Good luck to an individual or small business trying to hold OpenAI or Meta to account if they breach contract over training, or do something crazy like copyright infringement on an industrial scale.
255 karma · joined May 29, 2014
Good luck to an individual or small business trying to hold OpenAI or Meta to account if they breach contract over training, or do something crazy like copyright infringement on an industrial scale.
These lights would have predated the private equity era but I'm guessing sourcing options were somewhat more limited back in 2016.
I don't mean to dismiss the risks or overlook the amount of damage that could be done just by lever-pulling - we sure have enough outdated infrastructure hooked up to the internet - but the jumps in complexity and necessary compute for most of these tasks are probably somewhat larger than the analogy implies.
Not everybody is coding or doing work that lends itself to burning tokens for warmth. Reuters for example seems to be more interested in using it for research, editing and formatting citations and the like. There's only so much of that work that needs doing, it doesn't always need to be real-time, and they probably don't see it scaling exponentially. They also need to be very aware and in control of their model's biases, or they risk it compromising their work output.
It's widely expected that all of the major providers will need to - and surely want to - drastically raise prices to justify the ludicrous amount of capital they're burning. Multiple companies have already talked about how their AI costs have exploded, and from what I understand that scale of enterprise is paying API rates. I would be disappointed if big business wasn't having a think about what that liability could look like. It's one thing to be reliant on a relatively "stable" vendor like Microsoft for Windows and Office, another to get AWS sticker shock, and then this is promising to be an order of magnitude worse.
Then just plain trust. What if ChatGPT starts recommending your competitors products, or the USA bars export of Anthropic's latest model (again, but for real this time), or they stop serving a model your business now depends on, and so on... That's a lot of risk to leave outside of your control.
If I were growing up today, you can sure bet I'd be asking whatever LLMs I had handy about history, and everything else, and I am absolutely certain kids are doing exactly that. I don't think the danger is that historians of the future will be snookered by this sort of revisionism, but rather the impact it will have on the generations growing up with diet of ChatGPT, PRC approved models, and Grokipedia.
But I agree that's the catch - it doesn't make sense to throw money at open source models in hopes of direct return, so you need a nation or conglomerate to do it so as to control the technology they rely on.
Unfortunately, I found it had some unfortunate video playback bugs for me on Linux, so I ended up bouncing back to Firefox. I'm also bit leery of relying on smaller projects with all the supply chain issues these days...
I would argue the process these days has more to do with the harness than the model, at least when we're talking about the SOTA options. Claude Code's biggest advantage isn't Opus, rather it's the shared knowledge the community has been building and sharing around using it effectively. Almost all of the out-of-the-box tutorials and skills and frameworks are build for Claude first, then Codex maybe.
I'd go further and say that CC and Codex are not even the best harnesses available, they just offer the most subsidized rate plans.
What hurt Alberta was every cyclical crash in oil prices, and their steadfast refusal to implement additional revenue streams like a provincial sales tax while spending instead of saving their resource-boom surpluses.
I'm active in a number of online communities that are doing just fine but the difference is those all involve ongoing relationships, built over time and with engagement across multiple platforms. I've no doubt this clock is ticking too but it's still harder to fake a user across a mix of text chat, voice and video calls, playing an online game, etc and when much of the web of relationships extends back into real life activity.
But I agree the golden age of easy anonymous connections online has ended.
https://newsroom-deezer.com/2025/09/28-fully-ai-generated-mu...
I got tired of the increasing AI slop in my YouTube Music feed and switched to Deezer a few months ago. Since then, not a single AI artist I've been able to spot. If a relatively marginal player like that can manage it, why can't Spotify or YTM? My suspicion is simply that Deezer actually actually tries.
It's the same problem with Google and search. Kagi and others have demonstrated that you can produce better results with an infinitesimal fraction of the budget, and Google is still plenty competent where they care to be. This won't start to get fixed until they see a financial incentive to do so.
A text interface is just really damn good at efficient and precise information delivery and interaction, in a way that takes a lot more work for a GUI to match, and they are composable in a way GUIs simply are not. Most users won't - and currently don't - care about terminals, but I doubt it will ever stop being a standard tool for power users.
I don't doubt we'll see new paradigms emerge, but I think they'll come in the form of higher level abstractions for certain classes of task rather than a replacement for the sort of TUIs and GUIs we have today.
And it shouldn't just be one person, unless they are at the very top of a small pyramid. Legal culpability needs to percolate upwards to ensure leadership has the proper incentive. No throwing your Head of Safety to the wolves while you go back to gilding your parachute.
To my thinking, to orchestrate or steer suggests a conductor or driver, an outside entity providing direction. A master agent creating and directing subagents could reasonably be called an orchestrator.
A harness is what the horse wears to pull a cart, or what connects a pilot to a parachute and provides the controls to tug on and steer. It might provide guidance or capability, but not active direction. It's also a fairly common use in hardware ( a wire harness) and software (a testing harness) already.
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/2026/01/ai-memorizati...
If you've spent time struggling to make ends meet, even median income can feel like previously unimaginable wealth and security, and workplace satisfaction is rarely something that you had a great deal of choice around. If you've spent most of a decade making six figures with benefits, it's easier to decide an extra 10k or even 50k isn't worth the added stress.
Cost of living and personal situation (dual incomes, dependents) can shift that needle around quite a lot too.
Using AI to create an artistic work has more in common with commissioning art than creating it. Just instead of a person, you're paying the owners of a machine built on theft because it's cheaper and more compliant. It isn't really your creativity on display, and it certainly isn't that of the model or the hosting company.
The smallest part of any creative work is the prompt. The blood and the soul of it live in overcoming the constraints and imperfections. Needing to learn how to sing or play an instrument isn't an impediment to making music, it's a fundamental aspect of the entire exercise.
I think the point is well made though. When you're building something like a transactions database, the margin for error is rather low.
Actual engineers have professional standards bodies and legal liability when they shirk and the bridge falls down or the plane crashes or your wiring starts on fire.
Software "engineers" are none of those things but can at least emulate the approaches and strive for reproducibility and testability. Skilled craftsman; not engineers.
Prompt "engineers" is yet another few steps down the ladder, working out mostly by feel what magic words best tickle each model, and generally with no understanding of what's actually going on under the hood. Closer to a chef coming up with new meals for a restaurant than anything resembling engineering.
The battle on the use of language around engineer has long been lost but applying it to the subjective creative exercise of writing prompts is just more job title inflation. Something doesn't need to be engineering to be a legitimate job.
Who do you imagine will be throwing money at all these side-hustle "make money with AI" business you envision? No doubt there will be a few- there already are a few- but as the market gets increasingly flooded with AI slop enterprise with very little value add, that well is going to dry up quick.
It's not different than all those content creators making videos offering to teach you the secrets to easy money... instead of just making all that easy money themselves.
There's a long history of that sort of behaviour. ISPs gaming bandwidth tests when they detect one is being run. Software recognizing being run in a VM or on a particular configuration. I don't think it's a stretch to assume some of the money at OpenAI and others has gone into spotting likely benchmark queries and throwing on a little more compute or tagging them for future training.
I would be outright shocked if most of these benchmarks are even attempting serious countermeasures.
I echo the parent comment. I'm really on a Proton user for email and VPN. The quality drops off rather quickly after that. Calendar, Drive, Pass, and Wallet are all adequate at best; their primary selling point is not being Google rather than being particularly well built or supported. I would rather see them focus on being a truly competitive ecosystem.
I'm also not terribly impressed at the way they've positioned Lumo as a separate service from the existing Scribe AI features, and so conveniently not part of Ultimate plans.