17 ms·

Aaron Swartz and Sam Altman

320 points by ta988 2y ago

tempodox 2y ago
[flagged]
- error_logic 2y ago
  This despite the fact that what actually Made America Great was constructive, honest, healthy competition--not the insane destroy-the-competition monopolist's outlook which tries to destroy opportunity for others and thus competition itself. Horseshoe theory is real.
b8 2y ago
Sam Altman failed upwards only because PG likes him. Aaron Swartz was actually a technical genius imo. DOJ never should of charged Swartz.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- tzury 2y ago
  Define failure.
  - kevingadd 2y ago
    Does Loopt count as a success? The exit was slightly more than the total investment, I guess. What about Worldcoin? He's at least not someone I naturally associate with business success pre-OpenAI (and the jury's still out on OpenAI considering their financial situation) but I suppose depending on how you evaluate it his success rate isn't 0%. You can say OpenAI is a "success" given their achievements in AI but those aren't Sam's work, he should mostly be credited with their business/financial performance and right now OpenAI-the-business is mostly a machine that burns electricity and operates in the red.
    - tzury 2y ago
      Loopt was not a success. But pg handing over the leadership of YC to him is indeed the father of all successes. That lead to OpenAI, which is not a “success”, rather the success story of the recent years.
- baxtr 2y ago
  Although I agree, I think your analysis could be enhanced by asking "why" a couple of times to get to the root. Why did PG "like" him?
  - leoc 2y ago
    Alan Kay really liked him in 2016. https://youtu.be/fKcCwa_j8e0 https://youtu.be/fKcCwa_j8e0 I think Altman is very good at cultivating people. Mind you, it seems that Swartz got around by making dazzling impressions on people, too.
    - _zagj 2y ago
      >cultivating More like manipulating.
  - bookaway 2y ago
    PG liked him, because Altman decided to go to great lengths to get PG to like him. While Drew, Chesky and the Collison brothers were busy building billion dollar companies, Altman took the “shortcut” and made a concerted effort to cozy up to the most powerful man in the room — and it payed dividends. Altman did the same thing in the early OpenAI days by doing flaterring video series interviews with Elon Musk, Vinod Khosla and others [0]. Incidentally, The YC interview with Elon Musk was done the year Musk made a donation to OpenAI (2016), I still remember PG’s essay where he gave Altman the ultimate character reference (2008) [1]: >When we predict good outcomes for startups, the qualities that come up in the supporting arguments are toughness, adaptability, determination. Which means to the extent we're correct, those are the qualities you need to win…Sam Altman has it. You could parachute him into an island full of cannibals and come back in 5 years and he'd be the king. If you're Sam Altman, you don't have to be profitable to convey to investors that you'll succeed with or without them. (In retrospect, praising Altman for being the “king of cannibals” has a nice touch of gallows humor to it. Hilariously, even recently pg has a seemingly unintentional tendency to give Altman compliments that appear to be character warnings masquerading as compliments.) In 2009, pg included Altman in the top 5 in a list of the most interesting startup founders of the last 30 years.[2] If this was an observation made from afar, you could easily say it was “prescient”. But objectively at the time, no one could find any verifiable evidence in the real world to justify such an assessment. It wasn’t prescient because pg had became directly responsibly for Altman’s future success, in a case of self-fulfilling prophesy. Altman was often referenced in the acknowledgments of pg’s essays for reading early drafts and is probably referenced more than any other founder in the essays. Altman’s entire streetcred came from pg and also, once he made Altman head of YC, YC. From afar, it looks like a victory for office poltics, a skill incidentally that sociopaths are known to excel at. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tnBQmEqBCY0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tnBQmEqBCY0 [1] https://www.paulgraham.com/fundraising.html https://www.paulgraham.com/fundraising.html [2] https://www.paulgraham.com/5founders.html https://www.paulgraham.com/5founders.html
- leoc 2y ago
  What’s the best evidence for Swartz’ technical genius?
  - wesselbindt 2y ago
    My personal favorite is that he was part of authoring the RSS spec at age 14. But you're more than welcome to Google for other pieces of evidence yourself if you're genuinely interested and not just being argumentative.
    - LunaSea 2y ago
      Not that I disagree that with the idea that he was brilliant but the RSS spec isn't what I would consider a complex piece of documentation. Even for a 14 year old.
      - wesselbindt 2y ago
        What were you doing at 14?
        xnickb 2y ago
        Not the person you asked, but I (in 2004) was part of sysadmin team at the school. I helped developing tools for automating many tasks around teacher and student performance measurement and tracking. I also wrote a piece of software that went super viral among sysadmins all over the city and I was getting "thank you" emails for years after. Had anyone been developing RSS spec next to me I'd definitely jump on it. As any 14 y/o would. I don't think I'm particularly brilliant or even smart. Your circle defines you. Surround any healthy teenager with interest in tech with the right people and they'll have a lot to show in no time
        leoc 2y ago
        Being well-educated and well-connected doesn't necessarily mean you aren't great. The Sutherland boys were famously hanging out with Edmund Berkeley at his computer lab while they were still children, thanks to their mum knowing Berkeley through the General Semantics scene https://spectrum.ieee.org/sketchpad https://spectrum.ieee.org/sketchpad https://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/access/text/2023/02/102738195-05-01-acc.pdf https://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/access/text/20... . It was also luck, as well as skill, that got Ivan enjoying sole use of the gigantic, cutting-edge TX-2 for hours every week in the early '60s. You nevertheless still have to hand it to him for creating flipping Sketchpad https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sketchpad https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sketchpad in 1963 at the age of 24. On the other hand, Ivan Sutherland had created Sketchpad before he turned 25.
- tcptomato 2y ago
  > should of charged what?
  - stewartmcgown 2y ago
    Common mistake in English, usually the writer means "should've".
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
ilrwbwrkhv 2y ago
Oh man. Heavy stuff. Our industry will be looked at as good or bad? I hope we end up doing good for the world.
- memonkey 2y ago
  Hard to say when there is a profit motive for all industries. Seems like every industry at the moment is not really looking for human advancement, or maybe it is looking at advancing but only if the results are expensive for end users and efficient/proprietary for the company.
  - ilrwbwrkhv 2y ago
    Yes but the thing is our industry has almost unparalleled leverage and marginal utility cost is zero.
- zx10rse 2y ago
  Open source the models it is the only right decision.
  - remram 2y ago
    I don't understand. If something hurts your civilization but it was free, does that make it better? Like if everyone was able to build a nuclear bomb, would that make the ensuing nuclear winter more moral?
    - zx10rse 2y ago
      You contradict your own analogy. Do you live in nuclear winter? Because there are plenty of countries with nuclear weapon capabilities half of them are considered enemies. Why are they not bombing each other? Why do you even consider nuclear winter as a moral thing?
rglover 2y ago
Aaron was the OG. If you've never dug through his blog, do yourself a favor [1]. Also make some time to watch The Internet's Own Boy doc about him [2] and look up some of his talks during the SOPA shenanigans. RIP. [1] http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/ http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/ [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9vz06QO3UkQ&rco=1 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9vz06QO3UkQ&rco=1
- timonofathens 2y ago
  He also wrote one often-quoted "explanation" of Infinite Jest: http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/ijend http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/ijend
menzoic 2y ago
For one Sam scraped under the veil of a corporation which helps reduce or remove personal liability. Second, if the crime was the act of scraping then it’s directly comparable. But if the crime is publishing the data for free, that’s quite different from training AI to learn from the data while not being able to reproduce the exact content. “Probabilistic plagiarism” is not what’s happening or even aligned with the definition of plagiarism (which matters if we’re talking about legal consequences). What’s happening is that it’s learning patterns from the content that it can apply to future tasks. If a human reads all that content then gets asked a question about a paper, they too would imperfectly recant what they learned.
- jazzyjackson 2y ago
  Ask any LLM to recite lyrics and see that it's not so probabilistic after all, it's perfectly capable of publishing protected content, and the filter to prevent it from doing so is such a bolt-on its embarrassing.
  - menzoic 2y ago
    We have to understand what plagiarism is if making claims of it. Claiming that you authored content and reciting content are different things. Reciting content isn’t plagiarism. Claiming you are the author of content that you didn’t author is plagiarism. > it's perfectly capable of publishing protected content At most it can produce partial excerpts. LLMs don’t store the data that it’s trained on. That would be infeasible, the models would be too large. Instead, it stores semantic representations which often uses entirely different words and sentence structures than the source content. And of course most of the data is lost entirely during this lossy compression.
    - Earw0rm 2y ago
      That's a little like saying downloading mp3s isn't music piracy, because it's not encoding the actual music, just some lossy compressed wavelets that sound like it.
mastazi 2y ago
In the photo there are some other faces that I think I might recognise, but I'm not 100% sure. Is there a list of everyone in the picture somewhere on the internet? Edit I think the lady on the left is Jessica Livingston and a younger PG on the right
- idlewords 2y ago
  It would be pretty terrifying if it was an older PG.
- tptacek 2y ago
  No, that's Jessica Livingston, the cofounder of YC.
  - mastazi 2y ago
    yes, you are right, I edited my comment.
- aimazon 2y ago
  https://i.imgur.com/e0GPhSE.jpeg https://i.imgur.com/e0GPhSE.jpeg 1. zak stone, memamp 2. steve huffman, reddit 3. alexis ohanian, reddit 4. emmet shear, twitch 5. ? 6. ? 7. ? 8. jesse tov, https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/simmery https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/simmery 9. pg 10. jessica 11. KeyserSosa, initially memamp but joined reddit not long after (I forget his real name) 12. phillip yuen, textpayme 13. ? 14. aaron swartz, infogami at the time 15. ? 16. sam altman, loopt at the time 17. justin kan, twitch
  - mastazi 2y ago
    Amazing, thank you!
  - zurvanist 2y ago
    > 11. KeyserSosa, initially memamp but joined reddit not long after (I forget his real name) Chris Slowe Clickfacts had 3 founders so probably that's 3 of your ?s. The photo has no 13 btw.
qwertox 2y ago
Sam Altman wouldn't spend a second reflecting about this.
- piyuv 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - CaptainFever 2y ago
    Do you have proof that he is a sociopath?
    - okwhateverdude 2y ago
      [flagged]
      - CaptainFever 2y ago
        Sure, thanks.
      - xtracto 2y ago
        I hate these type of exchanges that are happening more and more in HN. Passive aggressive comments and replies from both sides of an argument. The "take comments meanings at their best value " keeps being eroded. And comments sections for these type of stories get full of them. There's no value in GP asking "do you have proof that X goes twice a day to the toilet?" ... and of course the reply is as empty as the question. The level of discourse is getting lower and lower.
        binary_slinger 2y ago
        As HN becomes more popular this will become more prevalent. The same thing happened to Reddit over the past 14 years.
        slater 2y ago
nell 2y ago
Why is Sam Altman singled out in these copyright issues? Aren't there plenty of competing models?
- mrkpdl 2y ago
  OpenAI is the highest profile.
  - nell 2y ago
    They were. The margin is not that much anymore; Claude Sonnet is the go-to model for devs nowadays. The best video model is Google's.
- sinuhe69 2y ago
  The two are seen on the picture together! So more similar they could not be. That highlights the irony and hypocrite of capitalism, of better say of human society.
  - CaptainFever 2y ago
    It's possible that both of them are more similar in thought than anti-AI people think, which is why they hung out together.
- mvdtnz 2y ago
  I don't believe you're asking this in good faith because the answer is so obvious. But just in case, it's because OpenAI is by a ridiculously large margin the most well known player in the space and unlike the leaders of other organisations his name is known and he has a personal brand which he puts a lot of effort into promoting.
  - nell 2y ago
    Why is it obvious. Google is a much more powerful profitable entity that has equally good models. Facebook uses data from Libgen. Both are highly profitable companies who could pay for resources but don't. Anthropic, the ethical fork of OpenAI doesn't do anything much different nowadays. OpenAI may have had a head start, but the competition is not far behind. https://x.com/backus/status/1878484938003034391 https://x.com/backus/status/1878484938003034391
benatkin 2y ago
I know I support what aaronsw did and I don’t think he shouldn’t have gotten in any trouble for it, let alone to the tragic level it went to. As for sama, I’m not sure, on one hand I like the innovation and on the other hand it’s very worrying for humanity. I appreciate the post and the fond memories of Aaron but I’m not in complete agreement with the author about sama.
begueradj 2y ago
Aaron was a developer himself but Sam ... ?
dehrmann 2y ago
This post misses a lot of nuance. Aaron Swartz was an activist who did obviously illegal things and got caught and prosecuted. What OpenAI is doing is in legal gray area because it might be transformative enough to be fair use; we just don't know yet.
- dkjaudyeqooe 2y ago
  Simply being transformative is not sufficient for it to be fair use. But more to the point if it's deemed illegal Altman won't suffer any personal legal consequences.
- jmcgough 2y ago
  It's not about simply not doing something illegal - we all regularly commit crimes that we could be charged with if we piss off the wrong people. When a company does it, it's "disrupting" and heavily rewarded if the company has enough funding or revenue. When people like AS do it, they get destroyed. Selective enforcement in order to maintain the status quo. The last few years have clearly shown that if you are wealthy enough, the rules do not apply to you.
  - gklitz 2y ago
    If OpenAI had run its company by hiding their hardware around a university campus they would have gotten in trouble too. It is not as much about the scraping as it’s the the part where MIT sees a masked person sneaking into backrooms hiding equipment that got AS in trouble. And of cause that he literally disrupted service to jstor because he did a poor job of scraping it. He could have gotten through all of this if he had appeared less like a cyber terrorist in his execution of his plan, but of cause he though he wouldn’t get caught doing it, so he never considered how it would look if he did.
  - rurban 2y ago
    No, we don't. We are not criminals, unlike blackhat hackers, data horders, CIA affiliated companies (meta, google) or the typical big company sociopathic fraudster.
- 2y ago
aaron695 2y ago
[dead]
khazhoux 2y ago
Thank you, Sam Altman and everyone at OpenAI, for creating ChatGPT and unleashing the modern era of generative AI, which I use every day to speed up my job and coding at home. Signed, Someone who doesn't care that you're making $$$$ from it
- angoragoats 2y ago
  If I’m an author and I don’t want my work included in the corpus of text used for training ChatGPT, should I have that right? What about if I’m an artist and I don’t want my work included in the training data for an image generation model?
  - worik 2y ago
    > I don’t want my work included in the corpus of text used for training ChatGPT, should I have that right? No You could choose not to publish, and be read If you are read you can be used to learn from
    - angoragoats 2y ago
      Generative AI is not learning. Copyrights don’t depend on whether I choose to publish a particular work or not. Zuckerberg personally approved using pirated content to train a model. Is that OK too?
      - wiseowise 2y ago
        Yes.
      - Kiro 2y ago
        Absolutely. Abolish all copyright. I can't believe hackers have lost their pirating roots and have become copyright zealots instead.
        xtracto 2y ago
        This!. Thing is you are preaching to the wrong choir, Hackernews roots were not about the "original" hacking, but more about Silicon Valley for profit entrepreneurs creating stuff for profit to heavy quotes "make the world a better place" and "democratization X". The real hackers were in usenet, /. and similar forums. Now, I'm too old and haven't found a good place. Information wants to be free, copyright is a last century millennium construct to earn money from invention. (Before copyright, people got paid by patrons to invent their stuff). Copyright should be left at the XX century door, and whoever wants to "monetize" their intellect should use methods for the XXI century.
elp 2y ago
Aaron Swartz was targeted by some pretty overly zealous prosecution no objection, but lets not forget that what he really did. He put a laptop in a wiring closet that was DOSing JSTOR and kept changing IPs to avoid being blocked. The admins had to put a camera on the closet to eventually catch him. He might have had good intentions but the way he went about getting the data was throwing soup at paintings levels of dumb activism. For all the noise the real punishment he was facing was 6 months in low security [1]. I'm pretty sure OpenAI would have also been slapped hard for the same crime. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Swartz#Arrest_and_prosecution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Swartz#Arrest_and_prosec... Edit: added link
- cassianoleal 2y ago
  > the way he went about getting the data was throwing soup at paintings levels of dumb activism. Throwing soup at paintings doesn’t make the paintings available to the public. What he did had a direct and practical effect.
  - cowsandmilk 2y ago
    > What he did had a direct and practical effect The main impact of Aaron Swartz’s actions were that it became much more difficult to walk onto MIT’s campus and access journal articles from a laptop without being a member of the MIT community. I did this for a decade beforehand and this became much more locked down in the years after his actions due to restrictions the publishers pushed at MIT. Aaron intentionally went to the more open academic community in Cambridge (Harvard, his employer, was much more restrictive) and in the process ruined that openness for everyone.
    - breck 2y ago
      [dead]
- izabera 2y ago
  Just for context, there is a new post about OpenAI DDoS'ing half the internet every other day on hn https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42660377 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42660377 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42549624 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42549624
CaptainFever 2y ago
This post pits the two people against each other. Am I the only one here who likes both Sam Altman and Aaron Swartz? They've both done great things to help remix culture. Sure, you could say that the law has come down differently on the two, but there are several differences: the timing (one was decades earlier), the nature of copying (one was direct, while the other was just to train and more novel), and the nature of doing (doing it individually vs as a corporation). But this doesn't have to reflect on them. You don't have to hate one and love the other... you can like both of them.
Sid950 2y ago
Idk but I find Aaron actually cool and intelligent.
moralestapia 2y ago
>Thank you Aaron for so much, for RSS, for Markdown, for Creative Commons and more. Didn't he also create the internet?
- ta988 2y ago
  Is it sarcasm? Did you check about the history of those three?
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
tptacek 2y ago
I don't understand the singling out of Altman here. If there's shade to throw at Altman, it's that his company occupies a position similar to that of Tesla: an early mover to a technology that appears to be on a path to universal adoption, including by large incumbents. It's hard to see what would be different about things were Altman not in the position he occupies now.
- bookaway 2y ago
  They were in the same YC batch standing next to each in a photo, so someone looked at the photo and chose to juxtapose their work and fates on the day Aaron Swartz died. If this is what you mean by "singling out", I don't see what's hard to understand.
- ycombinatrix 2y ago
  They both did mass copyright infringement...
idlewords 2y ago
The right person to contrast with Aaron Swartz is Alexandra Elbakyan. She got it done without any of the drama, fuss, or prominent mentors.
- divbzero 2y ago
  She absolutely got it done, but not surprisingly there was still significant legal backlash she had to deal with. https://www.nature.com/articles/nature.2017.22196 https://www.nature.com/articles/nature.2017.22196
  - idlewords 2y ago
    Yeah, I'm not saying it was easy for her. Quite the opposite!
- csomar 2y ago
  I guess it helped she lived in Russia? where she could throw the US governments laws into the garbage bin?
3000 2y ago
One was a hero, the other one works for (or is!) cyberdyne systems and doesnt even seem to realize it.

320 points by ta988 2y ago

tempodox 2y ago

[flagged]

error_logic 2y ago
This despite the fact that what actually Made America Great was constructive, honest, healthy competition--not the insane destroy-the-competition monopolist's outlook which tries to destroy opportunity for others and thus competition itself. Horseshoe theory is real.

b8 2y ago

Sam Altman failed upwards only because PG likes him. Aaron Swartz was actually a technical genius imo. DOJ never should of charged Swartz.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
tzury 2y ago
Define failure.
- kevingadd 2y ago
  Does Loopt count as a success? The exit was slightly more than the total investment, I guess. What about Worldcoin? He's at least not someone I naturally associate with business success pre-OpenAI (and the jury's still out on OpenAI considering their financial situation) but I suppose depending on how you evaluate it his success rate isn't 0%. You can say OpenAI is a "success" given their achievements in AI but those aren't Sam's work, he should mostly be credited with their business/financial performance and right now OpenAI-the-business is mostly a machine that burns electricity and operates in the red.
  - tzury 2y ago
    Loopt was not a success. But pg handing over the leadership of YC to him is indeed the father of all successes. That lead to OpenAI, which is not a “success”, rather the success story of the recent years.
baxtr 2y ago
Although I agree, I think your analysis could be enhanced by asking "why" a couple of times to get to the root. Why did PG "like" him?
- leoc 2y ago
  Alan Kay really liked him in 2016. https://youtu.be/fKcCwa_j8e0 https://youtu.be/fKcCwa_j8e0 I think Altman is very good at cultivating people. Mind you, it seems that Swartz got around by making dazzling impressions on people, too.
  - _zagj 2y ago
    >cultivating More like manipulating.
- bookaway 2y ago
  PG liked him, because Altman decided to go to great lengths to get PG to like him. While Drew, Chesky and the Collison brothers were busy building billion dollar companies, Altman took the “shortcut” and made a concerted effort to cozy up to the most powerful man in the room — and it payed dividends. Altman did the same thing in the early OpenAI days by doing flaterring video series interviews with Elon Musk, Vinod Khosla and others [0]. Incidentally, The YC interview with Elon Musk was done the year Musk made a donation to OpenAI (2016), I still remember PG’s essay where he gave Altman the ultimate character reference (2008) [1]: >When we predict good outcomes for startups, the qualities that come up in the supporting arguments are toughness, adaptability, determination. Which means to the extent we're correct, those are the qualities you need to win…Sam Altman has it. You could parachute him into an island full of cannibals and come back in 5 years and he'd be the king. If you're Sam Altman, you don't have to be profitable to convey to investors that you'll succeed with or without them. (In retrospect, praising Altman for being the “king of cannibals” has a nice touch of gallows humor to it. Hilariously, even recently pg has a seemingly unintentional tendency to give Altman compliments that appear to be character warnings masquerading as compliments.) In 2009, pg included Altman in the top 5 in a list of the most interesting startup founders of the last 30 years.[2] If this was an observation made from afar, you could easily say it was “prescient”. But objectively at the time, no one could find any verifiable evidence in the real world to justify such an assessment. It wasn’t prescient because pg had became directly responsibly for Altman’s future success, in a case of self-fulfilling prophesy. Altman was often referenced in the acknowledgments of pg’s essays for reading early drafts and is probably referenced more than any other founder in the essays. Altman’s entire streetcred came from pg and also, once he made Altman head of YC, YC. From afar, it looks like a victory for office poltics, a skill incidentally that sociopaths are known to excel at. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tnBQmEqBCY0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tnBQmEqBCY0 [1] https://www.paulgraham.com/fundraising.html https://www.paulgraham.com/fundraising.html [2] https://www.paulgraham.com/5founders.html https://www.paulgraham.com/5founders.html
leoc 2y ago
What’s the best evidence for Swartz’ technical genius?
- wesselbindt 2y ago
  My personal favorite is that he was part of authoring the RSS spec at age 14. But you're more than welcome to Google for other pieces of evidence yourself if you're genuinely interested and not just being argumentative.
  - LunaSea 2y ago
    Not that I disagree that with the idea that he was brilliant but the RSS spec isn't what I would consider a complex piece of documentation. Even for a 14 year old.
    - wesselbindt 2y ago
      What were you doing at 14?
      - xnickb 2y ago
        Not the person you asked, but I (in 2004) was part of sysadmin team at the school. I helped developing tools for automating many tasks around teacher and student performance measurement and tracking. I also wrote a piece of software that went super viral among sysadmins all over the city and I was getting "thank you" emails for years after. Had anyone been developing RSS spec next to me I'd definitely jump on it. As any 14 y/o would. I don't think I'm particularly brilliant or even smart. Your circle defines you. Surround any healthy teenager with interest in tech with the right people and they'll have a lot to show in no time
        leoc 2y ago
        Being well-educated and well-connected doesn't necessarily mean you aren't great. The Sutherland boys were famously hanging out with Edmund Berkeley at his computer lab while they were still children, thanks to their mum knowing Berkeley through the General Semantics scene https://spectrum.ieee.org/sketchpad https://spectrum.ieee.org/sketchpad https://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/access/text/2023/02/102738195-05-01-acc.pdf https://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/access/text/20... . It was also luck, as well as skill, that got Ivan enjoying sole use of the gigantic, cutting-edge TX-2 for hours every week in the early '60s. You nevertheless still have to hand it to him for creating flipping Sketchpad https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sketchpad https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sketchpad in 1963 at the age of 24. On the other hand, Ivan Sutherland had created Sketchpad before he turned 25.
tcptomato 2y ago
> should of charged what?
- stewartmcgown 2y ago
  Common mistake in English, usually the writer means "should've".
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

ilrwbwrkhv 2y ago

Oh man. Heavy stuff. Our industry will be looked at as good or bad? I hope we end up doing good for the world.

memonkey 2y ago
Hard to say when there is a profit motive for all industries. Seems like every industry at the moment is not really looking for human advancement, or maybe it is looking at advancing but only if the results are expensive for end users and efficient/proprietary for the company.
- ilrwbwrkhv 2y ago
  Yes but the thing is our industry has almost unparalleled leverage and marginal utility cost is zero.
zx10rse 2y ago
Open source the models it is the only right decision.
- remram 2y ago
  I don't understand. If something hurts your civilization but it was free, does that make it better? Like if everyone was able to build a nuclear bomb, would that make the ensuing nuclear winter more moral?
  - zx10rse 2y ago
    You contradict your own analogy. Do you live in nuclear winter? Because there are plenty of countries with nuclear weapon capabilities half of them are considered enemies. Why are they not bombing each other? Why do you even consider nuclear winter as a moral thing?

rglover 2y ago

Aaron was the OG. If you've never dug through his blog, do yourself a favor [1]. Also make some time to watch The Internet's Own Boy doc about him [2] and look up some of his talks during the SOPA shenanigans. RIP. [1] http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/ http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/ [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9vz06QO3UkQ&rco=1 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9vz06QO3UkQ&rco=1

timonofathens 2y ago
He also wrote one often-quoted "explanation" of Infinite Jest: http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/ijend http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/ijend

menzoic 2y ago

For one Sam scraped under the veil of a corporation which helps reduce or remove personal liability. Second, if the crime was the act of scraping then it’s directly comparable. But if the crime is publishing the data for free, that’s quite different from training AI to learn from the data while not being able to reproduce the exact content. “Probabilistic plagiarism” is not what’s happening or even aligned with the definition of plagiarism (which matters if we’re talking about legal consequences). What’s happening is that it’s learning patterns from the content that it can apply to future tasks. If a human reads all that content then gets asked a question about a paper, they too would imperfectly recant what they learned.

jazzyjackson 2y ago
Ask any LLM to recite lyrics and see that it's not so probabilistic after all, it's perfectly capable of publishing protected content, and the filter to prevent it from doing so is such a bolt-on its embarrassing.
- menzoic 2y ago
  We have to understand what plagiarism is if making claims of it. Claiming that you authored content and reciting content are different things. Reciting content isn’t plagiarism. Claiming you are the author of content that you didn’t author is plagiarism. > it's perfectly capable of publishing protected content At most it can produce partial excerpts. LLMs don’t store the data that it’s trained on. That would be infeasible, the models would be too large. Instead, it stores semantic representations which often uses entirely different words and sentence structures than the source content. And of course most of the data is lost entirely during this lossy compression.
  - Earw0rm 2y ago
    That's a little like saying downloading mp3s isn't music piracy, because it's not encoding the actual music, just some lossy compressed wavelets that sound like it.

mastazi 2y ago

In the photo there are some other faces that I think I might recognise, but I'm not 100% sure. Is there a list of everyone in the picture somewhere on the internet? Edit I think the lady on the left is Jessica Livingston and a younger PG on the right

idlewords 2y ago
It would be pretty terrifying if it was an older PG.
tptacek 2y ago
No, that's Jessica Livingston, the cofounder of YC.
- mastazi 2y ago
  yes, you are right, I edited my comment.
aimazon 2y ago
https://i.imgur.com/e0GPhSE.jpeg https://i.imgur.com/e0GPhSE.jpeg 1. zak stone, memamp 2. steve huffman, reddit 3. alexis ohanian, reddit 4. emmet shear, twitch 5. ? 6. ? 7. ? 8. jesse tov, https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/simmery https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/simmery 9. pg 10. jessica 11. KeyserSosa, initially memamp but joined reddit not long after (I forget his real name) 12. phillip yuen, textpayme 13. ? 14. aaron swartz, infogami at the time 15. ? 16. sam altman, loopt at the time 17. justin kan, twitch
- mastazi 2y ago
  Amazing, thank you!
- zurvanist 2y ago
  > 11. KeyserSosa, initially memamp but joined reddit not long after (I forget his real name) Chris Slowe Clickfacts had 3 founders so probably that's 3 of your ?s. The photo has no 13 btw.

qwertox 2y ago

Sam Altman wouldn't spend a second reflecting about this.

piyuv 2y ago
[flagged]
- CaptainFever 2y ago
  Do you have proof that he is a sociopath?
  - okwhateverdude 2y ago
    [flagged]
    - CaptainFever 2y ago
      Sure, thanks.
    - xtracto 2y ago
      I hate these type of exchanges that are happening more and more in HN. Passive aggressive comments and replies from both sides of an argument. The "take comments meanings at their best value " keeps being eroded. And comments sections for these type of stories get full of them. There's no value in GP asking "do you have proof that X goes twice a day to the toilet?" ... and of course the reply is as empty as the question. The level of discourse is getting lower and lower.
      - binary_slinger 2y ago
        As HN becomes more popular this will become more prevalent. The same thing happened to Reddit over the past 14 years.
        slater 2y ago

nell 2y ago

Why is Sam Altman singled out in these copyright issues? Aren't there plenty of competing models?

mrkpdl 2y ago
OpenAI is the highest profile.
- nell 2y ago
  They were. The margin is not that much anymore; Claude Sonnet is the go-to model for devs nowadays. The best video model is Google's.
sinuhe69 2y ago
The two are seen on the picture together! So more similar they could not be. That highlights the irony and hypocrite of capitalism, of better say of human society.
- CaptainFever 2y ago
  It's possible that both of them are more similar in thought than anti-AI people think, which is why they hung out together.
mvdtnz 2y ago
I don't believe you're asking this in good faith because the answer is so obvious. But just in case, it's because OpenAI is by a ridiculously large margin the most well known player in the space and unlike the leaders of other organisations his name is known and he has a personal brand which he puts a lot of effort into promoting.
- nell 2y ago
  Why is it obvious. Google is a much more powerful profitable entity that has equally good models. Facebook uses data from Libgen. Both are highly profitable companies who could pay for resources but don't. Anthropic, the ethical fork of OpenAI doesn't do anything much different nowadays. OpenAI may have had a head start, but the competition is not far behind. https://x.com/backus/status/1878484938003034391 https://x.com/backus/status/1878484938003034391

benatkin 2y ago

I know I support what aaronsw did and I don’t think he shouldn’t have gotten in any trouble for it, let alone to the tragic level it went to. As for sama, I’m not sure, on one hand I like the innovation and on the other hand it’s very worrying for humanity. I appreciate the post and the fond memories of Aaron but I’m not in complete agreement with the author about sama.

begueradj 2y ago

Aaron was a developer himself but Sam ... ?

dehrmann 2y ago

This post misses a lot of nuance. Aaron Swartz was an activist who did obviously illegal things and got caught and prosecuted. What OpenAI is doing is in legal gray area because it might be transformative enough to be fair use; we just don't know yet.

dkjaudyeqooe 2y ago
Simply being transformative is not sufficient for it to be fair use. But more to the point if it's deemed illegal Altman won't suffer any personal legal consequences.
jmcgough 2y ago
It's not about simply not doing something illegal - we all regularly commit crimes that we could be charged with if we piss off the wrong people. When a company does it, it's "disrupting" and heavily rewarded if the company has enough funding or revenue. When people like AS do it, they get destroyed. Selective enforcement in order to maintain the status quo. The last few years have clearly shown that if you are wealthy enough, the rules do not apply to you.
- gklitz 2y ago
  If OpenAI had run its company by hiding their hardware around a university campus they would have gotten in trouble too. It is not as much about the scraping as it’s the the part where MIT sees a masked person sneaking into backrooms hiding equipment that got AS in trouble. And of cause that he literally disrupted service to jstor because he did a poor job of scraping it. He could have gotten through all of this if he had appeared less like a cyber terrorist in his execution of his plan, but of cause he though he wouldn’t get caught doing it, so he never considered how it would look if he did.
- rurban 2y ago
  No, we don't. We are not criminals, unlike blackhat hackers, data horders, CIA affiliated companies (meta, google) or the typical big company sociopathic fraudster.
2y ago

aaron695 2y ago

[dead]

khazhoux 2y ago

Thank you, Sam Altman and everyone at OpenAI, for creating ChatGPT and unleashing the modern era of generative AI, which I use every day to speed up my job and coding at home. Signed, Someone who doesn't care that you're making $$$$ from it

angoragoats 2y ago
If I’m an author and I don’t want my work included in the corpus of text used for training ChatGPT, should I have that right? What about if I’m an artist and I don’t want my work included in the training data for an image generation model?
- worik 2y ago
  > I don’t want my work included in the corpus of text used for training ChatGPT, should I have that right? No You could choose not to publish, and be read If you are read you can be used to learn from
  - angoragoats 2y ago
    Generative AI is not learning. Copyrights don’t depend on whether I choose to publish a particular work or not. Zuckerberg personally approved using pirated content to train a model. Is that OK too?
    - wiseowise 2y ago
      Yes.
    - Kiro 2y ago
      Absolutely. Abolish all copyright. I can't believe hackers have lost their pirating roots and have become copyright zealots instead.
      - xtracto 2y ago
        This!. Thing is you are preaching to the wrong choir, Hackernews roots were not about the "original" hacking, but more about Silicon Valley for profit entrepreneurs creating stuff for profit to heavy quotes "make the world a better place" and "democratization X". The real hackers were in usenet, /. and similar forums. Now, I'm too old and haven't found a good place. Information wants to be free, copyright is a last century millennium construct to earn money from invention. (Before copyright, people got paid by patrons to invent their stuff). Copyright should be left at the XX century door, and whoever wants to "monetize" their intellect should use methods for the XXI century.

elp 2y ago

Aaron Swartz was targeted by some pretty overly zealous prosecution no objection, but lets not forget that what he really did. He put a laptop in a wiring closet that was DOSing JSTOR and kept changing IPs to avoid being blocked. The admins had to put a camera on the closet to eventually catch him. He might have had good intentions but the way he went about getting the data was throwing soup at paintings levels of dumb activism. For all the noise the real punishment he was facing was 6 months in low security [1]. I'm pretty sure OpenAI would have also been slapped hard for the same crime. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Swartz#Arrest_and_prosecution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Swartz#Arrest_and_prosec... Edit: added link

cassianoleal 2y ago
> the way he went about getting the data was throwing soup at paintings levels of dumb activism. Throwing soup at paintings doesn’t make the paintings available to the public. What he did had a direct and practical effect.
- cowsandmilk 2y ago
  > What he did had a direct and practical effect The main impact of Aaron Swartz’s actions were that it became much more difficult to walk onto MIT’s campus and access journal articles from a laptop without being a member of the MIT community. I did this for a decade beforehand and this became much more locked down in the years after his actions due to restrictions the publishers pushed at MIT. Aaron intentionally went to the more open academic community in Cambridge (Harvard, his employer, was much more restrictive) and in the process ruined that openness for everyone.
  - breck 2y ago
    [dead]
izabera 2y ago
Just for context, there is a new post about OpenAI DDoS'ing half the internet every other day on hn https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42660377 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42660377 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42549624 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42549624

CaptainFever 2y ago

This post pits the two people against each other. Am I the only one here who likes both Sam Altman and Aaron Swartz? They've both done great things to help remix culture. Sure, you could say that the law has come down differently on the two, but there are several differences: the timing (one was decades earlier), the nature of copying (one was direct, while the other was just to train and more novel), and the nature of doing (doing it individually vs as a corporation). But this doesn't have to reflect on them. You don't have to hate one and love the other... you can like both of them.

Sid950 2y ago

Idk but I find Aaron actually cool and intelligent.

moralestapia 2y ago

>Thank you Aaron for so much, for RSS, for Markdown, for Creative Commons and more. Didn't he also create the internet?

ta988 2y ago
Is it sarcasm? Did you check about the history of those three?

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

tptacek 2y ago

I don't understand the singling out of Altman here. If there's shade to throw at Altman, it's that his company occupies a position similar to that of Tesla: an early mover to a technology that appears to be on a path to universal adoption, including by large incumbents. It's hard to see what would be different about things were Altman not in the position he occupies now.

bookaway 2y ago
They were in the same YC batch standing next to each in a photo, so someone looked at the photo and chose to juxtapose their work and fates on the day Aaron Swartz died. If this is what you mean by "singling out", I don't see what's hard to understand.
ycombinatrix 2y ago
They both did mass copyright infringement...

idlewords 2y ago

The right person to contrast with Aaron Swartz is Alexandra Elbakyan. She got it done without any of the drama, fuss, or prominent mentors.

divbzero 2y ago
She absolutely got it done, but not surprisingly there was still significant legal backlash she had to deal with. https://www.nature.com/articles/nature.2017.22196 https://www.nature.com/articles/nature.2017.22196
- idlewords 2y ago
  Yeah, I'm not saying it was easy for her. Quite the opposite!
csomar 2y ago
I guess it helped she lived in Russia? where she could throw the US governments laws into the garbage bin?

3000 2y ago

One was a hero, the other one works for (or is!) cyberdyne systems and doesnt even seem to realize it.