that its just being pedantic.

Get real, you think LLMs got to where they are by training on 80 year old works? Your point is technically true, just basically irrelevant for LLM training.

I think you can realize how ludicrous it is to invoke 80 year old copyrights for a product whose main use case is coding. How much code from 1946 was it lawfully ingesting?

If you would like to discuss the nuances you're welcome to elaborate. If the end result of this nuanced is they get to stay kings of the crab bucket and reap greater and greater rewards it's reasoning at both ends to get the middle you want.

> you don’t address the ridiculous “copyright forever, nothing goes public domain” policies that got us to this place, you don’t distinguish between training on an 80 year old copyrighted work whose author is dead and rights are just in a company portfolio

You're describing what Pirate Party proponents have been championing since the start. Not that I disagree with that notion. Copyright law needs to be changed for modern times. But the laws as currently exist are what they are.

If you really believe OpenAI, Anthropic, or any corporation for that matter has done something truly altruistic then I have a bridge to sell you.

there's persuasion, and then there's inspiring people already on your side. the upvotes/downvotes will give you a clue who the audience turns out to be. it was an upvote from me.

It is ridiculous that OpenAI is a non-profit and Anthropic is a PBC, yet both actively resist open access to AI. This hinders human progress rather than serving it.

OpenAI is currently a PBC that metastasized out of the original nonprofit also called OpenAI which owns 26% of that PBC. But yes, it is ridiculous.

OpenAI isn't non-profit, they just don't have one yet caz everything is spent on training

Warned by YComb? I got something similar when discussing Flock.

Tech companies, in the end of the day, will stand together to suppress dissent under the guise of anything nearing plausible deniability.

>Warned by YComb? I got something similar when discussing Flock.

i was curious, because stego-tech also misrepresented the reason for their mod warning, and yours is the same.

you didnt get a warning because you were "discussing flock". its because you made a boring comment about "oligarch slushfund to pay bots" for "pro-flock astroturfing". that's not "discussing flock", its vague accusations of astroturfing.

its like, super duper clear in the guidelines that if you suspect astroturfing or botting that you should email the mods so they can investigate it.

dang has some pithy line about "mod less, not more when there is a relation to ycomb" and its true. ive ripped on flock plenty of times (fuck flock!). just put some actual substance in your comments.

I think it's more about keeping this forum one of the few places where you can have open minded conversations that don't delve into hivemind guided flamewars. Granted, I don't know what got warned or the reason.

Anything approaching nuance on other forums gets downvoted to oblivion and attacked if it doesn't fit the particular echo chamber it's in. That just reinforces the echo chamber. HN has to do quite a bit to preserve the culture and keep it from devolving into something like those other places.

> at least China gives most of those models back, for free, in the form of open-weights.

China also publishes a lot of impactful research in the open which has benefitted US labs too.

I agree with you. I read recently Anthropic had to pay 1.5B in fines for stealing copyrighted works. You know, if us normies get caught stealing, we go to jail and don't get to keep the loot, yet these companies get a slap on the wrist and keep everything. Its tragically hilarious.

it is not just copyrighted works.

openai and anthropic and google etc hire PHDs to create datasets by solving problems, writing thinking traces.

then they train their models on those datasets.

also as another user said, what is this 80+ years to protect some text? its ridiculous

It's only ridiculous for the big thieves, but if you violate copyright, you'll pay dearly. Calling it ridiculous will not protect you.

Thieves…like Anthropic who literally just settled a case for pirating? Those kind of thieves?

Always better to name them outright.

Anthropic STOLE data for training. Verifiably. Admitted. In court. Then settled.[0]

You can also likely assume that OpenAI did too. There simply wasn’t enough data without having done so at least at some point in their corporate history. In fact, I seem to recall they were able to extract Harry Potter text from all the major modes[1]

https://fortune.com/2026/07/21/anthropic-copyright-settlemen... [0]

https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.02671 [1]

No large company has ever cared about anything other than the financials, this is not specific to AI.

Generalizations are embarrassing.

Companies don’t have souls or minds. Some people in some large companies have absolutely cared about social good, art, and other things outside of financials.

I'm not referring to the sum feeling of all employees, I'm referring to the actions of the company as a whole, which is largely driven by the C-suite who have a financial responsibility to investors.

Even narrowing it down to them and their actions, they still do care about many other things. You might have only seen the worst in the media.

> Some people in some large companies have absolutely cared about social good, art, and other things outside of financials.

But companies do not care about social good, art, and other things outside of financials. A company is a generalization of sorts of all the people within the company who have influence over it's direction. 100% of people working for companies have a profit motive. That's why people work for for companies.

By that logic, 100% of professional musicians and farmers also have a profit motive. Not sure what we should conclude from that? People do truly care about a lot of other things in their work, even if it makes them money.

This is actually not the case: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodge_v._Ford_Motor_Co. However a look at Henry Ford’s personal priorities shows that there’s a be-careful-what-you-wish-for aspect to this (also arguably visible to a lesser extent in eg. Mark Zuckerberg’s dual-class-structure-enabled control on Facebook—and in Musk’s de facto control over his rambling empire).

I feel like this just furthers my point. Over 100 years ago a court ruled that companies have to operate primarily for the benefit of their shareholders. That is the regime we have been operating in ever since. You may get some eccentric cases like Ford or Zuckerberg from time to time when they don't operate in the interests of shareholders, but it's far from the norm.

No, you don't get to play the "everybody does that" card. These companies started out claiming to care about openness, and to have moral high ground.

Because it used to be profitable for them to say that when the only people paying attention were a niche technical audience. Now, it's no longer profitable to do so. That's what it's always been about.

Sadly, this has become very true during the last decades.

However, a half of century ago there were a non-negligible number of large companies for which there existed more important priorities than the financials, e.g. reputation and customer satisfaction, for instance Hewlett-Packard (which was something extremely different from those who have inherited this name).

Anyone who thinks these companies ever cared about any of that is naive.

Then I am naive, but I think they cared before they got powerful and chatgpt release.

So you're saying they have no integrity?

so back when the stakes were low to non-existant?

If your principles are only available on display when there is no consequence, they arnt your principles, they are a mask.

100% this. OpenAI created a for-profit subsidy (that is now an SBC and only controlled 26% by the original non-profit). Guess when they did that? After GPT-2 (Feb 2019) and before GPT-3 (June 2020). Not remotely surprising they started the move to for-profit as soon as they had something they thought could be profitable. Then in 2025 they switched to an SBC, dropped the non-profit control well below 50% and completely got rid of the profit cap. Just in time for the IPO talk. It was a mask the whole time.

At most I would buy that they convinced themselves they cared. It bought them a lot of good will at the time.

Developing the thing they say will cause the end of the world?

Look, if I was worried about nuclear bombs, I wouldn’t work on a nuclear bomb developing research center.

It’s all fake and pompous garbage.

I mean naivety is the default until wisdom born of experience prevails. I bought into the “do no evil” mantra of Google, and boy howdy did I learn the hard lessons from that.

It’s partly not arbitrarily punishing the naive unless they refuse to learn the lesson. Invite them in, acknowledging the error in judgement, and help them to be better going forward.

That’s how we win.

Capitalism creates never satiated hunger for more profits at almost any cost (even human life...see health insurance, but that's another discussion).

Maybe they cared, but that's always been irrelevant. "Show me the incentive and i'll show you the outcome": the only incentive for a company in our economic system is to make as much money as possible, anything in the way of that will get eroded by incentives (principled people get fired, or quit, or their principles weaken, or they get forced into doing things against their principles, or they get outcompeted, or...).

Thinking that an actor in a system will go against the incentives of the system (at least at scale and over time) is naive.

How about Volvo giving away their patented 3-point safety belt design for free to all competitors?

https://techandmedialaw.com/open-patent-rights-for-seatbelts...

(edit: sorry, re-reading your comment you were more directly referring to the AI companies and this context, I interpreted this more generally on my first glance)

> More folks should join us in open mockery of hypocritical whinging from technological robber barons.

I am with you 100% but mockery will not affect their wallets. which is the only thing they care about.

We should mock them because others look to us as the subject matter experts. It’s mirror neurons: if we mock these entities, these companies, as the technical experts we are, and we show others why they’re deserving of such mockery, then they will generally replicate those behaviors.

You’re more likely to laugh at a comedian when everyone else does, even if you don’t get the joke.

also China actually legally pays the API costs even when distilling. OPenAI and ANtro just straight up abused scraping bots which overloaded servers

They are scraping too, and don't follow copyright any more thoroughly (less if you count all the licensing openai, anth are doing now)

What China does is: buy accounts or API inference, often through shady methods, and then resell it at a cost/small profit/small loss (access to advanced AI models is often restricted for users in China, so there's a demand for region lock bypasses) - while saving all the traffic between the real AI users and the AI platform for future analysis, including distillation.

Being an "AI inference middleman" is pretty lucrative, and AI companies have only started to crack down on it.

I think originally they had good intentions. But they just cannot afford not to pull up the ladder, they raised too much.

> I think originally they had good intentions.

It was never the intent. What we are seeing is the methodology that Peter Thiel (hello, ycombinator) described in his book Zero to One [0]: "Competition is for losers"

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero_to_One

Intentions never win over incentives, especially as time and scale increase. And we live in an economic system where the only incentive is "make as much money as possible".

Fortunately, some people see no reason to hamstring development.

> Meanwhile America is tying itself in knots: politicians and bureaucrats are banning new data centers, piling on state regulations, and pushing for new federal agencies to pre-approve frontier models.

> This is how you lose the AI race. The rest of the world won’t play by our rules if we bog ourselves down. Permissionless innovation is how America won the internet and became the technological envy of the world. We can do it again with AI -- while addressing risks in a targeted way -- or we’ll watch our lead evaporate. [1]

- David Sacks, Chair of the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology

[1] https://x.com/DavidSacks/status/2078092271296143593

If only reason would prevail in the Whitehouse….

David Sacks is a Trump admin advisor.

> Bringing out the same drum I’ve been banging for years now, these companies have never actually cared about ensuring safe AI, regulation, or ensuring it benefits all humanity. It has always, always, been about control and their profit margins. Their actions have never reflected any sort of positive, shared human benefit since OpenAI released ChatGPT, and they’ll never actually provide said shared benefit when it comes down to benefitting everyone versus benefitting themselves.

Preach! Anthropic and OpenAI care about one thing, and it's not safety or the benefit of humanity: it's regulatory capture. All that other shit they wring their hands about – Anthropic especially – is invariably a marketing tactic or a persuasion tactic meant to convince us that A) they have the most capable, dangerous AIs and wouldn't you like to use them; and B) only they can be trusted to develop them because look at all these precautions they take and all of the blog posts/tweets their founders write about the oncoming doom of humanity.

What should they do instead? As far as I can tell from their actions they (Anth) are true believers about safety

They are true believers in preventing distillation.

Is that anti safety? Most of the safety pilled people seem to want SOTA models closed.

There were so many security issues to patch in recent months that some open source projects stopped accepting them. I'm not sure how people still think Anthropic was lying.

So far the first and only sophisticated cyberattack was carried out by openai rather than by one the subversive commie models that hate us for our freedoms, so forgive me for taking their safety and alignment spiel somewhat less seriously than they’d like.

That cyberattack is a sign of lack of safety, not of safety. It happened by accident.

"A model being tested broke out of its sandboxing and hacked a production system of a different organisation using a previously-unknown vulnerability, in order to steal test results, and that proves anthropic were worried for no reason months ago about future models being security issues" ...?

Anthropic have released a lot of security patches in recent months, so many that many open source maintainers are facing burnout (google it). It's public knowledge that they weren't lying, you can look at the code. Their ridiculous guardrails were so that projects could patch and prepare for more models like this one coming out.

>So far the first and only sophisticated cyberattack

the only one that was publicly admitted to and which you happened to have read about.

even prior to ai, most companies and organizations would never admit to being breached unless irrefutable proof of the breach came to light. in other cases it is just immediately classified and the public finds out 20 years later (or, depending on the country, simply covered up).

My contention is that, while they've converted and employ a legion of true believers (Dario may even be one himself), the veneration and flagellation at the altar of safety and alignment is conveniently self-serving. It demands constant scrutiny, because it only serves one single goal in the end: profit via regulatory capture.

People _hate_ when they talk about safety. It doesn't seem like it's helping them.

"been about control and their profit margins."

they have no profit margins haha, it's huge piles of cash on fire...

Yes, and thank China for open AI.

Yes, loved watching how people constantly got downvoted for warning this is what would happen, then it starts happening and the “yeah but” fluff starts. Corporate apologists all the way down.

ClosedAI executive literally posted that the administration should disseminate FUD through various agencies in order to protect their profits. Commodie has been crying wolf for years to protect their profits. Now they are openly literally conspiring to protect their profits.

“How could we have seen it coming?!” Easily.

>And to think I got warned in another post that I need to be nicer/more professional in discussing this topic.

it wasn't really "be nicer" and im surprised that was your takeaway; your last comment which was flagged had no substance. it was boring. ("i hate american aitechbros". neat.) at least this comment has some conversation starter in it.

I fully agree; but we also MUST STOP PRETENDING like HN and YC are good faith actors here. They are not. They blatantly curate (by flagging) comments and do everything possible to help both companies do this. Its not just OpenAI/Anthropic, there is a toxic ecosystem here supporting itself and doing everything possible to subvert the will of the people. There is 0 interest in merit and absolute focus on regulatory capture here and all YC investors and staff are fully complicit.

It's not HN. It's the readers.

There are lots of Anthropic and OpenAI employees here.

There are also lots of people that totally hate AI here.

If they don't like your comment, some of them will flag you. I get caught up in this frequently. The flagging strongly correlates with the audience that the headline sentiment attracts.

In a thread like this that is laser-focused on real criticism of OpenAI and Anthropic you'll do just fine to call out their bad behavior.

TY for your response. People like you make me miss the old HN. I (antidotally) feel that now its much more common to just down vote and feel self-righteous as opposed to actually taking the time to craft an articulate response. The reason I feel its more than the readers is because "dang" and the other hall monitors do their best to enforce this also. Its no longer the "hacker mentality" its post what helps the YC portfolio and no matter the merit we are OK with it. Honestly its not so hard to see why they fell in so hard with Trump given their true nature e.g: Zuck being the #1 funder of things that will essentially kill the open internet. I'm starting to think it was all fake, just a bunch of Trump-esq BS even before Trump.

This comment will be flagged soon and disappear just like anything else that does not support their "Trumpish" view of what the world should be.

Who are you and why should we listen to you banging on the drum?

Memento mori.

Yes they only care about money. That's what corporations usually do.

And I'll take that 10 times out of 10 over China's role in all of this, which is specifically to disrupt and sabotage the rest.

I can trust Anthropic and OpenAI to have economic interests. I can't trust the same from Chinese companies, which I can actually trust to have geopolitic interests.

This has more to do with two seperate approaches to innovation. One which favors a small handful of firms establishing full control over a monopoly on the market. And another favoring the wilderness of free market economics.

The only country with anything to gain or lose here is the United States because it decided to play the game of market domination. Either it ends up with market domination and wins, or it doesnt and loses. China's result will remain what its set out to do, which is to create a technology that will support millions of small bespoke companies unbeholden to a larger firm serving all sectors of the economy.

As we all know, the US is entirely free of geopolitical interests, which is why there was a US–Japan trade war in the late 80s.

I have no reason to care about the interests of these companies. My interests are best served with a competitive selection of open weights models available for my use.

OpenAI has the year-old GPT-OSS, and Anthropic has never released any open weights models. Meanwhile, other companies are delivering a steady stream of high-quality open weights models every month, and I'm not going to stop using them just because some other people don't like the country they were developed in.

I can’t say this enough…

Expect the tap on open models to slow and eventually disappear.

They don’t exist for altruistic reasons. It’s peculiar to current conditions.

Unlike Claude Fable, once an open weights model is released, it's available forever (or at least until every copy is lost or deleted, which won't be soon).

Open weights models are already great, and the ones that are already released will continue to be just as good as they are today even if newer versions are released at a different speed in the future.

A year from now we won’t care that today’s qwen is good enough for some stuff. But yes, it’ll still be available.

>My interests are best served with a competitive selection of open weights models available for my use.

Which is why Chinese companies use people like you.

Sorry for being blunt but if you think this policy would continue in a scenario in which they are hegemonic you are extremely delusional.

Also:

>I'm not going to stop using them just because some other people don't like the country they were developed in.

This is not a serious sentence, but a preposterous, straw-manning assertion to make, and it borders on the insult.

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