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Comment by Bluestein | Hacker News Reader

Also, as said elsewhere: "Lab" is rich here, for outfits that, facing these giant, energy swallowing black boxes have really no clue what's going on inside.-

The moniker gives them an air of scientific, knowledgeable, tranquil, pro-social, pro bono work.-

Of course they are entitled to kill off a few mice, or pillage the commons to forward their "lab" work.-

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> The moniker gives them an air of scientific, knowledgeable, tranquil, pro-social, pro bono work.

The Atlantic argued this (rather well, IMO) a week or so ago - "There’s No Such Thing as an AI ‘Lab’" - https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/2026/09/stop-calling-...

Obviously lab just means company. They use it because it confuses the public into thinking they are doing research primarily. Which of course is nonsense.

“We don’t know what’s going on” is essentially marketing. Sure we don’t _know_ but we have intuitions about why, where, and how to make certain changes…

Those labs publicly said during GPT-3/4 era that the optimal epoch count, or dataset repetition count, for foundation model training, is one. So it's a forward 1-pass compression.

But it's a black box! Nobody knows whats going on inside! It's all transformative! Sure...

Have they seen big pharma?

We also associate laboratories with evil scientists and Frankenstein and the like. I can just hear Boris Karloff (er Bobby Picket) uttering “I was working in the lab late one night. When my eyes beheld an eerie sight… … … …the monster mash”. If anything, I associate _uncertainty_ with labs. The result is never known up front, they’re a place of discovery.

But I get your meaning. What should they be called instead? AI Sausage Factories maybe (cue Upton Sinclair?)?

> What should they be called instead? AI Sausage Factories maybe (cue Upton Sinclair?)?

That's actually great? Slaughterhouses killing off the collective genius of humanity and grinding it into a bland paste for mass consumption.

Even kind of fits the model. All of the creativity man has raised is herded to the slaughterhouse and ground up so we end up with a big homogenized mash of ground up creativity, devoid of the life that gave it, rotten if not eaten soon enough.

By that definition, wall street would be a lab, and so would be a casino. I guess we could call them, "data refineries."

Refinery makes a lot of sense. I like it particularly because it raises the question of whose (whose) "oil" (data) it is they are purloining.-

The Aibittoir, perhaps

It used to be OpenAI was a real research organization that wrote real open-access papers that aren't marketing brochures, and when they did large training runs, they released all artifacts including model weights. Now certainly they are anything but. We haven't learned learned anything meaningful about ML from OpenAI since GPT-3 was released.

Their open-weights competitors like Facebook can at least claim some kind of public benefit, but it's still just running a well-understood algorithm on dubiously obtained data with longer and longer runs, give or take some inconsequential architectural tweaks.

Anthropic's mechanistic interpretability work is the most "lab-like" of these, but it's still just secondary to selling subscriptions and fear-mongering for regulatory capture/investment/publicity.

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