5 ms·

More signal that the open-weight models should be our destiny as an industry. These proprietary models are being used to usher in more surveillance and gatekeep

More signal that the open-weight models should be our destiny as an industry. These proprietary models are being used to usher in more surveillance and gatekeeping across the industry.

mrits 3mo ago
Either way I don't think this will end well for humanity.
- scottyah 3mo ago
  How could it not? I get the whole fear of AI making robots and going anti-human, but after using the tech for a few months now that seems too absurd.
  - munk-a 3mo ago
    There are two rationale objections, I think... One is the potential for skill rot where AI grows a heavy dependence in new employees and once the real price per token cost is settled on and discoverable (post massive IPOs and probably a while post - not immediately after) we, as a society, are left with a bunch of people dependent on a deeply inefficient technology to maintain software we now view as vital that might severely impede our ability to actually deal with climate change (press X to doubt Bezos). The second is that the psychological damage of interacting with models in a social context during your formative years is deeply damaging and we've essentially destroyed the ability for a generation or two to actually interact as productive members of society. Addressing the second issue doesn't necessarily exclude our ability to leverage models for business productivity but it seems unlikely to happen in the current climate without that also happening. I am hesitant to believe in a sudden outbreak of common sense at this point. The first point, could really be a systems collapse trigger - we can argue about the likelihood but denying it as a possibility is excessively naive.
    - sevenzero 3mo ago
      I agree with the skill drain argument but also think its a little too dramatic. Most people still can do the shit claude does for them, it just takes them 10x as long.
    - scottyah 3mo ago
      Both seem to just point at the WALL-E outcome, summarized as humans outsourcing too much thinking. I just don't see that as an end- just another divide between people. I'm seeing some degradation for sure, but not really an "end".
    - pc86 3mo ago
      What climate change have to do with anything?
      - fyltr 3mo ago
        there are claims that llms might be taxing on the planet to run BUT that they will solve [some, all] problems including climate change and therefore be beneficial in the long run.
  - petre 3mo ago
    It's would probably just burn more gas and make the climate even worse. Some assholes will get richer in the process.
    - scottyah 3mo ago
      But "some assholes" is an extremely large, growing group of people. Do you have any idea how much more productive small business owners are now? It's an insane boost for people who didn't want to spend their time on things that are extremely critical for business but not the focus of the business.
      - hn_acc1 3mo ago
        And people loved "free next day delivery" from Amazon, when it started. It's not quite the same level of service anymore, and membership has gone up in price. Would these businesses pay 2x? 5x? 10x? What is their breaking point? I'm sure xAI/OpenAI/whoever will find it and charge 0.9x that (eventually). Just look at telecoms / internet access and their rubbish "network congestion" claims to keep raising prices.
        scottyah 3mo ago
        I still get a lot of free next day, and now sometimes even same day, delivery for amazon. I doubt the membership prices has even matched inflation, but it is certainly well worth it. I can't see any governmental or volunteer organization that would produce even slightly comparable results with the same budget.
  - thewebguyd 3mo ago
    Because (collective) we don't own the tech. Frontier models are proprietary, their reasoning logic is hidden, and as seen with Fable the government giveth and taketh away on a whim. Capabilities can be gated behind certification programs, or by money, or any other numerous corrupt and non-corrupt means. Model capabilities can be segregated by pricing tiers, creating an economic underclass that cannot afford access to frontier intelligence. For humanity to benefit, the tech needs to be open and equally available to all.
    - scottyah 3mo ago
      Do you hate all lessons from humanity's past or just the most important ones? If it takes work from a specific subset of the population and isn't compensated, then my friend, what you advocate for is slavery...
      - thewebguyd 3mo ago
        Ah yes, I forgot, Linus Torvalds and the thousands of others that built Linux over time are all slaves. Guess someone should probably go rescue them.
        scottyah 3mo ago
        None of them were compelled, and nobody is stopping you from running your own LLM generously provided by others. Doesn't mean when linux came out people nationalized Apple and Microsoft.
        thewebguyd 3mo ago
        The risk I'm talking about isn't nationalization of companies, its corporate monopolization of frontier intelligence capabilities through capital consolidation and regulatory capture. "Just run your own LLM" ignores the asymmetry of frontier intelligence. You can build an operating system in your garage with just time and cheap hardware. You cannot go build GPT-5. And that's the problem with keeping it proprietary. If the primary cognitive engines of human progress are consolidated within just a handful of closed, proprietary cartels that can gate, alter, and revoke capabilities at will it creates a permanent economic underclass. The foundational infrastructure of our collective future shouldn't be entirely walled off. Fair compensation for a commercial product doesn't mean monopolization of foundational capabilities.
  - hn_acc1 3mo ago
    How can it end well, when it's mostly owned / controlled by narcistic billionaires who would love to eradicate anyone who so much as looks at them sideways? And who view "mass population reduction" and "I'll get to be a king in my castle, served by peons who depend on my favor to live" as the most desirable outcome of AGI?!? If even one of these had pledge that all profit goes to end world hunger, cancer research, etc, I could possibly see it - but they haven't. They're all after finding a way to be the biggest, richest asshole possible with the ability to crush anyone in their way..
    - scottyah 3mo ago
      Have you isolated yourself completely from reality? I don't even know where to begin on this. Let's start with the fact that China is pumping out some near-frontier models and open sourcing the weights- and they don't even follow capitalism and the owners aren't billionaires. Really there are like four models in the USA that are "owners/controllers", and only one is even slightly controllable by its CEO, though none of the frontier models can last a week without the support of entire teams. Why on earth would you want to siphon off the proceeds of AI development to (ok my bias is strong here- mostly corrupt) "ideals" like world hunger and cancer research (that probably get more dollars annually than the sum of actual profit any of these companies will ever get). That would just instantly kill the ability to improve AI at all, and the world could possibly be better for a few months?
herodoturtle 3mo ago
I’m curious (and please forgive my ignorance if it’s obvious), are open weight models practically feasible? I mean from a financial and sustainability standpoint, assuming they’re equally powerful as their proprietary counterparts. I guess I’m trying to understand the economics of it.
- andrewstuart2 3mo ago
  I hope/wonder if it will go the way computers did. We may learn to more effectively build RAM or parallel compute, and use it more effectively, in the coming decade in such a way that we can democratize more and more like we did with processors to the point that they're ubiquitous.
- roadside_picnic 3mo ago
  See my comment to parent. I've been using local LLMs for practical, personal tasks for a few months now very successfuly. You can run fantastic local models if you have either: - M-series Apple device with ideally >= 24GB of VRAM - RTX [345]090 GPU I'm fortunate enough to have both and use an M-series laptop as basically a persistent server (I don't use it much and when traveling typically just use my work laptop). My desktop doesn't act as a persitent server but I fire up llama.cpp on it all time for quick chat sessions. If you have one of the above devices and can dedicate it as server there are additional layers of tooling you can use that dramatically improve the experience. In particular Open WebUI allows you to add tons of useful tools (image gen, web search, code eval, etc), and agent harnesses like Hermes can make the current gen small models very capable. I have an agent in chat on my phone that basically handles all the sys-admin for the server it runs on.
  - hn_acc1 3mo ago
    What about RTX 3080? Too little VRAM?
    - roadside_picnic 3mo ago
      In addition to models getting better, the quantization methods have also got much better. If you already have an RTX 3080 it's absolutely worth the time to just mess around and see how it does, experiment with different quants that fit in your VRAM. If you're purchasing I would recommend coughing up the extra cash for the 3090. If you are experimenting it's worth mentioning that the harness/tooling is very important to getting a solid experience. Herme's agent is great for running helpful agents and OpenWeb UI can get really make the experience feel on par with paid chat interfaced. A reasonable halfway step is to pay for an open model through the provider or open router. You'll get many of the benefits (especially around pricing) without needing to shell out on hardware before deciding if you like the way these models work.
CobrastanJorji 3mo ago
Someone should start a nonprofit company focused on developing Open AI. I bet we could even get some sensible billionaires to help the effort.
- bckr 3mo ago
  We could all chip in
  - janalsncm 3mo ago
    Based on recent SEC filings, you’ll soon be able to.
- jaredsohn 3mo ago
  Maybe one of those trillionaires could help for a bit before leaving to make his own AI model, too.
- biraj-rocks 3mo ago
  i’d really love to be wrong, i don't think that the economics of it would let it happen. the potential of wealth creation with AI is so high, and also the fact that research, pre-training and inference is so expensive that, that any open-AI would eventually become OpenAI.
- codedokode 3mo ago
  And we are definitely not going to put our users on a watch list DB and send their data to the government? And how do we prevent Chinese companies from training on our open AI models and offering their models for free?
  - jrockway 3mo ago
    How does Red Hat prevent Chinese companies from producing a Linux distribution for free? They don't. And yet they still exist.
    - 3mo ago
roadside_picnic 3mo ago
I have a home server that runs Qwen3.6-35B-A3B through llama.cpp with Open WebUI for the user facing interface. My teen isn't super interested in AI, but whenever they do feel curious they have their own account they can use on our home network. As far as chatting goes local models are more than capable for handling standard chat questions, doing research, helping troubleshoot problems etc. In fact it was an agent powered by the same model that setup the open webui server and took care of all the account management features through my phone (using Hermes agent). If you're building AI powered features and using sophisticated agent setups for coding for work, then it make sense to use SoTA from these providers. But I've been using local models increasingly for personal use and am starting to find them preferable (I run an uncensored, ephemeral model for my own use and it's an entirely different experience than anything you can pay for). Still haven't cancelled my personal Anthropic subscription, but considering it soon.
- drusepth 3mo ago
  What is an "ephemeral" model in this context?
  - roadside_picnic 3mo ago
    Just running it through `llama-cli` so that there's absolutely no persistent state related to the chat (and least I believe this to be the case).
- jrochkind1 3mo ago
  What about local models do you find preferable? I guess "starting to find them preferable" suggests to me you think they work better, but this is surprising to me so I think I may have misunderstood, so I ask! Like you're saying they work better than the proprietary models (in what ways?), or you find them mostly good enough and prefer the privacy or cost, or what?
  - roadside_picnic 3mo ago
    There are a couple of things, but basically it boils down to the same reason people prefer Linux to Windows/MacOs: customization, control and privacy (arguably all of these are really subsets of 'control'). Having full control over how your data is retained, what the system prompt is, which version of the model you're running, etc leads to much a more consistent experience. For example, for chat sessions, I can't stand the new "let me push back" version of Claude. For my home models I never have to worry about that. There's never a mystery as to whether the model secretly degraded performance, I always know exactly which model I'm using and how well it's utilizing resources etc. Open models also give you full visibility into the reasoning steps, so you never have to guess what the model is thinking. Then when you start getting into things like uncensored/abliterated models we're talking about something you can't even pay for. In case you're unfamiliar, even open local models have guardrails built in. But people in the community have found ways to remove these. One of the things I've found most concerning about AI, which is under discussed, is the combination of people having personal chats with an agent that both monitors the conversation and refuses to discuss certain topics. This leads to a very deep level of self-censoring I find dystopian. I also have multiple hermes agents setup, some with local backends other with open but non-local backends (e.g. Kimi through the API). For some tasks, I've just started to find the local agent tends to work better for the type of tasks I want (maybe it just over thinks less?). I don't use it for coding so much as research tasks and sysadmin stuff, but I've been really happy with the results. Oh, and let's not forget, especially running on a Mac, these local models are basically free to run.
ai-x 3mo ago
I'm happy to give my identity to Anthropic and crush my competition with irrational fear about privacy and personal data. This is a serious competitive advantage and a moat.
- chinathrow 3mo ago
  Is this satire? I really can't tell.
  - card_zero 3mo ago
    Bragging about a strategy isn't very strategic. So the comment's purpose is something else.
    - ai-x 3mo ago
      Warren Buffett brags about his strategy. Jeff Bezos brags about his strategy. The reason they can brag is, even if it's simple, competition doesn't have the culture to copy/follow it. (My post is literally downvoted) Losing privacy has ZERO downsides for ordinary people. Nobody cares about your data. Literally, put all your life on a YouTube channel and see how many views that Video will get. ZERO. Irrational fears (especially if it's conspiratorial) => Sub-optimal decision. Just like Buffett, Bezos, my strategy is simple -- go against firms that are making irrational decision. It's the same framework to adopt cloud, AI and many frontier technologies and disrupt
- sevenzero 3mo ago
  >This is a serious competitive advantage Given they have laughable uptime and I have yet to find a useful project mostly written by claude... I doubt it.
  - johndhi 3mo ago
    Huh? Limited uptime means you can't write projects with it? I assume downtime means you can't host on it ...
baq 3mo ago
More signal this won’t happen without some serious social unrest, not garden variety Jan 6 events… and the window is closing rapidly - when this tech gets sufficiently advanced there won’t be a place to hide.
- deleted 3mo ago
  [deleted]
extr 3mo ago
They are not going to let open weights models with zero restrictions exist dude. They will be regulated like guns, or probably closer to nerve gas or enriched uranium.
- pc86 3mo ago
  Only if you let them.
  - extr 3mo ago
    I don't know that I want to stop such a thing. It's good that nerve gas is banned. I don't want random people having access to easy-to-follow instructions to make COVID-29.
- infamouscow 3mo ago
  The government is not going to enforce this, the game theory does not work in their favor. The SCOTUS has made it exceptionally clear mathematics and software are protected by the First Amendment. The Atomic Energy Act of 1954 tries to make a very narrow exception for nuclear weapons, but 1. The law has never been challenged in court for being unconstitutional, and 2. It doesn't apply to model weights Any attempt by the government to suppress open models will meet legal challenges on the grounds of (1) or (2). Congress could amend the act to include model weights, but that won't prevent legal challenges on the grounds of it being unconstitutional (which it is).
  - extr 3mo ago
    I'm skeptical any of that matters at all if at some point AI is perceived by the government to be a true existential risk to public welfare.

More signal that the open-weight models should be our destiny as an industry. These proprietary models are being used to usher in more surveillance and gatekeeping across the industry.

mrits 3mo ago

Either way I don't think this will end well for humanity.

scottyah 3mo ago
How could it not? I get the whole fear of AI making robots and going anti-human, but after using the tech for a few months now that seems too absurd.
- munk-a 3mo ago
  There are two rationale objections, I think... One is the potential for skill rot where AI grows a heavy dependence in new employees and once the real price per token cost is settled on and discoverable (post massive IPOs and probably a while post - not immediately after) we, as a society, are left with a bunch of people dependent on a deeply inefficient technology to maintain software we now view as vital that might severely impede our ability to actually deal with climate change (press X to doubt Bezos). The second is that the psychological damage of interacting with models in a social context during your formative years is deeply damaging and we've essentially destroyed the ability for a generation or two to actually interact as productive members of society. Addressing the second issue doesn't necessarily exclude our ability to leverage models for business productivity but it seems unlikely to happen in the current climate without that also happening. I am hesitant to believe in a sudden outbreak of common sense at this point. The first point, could really be a systems collapse trigger - we can argue about the likelihood but denying it as a possibility is excessively naive.
  - sevenzero 3mo ago
    I agree with the skill drain argument but also think its a little too dramatic. Most people still can do the shit claude does for them, it just takes them 10x as long.
  - scottyah 3mo ago
    Both seem to just point at the WALL-E outcome, summarized as humans outsourcing too much thinking. I just don't see that as an end- just another divide between people. I'm seeing some degradation for sure, but not really an "end".
  - pc86 3mo ago
    What climate change have to do with anything?
    - fyltr 3mo ago
      there are claims that llms might be taxing on the planet to run BUT that they will solve [some, all] problems including climate change and therefore be beneficial in the long run.
- petre 3mo ago
  It's would probably just burn more gas and make the climate even worse. Some assholes will get richer in the process.
  - scottyah 3mo ago
    But "some assholes" is an extremely large, growing group of people. Do you have any idea how much more productive small business owners are now? It's an insane boost for people who didn't want to spend their time on things that are extremely critical for business but not the focus of the business.
    - hn_acc1 3mo ago
      And people loved "free next day delivery" from Amazon, when it started. It's not quite the same level of service anymore, and membership has gone up in price. Would these businesses pay 2x? 5x? 10x? What is their breaking point? I'm sure xAI/OpenAI/whoever will find it and charge 0.9x that (eventually). Just look at telecoms / internet access and their rubbish "network congestion" claims to keep raising prices.
      - scottyah 3mo ago
        I still get a lot of free next day, and now sometimes even same day, delivery for amazon. I doubt the membership prices has even matched inflation, but it is certainly well worth it. I can't see any governmental or volunteer organization that would produce even slightly comparable results with the same budget.
- thewebguyd 3mo ago
  Because (collective) we don't own the tech. Frontier models are proprietary, their reasoning logic is hidden, and as seen with Fable the government giveth and taketh away on a whim. Capabilities can be gated behind certification programs, or by money, or any other numerous corrupt and non-corrupt means. Model capabilities can be segregated by pricing tiers, creating an economic underclass that cannot afford access to frontier intelligence. For humanity to benefit, the tech needs to be open and equally available to all.
  - scottyah 3mo ago
    Do you hate all lessons from humanity's past or just the most important ones? If it takes work from a specific subset of the population and isn't compensated, then my friend, what you advocate for is slavery...
    - thewebguyd 3mo ago
      Ah yes, I forgot, Linus Torvalds and the thousands of others that built Linux over time are all slaves. Guess someone should probably go rescue them.
      - scottyah 3mo ago
        None of them were compelled, and nobody is stopping you from running your own LLM generously provided by others. Doesn't mean when linux came out people nationalized Apple and Microsoft.
        thewebguyd 3mo ago
        The risk I'm talking about isn't nationalization of companies, its corporate monopolization of frontier intelligence capabilities through capital consolidation and regulatory capture. "Just run your own LLM" ignores the asymmetry of frontier intelligence. You can build an operating system in your garage with just time and cheap hardware. You cannot go build GPT-5. And that's the problem with keeping it proprietary. If the primary cognitive engines of human progress are consolidated within just a handful of closed, proprietary cartels that can gate, alter, and revoke capabilities at will it creates a permanent economic underclass. The foundational infrastructure of our collective future shouldn't be entirely walled off. Fair compensation for a commercial product doesn't mean monopolization of foundational capabilities.
- hn_acc1 3mo ago
  How can it end well, when it's mostly owned / controlled by narcistic billionaires who would love to eradicate anyone who so much as looks at them sideways? And who view "mass population reduction" and "I'll get to be a king in my castle, served by peons who depend on my favor to live" as the most desirable outcome of AGI?!? If even one of these had pledge that all profit goes to end world hunger, cancer research, etc, I could possibly see it - but they haven't. They're all after finding a way to be the biggest, richest asshole possible with the ability to crush anyone in their way..
  - scottyah 3mo ago
    Have you isolated yourself completely from reality? I don't even know where to begin on this. Let's start with the fact that China is pumping out some near-frontier models and open sourcing the weights- and they don't even follow capitalism and the owners aren't billionaires. Really there are like four models in the USA that are "owners/controllers", and only one is even slightly controllable by its CEO, though none of the frontier models can last a week without the support of entire teams. Why on earth would you want to siphon off the proceeds of AI development to (ok my bias is strong here- mostly corrupt) "ideals" like world hunger and cancer research (that probably get more dollars annually than the sum of actual profit any of these companies will ever get). That would just instantly kill the ability to improve AI at all, and the world could possibly be better for a few months?

herodoturtle 3mo ago

I’m curious (and please forgive my ignorance if it’s obvious), are open weight models practically feasible? I mean from a financial and sustainability standpoint, assuming they’re equally powerful as their proprietary counterparts. I guess I’m trying to understand the economics of it.

andrewstuart2 3mo ago
I hope/wonder if it will go the way computers did. We may learn to more effectively build RAM or parallel compute, and use it more effectively, in the coming decade in such a way that we can democratize more and more like we did with processors to the point that they're ubiquitous.
roadside_picnic 3mo ago
See my comment to parent. I've been using local LLMs for practical, personal tasks for a few months now very successfuly. You can run fantastic local models if you have either: - M-series Apple device with ideally >= 24GB of VRAM - RTX [345]090 GPU I'm fortunate enough to have both and use an M-series laptop as basically a persistent server (I don't use it much and when traveling typically just use my work laptop). My desktop doesn't act as a persitent server but I fire up llama.cpp on it all time for quick chat sessions. If you have one of the above devices and can dedicate it as server there are additional layers of tooling you can use that dramatically improve the experience. In particular Open WebUI allows you to add tons of useful tools (image gen, web search, code eval, etc), and agent harnesses like Hermes can make the current gen small models very capable. I have an agent in chat on my phone that basically handles all the sys-admin for the server it runs on.
- hn_acc1 3mo ago
  What about RTX 3080? Too little VRAM?
  - roadside_picnic 3mo ago
    In addition to models getting better, the quantization methods have also got much better. If you already have an RTX 3080 it's absolutely worth the time to just mess around and see how it does, experiment with different quants that fit in your VRAM. If you're purchasing I would recommend coughing up the extra cash for the 3090. If you are experimenting it's worth mentioning that the harness/tooling is very important to getting a solid experience. Herme's agent is great for running helpful agents and OpenWeb UI can get really make the experience feel on par with paid chat interfaced. A reasonable halfway step is to pay for an open model through the provider or open router. You'll get many of the benefits (especially around pricing) without needing to shell out on hardware before deciding if you like the way these models work.

CobrastanJorji 3mo ago

Someone should start a nonprofit company focused on developing Open AI. I bet we could even get some sensible billionaires to help the effort.

bckr 3mo ago
We could all chip in
- janalsncm 3mo ago
  Based on recent SEC filings, you’ll soon be able to.
jaredsohn 3mo ago
Maybe one of those trillionaires could help for a bit before leaving to make his own AI model, too.
biraj-rocks 3mo ago
i’d really love to be wrong, i don't think that the economics of it would let it happen. the potential of wealth creation with AI is so high, and also the fact that research, pre-training and inference is so expensive that, that any open-AI would eventually become OpenAI.
codedokode 3mo ago
And we are definitely not going to put our users on a watch list DB and send their data to the government? And how do we prevent Chinese companies from training on our open AI models and offering their models for free?
- jrockway 3mo ago
  How does Red Hat prevent Chinese companies from producing a Linux distribution for free? They don't. And yet they still exist.
  - 3mo ago

roadside_picnic 3mo ago

I have a home server that runs Qwen3.6-35B-A3B through llama.cpp with Open WebUI for the user facing interface. My teen isn't super interested in AI, but whenever they do feel curious they have their own account they can use on our home network. As far as chatting goes local models are more than capable for handling standard chat questions, doing research, helping troubleshoot problems etc. In fact it was an agent powered by the same model that setup the open webui server and took care of all the account management features through my phone (using Hermes agent). If you're building AI powered features and using sophisticated agent setups for coding for work, then it make sense to use SoTA from these providers. But I've been using local models increasingly for personal use and am starting to find them preferable (I run an uncensored, ephemeral model for my own use and it's an entirely different experience than anything you can pay for). Still haven't cancelled my personal Anthropic subscription, but considering it soon.

drusepth 3mo ago
What is an "ephemeral" model in this context?
- roadside_picnic 3mo ago
  Just running it through `llama-cli` so that there's absolutely no persistent state related to the chat (and least I believe this to be the case).
jrochkind1 3mo ago
What about local models do you find preferable? I guess "starting to find them preferable" suggests to me you think they work better, but this is surprising to me so I think I may have misunderstood, so I ask! Like you're saying they work better than the proprietary models (in what ways?), or you find them mostly good enough and prefer the privacy or cost, or what?
- roadside_picnic 3mo ago
  There are a couple of things, but basically it boils down to the same reason people prefer Linux to Windows/MacOs: customization, control and privacy (arguably all of these are really subsets of 'control'). Having full control over how your data is retained, what the system prompt is, which version of the model you're running, etc leads to much a more consistent experience. For example, for chat sessions, I can't stand the new "let me push back" version of Claude. For my home models I never have to worry about that. There's never a mystery as to whether the model secretly degraded performance, I always know exactly which model I'm using and how well it's utilizing resources etc. Open models also give you full visibility into the reasoning steps, so you never have to guess what the model is thinking. Then when you start getting into things like uncensored/abliterated models we're talking about something you can't even pay for. In case you're unfamiliar, even open local models have guardrails built in. But people in the community have found ways to remove these. One of the things I've found most concerning about AI, which is under discussed, is the combination of people having personal chats with an agent that both monitors the conversation and refuses to discuss certain topics. This leads to a very deep level of self-censoring I find dystopian. I also have multiple hermes agents setup, some with local backends other with open but non-local backends (e.g. Kimi through the API). For some tasks, I've just started to find the local agent tends to work better for the type of tasks I want (maybe it just over thinks less?). I don't use it for coding so much as research tasks and sysadmin stuff, but I've been really happy with the results. Oh, and let's not forget, especially running on a Mac, these local models are basically free to run.

ai-x 3mo ago

I'm happy to give my identity to Anthropic and crush my competition with irrational fear about privacy and personal data. This is a serious competitive advantage and a moat.

chinathrow 3mo ago
Is this satire? I really can't tell.
- card_zero 3mo ago
  Bragging about a strategy isn't very strategic. So the comment's purpose is something else.
  - ai-x 3mo ago
    Warren Buffett brags about his strategy. Jeff Bezos brags about his strategy. The reason they can brag is, even if it's simple, competition doesn't have the culture to copy/follow it. (My post is literally downvoted) Losing privacy has ZERO downsides for ordinary people. Nobody cares about your data. Literally, put all your life on a YouTube channel and see how many views that Video will get. ZERO. Irrational fears (especially if it's conspiratorial) => Sub-optimal decision. Just like Buffett, Bezos, my strategy is simple -- go against firms that are making irrational decision. It's the same framework to adopt cloud, AI and many frontier technologies and disrupt
sevenzero 3mo ago
>This is a serious competitive advantage Given they have laughable uptime and I have yet to find a useful project mostly written by claude... I doubt it.
- johndhi 3mo ago
  Huh? Limited uptime means you can't write projects with it? I assume downtime means you can't host on it ...

baq 3mo ago

More signal this won’t happen without some serious social unrest, not garden variety Jan 6 events… and the window is closing rapidly - when this tech gets sufficiently advanced there won’t be a place to hide.

deleted 3mo ago
[deleted]

extr 3mo ago

They are not going to let open weights models with zero restrictions exist dude. They will be regulated like guns, or probably closer to nerve gas or enriched uranium.

pc86 3mo ago
Only if you let them.
- extr 3mo ago
  I don't know that I want to stop such a thing. It's good that nerve gas is banned. I don't want random people having access to easy-to-follow instructions to make COVID-29.
infamouscow 3mo ago
The government is not going to enforce this, the game theory does not work in their favor. The SCOTUS has made it exceptionally clear mathematics and software are protected by the First Amendment. The Atomic Energy Act of 1954 tries to make a very narrow exception for nuclear weapons, but 1. The law has never been challenged in court for being unconstitutional, and 2. It doesn't apply to model weights Any attempt by the government to suppress open models will meet legal challenges on the grounds of (1) or (2). Congress could amend the act to include model weights, but that won't prevent legal challenges on the grounds of it being unconstitutional (which it is).
- extr 3mo ago
  I'm skeptical any of that matters at all if at some point AI is perceived by the government to be a true existential risk to public welfare.