12 ms·

A concern: More and more plainly, OpenAI and Anthropic are making plays to own (and lease) the "means of production" in software. OK - I'm a pretty happy rente

• rTX5CMRXIfFG 7mo ago
  If it ever goes bad, well I hope that that’s an impetus for new open source projects to be started — and with improvements over and lessons learned from incumbent technologies, right at the v1 of said projects.
  • Maxion 7mo ago
    If LLMs turn out to be such a force multiplier, the way to fight it is to ensure that there are open source LLMs.
    • runarberg 7mo ago
      That would be accepting the framing of your class enemy, there is no reason to do that.
    • metalliqaz 7mo ago
      unless they are also pirate LLMs, I don't see how any open source project could have pockets deep enough for the datacenters needed to seriously contend
    • fnordpiglet 7mo ago
      The problem is even if an OSS had the resources (massive data centers the size of NYC packed with top end custom GPU kits) to produce the weights, you need enormous VRAM laden farms of GPUs to do inference on a model like Opus 4.6. Unless the very math of frontier LLMs changes, don’t expect frontier OSS on par to be practical.
      • palmotea 7mo ago
        > you need enormous VRAM laden farms of GPUs to do inference on a model like Opus 4.6. It's probably a trade secret, but what's the actual per-user resource requirement to run the model?
        • deleted 7mo ago
          [deleted]
      • supern0va 7mo ago
        There's already an ecosystem of essentially undifferentiated infrastructure providers that sell cheap inference of open weights models that have pretty tight margins. If the open weights models are good, there are people looking to sell commodity access to it, much like a cloud provider selling you compute.
      • lukeschlather 7mo ago
        I feel like you're overstating the resources required by a couple orders of magnitude. You do need a GPU farm to do training, but probably only $100M, maybe $1B of GPUs. And yes, that's a lot of GPUs, but they will fit in a single datacenter, and even in dollar terms, there are many individual buildings in NYC that are cheaper.
        • fnordpiglet 7mo ago
          I refer you to the data centers under construction roughly the size of Manhattan to do next generation model training. Granted they’re also to house inference, but my statement wasn’t hyperbole, it’s based on actual reality. To accommodate the next generation of frontier training it’s infeasible for any but the most wealthy organizations on earth to participate. OSS weights are toys. (Mind you i like toys)
    • captainbland 7mo ago
      I think the issue is that LLMs are a cash problem as much as they are a technical problem. Consumer hardware architectures are still pretty unfriendly to running models which are actually competitive to useful models so if you want to even do inference on a model that's going to reliably give you decent results you're basically in enterprise territory. Unless you want to do it really slowly. The issue that I see is that Nvidia etc. are incentivised to perpetuate that so the open source community gets the table scraps of distills, fine-tunes etc.
      • butlike 7mo ago
        You got me thinking that what's going to happen is some GPU maker is going to offer a subsidized GPU (or RAM stick, or ...whatever) if the GPU can do calculations while your computer is idle, not unlike Folding@home. This way, the company can use the distributed fleet of customer computers to do large computations, while the customer gets a reasonably priced GPU again.
        • vlovich123 7mo ago
          The kinds of GPUs that are in use in enterprise are 30-40k and require a ~10KW system. The challenge with lower power cards is that 30 1k cards are not as powerful, especially since usually you have a few of the enterprise cards in a single unit that can be joined efficiently via high bandwidth link. But even if someone else is paying the utility bill, what happens when the person you gave the card to just doesn’t run the software? Good luck getting your GPU back.
      • cyanydeez 7mo ago
        Consumer hardware is there. grab a mac or AMD395+ and Qwen coder and Cline or Open code and you're getting 80% of the real efficiency.
        • smilekzs 7mo ago
          New Strix Halo (395+) user here. It is very librating to be able to "just" load the larger open-weight MoEs. At this param count class, bigger is almost always better --- my own vibe check confirms this, but obviously this is not going to be anywhere close to the leading cost-optimized closed-weight models (Flash / Sonnet). The tradeoff with these unified LPDDR machines is compute and memory throughput. You'll have to live with the ~50 token/sec rate, and compact your prefix aggressively. That said, I'd take the effortless local model capability over outright speed any day. Hope the popularity of these machines could prompt future models to offer perfect size fits: 80 GiB quantized on 128 GiB box, 480 GiB quantized on 512 GiB box, etc.
    • nunez 7mo ago
      Open-source models will never be _truly_ competitive as long as obtaining quality datasets and training on them remains prohibitively expensive. Plus, most users don't want to host their own models. Most users don't care that OpenAI, Anthropic and Google have a monopoly on LLMs. ChatGPT is a household name, and most of the big businesses are forcing Copilot and/or Claude onto their employees for "real work." This is "everyone will have an email server/web server/Diaspora node/lemmy instance/Mastodon server" all over again.
      • heavyset_go 7mo ago
        Local models are more like browsers than servers. The user doesn't care where they're hosted, they click an icon and ask questions either way.
        • fragmede 7mo ago
          People do care about the privacy of these things though. It's one thing to talk about encryption, but users are pouring out their heart and soul to these things, and they're not all idiots.
  • hot_iron_dust 7mo ago
    What would the new open source projects do differently from the "old" ones? I don't think you can forbid model training on your code if your project is open source.
  • bix6 7mo ago
    If it goes bad? It’s too late by that point. And how is open source going to compete with billions of investment dollars?
    • darth_avocado 7mo ago
      If AI tools are as good as the CEOs claim, we should have no friction towards building multiple open source alternatives very quickly. Unless of course, they aren’t as good as they are being sold as, in which case, we have nothing to worry about.
• devnotes77 7mo ago
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• cube2222 7mo ago
  Honestly, for now they seem to be buying companies built around Open Source projects which otherwise didn't really have a good story to pay for their development long-term anyway. And it seems like the primary reason is just expertise and tooling for building their CLI tools. As long as they keep the original projects maintained and those aren't just acqui-hires, I think this is almost as good as we can hope for. (thinking mainly about Bun here as the other one)
  • bix6 7mo ago
    And how likely is that? Once you’re acquired you have to do what the boss says. That means prioritizing your work to benefit the company. That is often not compatible with true open source. How frequently do acquired projects seriously maintain their independence? That is rare. They may have more resources but they also have obligations. And this doesn’t even touch on the whole commodification and box out strategy that so many tech giants have employed.
    • JoshTriplett 7mo ago
      > Once you’re acquired you have to do what the boss says. Or quit, and take the (Open Source) project and community with you. Companies sometimes discover this the hard way; see, for instance, the story of how Hudson became Jenkins.
• volkercraig 7mo ago
  It's not any different from the launch of the FSF. There's a simple solution. If you don't want your lunch eaten by a private equity firm, make sure whatever tool you use is GPL licensed.
  • palmotea 7mo ago
    > If you don't want your lunch eaten by a private equity firm, make sure whatever tool you use is GPL licensed. 1. For the record: the GPL is entirely dependent on copyright. 2. If AI "clean-room" re-implementations are allow to bypass copyright/licenses, the GPL won't protect you.
    • islandfox100 7mo ago
      Maybe I'm reading wrong here, but what's the implication of the clean room re-implementations? Someone else is cloning with a changed license, but if I'm still on the GPL licensed tool, how am I "not protected"?
      • eru 7mo ago
        There's basically no different between GPL and BSD in that case.
      • darkwater 7mo ago
        1. Company A develops Project One as GPLv3 2. BigCo bus Company A 3a. usually here BigCo should continue to develop Project One as GPLv3, or stop working on it and the community would fork and it and continue working on it as GPLv3 3b. BigCo does a "clean-room" reimplementation of Project One and releases it under proprietary licence. Community can still fork the older version and work on it, but BigCo can continue to develop and sell their "original" version.
        • makapuf 7mo ago
          2. BigCo owns ProjectOne now 3a. Bigco is now free to release version N+1 as closed source only. 3b. Community can still fork the older version and work on it, but BigCo can continue to develop and sell their original version.
• throwaway63467 7mo ago
  It’s a small tool shop building a tiny part of the Python ecosystem, let’s not overstate their importance. They burned through their VC money and needed an exit and CLI tool chains are hyped now for LLMs, but this mostly sounds like an acquihire to me. Dev tools are among the hardest things to monetize with very few real winners, so good for them to get a good exit.
  • druml 7mo ago
    Small tool shop, burning VC money, true. "Tiny part of the Python ecosystem" is an understatement given how much impact uv has made alone.
    • Hamuko 7mo ago
      Do you have any statistics for that?
      • pm90 7mo ago
        anecdotally every place ive worked at has switched over and never looked back.
        • shawnwall 7mo ago
          been in the python game a long time and i've seen so many tools in this space come and go over the years. i still rely on good ol pip and have had no issues. that said, we utilize mypy and ruff, and have moved to pyproject etc to remotely keep up with the times.
          • jitl 7mo ago
            uv solved it, it will be the only tool people use in 2 more years. if you’re a python shop / expert then you can do pip etc but uv turned incidental python + deps from a huge PITA for the rest of us, to It Just Works simplicity on the same level or better than Golang.
• AndrewKemendo 7mo ago
  Explain to me how this is any different than Microsoft, Blackrock, Google, Oracle, Berkshire or any other giant company acquiring their way to market share?
• TrackerFF 7mo ago
  But how does this work out in the long run, in the case of AGI? If AGI becomes available, especially at the local and open-source level, shouldn't all these be democratized - meaning that the AGI can simply roll out the tooling you need. After all, AGI is what all these companies are chasing.
  • butlike 7mo ago
    Let us assume AGI never comes. I don't plan scenarios for when aliens land, why should I for AGI? It's not particularly close.
• butlike 7mo ago
  If it becomes too antagonistic, people will change. The desire to build things is larger than any given iron fist du jour. Just ask Oracle or IBM.
  • goku12 7mo ago
    Could you say the same about the Chrome browser? Google is using it to EEE the web (Embrace, Extend and Extend it till it's a monstrosity that nobody else can manage). That's pretty antagonistic. But did people change?
    • butlike 7mo ago
      Sample size: 1 but I use Arc browser. It's still webkit under the hood (and in maintenance mode now), though it's actually pretty good and last I checked had most of the baked in google stuff toggled-off by default
      • goku12 7mo ago
        I don't get the exact point you're making. Chrome forked WebKit into Bling a long time ago. How does it fit into what I said?
• deleted 7mo ago
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• pixelsort 7mo ago
  In the many darker timelines that one can extrapolate, capturing essential tech stacks is just a pre-cursor to capturing hiring. Once we start seeing Open AI and Anthropic getting into the certifications and testing they'll quickly become the gold standard. They won't even need to actually test anyone. People will simply consent to having their chat interactions analyzed. The models collect more information about us than we could ever imagine because definitionally, those features are unknown unknowns for humans. For ML, the gaps in our thinking carry far richer information about is than our actual vocabularies, topics of interest, or stylometric idiosyncrasies.
  • echelon 7mo ago
    As if there will be hiring in the fullness of time. There will come a day when you can will an entire business into existence at the press of a button. Maybe it has one or two people overseeing the business logic to make sure it doesn't go off the rails, but the point is that this is a 100x reduction in labor and a 100,000x speed up in terms of delivery. They'll price this as a $1M button press. Suddenly, labor capital cannot participate in the market anymore. Only financial capital can. Suddenly, software startups are no longer viable. This is coming. The means of production are becoming privatized capital outlays, just like the railroads. And we will never own again. There is nothing that says our careers must remain viable. There is nothing that says our output can remain competitive, attractive, or in demand. These are not laws. Knowledge work may be a thing of the past in ten years' time. And the capital owners and hyperscalers will be the entirety of the market. If we do not own these systems (and at this point is it even possible for open source to catch up?), we are fundamentally screwed. I strongly believe that people not seeing this - downplaying this - are looking the other way while the asteroid approaches. This. Is. The. End.
    • pixelsort 7mo ago
      There could be opportunities we haven't anticipated. What if labor organizes around human work and consumers are willing to pay the premium? At that point, it's an arms race against the SotA models in order to deepen the resolution and harden the security mechanisms for capturing the human-affirming signals produced during work. Also, lowering the friction around verification. In that timeline, workers would have to wear devices to monitor their GSR and record themselves on video to track their PPG. Inconvenient, and ultimately probably doomed, but it could extend or renew the horizon for certain kinds of knowledge work.
• dismalaf 7mo ago
  Of course they're trying to capture existing tech stacks. The models themselves are plateauing (most advancement is coming from the non-LLM parts of the software), they took too much VC money so they need to make some of it back. So gobbling up wafers, software, etc... is the new plan for spending the money and trying to prevent catastrophic losses.
• deleted 7mo ago
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• bargainbin 7mo ago
  This is a logical conclusion of most open source tools in a capitalist economy, it's been this way for decades. Equivalent or better tools will pop up eventually, heck if AI is so fantastic then you could just make one of your own, be the change you want to see in the world, right?
• paseante 7mo ago
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• justinhj 7mo ago
  These are MIT/Apache 2. Sure they can buy and influence the direction but they can't prevent forks if they stray from what users want.
• gigatexal 7mo ago
  If our corporate overlords are gonna buy up all that is good I’d rather it have been Anthropic and not that wierdo humans-need-food-and-care-for-inference-so-LLMs aren’t-that-power-hungry Sam Altman. Man that guy is weird. Oh well. They’ll hopefully get options and make millions when the IPO happens. Everyone eventually sells out. Not everyone can be funded by MIT to live the GNU maximalist lifestyle.
• mountainriver 7mo ago
  [flagged]
  • kevin42 7mo ago
    That's an interesting take, but I'm not sure 'easy to write' is the only advantage. There is also a really good ecosystem of libraries, especially for scientific computing. My experience has been that Claude can write good c++ code, but it's not great about optimization. So, curated Python code can often be faster than an AI's reimplementation of an algorithm in c++.
    • mountainriver 7mo ago
      Yeah ML is the one of the only spaces I could see it living on, but even then doing it in C++ isn't that much harder for an LLM
  • stuxnet79 7mo ago
    > cost of significantly better languages is essentially free Is it? We still need meatspace humans to vet what these AI agents produce. Languages like C++ / Rust etc still require huge cognitive overhead relative to Python & that will not change anytime soon. Unless the entire global economy can run on agents with minimal human supervision someone still has to grapple with the essential complexity of getting a computer to do useful things. At least with Python that complexity is locked away within the CPython interpreter. Also an aside, when has a language ever gotten traction based solely on its technical merits? Popularity is driven by ease-of-use, fashion, mindshare, timing etc.
    • mountainriver 7mo ago
      Yeah that's sort of fair today, although we have switched over most of our org to Rust and it hasn't been much of a problem. The LLM can usually explain small parts of code with high accuracy if you are unsure. Overall the switch has been very much loved. Everything is faster and more stable, we haven't seen much of a reduction in output
  • 7mo ago
• nazgulnarsil 7mo ago
  it never made sense to have devs all over the world doing the same task with tiny variation. Centralization was inevitable. LLMs might have been a step change but the trajectory was already set.
  • Zopieux 7mo ago
    The exact opposite has started: every single developer with an LLM subscription now has 45 variations of any foundational tool and library, to cater to their weird use-case, because it was easier for the LLM to just modify it rather than adapting to it. Almost nobody upstreams such improvements (or they are too niche anyway). The ecosystem will be this way for a while, if not the new normal.
    • cyanydeez 7mo ago
      I see it as:LLMs will solve the problems they create. They'll 10x your eccentric layout, modularity, monolith; they'll multiply your anti-DRY or try to make everything DRY. It's largescale copy/paste/find/replace in a glorious crescendo of idiosyncratic programming. `
    • nazgulnarsil 7mo ago
      the previous normal lasted decades, this one will last a year.
• andrepd 7mo ago
  "Bearded German philosopher" once again being uncannily applicable to 21st century happenings...
• getpokedagain 7mo ago
  Stop using MIT licensed software being run by small vc backed operations if you value stability. They are risky and often costly Trojan horses.
  • brabel 7mo ago
    What do you mean? MIT is essentially as open as you can get. The worst that can happen is that they will relicense, eventually, to force big users to pay, but when that happens everybody knows how it goes: some consortium of other big companies forks it and continues development as if nothing happened.
    • jhasse 7mo ago
      Well if it's GPL without CLA and they accept outside contributions, they can't relicense / make it propriatary. Unlike with MIT.
      • kpcyrd 7mo ago
        Step 1: discontinue the public repository, step 2: sell access to your GPL codebase. The GPL (and even the AGPL) doesn't require you to make your modified source code publicly available (Debian explicitly considers licenses with this requirement non-free). The GPL only states you need to provide your customers with source code.
        • selcuka 7mo ago
          Sure, but it also allows your customers to modify the source code you provided, and distribute/sell it. With MIT they can simply relicence it and sell binary-only versions. The open-ness stops at that point.
• ren_engineer 7mo ago
  somebody looked at Claude Code's binaries and Anthropic is testing out their own app platform called antspace. Not sure why people are shocked, they've been cloning features of their API customers and adding them to their core products since day 1. Makes sense they will take user data and do it for Claude Code by copying features or buying up what developers are using so they can lock people into a stack. These are the same people that trained on every scrap of data they could get their hands on and now complain about distilling models from their output https://x.com/AprilNEA/status/2034209430158619084 https://x.com/AprilNEA/status/2034209430158619084 Ironically this type of stuff really makes me doubt their AGI claims, why would they bother with this stuff if they were confident of having AGI within the next few years? They would be focused on replacing entire industries and not even make their models available at any price. Why bother with a PaaS if you think you are going to replace the entire software industry with AGI?
  • Frieren 7mo ago
    > they've been cloning features of their API customers and adding them to their core products since day 1 Is this not just the strategy of all platforms. Spy on all customers, see what works for them and copy the most valuable business models. Amazon does that with all kinds of products. Platforms will just grow to own all the market and hike prices and lower quality, and pay close to nothing to employees. This is why we used to have monopoly regulations before being greedy became a virtue.
    • dwd 7mo ago
      It is exactly the strategy of all platforms - they get greedy to the point of screwing over their own customers. I've lost count of number of times I've seen a platform get popular and then expand to offer the same services as its customers, often even undercutting market rates. Just wait till they offer "Developer Certification" so you have to pay them to get a shiny little badge and a certificate while they go around saying no badge = you're shit.
  • tw1984 7mo ago
    > this type of stuff really makes me doubt their AGI claims, why would they bother with this stuff if they were confident of having AGI within the next few years? because AGI doesn't grow in a cage, it requires a piece of software running somewhere. someone has to build both to get that happen. that is like a high school level question.
• munk-a 7mo ago
  I think the good news here is that since OpenAI is a zombie company at this point this particular acquisition shouldn't be too concerning - and from what I've seen Anthropic has been building out in a direction of increased specialization. That said vertical integration is as much of a problem as it always was and it'd be excellent to see some sane merger oversight from the government.
• ffsm8 7mo ago
  Hmm, from my perspective, an essential step to legitimize "vibecoding" in an enterprise setting is to to have a clearly communicated best practice - and have the LLM be hyper optimized for that setting. Like having a system prompt which takes care of the project structure, languages, libraries etc It's pretty much the first step to replacing devs, which is their current "North Star" (to be changed to the next profession after) Once they've nailed that, the devs become even more of a tool then they're already are (from the perspective of the enterprise).
• charcircuit 7mo ago
  As the cost of building software trends towards $0 I don't see how one can realistic own "the" means of production rather than "a" means. Any competitor can generate a similar product cheaply.
• thegrim33 7mo ago
  >> "means of production" in software Ah yes, it was impossible to write software before these companies existed, and the only way to write software is via the products from these companies. They sure do control the "means of production".
  • kpcyrd 7mo ago
    I stopped programming in python about 8-9 years ago because the tooling was so bad.
• PaulHoule 7mo ago
  You know until today I dismissed all those concerns about uv being a commercial product but now I am very concerned. Microsoft has been a reasonable steward of github and npm considering everything but I don't feel so good about OpenAI this makes me reconsider my use of uv and Python as a whole because uv did a lot to stop the insanity. Not least Microsoft has been around since 1975 whereas I could picture OpenAI vanishing instantly in a fit of FOMO.
  • conartist6 7mo ago
    Perhaps a reasonable steward, but no more than a steward. All the passion and vision is gone from GitHub and NPM. They're now too big and too stale not to (eventually) be replaced by projects which do still have excitement and leadership
• cyanydeez 7mo ago
  Not a concern: LLMs can fork all these products while they're still open licensed.
• Rapzid 7mo ago
  Vercel did this as well. I called it "ecosystem capture" but I like "means of production" too.
• stingrae 7mo ago
  The risk is one of them buys it and pulls an Oracle / Java (Sun) stunt.
• jillesvangurp 7mo ago
  It's open source. Forking it is an option. And with AI, one-shotting a replacement is an option as well. Or having it make changes to your fork. Just because you can, doesn't mean you should do that of course. The point is that the value of accumulated know how and skill that lead to things like uv isn't lost even if the worst would happen to the company or people behind it. I don't think there are many signs of that. I don't think they had much of a revenue model around providing OSS tools. It's problematic for a lot of VC funded companies. An exit like this is as good as it gets. OpenAI now pays them to do their thing. Investors are probably pretty happy. And we maybe get to skip the enshittification that seems inevitable with the whole IPO/hedge funds circus that many vc funded OSS companies end up being subjected to. Problem solved. Congratulations to the team. They can continue doing what they love doing in a company that clearly loves all things python. And who knows what they can do next when freed from having to worry about making investors happy? Big companies and OSS have always had symbiotic relationships. Some of the largest contributors to open source are people working in big companies. OpenAI fits this tradition beautifully. Most big software companies actively contribute to OSS projects that are relevant or important to them. Even very secretive companies like Apple or profit focused sharks like Oracle. Google, Meta, IBM. There are very few large software companies that aren't doing that. OSS without this very large scale corporate sponsor ships would just be a niche thing. Yes there are a lot of small projects. I have a few of my own even. But most of the big ones have some for profit businesses behind them. The real meta question is of course if we still need a lot of the people centered development tooling when AIs are starting to do essentially all of the heavy lifting in terms of coding. I think we might need very different tools soon.
• birdfood 7mo ago
  These companies are telling us software development is over. They are positioning themselves as the means of production. You want to build anything you do it through them. And since ‘software is solved’ this is not a software but a user acquisition.
  • LtWorf 7mo ago
    Why do they need to acquire users who are developers if software development is over?
  • Escapade5160 7mo ago
    The means of production are just files with special extensions.
• pitcock 7mo ago
  They’re not ahead on code though, and they recently announced giving up on rich media AI entirely lmao The fuck does OpenAI have to offer? Nothing I need. The only reason Gemini is the best is UX, really running my own Mistral 7b is more than fine. Because slow ass Gemini is still a slightly more convenient experience I use that. Nobody OWNS nor will own the means of essentially thoughts. It’s such a silly idea I wonder if it’s propaganda.
  • mrweasel 7mo ago
    > The fuck does OpenAI have to offer? That's the problem isn't it. OpenAI have nothing to offer, neither does many of the other AI companies, nothing that's not replaceable at least. They need to gobble up these other actors in an attempt to own something that someone might actually pay for. Anthropic seems successful with Claude Code and can drive sales that way. OpenAI struggles to sell ChatGPT as a standalone offering, so they need products and services that will consume it, allowing them to push sales via that route. They also need to control those products, because LLMs are pretty much plug-able at this point, and that's no good. OpenAI needs a lock in.
• heavyset_go 7mo ago
  It's even worse than that, Astral took over python-build-standalone and uv uses its Python builds on all platforms. That means OpenAI will be able to do whatever they want to your Python binaries, including every Python binary in your deployments, with whatever telemetry that want to instrument in the builds.
• DeathArrow 7mo ago
  >As they gobble up previously open software stacks, how viable is it that these stacks remain open? My question is if them gobbling up the alternatives will make room for other alternatives to grow.
• virgildotcodes 7mo ago
  Also notable that after Anthropic’s acquisition of Bun, the vast majority of the communication and seeming effort from Jared on twitter seemed to shift to fixing issues with Claude Code. I imagine many of these efforts benefitted the community as a whole, but it does make sense that the owners will have these orgs at least prioritize their own internal needs.