4 ms·

"When elephants fight, it is the grass that suffers." There's really nobody for normal people to root for in this battle. They're fighting over who gets to wie

"When elephants fight, it is the grass that suffers." There's really nobody for normal people to root for in this battle. They're fighting over who gets to wield the dick that is going to screw us all.

alsetmusic 5mo ago
> There's really nobody for normal people to root for in this battle. I believe the reports that Sam Altman is an egomaniacal liar. But I haven't been privy to any of it other than seeing him hype his company's tech in a clearly dishonest manner. That's not great. I've seen Elon be an active piece of shit, white nationalist, conspiracy promoter, etc, for years. I don't root for Sam Altman. I root against Elon. In a dystopian world where everything is terrible (the one we live in), I can at least take some pleasure in seeing a person I dislike have a bad time. It still makes me angry that he can just waste the time of the courts out of spite. Can't prevent it, might as well find the silver lining.
- dominotw 5mo ago
  I think paul graham needs to really come clean about why he did this https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41034829 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41034829
- graemep 5mo ago
  > I've seen Elon be an active piece of shit, white nationalist, conspiracy promoter, etc, for years. I don't root for Sam Altman. I root against Elon. A stopped clock is right twice a day Even Elon is sometimes right.
  - dd8601fn 5mo ago
    I know it can be very hard to admit because he’s broadly terrible, but he spent the last 20 years being right on some really, really big gambles, where many experts told us he wouldn’t.
- _verandaguy 5mo ago
  You don't have to root for or against anyone in this fight. It's perfectly valid to oppose both actors and both outcomes, and the stakes of the fight.
- adrian_b 5mo ago
  Not being an US citizen, I have not been affected by any action of Elon Musk, even if I despise many of the things done by him in USA, like the results of DOGE. On the other hand, I have much more reasons to hate Sam Altman, who has stolen a significant amount of money from my own pocket and from a very great number of other people around the world, by causing the huge increases in the prices of DRAM, SSDs and HDDs. Moreover, Elon Musk has some positive achievements, even if it is hard to put them in balance with his bad actions, while I see absolutely nothing good done by Sam Altman. Successfully luring fools to invest hundreds of billions in AI does not count as something good.
pdonis 5mo ago
While I have a great deal of sympathy for this point of view, I think the article makes an interesting observation that suggests it actually doesn't matter whether these people are intentionally trying to screw everybody or not--the actual problem is much bigger even than that: To claim that OpenAI’s mission of cultivating beneficial A.I. was compromised by Sam Altman is to let the entire industry off the hook. Yes, Altman seems to have a rather casual relationship with the truth. But it is far more interesting, complicated, and useful to take his self-defense at face value—to interpret the many sins of OpenAI, and its competitors, as the result of a good-faith exercise in futility. What if we imagined that he did in fact set out to do good? And discovered—or, perhaps better, failed to discover—along the way that this was structurally impossible?
- cma 5mo ago
  Leaked emails I think showed the open source part at the heart of the concept of OpenAI was never serious and was just to help recruit.
  - pdonis 5mo ago
    I don't know that the hypothetical I described requires that the open source part was sincere. The article focuses on Altman's belief that someone was going to develop AI and he thought it would be bad if Google did it first--meaning, by implication, that it would be good if an organization that he started did it first. But what if it turns out to be bad no matter who did it first?
    - jayd16 5mo ago
      These are Dr. Doom morals.
    - danaris 5mo ago
      To the extent that that's true, it's true because Sam Altman did it at all. It is not that hard to construct a scenario wherein an alternative version of Sam Altman pushed really hard for a genuinely ethical LLM—one trained only on data that he had full unclouded rights to, either because it was public domain or because he had bought or otherwise explicitly received the rights, among other measures—and had then made that competitive in the market with the rest of the existing crop of LLMs. In a scenario like that, whether his LLM did well or not, one could clearly see that Alt-Altman, as it were, was genuinely making an effort. The reality doesn't look anything like that. In this reality, it doesn't matter whether Altman thought he was trying to get there first because others would make it worse: he made it worse, and his actions match up very, very well with what one would expect the actions of a man who just wanted money, control, and power to be.
nightski 5mo ago
It's too valuable of a tech to remain in the control of any corporation. Open models will find a way. Compute requirements will go down and there will be many of us making it a priority to transform the tech into something open like the Linux kernel vs a closed cloud tech. Nvidia has 75% profit margins right now. That won't continue forever. It may take quite some time but it will normalize.
- root_axis 5mo ago
  Unfortunately, there's really no clear path to viable local models for the common folk, the hardware requirements are just too extreme. I say this as someone with a pair of A100s that is absolutely delighted by what the open source models are capable of, but even with the best harnesses, tiny quantized models are just not even close to the same league as something like Kimi-k2. Of course, here on HN it's easy to find folks who get a lot out of tinkering with tiny models, but the masses don't want to tinker with toys, they want something fast with a large context and approximating at least Opus 4.6 level reliability and capability, which simply can't be squeezed into a quantized 60b model.
  - nightski 5mo ago
    Right now, yes but I am fairly confident this will change. Not only do I truly believe we will see massive efficiency gains in inference, I also believe the cost of hardware will come down. Again Nvidia's getting a 75% margin on this hardware. Usually hardware margins are significantly smaller. More supply will come online even if that takes years.
reenorap 5mo ago
I read this quote from a bottle cap of Honest Tea. I’ve used it so many times since then because it speaks so much truth about life today.
stronglikedan 5mo ago
I think Elon had the moral high ground in principle, but him waiting so long makes me think it was never about the moral high ground to begin with.
- javier_e06 5mo ago
  Musk was not going to win due to the statue of limitations. Altman was wrong to turn a non-profit to a for-profit because they need it more money (really?). Was not the whole point of Open AI to shield artificial intelligence from the amoral practices of capitalistic controls? This is yet another example of our legal system falling short due to the fast an unforeseen changes of society and technology.
GuinansEyebrows 5mo ago
> There's really nobody for normal people to root for in this battle. his name is Luigi Mangione :)
alfiedotwtf 5mo ago
Oddly enough, the normal people you’re forgetting, who I think not only will win but already have won, are the Chinese.
- fumar 5mo ago
  How so?

alsetmusic 5mo ago

> There's really nobody for normal people to root for in this battle. I believe the reports that Sam Altman is an egomaniacal liar. But I haven't been privy to any of it other than seeing him hype his company's tech in a clearly dishonest manner. That's not great. I've seen Elon be an active piece of shit, white nationalist, conspiracy promoter, etc, for years. I don't root for Sam Altman. I root against Elon. In a dystopian world where everything is terrible (the one we live in), I can at least take some pleasure in seeing a person I dislike have a bad time. It still makes me angry that he can just waste the time of the courts out of spite. Can't prevent it, might as well find the silver lining.

dominotw 5mo ago
I think paul graham needs to really come clean about why he did this https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41034829 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41034829
graemep 5mo ago
> I've seen Elon be an active piece of shit, white nationalist, conspiracy promoter, etc, for years. I don't root for Sam Altman. I root against Elon. A stopped clock is right twice a day Even Elon is sometimes right.
- dd8601fn 5mo ago
  I know it can be very hard to admit because he’s broadly terrible, but he spent the last 20 years being right on some really, really big gambles, where many experts told us he wouldn’t.
_verandaguy 5mo ago
You don't have to root for or against anyone in this fight. It's perfectly valid to oppose both actors and both outcomes, and the stakes of the fight.
adrian_b 5mo ago
Not being an US citizen, I have not been affected by any action of Elon Musk, even if I despise many of the things done by him in USA, like the results of DOGE. On the other hand, I have much more reasons to hate Sam Altman, who has stolen a significant amount of money from my own pocket and from a very great number of other people around the world, by causing the huge increases in the prices of DRAM, SSDs and HDDs. Moreover, Elon Musk has some positive achievements, even if it is hard to put them in balance with his bad actions, while I see absolutely nothing good done by Sam Altman. Successfully luring fools to invest hundreds of billions in AI does not count as something good.

pdonis 5mo ago

While I have a great deal of sympathy for this point of view, I think the article makes an interesting observation that suggests it actually doesn't matter whether these people are intentionally trying to screw everybody or not--the actual problem is much bigger even than that: To claim that OpenAI’s mission of cultivating beneficial A.I. was compromised by Sam Altman is to let the entire industry off the hook. Yes, Altman seems to have a rather casual relationship with the truth. But it is far more interesting, complicated, and useful to take his self-defense at face value—to interpret the many sins of OpenAI, and its competitors, as the result of a good-faith exercise in futility. What if we imagined that he did in fact set out to do good? And discovered—or, perhaps better, failed to discover—along the way that this was structurally impossible?

cma 5mo ago
Leaked emails I think showed the open source part at the heart of the concept of OpenAI was never serious and was just to help recruit.
- pdonis 5mo ago
  I don't know that the hypothetical I described requires that the open source part was sincere. The article focuses on Altman's belief that someone was going to develop AI and he thought it would be bad if Google did it first--meaning, by implication, that it would be good if an organization that he started did it first. But what if it turns out to be bad no matter who did it first?
  - jayd16 5mo ago
    These are Dr. Doom morals.
  - danaris 5mo ago
    To the extent that that's true, it's true because Sam Altman did it at all. It is not that hard to construct a scenario wherein an alternative version of Sam Altman pushed really hard for a genuinely ethical LLM—one trained only on data that he had full unclouded rights to, either because it was public domain or because he had bought or otherwise explicitly received the rights, among other measures—and had then made that competitive in the market with the rest of the existing crop of LLMs. In a scenario like that, whether his LLM did well or not, one could clearly see that Alt-Altman, as it were, was genuinely making an effort. The reality doesn't look anything like that. In this reality, it doesn't matter whether Altman thought he was trying to get there first because others would make it worse: he made it worse, and his actions match up very, very well with what one would expect the actions of a man who just wanted money, control, and power to be.

nightski 5mo ago

It's too valuable of a tech to remain in the control of any corporation. Open models will find a way. Compute requirements will go down and there will be many of us making it a priority to transform the tech into something open like the Linux kernel vs a closed cloud tech. Nvidia has 75% profit margins right now. That won't continue forever. It may take quite some time but it will normalize.

root_axis 5mo ago
Unfortunately, there's really no clear path to viable local models for the common folk, the hardware requirements are just too extreme. I say this as someone with a pair of A100s that is absolutely delighted by what the open source models are capable of, but even with the best harnesses, tiny quantized models are just not even close to the same league as something like Kimi-k2. Of course, here on HN it's easy to find folks who get a lot out of tinkering with tiny models, but the masses don't want to tinker with toys, they want something fast with a large context and approximating at least Opus 4.6 level reliability and capability, which simply can't be squeezed into a quantized 60b model.
- nightski 5mo ago
  Right now, yes but I am fairly confident this will change. Not only do I truly believe we will see massive efficiency gains in inference, I also believe the cost of hardware will come down. Again Nvidia's getting a 75% margin on this hardware. Usually hardware margins are significantly smaller. More supply will come online even if that takes years.

reenorap 5mo ago

I read this quote from a bottle cap of Honest Tea. I’ve used it so many times since then because it speaks so much truth about life today.

stronglikedan 5mo ago

I think Elon had the moral high ground in principle, but him waiting so long makes me think it was never about the moral high ground to begin with.

javier_e06 5mo ago
Musk was not going to win due to the statue of limitations. Altman was wrong to turn a non-profit to a for-profit because they need it more money (really?). Was not the whole point of Open AI to shield artificial intelligence from the amoral practices of capitalistic controls? This is yet another example of our legal system falling short due to the fast an unforeseen changes of society and technology.

GuinansEyebrows 5mo ago

> There's really nobody for normal people to root for in this battle. his name is Luigi Mangione :)

alfiedotwtf 5mo ago

Oddly enough, the normal people you’re forgetting, who I think not only will win but already have won, are the Chinese.

fumar 5mo ago
How so?