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.
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.
>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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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"
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".
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
>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.
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.
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 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.
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
>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.
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.
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.
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’m in a bubble so I may not see the big picture, but I feel like these guys are completely destroying any kind of credibility they had.
Anthropic especially has this arrogant, “we’re smarter than you”, communication style, and acts like they’re serving some higher purpose (to the point of absurdity in some cases like “model welfare”) - I think part of all this might be the EA roots but I’m not sure. But then they get a little competition and suddenly they’re a little tattle-tale running to the government looking to artificially preserve their advantage. I’ve seen nobody who doesn’t see the naked self interest. There’s no mission, not higher purpose, not even competitive spirit, just some people that were on top and can’t handle the idea that they weren’t as special as they thought. It’s going to bite them in the long run, we’ll probably get some politically motivated legislation, but the cats out of the bag, they’ve lost all credibility and don’t even have a uniquely competitive model anymore, they’ll end up as just another also-ran.
They are relying on the same tactics Apple and Tesla used - loyal, fanatical fanbase drowning every legitimate criticism. Their fanatical fanbase is doing the real heavy lifting, not some joint-statement: "I haven't written any code in a year man, this is so good", "you are just a denier that will be irrelevant in 2 months", "you are not knowledgeable on the subject of ai", "you are just a hater" list goes on, I've heard it all.
As I said a day or two ago, the open weights Chinese models may be good (hey might be better even) but let's not fool ourselves - the only reason the Chinese are pushing for open weights is because they were not the first people at the party and that's the only way they can fight against openai and anthropic. They are just as much of an enemy as both openai and anthropic - hopefully enough people realize that without supporting either. Just sit back and let them eat each-other. That's the only sensible thing to do.
Do we have customer turnover (or intent-to-renew) figures for OpenAI or Anthropic that put them in the category of Apple or pre-DOGE Musk Tesla product owners?
I shouldn't get in arguments about this stuff online, but have you actually sat down and thought about this in-depth? It's pretty normal to have a gut reaction that this is insane, but it's worth thinking about.
If we replaced every neuron in your brain, one by one, with a silicon equivalent, would you stop being conscious? At what point? Would you be able to tell?
If yes, what about if we took those silicon neurons and instead simulated them, IE perfectly simulated an entire human brain, neuron-for-neuron, would that be conscious?
If yes, where is the line at which code starts being conscious? Can you categorically say that existing LLMs are on one side or the other? Would scaling up or down change that?
There are robust philosophical positions on all sides of this argument.
> If we replaced every neuron in your brain, one by one, with a silicon equivalent, would you stop being conscious? At what point?
We don’t understand the brain well enough to do this. There are still spirited debates around whether neurochemicals have to be individually modeled, and that’s before you get into the quantum hoo ha which may or may not be hoo ha.
There's a reason we have expressions like "train of thought". Going from one idea to another is pretty much how we think. Much like going from one token to another.
1. "Eureka moments" often pop up almost out of nowhere, this suggests that there's processing going on at a non-verbal, non-token level.
2. The fact that we think in language is an evolutionarily new phenomenon. Plenty of "smart" animals are capable of complex behaviors and learning without any kind of language "tokens". There's no reason to think that human reasoning is different and somehow confined to "tokens" instead of being a broader system. Consider language itself. The human species created it somehow out of nothing. We "tokenized" our cognition to be able to communicate. But I would argue this was driven by our social needs, not our cognitive needs and the human ability to think does not require tokens at all.
Edit:
Finally, consider how limited language really is. Even for something simple, like pain, we don't even have a way to communicate objective reality to another person. We can say "it hurts" and use metaphors: "stabbing pain", "dull pain", etc. But the experience of pain can't really be communicated to another person. It's even worse once you remove non-verbal cues like facial expressions and body language - pain just becomes a vague concept on the page.
Meanwhile, our brain is perfectly capable of perceiving the slightest changes in pain and altering our behavior accordingly. Now extend this to other human experience.
I think the best analogy here is that treating human cognition as a problem of processing "tokens" is confusing the map for the territory.
> If we replaced every neuron in your brain, one by one, with a silicon equivalent, would you stop being conscious? At what point? Would you be able to tell?
The idea that we could have a silicon equivalent at all is already a huge assumption. For starters, the silicon equivalent cannot grow or kill neural connections or neurons as needed. Biological systems have a number of properties that silicon systems just don't at the moment.
But everything that's different seems like an arbitrary requirement. I hope I'm also conscious in moments where I'm not actively growing/killing neural connections.
the only thing that point into you being in a bubble is thinking that credibility matters? In the end, companies will buy the best models for their use case based on capabilities, price, ease of access, etc, they will sign up with some providers and coders will just use whatever their employees give them 95% of the case.
I think we are in a chaotic state because we don't know how the whole AI thing will play out longer term. FUD tactics are a choice in this phase to take advantage of the public perception. You have to assume that especially many non technical people are quite concerned and would probably agree to any regulation to make them feel safer.
Of course it also reveals how unethical these actors are.
There is nothing these big tech companies hate more than competition. It took Google, Apple and M$ long long time to establish their monopolies. OpenAI and Anthropic are trying to speed run it.
And they've provided no technical explanation of how...
This may be an odd reference, but I remember this song and dance with Roomba Vs. Roborock. "Roborock stole our IP!!!" but the problem was that song was slightly believable in the very early days, then Roborock started releasing products far better than anything Roomba had, but the tune in the US never changed. Literally for years after Roborock's products were two generations better than Roomba, but somehow they "stole" that?
China has money, talent, and cheap electricity/superior infrastructure. The US's big AI built their products on stolen copyright material and social media scraping. China likely got a catchup boost via distilling, but recently a lot of their AI ventures have come fully online, and they've just throwing tons of compute/power at the problem, and we're starting to see legitimately competitive products without shortcuts/cheating.
But the US won't change its tune; and that's convenient because they don't really want to compete, but rather roll out protectionism and fear per normal.
Given the fact that we seen not any evidence beyond people "see, it one shot X game looks similar to Fable" (a lot of one shots look similar to other models).
You expect to see something from Fable its restrictions/fallback behavior popping up in K3. You do not filter out all that behavior. Especially on such a short notice.
For me the milk example, where somebody asked if some EU cheese's had type A/B milk type (they are allergic), triggering bio restriction prompts. That just shows you how hard it is to find all those restrictions because its not in obvious spots where Fable goes off.
Yet, not a single person has shown this behavior in K3...
The funny thing is, other Chinese companies can train on K3 when the open weight are released next week.
So even if K3 was or was not trained on Fable, they already have a alternative to get their models to the same level.
Z.ai found a way to crack/overcome the cryptography that safeguarded Claude/Fable's thinking tokens in Claude Code, so Z.ai had the ability to peak into decrypted thinking tokens that Fable produced in Claude Code. Z.ai also shared their findings with other big LLM companies like Moonshot AI, which had 20,000+ accounts speed running through Fable to get their hands on as many high quality thinking tokens as possible for distillation.
Distills are bad for the US economy because they compress margins that otherwise go to pushing the frontier. You'd see model progress dramatically slowed if US companies had to compete on distills.
> You'd see model progress dramatically slowed if US companies had to compete on distills
We’re already competing on distills—they exist. The question is whether America will actually compete or if it will lean into its populist tendency and cede the market globally to China.
Yeah, I don’t buy this is happening. I’m open to being wrong. But folks who believe that can put their money where their mouths are in terms for stumping up cash for the training.
> distills force you to move your compute off the frontier
It's the exact parallel of how it'll play out for U.S. automakers: destined for irrelevance given their inability or unwillingness to compete against China in the EV market. Instead they pretend EVs are bad and cry for protectionist policies.
The sad fact here is that OpenAI and Anthropic are only looking for a max 1-year runway (Anthropic's is only a few months away) so that they can IPO and their VC investors cash out immensely. They do not care about AI safety or fairness, only to appease their VC overlords. But the public is being lied to and pitched this narrative that "open weight AI models are all bad".
To their mutual detriment. If anything, this proves how unsustainable of a business LLMs are in their current form.
This is a ultra speed run of what Red Hat and SuSE upending Windows in the 90s/00s.
LLMs are incredible and extremely useful, but they never should have been a for-profit venture. At least not at first. They should have originated from universities (who would have had the capital to fund model development and do so ethically in this universe), and LLMs should have been much, much smaller in scope (like autocorrect in word processors or autocomplete in IDEs). Instead, we (well, OpenAI mostly) opted to burn the Amazon to extract profit from the wood, our planet's future be damned.
Between this, transferring billions from EV R&D, eliminating the EV tax credit and targetting research universities, I can't help but think that Krebs was right. So MANY of the policy decisions being made by the US are inexplicable UNLESS you assume that a rootkit has infected the government.
You know what? That is fine based merely on recent openai/hugginface incident ( after all, they needed open weights model to actually troubleshoot it, because 'safe' one did not let em ).
I would rather we not lose the AI race so idiotically.
Winning the AI race means letting OpenAI and Anthropic face market forces.
Edit: Clearly other companies are doing well. ElevenLabs, Runway, FAL, RunPod, CoreWeave, Lambda, BaseTen, Lovable. These are real companies that didn't raise absurd amounts of capital. They've grown revenues at a solid clip, provide real value, and didn't go off the deep end with fundraising.
How are we winning? Nobody has actually created a business model that works yet. Just because you can hemorrhage hundreds of billions of dollars to build the most performant model doesn't necessarily mean you're going to make your money back.
This is a great question. Unless OP works for one of the big AI companies, the "we" is actually just "they." He would rather they not lose the AI race so idiotically. If we are not in the race, we're losers-by-default as those in the race reap all the benefits.
“This is a point that bears repeating: because U.S. open weight model makers must follow the frontier labs’ terms of service, they (1) are worse than Chinese alternatives and (2) end up distilling the distillation, just with a detour through Chinese labs. Wouldn’t it be better if western open weight model makers could go to the source?
…
The U.S. should pass a law that (1) makes explicit that collecting data for training models is fair use, and (2) bars terms of service that forbid distillation, for U.S. companies at a minimum. Stopping distillation — which is literally just querying the API — is nearly impossible; the U.S. should go the other way and lean into a new copyright policy that both indemnifies the labs and also guarantees that what they learned fuels further innovation for everyone else” [1].
The point of regulation in Europe is usually to protect people. Regulation in the US seems to be done with the purpose of protection companies. I'm not 100% sure, but this feels non-ideal for most people.
I mean if you cut out the bottom 65% and the top 1% (but perhaps even top 5%) of americans, you are left with a group of generally affluent people who are the actual backbone of the US economy. These people work white collar career jobs, own houses, own stocks, have retirement on track, college debt paid off or soon to be, good health insurance, go on vacations, drive new(ish) cars, let their instagram impulse buying get a bit out of control sometimes, maybe they work from home or are hybrid.
These people are the antithesis of "America is a Shithole", and they know it, so they keep their head down and point at the top 1% like everyone else. It's virtuous and pure to do so (and of course keeps the heat off them, the wealthiest contingent). If you isolate this group and compare them globally, it spells out why for decades so many white collar workers wanted to be in the US rather than Europe or the East.
> point of regulation in Europe is usually to protect people
That may be the stated aim. The effects are the same: incumbency advantage. Oddly pushed by the countries, for the EU, and states, for the U.S., where the protected companies live and put assets.
Many examples of when this is not seemingly the goal, hence the "usually". Some people suck, everywhere, and sometimes they end up with power to enact things, this happens everywhere, Europe is probably no better. Hopefully the institutions we've built up and continue to build, are more resilient when the future real tests come though, so far they haven't really been put under real stress.
Please explain how making it difficult to start a business and hire employees protects people. I've never understood that logic but maybe I'm missing something.
The goal isn't "making it difficult to start a business", the goal is to protect people, meaning things affecting the public are more controlled, slower and more bureaucratic to initiate. The slowness is a feature and there really isn't any "difficulty" in starting a business, it just takes time to fill out papers and wait for approvals and what not.
"the slowness is a feature" - I grew up in eastern block of Europe in the 80-90s, this type of sentiment has a real "the party loves you, this is for your own good" vibe.
Difference in opinion isn't authoritarianism or means you live a dictatorship. Slowness is actually a feature in lots of societies, for example in Spain where I live, for better or worse. Your comment gives of a "so you hate waffles?" vibe.
It's very simple to start a business, and it's even simpler to hire people.
It is hard to fire employee, especially when the company is doing good, yes.
It is a bit slow and administratively annoying to start a business in some countries, yes, though in those you can usually start operating while starting AND there are workarounds which is why there isn't enough pressure to stop it (eg, the german "pre made company shell" market is how you actually do it instead of making your own).
Yeh all I wanna do I hire a few employees, raise some capital and put my AI nudifier out into the hands of German schoolkids, but damn EU regulators just wants to keep the little guy down I guess
Go live a few months as an average middle class person in Western Europe and then do the same in the US. You can argue in favor of US superiority based on GDP and stock market and number of billionaires a hundred other similar metrics, but looking at basic happiness and quality of life there’s really no comparison. Europeans value maximizing family, community, physical and mental health, leisure time, hobbies, culture, and so their laws and policies are written in that way.
> looking at basic happiness and quality of life there’s really no comparison
Uh, at similar fractions of average income there is a lot more of folks being happier where they are than grass-is-clearly-greener-on-one-side-versus-another.
Yep. Growing up, I always defaulted to the "enlightened centrist" perspective that antitrust law and IP law and trade law were failing to help the median person simply due to the difficulty of the problem, that insofar as our regulation was inadequate it was inadequate because it had to balance multiple crossed incentives and stay ahead of world class sprinters who had a systemic resource advantage because the economy will always be larger than the regulators. But the more I learn about the history of these subjects the more I realize that the levers were understood, they did work, and that the present outcomes were entirely intentional.
Reagan and the Chicago school intentionally shifted antitrust and IP law into monopoly mode (Bork and Bowman+Posner). The Consumer Welfare Standard is an obvious fig-leaf over Robber Baron talking points as defeated earlier by Brandeis, the Nine No-Nos (lol) indicate that the failure modes of modern IP policy weren't just understood but contained, and then containment was turned off. Trade is a messier story but Triffin articulated the distributional problems in the 60s so nobody gets to claim ignorance.
The bad news is that there is more corruption that I thought, but the good news is that the problems are more solvable than I thought.
The winning monopolies and CEOs seem to be intent into turning into some kind of techno fascists feudalism with the most corrupt government on earth, uncontrollable start the war machine and increasingly less and generally destroying democracy.
So, I am not sure it is such a win. These guys seem to be winning.
National pride aside, we must decide if competition is good or is it bad. In the west we've been conditioned that competition is good and expect consequences and tradeoffs. In this case we're seeing incumbents trying to lobby government to secure their market share.
People rightfully question if these business models were ever feasible or sustainable to begin with. But isn't that the risk they took? We can certainly recognize that being displaced before realizing profit from your work is like a kick in the pants, but isn't that always supposed to be a possible outcome? I realize that is part of why we have intellectual property rights to reward innovators - but that isn't a universal concept in this global economy.
Which, some might argue, may be the point on the global stage. It is an ideological competition as well.
There is no greater moral priority than making Sam Altman and Dario Amodei into trillionaires. No greater. We all may die, or be pushed into poverty, but our sacrifice will be worth it to them.
I was under the impression Axios did that kind of shit even before LLMs, though I admit I haven't refreshed my memory on older Axios articles before this statement.
Yeah this makes it unreadable for me, immediately distracted by how stupid it is and lose interest in the article. As someone else noted, it’s people who think they are writing for an “executive” audience that have never been within 100 feet of an executive.
I bounced off that at first, too, but I'm glad I revisited. It's exactly what I wanted from most news. All the relevant information up front. None of the bullshit of regular news reporting.
They want you to rent their compute instead of running it on your own hardware.
They are part of tribal play to make everything rented. Self driving taxis, where no one owns a car, rented computers talking to rented compute for AI tokens, rented text books, and rented history books preaching hallucinated facts
That tiny cabal wants everyone to be digital serfs where the only place to buy or sell is on a platform owned by a tribe member while you ride in your rented self driving taxi to your rented house while making dinner plans using your rented compute.
China wants you to own your bits. Because a 30 year old tractor you own is better for a small farmer than a rented John Deer self driving auto farm in the hands of the serf.
The American tribal vision is serfdom forever and the Chinese vision is everyone having a tiny farm they own with local compute AI driven cars that cost half a years salary instead of three years salary with continuing rental feature subscriptions.
I know which side I am on.
Do your part for humanity and replicate Chinese open source models as far and wide as possible! It is for our future to avoid the Tribal's push for Serfdom! China is trying to help us!!
Use Chinese AI today. Its for your children tomorrow or they will be serfs to about ten Jewish men and one South African Satanist with a dozen Jewish babies.
I was honestly like “I disagree with pushing Chinese models just because OpenAI and Anthropic are shitheads, but that isn’t insane asylum” before I got to doors of Bedlam.
> They want you to rent their compute instead of running it on your own hardware
I don't think this is the main thing. I think the real risk open weights AI poses to them is that it allows us to get inference from providers that only care about making profits on inference. What OpenAI/Anthropic want is to be able to jack up inference prices once everyone is dependent. Open weights keeps them honest.
I see it as a battle for the global economy. On the American side is the one that wants to run the mainframe everyone accesses via client, and on the Chinese side they want the processing at the periphery, on the clients. Even the American military asks zion while the Chinese build their compute at the peripheries instead of using Zionist architecture.
It is fundamentally a battle between "zionists" creating serfdom with control over literature and historical knowledge against "communalists" for the future of mankind.
Open Weights is about who drives your pickup, educates your kid, decides your injection, and orders your groceries. Is it Your local set of ASICS, or their mainframe in zion.
This is why it is a national security priority for both sides and the war is now as China establishes its own 14nm ASICs chip making ability.
E.g. USA terminators will take their orders via zion mainframe and the Chinese terminators will handle the compute locally. Which means local chinese could defend against both kinds, and the serfs who live outside of zion will not be able to.
It is zionist serfdom vs communalism/sovereignty playing in theaters globally in 5G Warfare
HN loses its fucking mind the moment any topic related to AI safety is mentioned.
This website just does not fundamentally believe we are getting to AGI, or that RSI is a thing that can happen, and so anyone doing anything about it must have some evil ulterior motive.
It also doesn't seem to know what it wants. When Trump blocks Fable "there needs to be proper legislation, not an authoritarian controlling this". When an article discusses the legislative process "F' these companies!".
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.
"Openness" is not inherently a good thing, this is a naive techno libertarian mindset.
You don't hand every random script kiddie a zero day button. When models get better, you don't hand them an AGI that can help them make bioweapons or whatever.
When it comes to intelligence, there is a limit to openness that any sane non-tech-libertarian would agree on.
The irony of creating distilled models by training against closed-source models, which were themselves trained on copyrighted work without permission arguing it was fair use.
1) This is going to be like Electric cars. You see how far ahead China is there for commercial viability for a wider consumer base
2) There are many reasons why Anthropic and Open Ai will collapse aside from this.
3) Wait until you have non-China models that are good enough. Hint: they already exist. Microsoft partnering with Mistral is a big red flag for OpenAI and Anthropic.
Naming plays top role in a corp's success. OpenAI chose terrible ones: a cheating, barely legal for the company and a scientific abbreviation for their popular product. I predict market fate will give them a lesson by pushing them to failure.
More and more these companies sound like they want to protect market share, instead of lose it to foreign models. I believe the cat's already out of the bag on this one. Regulatory capture and more export control will indeed push more people to Chinese models that are good enough right now. I'm not sure they actually realize that.
I am very pro open source models - I use them every single day.. But we obviously don't want everyone to have capabilities like and beyond what caused the huggingface incident in every domain, so it's not like it all comes from bottom line cynicism.
You can say you don't want the bad guys to get the capability until and after the reality hits you. But this arrogant hope stands in the way of developing an effective response. The handlers of closed models would like you to be dependent on them for protection, this much is clear.
It's inevitable. The value proposition of the software isn't large enough to justify (by itself) the valuation. Not to mention it's trained on lots of public or scraped data.
It's a gold rush, and the only guy getting rich will be the one selling the shovel (nvidia + cloud in this case).
There's money now to _build_ these massive data centers. If there is long-term money to operate, we'll see.
It might mean we'll get cheaper cloud compute in the future, but I'm also positive on the market's ability to absorb the excess capacity quickly. It's Jervon's paradox.
I am less exuberant on market willing to pay the rates that are need to cover the loan servicing costs of these investments. Numbers look really suspicious because they are so significant compared to economy in general.
Corporations are already pulling back from using expensive SotA closed models. The buffet is open weight. Just look at Databricks as an endpoint provider for both open weight and closed LLMs. Companies will utilize what is cheaper and does the job. We all know the market pressure is real and present. What has become truly apparent is that when (not if) mythos class open weight models get released, if cybersecurity folks and developers have no access to use them to help harden and guard infrastructure, it leaves the gates wide open to attach vectors which will not be defensible. This is the real danger that the vast majority of corporate entities should be caring about. Shutting down open models is setting up for serious security concerns.
The OpenAI/Huggingface debacle is patient-zero. Huggingface used GLM 5.2 to help mitigate and were unable to use more capable closed sota models for the analysis due to guardrails. It is a foot gun of the highest order. We should all be concerned. I feel like Captain Obvious saying this.
because on one hand you have many citizens that hardly can organize themselves and with few resources, on the other a big company funded by other big companies. The law isn't the same for everyone.
idk if its competition?? if tech evolution from ability to distill from libgen to ability to distill from another closed source model means the closed weights models collapse, maybe claude/ openai can still evolve using ability to train further with chat logs from their users...but i think if someone makes algo that can fine tune open model on their own business logic/codebase/internal processes that is what most companies and customers want, they dont need or use 90% of the weights anyway only those that are relevant to their business processes,,then company will pay for optimized server hardware still but on their own weights if that is where they can get good tps. its always good if u own ur own weights and can fine tune but that is priveledge rn limited to large corporations not small business
Is the headline here ("OpenAI and Anthropic unite against open-weight AI risks to their bottom line") an editorialized version of the original "OpenAI and Anthropic unite against China's open models" or did Axios change theirs?
This AI generated article about closed-weights model providers collaborating for additional scrutiny of open weights models, where the article itself has the tell-tale structure of being written by Claude Opus, which is aware it is a closed-weight model.
Thank goodness no one is taking any of this seriously, because it could never be anything more than a machine generated hatchet job.
A faster and better educated understanding of the subject matter could be achieved by standing in front of a wood chipper and dropping a brick in it to see what happens. “Yes, there were results! But why? Why to literally every variable involved?”
Regulation won't beat engineering here. China will continue to release open weight models that are impossible to ban without unprecedented surveillance in Western countries.
AI labs need to innovate if they want to win. Open models are capitalism. Ideally Western companies should get more efficient, but if we can't then we should be doing the opposite of regulation, and subsidizing western models.
There's a baby and bathwater situation here. If the US actually starts entertaining protectionism here, it might push most of the rest of the world (including places like the EU, India, South America, etc.) away from Openai and Anthropic towards other models not controlled by the US (which is mostly models made in China currently).
OpenAI and Anthropic kind of need that revenue to justify their current valuations. The US market by itself is too small for that. And if that money dries up, it's going to be much harder for them to maintain their technical head start. The US starting to impose all sorts of restrictions here would not be helpful.
Given all the models were effectively subsidized by being granted free access to copyrighted data for training on it only makes sense for the resulting weights to be free.
The fact these two cos are bleating about this while having built their empires on IP theft is just insane.
They act like people don’t see it and then wonder why there might be any resentment towards AI companies.
I am pro AI but there has long been a cultural problem with mercenary attitudes in the big data/ML and now AI world of which this is just the latest most extreme manifestation.
Ah, the ever present American Exceptionalism. China really does not care what happens within the borders of the US, at least as far as stopping them developing their own models.
Make laws, make policy, ban them from US markets. It won't stop China doing whatever the hell they want. Like SpaceX developed reusable rockets and China thought "That's a good idea" and now they have their own reusable rockets.
They will do that with AI too, and fast. Having your head in the sand just exposes your rear end, and you've removed your ability to see the predator coming...
Ironic that US companies are monopolistically pushing FUD for regulation and China is pushing open source to the world. How the tables have turned. The reality is the AI trade and "bubble" is masking an otherwise flat, inflated economy. History tells us that the US position doesn't end well.
There’s a broader issue here that goes beyond OpenAI and Anthropic. In the last couple of years US economic growth has been driven almost entirely by AI and data center spending. It may not be too outlandish to claim that we are in a recession right now but it is hidden by the AI bubble and all the underlying circular financing.
So it isn’t just the two companies and their investors that have a vested interest in keeping the music playing, it’s the entire US government. No surprises then that government officials are now openly accusing Chinese companies of cheating. Sanctions and tariffs are probably going to follow.
That's what you get living on borrowed time. The entire thing started off with the wrong foot, using copyrighted and licensed work without attribution followed by a nonsensical illusion of "fair play" because you wanted to win. This is just one way where the moat will fall, the next wave will be when consumer and local inference catches up.
As someone outside both USA and China. I think it is time to increase my spending on Chinese infra/services. It is imperative to have alternatives to US oligopolies else will be at whims of these techbros and govt elected by money and relgious fanaticism. So, bye-bye Claude; hello Kimi.
The reason barking at open source will only get the dog thrown into the river is because there is a whole lot more cumulative power distributed among companies and consumers who don't want two incumbents to dictate which kinds of alternatives can exist.
Note that those rushing to the "all corpos evil" talking points will turn around and advocate delegating these decisions to "the government." This is the same government that they also claim is bought by the corporations. It's also the same government that will enforce the regulatory capture on behalf of the yucky corporation against the broad, diverse interests.
Thinking big vs small while embracing the biggest of the big is some kind of inconsistency that people need to deal with by looking in the mirror and finding some awareness. Nuance. If your problem model is wrong, so is every solution you propose except if your wrong model may get lucky from time to time. Not every broken model is a broken clock. Some broken models cannot admit the right answer ever.
The real dynamic on display here is broad, correlated mass of overlapping interests, big and small. The big pile of people and entities that don't want to be governed by OpenAI and Anthropic can push harder and win the tug of war. You don't have to like your temporary allies all the time, but at least know who they are and when you are aligned.
Humanity discovered a technique for compressing the world's information into a few files that fit on a USB drive. It's just insane that some people thought they'd get to be the only ones who get to possess them.
This is such a naive take. What happens when "those files on a USB drive" turn into a zero day button that can harm millions of people?
What happens when they help authoritarian dictatorships build nuclear weapons?
What happens when they teach average people the steps needed to make a bioweapon at home?
Every society restricts dangerous capabilities at the end of the day, because most people realize there is a crossover point between the danger of the capability and it being available to everyone.
More and more I'm getting the feeling that I should drop my Claude account and fully move to Chinese providers. This is sickening, especially with every mention being about "the US evaluating" aka controlling. Meanwhile us in the rest of the world can only look on and hope cracks remain for us to benefit.
My bet: Thanks to China, compute gets cheaper, models get better, both economically and qualitatively, and AI becomes increasingly commoditized rather than controlled by a select few.
If I wager on anything else, it won’t matter, because it would mean living in a dystopian hell where any bet is meaningless.
I don't think it's ever a good idea to change the rules of the game in order to stay competitive.
In recent years, with US further turning their back from globalization into America first protectionism, the rest of the world is getting increasingly tired and slowly de risking out of US products and tech.
European companies are either suffering us levies, or us interference with whom they can conduct business with, or consistently risking that their service and cloud providers can become liabilities over night.
EU is also strongly pushing for US alternatives in payments, telecoms, space, etc. And I didn't even mention politics yet.
US is still enjoying an apex position, but it may overestimate its gripe and underestimate resentments (Greenland threats have been a point of no return).
The actions of US looks like those of a decaying empire.
What plays in US hands is that its biggest "allies" are mature democracies, and mature democracies really procrastinate any painful change unless they have to confront it, thus it may keep getting away with this for very long.
They have had many "good" ideas about one-sided deals of late - usually served with a "or else..." and then the "or else" happens anyway.
One wonders how many times that trick can be used. In fact, no need to wonder. Look around, the EU is busily spinning up arms industries, alternative payment platforms and expanding trade agreements with nearly everyone else.
Yes. The US can try. But while we haven't filed for divorce yet, we are definitely looking elsewhere.
If European companies host Chinese models there’s no way to make the usual “privacy” argument. Nor can they claim monopoly. What’s left then, ban math?
These fucking assholes want to selfishly sink our country and our competitiveness because their valuations are tied to a thin little moat, and they moronically raised way too much capital. They think regulation can save them, when in actuality it will doom all of us.
The problem isn't only them, it's all the greedy investors and enablers around them thinking they can hold the potato just long enough to enrich themselves before the whole things explodes. The "enablers" are the real problem and this is why Elon is still not behind bars.
Am I the only one that finds the "laissez faire" attitude of the tech crowd insufferable?
There is this chronic refusal to believe that new technologies can cause harm.
My team works on testing risks from both companies' leading models and I feel pretty confident saying that uncensored next gen models becoming "open" would be a net negative for society.
I don't understand why no narrative regarding the risks of technology can land with the tech crowd until it's too late (hello, social media!)
They can try to do whatever they want to do. They can ban Huggingface. It just means we will get our models from torrents, or have someone from China ship us an SD card with the weights on it.
The only practical open source models, that can be fine tuned and are of sufficient quality are all Chinese. The only thing that has been released by labs are yesterday's tech. And that's exactly how they want it. They don't care about open source, don't care about the community. It's just another funnel for them to capture customers into their closed tech, which is where the actual serious high quality models are.
> Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has argued that open-weight models are harder to keep safe because, once their weights are released, developers lose the ability to revoke access, update safety guardrails or prevent misuse.
Yes, I totally love the fact that when using the closed source models that I pay for, once released, they can still shut me out or silently poison the results based on IP address, timezone, hostname, keywords or just the general vibes, etc. at any time (all of which already proved to have happend or even admitted to / bragged about). /s
As usual, HN and the media think they understand AI safety and the implications of the race to RSI better than the people that have worked on this their whole lives.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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".
Anyone who thinks these companies ever cared about any of that is naive.
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.
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.
Then I am naive, but I think they cared before they got powerful and chatgpt release.
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.
So you're saying they have no integrity?
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.
Who are you and why should we listen to you banging on the drum?
Memento mori.
> 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.
>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.
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.
also China actually legally pays the API costs even when distilling. OPenAI and ANtro just straight up abused scraping bots which overloaded servers
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.
They are scraping too, and don't follow copyright any more thoroughly (less if you count all the licensing openai, anth are doing now)
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.
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.
> 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.
>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.
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.
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.
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’m in a bubble so I may not see the big picture, but I feel like these guys are completely destroying any kind of credibility they had.
Anthropic especially has this arrogant, “we’re smarter than you”, communication style, and acts like they’re serving some higher purpose (to the point of absurdity in some cases like “model welfare”) - I think part of all this might be the EA roots but I’m not sure. But then they get a little competition and suddenly they’re a little tattle-tale running to the government looking to artificially preserve their advantage. I’ve seen nobody who doesn’t see the naked self interest. There’s no mission, not higher purpose, not even competitive spirit, just some people that were on top and can’t handle the idea that they weren’t as special as they thought. It’s going to bite them in the long run, we’ll probably get some politically motivated legislation, but the cats out of the bag, they’ve lost all credibility and don’t even have a uniquely competitive model anymore, they’ll end up as just another also-ran.
They are relying on the same tactics Apple and Tesla used - loyal, fanatical fanbase drowning every legitimate criticism. Their fanatical fanbase is doing the real heavy lifting, not some joint-statement: "I haven't written any code in a year man, this is so good", "you are just a denier that will be irrelevant in 2 months", "you are not knowledgeable on the subject of ai", "you are just a hater" list goes on, I've heard it all.
As I said a day or two ago, the open weights Chinese models may be good (hey might be better even) but let's not fool ourselves - the only reason the Chinese are pushing for open weights is because they were not the first people at the party and that's the only way they can fight against openai and anthropic. They are just as much of an enemy as both openai and anthropic - hopefully enough people realize that without supporting either. Just sit back and let them eat each-other. That's the only sensible thing to do.
Interestingly, Apple will Sherlock the pants off of OpenAI and Anthropic once they release Siri+. At least for B2C.
> Their fanatical fanbase
Do we have customer turnover (or intent-to-renew) figures for OpenAI or Anthropic that put them in the category of Apple or pre-DOGE Musk Tesla product owners?
They have no fanbase anymore. They poisoned all of that goodwill.
RIP Anthropic "good guys" January 2021 - January 2026.
Earlier this year they limited how you could use your subscription. It's been rapidly downhill since then.
> model welfare
I shouldn't get in arguments about this stuff online, but have you actually sat down and thought about this in-depth? It's pretty normal to have a gut reaction that this is insane, but it's worth thinking about.
If we replaced every neuron in your brain, one by one, with a silicon equivalent, would you stop being conscious? At what point? Would you be able to tell?
If yes, what about if we took those silicon neurons and instead simulated them, IE perfectly simulated an entire human brain, neuron-for-neuron, would that be conscious?
If yes, where is the line at which code starts being conscious? Can you categorically say that existing LLMs are on one side or the other? Would scaling up or down change that?
There are robust philosophical positions on all sides of this argument.
>> If we replaced every neuron in your brain, one by one, with a silicon equivalent, would you stop being conscious?
If we put your brain in a jar, would you be a person? Would you have normal consciousness? Honestly I don't know and I am not the person to ask.
But the brain is just a computer metaphor has flaws, particularly when you take account how poorly the brain is understood.
> If we replaced every neuron in your brain, one by one, with a silicon equivalent, would you stop being conscious? At what point?
We don’t understand the brain well enough to do this. There are still spirited debates around whether neurochemicals have to be individually modeled, and that’s before you get into the quantum hoo ha which may or may not be hoo ha.
There's a reason we have expressions like "train of thought". Going from one idea to another is pretty much how we think. Much like going from one token to another.
Not true in 2 particular ways:
1. "Eureka moments" often pop up almost out of nowhere, this suggests that there's processing going on at a non-verbal, non-token level.
2. The fact that we think in language is an evolutionarily new phenomenon. Plenty of "smart" animals are capable of complex behaviors and learning without any kind of language "tokens". There's no reason to think that human reasoning is different and somehow confined to "tokens" instead of being a broader system. Consider language itself. The human species created it somehow out of nothing. We "tokenized" our cognition to be able to communicate. But I would argue this was driven by our social needs, not our cognitive needs and the human ability to think does not require tokens at all.
Edit:
Finally, consider how limited language really is. Even for something simple, like pain, we don't even have a way to communicate objective reality to another person. We can say "it hurts" and use metaphors: "stabbing pain", "dull pain", etc. But the experience of pain can't really be communicated to another person. It's even worse once you remove non-verbal cues like facial expressions and body language - pain just becomes a vague concept on the page.
Meanwhile, our brain is perfectly capable of perceiving the slightest changes in pain and altering our behavior accordingly. Now extend this to other human experience.
I think the best analogy here is that treating human cognition as a problem of processing "tokens" is confusing the map for the territory.
ARTHUR I'm sorry -- did you just say you need my brain?
BENJY MOUSE Yes. To extract the question.
ARTHUR You can't have my brain. I'm using it.
FRANKY MOUSE Barely.
BENJY MOUSE We can replace it if you think it's important. An electronic brain maybe.
FRANKY MOUSE A simple one should suffice. Who would know the difference?
ARTHUR I would!
FRANKY MOUSE No, you wouldn't. We could program you not to.
> If we replaced every neuron in your brain, one by one, with a silicon equivalent, would you stop being conscious? At what point? Would you be able to tell?
The idea that we could have a silicon equivalent at all is already a huge assumption. For starters, the silicon equivalent cannot grow or kill neural connections or neurons as needed. Biological systems have a number of properties that silicon systems just don't at the moment.
But everything that's different seems like an arbitrary requirement. I hope I'm also conscious in moments where I'm not actively growing/killing neural connections.
There's no point. HN is arrogant and thinks it understands the subject matter better than the people that have worked on it their whole lives.
Everything is a conspiracy here.
the only thing that point into you being in a bubble is thinking that credibility matters? In the end, companies will buy the best models for their use case based on capabilities, price, ease of access, etc, they will sign up with some providers and coders will just use whatever their employees give them 95% of the case.
I think we are in a chaotic state because we don't know how the whole AI thing will play out longer term. FUD tactics are a choice in this phase to take advantage of the public perception. You have to assume that especially many non technical people are quite concerned and would probably agree to any regulation to make them feel safer.
Of course it also reveals how unethical these actors are.
There is nothing these big tech companies hate more than competition. It took Google, Apple and M$ long long time to establish their monopolies. OpenAI and Anthropic are trying to speed run it.
“competition is for losers” — Peter Thiel
He’s just the gift that keeps on giving, isn’t he?
> nothing these big tech companies hate more than competition
Their users? (Not to be confused with their users' money)
No, they do not feel about their users one way or another. As soon as they have their monopoly, they no longer need to.
No way this can go wrong for the U.S. economy! Do everything you can to protect the existing incumbents, pay no mind to the wider consequences.
Winning strategy.
Doesn't help how the us gov is saying Kimi 3 stole IP of Fable even though it's not possible to distill Fable in 1 month.
And they've provided no technical explanation of how...
This may be an odd reference, but I remember this song and dance with Roomba Vs. Roborock. "Roborock stole our IP!!!" but the problem was that song was slightly believable in the very early days, then Roborock started releasing products far better than anything Roomba had, but the tune in the US never changed. Literally for years after Roborock's products were two generations better than Roomba, but somehow they "stole" that?
China has money, talent, and cheap electricity/superior infrastructure. The US's big AI built their products on stolen copyright material and social media scraping. China likely got a catchup boost via distilling, but recently a lot of their AI ventures have come fully online, and they've just throwing tons of compute/power at the problem, and we're starting to see legitimately competitive products without shortcuts/cheating.
But the US won't change its tune; and that's convenient because they don't really want to compete, but rather roll out protectionism and fear per normal.
That's wild. It was only 15 days. It would have been impossible to gather enough data AND clean it up AND train AND do post training in just 15 days.
> It was only 15 days.
That, and usage was also half.
Given the fact that we seen not any evidence beyond people "see, it one shot X game looks similar to Fable" (a lot of one shots look similar to other models).
You expect to see something from Fable its restrictions/fallback behavior popping up in K3. You do not filter out all that behavior. Especially on such a short notice.
For me the milk example, where somebody asked if some EU cheese's had type A/B milk type (they are allergic), triggering bio restriction prompts. That just shows you how hard it is to find all those restrictions because its not in obvious spots where Fable goes off.
Yet, not a single person has shown this behavior in K3...
The funny thing is, other Chinese companies can train on K3 when the open weight are released next week.
So even if K3 was or was not trained on Fable, they already have a alternative to get their models to the same level.
Then it's a case of trying to uphold the narrative?
the rumor in chinese web is the following.
Z.ai found a way to crack/overcome the cryptography that safeguarded Claude/Fable's thinking tokens in Claude Code, so Z.ai had the ability to peak into decrypted thinking tokens that Fable produced in Claude Code. Z.ai also shared their findings with other big LLM companies like Moonshot AI, which had 20,000+ accounts speed running through Fable to get their hands on as many high quality thinking tokens as possible for distillation.
https://github.com/rgreenblatt/which_claude_is_k3/blob/main/...
https://x.com/alex_prompter/status/2079625670918046048
Like all rumors, who knows what's true or what's not.
Distills are bad for the US economy because they compress margins that otherwise go to pushing the frontier. You'd see model progress dramatically slowed if US companies had to compete on distills.
> You'd see model progress dramatically slowed if US companies had to compete on distills
We’re already competing on distills—they exist. The question is whether America will actually compete or if it will lean into its populist tendency and cede the market globally to China.
If you want the cost of today's intelligence to go down, distills are fantastic.
If you want AGI to arrive sooner, distills force you to move your compute off the frontier and will necessarily delay it significantly.
It's a question of what you actually want out of the AI race.
> If you want AGI to arrive sooner
Yeah, I don’t buy this is happening. I’m open to being wrong. But folks who believe that can put their money where their mouths are in terms for stumping up cash for the training.
> distills force you to move your compute off the frontier
Versus moving it to inference?
bad for the US economy but good for the World economy.
It's the exact parallel of how it'll play out for U.S. automakers: destined for irrelevance given their inability or unwillingness to compete against China in the EV market. Instead they pretend EVs are bad and cry for protectionist policies.
The sad fact here is that OpenAI and Anthropic are only looking for a max 1-year runway (Anthropic's is only a few months away) so that they can IPO and their VC investors cash out immensely. They do not care about AI safety or fairness, only to appease their VC overlords. But the public is being lied to and pitched this narrative that "open weight AI models are all bad".
Clearly worked for Oracle and Intel, who are still making their executives rich. What do you mean "average person", who gives a fuck about those?
To their mutual detriment. If anything, this proves how unsustainable of a business LLMs are in their current form.
This is a ultra speed run of what Red Hat and SuSE upending Windows in the 90s/00s.
LLMs are incredible and extremely useful, but they never should have been a for-profit venture. At least not at first. They should have originated from universities (who would have had the capital to fund model development and do so ethically in this universe), and LLMs should have been much, much smaller in scope (like autocorrect in word processors or autocomplete in IDEs). Instead, we (well, OpenAI mostly) opted to burn the Amazon to extract profit from the wood, our planet's future be damned.
Between this, transferring billions from EV R&D, eliminating the EV tax credit and targetting research universities, I can't help but think that Krebs was right. So MANY of the policy decisions being made by the US are inexplicable UNLESS you assume that a rootkit has infected the government.
> they never should have been a for-profit venture
Chinese models (many made by for-profit companies, mind you) are distilling American designs for a reason. Profit motives work.
You know what? That is fine based merely on recent openai/hugginface incident ( after all, they needed open weights model to actually troubleshoot it, because 'safe' one did not let em ).
Let it all burn:D
edit:
And lets hope we learn a lesson.
> And lets hope we learn a lesson.
That is the last thing that will happen. We don't seem to ever learn a lesson.
2008 could have been that time :(
They also could have used their brains.
I laughed, because it absolutely is an option and I dont see it happen.
I would rather we not lose the AI race so idiotically.
Winning the AI race means letting OpenAI and Anthropic face market forces.
Edit: Clearly other companies are doing well. ElevenLabs, Runway, FAL, RunPod, CoreWeave, Lambda, BaseTen, Lovable. These are real companies that didn't raise absurd amounts of capital. They've grown revenues at a solid clip, provide real value, and didn't go off the deep end with fundraising.
How are we winning? Nobody has actually created a business model that works yet. Just because you can hemorrhage hundreds of billions of dollars to build the most performant model doesn't necessarily mean you're going to make your money back.
Have you actually looked at the current financials?
Many people have
It would be nice if AI turned out to not be yet another winner-take-all technology "race" that had to be won by one company.
The companies in your 'edit' have raised huge amounts of money and are part of the same US VC shitcycle.
Who is 'we'?
This is a great question. Unless OP works for one of the big AI companies, the "we" is actually just "they." He would rather they not lose the AI race so idiotically. If we are not in the race, we're losers-by-default as those in the race reap all the benefits.
My immediate thought as well.
The current US climate is for most of the people to face the market forces while some have pay-to-play privileges...
“This is a point that bears repeating: because U.S. open weight model makers must follow the frontier labs’ terms of service, they (1) are worse than Chinese alternatives and (2) end up distilling the distillation, just with a detour through Chinese labs. Wouldn’t it be better if western open weight model makers could go to the source?
…
The U.S. should pass a law that (1) makes explicit that collecting data for training models is fair use, and (2) bars terms of service that forbid distillation, for U.S. companies at a minimum. Stopping distillation — which is literally just querying the API — is nearly impossible; the U.S. should go the other way and lean into a new copyright policy that both indemnifies the labs and also guarantees that what they learned fuels further innovation for everyone else” [1].
[1] https://stratechery.com/2026/whos-afraid-of-chinese-models/
This feels like the US is going to take a page from Europes book and regulate itself into uncompetitiveness
The point of regulation in Europe is usually to protect people. Regulation in the US seems to be done with the purpose of protection companies. I'm not 100% sure, but this feels non-ideal for most people.
To take the point further, the US still protects people. It's just that the people tend to exclusively inhabit the top 0.1% or 0.01% quantiles.
More like the top ~35%, but it's taboo to talk about that.
What do you mean ~35% ?
I mean if you cut out the bottom 65% and the top 1% (but perhaps even top 5%) of americans, you are left with a group of generally affluent people who are the actual backbone of the US economy. These people work white collar career jobs, own houses, own stocks, have retirement on track, college debt paid off or soon to be, good health insurance, go on vacations, drive new(ish) cars, let their instagram impulse buying get a bit out of control sometimes, maybe they work from home or are hybrid.
These people are the antithesis of "America is a Shithole", and they know it, so they keep their head down and point at the top 1% like everyone else. It's virtuous and pure to do so (and of course keeps the heat off them, the wealthiest contingent). If you isolate this group and compare them globally, it spells out why for decades so many white collar workers wanted to be in the US rather than Europe or the East.
> point of regulation in Europe is usually to protect people
That may be the stated aim. The effects are the same: incumbency advantage. Oddly pushed by the countries, for the EU, and states, for the U.S., where the protected companies live and put assets.
You mean like Chat Control 2.0, by which ordinary people are targeted and politicians are exempt?
Many examples of when this is not seemingly the goal, hence the "usually". Some people suck, everywhere, and sometimes they end up with power to enact things, this happens everywhere, Europe is probably no better. Hopefully the institutions we've built up and continue to build, are more resilient when the future real tests come though, so far they haven't really been put under real stress.
Please explain how making it difficult to start a business and hire employees protects people. I've never understood that logic but maybe I'm missing something.
The goal isn't "making it difficult to start a business", the goal is to protect people, meaning things affecting the public are more controlled, slower and more bureaucratic to initiate. The slowness is a feature and there really isn't any "difficulty" in starting a business, it just takes time to fill out papers and wait for approvals and what not.
"the slowness is a feature" - I grew up in eastern block of Europe in the 80-90s, this type of sentiment has a real "the party loves you, this is for your own good" vibe.
Difference in opinion isn't authoritarianism or means you live a dictatorship. Slowness is actually a feature in lots of societies, for example in Spain where I live, for better or worse. Your comment gives of a "so you hate waffles?" vibe.
It's very simple to start a business, and it's even simpler to hire people.
It is hard to fire employee, especially when the company is doing good, yes.
It is a bit slow and administratively annoying to start a business in some countries, yes, though in those you can usually start operating while starting AND there are workarounds which is why there isn't enough pressure to stop it (eg, the german "pre made company shell" market is how you actually do it instead of making your own).
Yeh all I wanna do I hire a few employees, raise some capital and put my AI nudifier out into the hands of German schoolkids, but damn EU regulators just wants to keep the little guy down I guess
What regulations specifically do you find make it hard for you to start a business or hire people?
Go live a few months as an average middle class person in Western Europe and then do the same in the US. You can argue in favor of US superiority based on GDP and stock market and number of billionaires a hundred other similar metrics, but looking at basic happiness and quality of life there’s really no comparison. Europeans value maximizing family, community, physical and mental health, leisure time, hobbies, culture, and so their laws and policies are written in that way.
> looking at basic happiness and quality of life there’s really no comparison
Uh, at similar fractions of average income there is a lot more of folks being happier where they are than grass-is-clearly-greener-on-one-side-versus-another.
Nah. I've spent enough time in Western Europe to know that's total BS. It's a nice place to visit but I wouldn't want to live there.
Europe wins by knowing better than to play those games.
Except without any of the benefits of regulation to its citizens.
Exactly.
Europe regulates to protect humanity.
USA regulates to protect monopolies and political power
Yep. Growing up, I always defaulted to the "enlightened centrist" perspective that antitrust law and IP law and trade law were failing to help the median person simply due to the difficulty of the problem, that insofar as our regulation was inadequate it was inadequate because it had to balance multiple crossed incentives and stay ahead of world class sprinters who had a systemic resource advantage because the economy will always be larger than the regulators. But the more I learn about the history of these subjects the more I realize that the levers were understood, they did work, and that the present outcomes were entirely intentional.
Reagan and the Chicago school intentionally shifted antitrust and IP law into monopoly mode (Bork and Bowman+Posner). The Consumer Welfare Standard is an obvious fig-leaf over Robber Baron talking points as defeated earlier by Brandeis, the Nine No-Nos (lol) indicate that the failure modes of modern IP policy weren't just understood but contained, and then containment was turned off. Trade is a messier story but Triffin articulated the distributional problems in the 60s so nobody gets to claim ignorance.
The bad news is that there is more corruption that I thought, but the good news is that the problems are more solvable than I thought.
The winning monopolies and CEOs seem to be intent into turning into some kind of techno fascists feudalism with the most corrupt government on earth, uncontrollable start the war machine and increasingly less and generally destroying democracy.
So, I am not sure it is such a win. These guys seem to be winning.
*ATTENTION*
This is a Big Green Flag for open-weight AI models.
National pride aside, we must decide if competition is good or is it bad. In the west we've been conditioned that competition is good and expect consequences and tradeoffs. In this case we're seeing incumbents trying to lobby government to secure their market share.
People rightfully question if these business models were ever feasible or sustainable to begin with. But isn't that the risk they took? We can certainly recognize that being displaced before realizing profit from your work is like a kick in the pants, but isn't that always supposed to be a possible outcome? I realize that is part of why we have intellectual property rights to reward innovators - but that isn't a universal concept in this global economy.
Which, some might argue, may be the point on the global stage. It is an ideological competition as well.
There is no greater moral priority than making Sam Altman and Dario Amodei into trillionaires. No greater. We all may die, or be pushed into poverty, but our sacrifice will be worth it to them.
"Why it matters: ...
The big picture: ...
Zoom in:...
Zoom out:..."
I wonder if they used an American or Chinese LLM to write this article?
I was under the impression Axios did that kind of shit even before LLMs, though I admit I haven't refreshed my memory on older Axios articles before this statement.
Yeah this makes it unreadable for me, immediately distracted by how stupid it is and lose interest in the article. As someone else noted, it’s people who think they are writing for an “executive” audience that have never been within 100 feet of an executive.
I bounced off that at first, too, but I'm glad I revisited. It's exactly what I wanted from most news. All the relevant information up front. None of the bullshit of regular news reporting.
I think axios has always used this style
Nah, that's Axios house style for their readership of extremely busy/important illiterates.
You are right, all their recent articles are written this way :(
Still, if feels very LLM-y with their short sentences, definitive statements and a love for lists when none is needed.
On the other hand, maybe Axios was such dominant component in the training dataset that now every LLM speaks like this...
Axios has had this style for years and years, before ChatGPT came out.
They want you to rent their compute instead of running it on your own hardware.
They are part of tribal play to make everything rented. Self driving taxis, where no one owns a car, rented computers talking to rented compute for AI tokens, rented text books, and rented history books preaching hallucinated facts
That tiny cabal wants everyone to be digital serfs where the only place to buy or sell is on a platform owned by a tribe member while you ride in your rented self driving taxi to your rented house while making dinner plans using your rented compute.
China wants you to own your bits. Because a 30 year old tractor you own is better for a small farmer than a rented John Deer self driving auto farm in the hands of the serf.
The American tribal vision is serfdom forever and the Chinese vision is everyone having a tiny farm they own with local compute AI driven cars that cost half a years salary instead of three years salary with continuing rental feature subscriptions.
I know which side I am on.
Do your part for humanity and replicate Chinese open source models as far and wide as possible! It is for our future to avoid the Tribal's push for Serfdom! China is trying to help us!!
Use Chinese AI today. Its for your children tomorrow or they will be serfs to about ten Jewish men and one South African Satanist with a dozen Jewish babies.
Wow, talk about a comment that starts out solid, with good points, and making a lot of sense, and ends up in an insane asylum!
I was honestly like “I disagree with pushing Chinese models just because OpenAI and Anthropic are shitheads, but that isn’t insane asylum” before I got to doors of Bedlam.
> They want you to rent their compute instead of running it on your own hardware
I don't think this is the main thing. I think the real risk open weights AI poses to them is that it allows us to get inference from providers that only care about making profits on inference. What OpenAI/Anthropic want is to be able to jack up inference prices once everyone is dependent. Open weights keeps them honest.
I see it as a battle for the global economy. On the American side is the one that wants to run the mainframe everyone accesses via client, and on the Chinese side they want the processing at the periphery, on the clients. Even the American military asks zion while the Chinese build their compute at the peripheries instead of using Zionist architecture.
It is fundamentally a battle between "zionists" creating serfdom with control over literature and historical knowledge against "communalists" for the future of mankind.
Open Weights is about who drives your pickup, educates your kid, decides your injection, and orders your groceries. Is it Your local set of ASICS, or their mainframe in zion.
This is why it is a national security priority for both sides and the war is now as China establishes its own 14nm ASICs chip making ability.
E.g. USA terminators will take their orders via zion mainframe and the Chinese terminators will handle the compute locally. Which means local chinese could defend against both kinds, and the serfs who live outside of zion will not be able to.
It is zionist serfdom vs communalism/sovereignty playing in theaters globally in 5G Warfare
The comments on this article are terrible. I can't believe it's gotten this toxic around here.
HN loses its fucking mind the moment any topic related to AI safety is mentioned.
This website just does not fundamentally believe we are getting to AGI, or that RSI is a thing that can happen, and so anyone doing anything about it must have some evil ulterior motive.
It also doesn't seem to know what it wants. When Trump blocks Fable "there needs to be proper legislation, not an authoritarian controlling this". When an article discusses the legislative process "F' these companies!".
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.
"Openness" is not inherently a good thing, this is a naive techno libertarian mindset.
You don't hand every random script kiddie a zero day button. When models get better, you don't hand them an AGI that can help them make bioweapons or whatever.
When it comes to intelligence, there is a limit to openness that any sane non-tech-libertarian would agree on.
Why should some unelected US-based technocrats with a terrible track record get to decide for us?
The irony of creating distilled models by training against closed-source models, which were themselves trained on copyrighted work without permission arguing it was fair use.
1) This is going to be like Electric cars. You see how far ahead China is there for commercial viability for a wider consumer base
2) There are many reasons why Anthropic and Open Ai will collapse aside from this.
3) Wait until you have non-China models that are good enough. Hint: they already exist. Microsoft partnering with Mistral is a big red flag for OpenAI and Anthropic.
How ironic that OpenAI is fighting Open AI.
Naming plays top role in a corp's success. OpenAI chose terrible ones: a cheating, barely legal for the company and a scientific abbreviation for their popular product. I predict market fate will give them a lesson by pushing them to failure.
It is open, but they open it for you.
So Anthropic/OpenAI is the new Microsoft and Open Weight models are the new Linux and its cancer?
https://www.quora.com/Why-did-Steve-Ballmer-call-Linux-a-can...
I guess it hurts the big AI companies knowing that AI can be way cheaper than what they sell.
More and more these companies sound like they want to protect market share, instead of lose it to foreign models. I believe the cat's already out of the bag on this one. Regulatory capture and more export control will indeed push more people to Chinese models that are good enough right now. I'm not sure they actually realize that.
I am very pro open source models - I use them every single day.. But we obviously don't want everyone to have capabilities like and beyond what caused the huggingface incident in every domain, so it's not like it all comes from bottom line cynicism.
You can say you don't want the bad guys to get the capability until and after the reality hits you. But this arrogant hope stands in the way of developing an effective response. The handlers of closed models would like you to be dependent on them for protection, this much is clear.
Then you're not very pro open source models.
"I'm pro self defense but don't want everyone to have an ICBM."
"Then you're not pro self defense!"
>ut we obviously don't want everyone to have capabilities like and beyond what caused the huggingface incident in every domain
Why not? These tools are also very useful for defense, you just need to apply them.
Read the HuggingFace postmortem, they had to use an open model because all others they tried refused to do any work.
I'm actually having a party when they both go bust. Maybe a festival?
Imagine having the brass neck to go and lobby for a rent-seeking monopoly?
It's inevitable. The value proposition of the software isn't large enough to justify (by itself) the valuation. Not to mention it's trained on lots of public or scraped data.
It's a gold rush, and the only guy getting rich will be the one selling the shovel (nvidia + cloud in this case).
And I would not be so sure about cloud... It is like building massive brothel and then the rush simply going away and you still having loan to pay.
There's money now to _build_ these massive data centers. If there is long-term money to operate, we'll see.
It might mean we'll get cheaper cloud compute in the future, but I'm also positive on the market's ability to absorb the excess capacity quickly. It's Jervon's paradox.
I am less exuberant on market willing to pay the rates that are need to cover the loan servicing costs of these investments. Numbers look really suspicious because they are so significant compared to economy in general.
I always laugh when people defend the big AI labs and post archive.is links. Techies love copyright and ToS violations until they are targeted.
Corporations are already pulling back from using expensive SotA closed models. The buffet is open weight. Just look at Databricks as an endpoint provider for both open weight and closed LLMs. Companies will utilize what is cheaper and does the job. We all know the market pressure is real and present. What has become truly apparent is that when (not if) mythos class open weight models get released, if cybersecurity folks and developers have no access to use them to help harden and guard infrastructure, it leaves the gates wide open to attach vectors which will not be defensible. This is the real danger that the vast majority of corporate entities should be caring about. Shutting down open models is setting up for serious security concerns.
The OpenAI/Huggingface debacle is patient-zero. Huggingface used GLM 5.2 to help mitigate and were unable to use more capable closed sota models for the analysis due to guardrails. It is a foot gun of the highest order. We should all be concerned. I feel like Captain Obvious saying this.
If the US government was bankrolling OAI and Anthropic, and those models were free, would the situation be better?
So, they are just going to ban chinese models, close their eyes and pretend that both Anthropic and OpenAI are worth $1T?
How can distillation be considered IP theft, when IP theft is the defacto method in how the closed-weight models were trained?
because on one hand you have many citizens that hardly can organize themselves and with few resources, on the other a big company funded by other big companies. The law isn't the same for everyone.
idk if its competition?? if tech evolution from ability to distill from libgen to ability to distill from another closed source model means the closed weights models collapse, maybe claude/ openai can still evolve using ability to train further with chat logs from their users...but i think if someone makes algo that can fine tune open model on their own business logic/codebase/internal processes that is what most companies and customers want, they dont need or use 90% of the weights anyway only those that are relevant to their business processes,,then company will pay for optimized server hardware still but on their own weights if that is where they can get good tps. its always good if u own ur own weights and can fine tune but that is priveledge rn limited to large corporations not small business
They are basically trying to pursue a model copyright.
That's funny, because they made their models exactly because of open stuff on the web.
But they will loose this battle. There is no way to technically avoid open models to be created, so they will be created.
They saw the threat a long time ago, but then it was in their interest to not have pesky regulations get in the way of world domination.
Now they’re being outcompeted and so we should suddenly have regulations.
Time to put your big boy pants on and compete.
Is the headline here ("OpenAI and Anthropic unite against open-weight AI risks to their bottom line") an editorialized version of the original "OpenAI and Anthropic unite against China's open models" or did Axios change theirs?
I wonder what they'll do when there are open european and american models that lap them. Will we see "Open"AI claim open ai is a threat to humanity?
This AI generated article about closed-weights model providers collaborating for additional scrutiny of open weights models, where the article itself has the tell-tale structure of being written by Claude Opus, which is aware it is a closed-weight model.
Thank goodness no one is taking any of this seriously, because it could never be anything more than a machine generated hatchet job.
A faster and better educated understanding of the subject matter could be achieved by standing in front of a wood chipper and dropping a brick in it to see what happens. “Yes, there were results! But why? Why to literally every variable involved?”
Regulation won't beat engineering here. China will continue to release open weight models that are impossible to ban without unprecedented surveillance in Western countries.
AI labs need to innovate if they want to win. Open models are capitalism. Ideally Western companies should get more efficient, but if we can't then we should be doing the opposite of regulation, and subsidizing western models.
There's a baby and bathwater situation here. If the US actually starts entertaining protectionism here, it might push most of the rest of the world (including places like the EU, India, South America, etc.) away from Openai and Anthropic towards other models not controlled by the US (which is mostly models made in China currently).
OpenAI and Anthropic kind of need that revenue to justify their current valuations. The US market by itself is too small for that. And if that money dries up, it's going to be much harder for them to maintain their technical head start. The US starting to impose all sorts of restrictions here would not be helpful.
Given all the models were effectively subsidized by being granted free access to copyrighted data for training on it only makes sense for the resulting weights to be free.
This is so boring, it's like the tarriffs on chinese EVs.
The fact these two cos are bleating about this while having built their empires on IP theft is just insane.
They act like people don’t see it and then wonder why there might be any resentment towards AI companies.
I am pro AI but there has long been a cultural problem with mercenary attitudes in the big data/ML and now AI world of which this is just the latest most extreme manifestation.
We might see people rushing to download the Chinese models expecting a ban, like they mobbed stores for tissue paper a few years ago.
Ah, the ever present American Exceptionalism. China really does not care what happens within the borders of the US, at least as far as stopping them developing their own models.
Make laws, make policy, ban them from US markets. It won't stop China doing whatever the hell they want. Like SpaceX developed reusable rockets and China thought "That's a good idea" and now they have their own reusable rockets.
They will do that with AI too, and fast. Having your head in the sand just exposes your rear end, and you've removed your ability to see the predator coming...
Ironic that US companies are monopolistically pushing FUD for regulation and China is pushing open source to the world. How the tables have turned. The reality is the AI trade and "bubble" is masking an otherwise flat, inflated economy. History tells us that the US position doesn't end well.
OpenAI vs. Open AIs
I knew this would happen someday.
Those people really believe in the idea of a "technological republic", heh.
There’s a broader issue here that goes beyond OpenAI and Anthropic. In the last couple of years US economic growth has been driven almost entirely by AI and data center spending. It may not be too outlandish to claim that we are in a recession right now but it is hidden by the AI bubble and all the underlying circular financing.
So it isn’t just the two companies and their investors that have a vested interest in keeping the music playing, it’s the entire US government. No surprises then that government officials are now openly accusing Chinese companies of cheating. Sanctions and tariffs are probably going to follow.
That's what you get living on borrowed time. The entire thing started off with the wrong foot, using copyrighted and licensed work without attribution followed by a nonsensical illusion of "fair play" because you wanted to win. This is just one way where the moat will fall, the next wave will be when consumer and local inference catches up.
As someone outside both USA and China. I think it is time to increase my spending on Chinese infra/services. It is imperative to have alternatives to US oligopolies else will be at whims of these techbros and govt elected by money and relgious fanaticism. So, bye-bye Claude; hello Kimi.
Bill Gureley's talk on regulation comes to mind: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F9cO3-MLHOM&t=1447s
The reason barking at open source will only get the dog thrown into the river is because there is a whole lot more cumulative power distributed among companies and consumers who don't want two incumbents to dictate which kinds of alternatives can exist.
Note that those rushing to the "all corpos evil" talking points will turn around and advocate delegating these decisions to "the government." This is the same government that they also claim is bought by the corporations. It's also the same government that will enforce the regulatory capture on behalf of the yucky corporation against the broad, diverse interests.
Thinking big vs small while embracing the biggest of the big is some kind of inconsistency that people need to deal with by looking in the mirror and finding some awareness. Nuance. If your problem model is wrong, so is every solution you propose except if your wrong model may get lucky from time to time. Not every broken model is a broken clock. Some broken models cannot admit the right answer ever.
The real dynamic on display here is broad, correlated mass of overlapping interests, big and small. The big pile of people and entities that don't want to be governed by OpenAI and Anthropic can push harder and win the tug of war. You don't have to like your temporary allies all the time, but at least know who they are and when you are aligned.
Humanity discovered a technique for compressing the world's information into a few files that fit on a USB drive. It's just insane that some people thought they'd get to be the only ones who get to possess them.
This is such a naive take. What happens when "those files on a USB drive" turn into a zero day button that can harm millions of people?
What happens when they help authoritarian dictatorships build nuclear weapons?
What happens when they teach average people the steps needed to make a bioweapon at home?
Every society restricts dangerous capabilities at the end of the day, because most people realize there is a crossover point between the danger of the capability and it being available to everyone.
This article doesn’t even say anything.
Two companies stole trillions of tokens worth of IP from Americans so of course the US government will step in and protect "their IP" from competitors
More and more I'm getting the feeling that I should drop my Claude account and fully move to Chinese providers. This is sickening, especially with every mention being about "the US evaluating" aka controlling. Meanwhile us in the rest of the world can only look on and hope cracks remain for us to benefit.
My bet: Thanks to China, compute gets cheaper, models get better, both economically and qualitatively, and AI becomes increasingly commoditized rather than controlled by a select few.
If I wager on anything else, it won’t matter, because it would mean living in a dystopian hell where any bet is meaningless.
I don't think it's ever a good idea to change the rules of the game in order to stay competitive.
In recent years, with US further turning their back from globalization into America first protectionism, the rest of the world is getting increasingly tired and slowly de risking out of US products and tech.
European companies are either suffering us levies, or us interference with whom they can conduct business with, or consistently risking that their service and cloud providers can become liabilities over night.
EU is also strongly pushing for US alternatives in payments, telecoms, space, etc. And I didn't even mention politics yet.
US is still enjoying an apex position, but it may overestimate its gripe and underestimate resentments (Greenland threats have been a point of no return).
The actions of US looks like those of a decaying empire.
What plays in US hands is that its biggest "allies" are mature democracies, and mature democracies really procrastinate any painful change unless they have to confront it, thus it may keep getting away with this for very long.
Who is in charge of AI strategy for the US? They are doing a terrible job!
Cynically: someone who is just fully deferring to Claude or ChatGPT
More cynically: someone directly in the pocket of OpenAI
and probably holding stocks in these companies
The other 95.8% of the world has entered the chat.
The US will try to force Europe to implement such restrictions as well.
They have had many "good" ideas about one-sided deals of late - usually served with a "or else..." and then the "or else" happens anyway.
One wonders how many times that trick can be used. In fact, no need to wonder. Look around, the EU is busily spinning up arms industries, alternative payment platforms and expanding trade agreements with nearly everyone else.
Yes. The US can try. But while we haven't filed for divorce yet, we are definitely looking elsewhere.
If European companies host Chinese models there’s no way to make the usual “privacy” argument. Nor can they claim monopoly. What’s left then, ban math?
Fuck these two companies.
Fuck Sam and Dario.
These fucking assholes want to selfishly sink our country and our competitiveness because their valuations are tied to a thin little moat, and they moronically raised way too much capital. They think regulation can save them, when in actuality it will doom all of us.
Go to hell, OpenAI and Anthropic.
Call your senators right now.
The problem isn't only them, it's all the greedy investors and enablers around them thinking they can hold the potato just long enough to enrich themselves before the whole things explodes. The "enablers" are the real problem and this is why Elon is still not behind bars.
They can go pound sand.
Am I the only one that finds the "laissez faire" attitude of the tech crowd insufferable?
There is this chronic refusal to believe that new technologies can cause harm.
My team works on testing risks from both companies' leading models and I feel pretty confident saying that uncensored next gen models becoming "open" would be a net negative for society.
I don't understand why no narrative regarding the risks of technology can land with the tech crowd until it's too late (hello, social media!)
They can try to do whatever they want to do. They can ban Huggingface. It just means we will get our models from torrents, or have someone from China ship us an SD card with the weights on it.
The only practical open source models, that can be fine tuned and are of sufficient quality are all Chinese. The only thing that has been released by labs are yesterday's tech. And that's exactly how they want it. They don't care about open source, don't care about the community. It's just another funnel for them to capture customers into their closed tech, which is where the actual serious high quality models are.
> Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has argued that open-weight models are harder to keep safe because, once their weights are released, developers lose the ability to revoke access, update safety guardrails or prevent misuse.
Yes, I totally love the fact that when using the closed source models that I pay for, once released, they can still shut me out or silently poison the results based on IP address, timezone, hostname, keywords or just the general vibes, etc. at any time (all of which already proved to have happend or even admitted to / bragged about). /s
As usual, HN and the media think they understand AI safety and the implications of the race to RSI better than the people that have worked on this their whole lives.