6 ms·
Reminds me a bit of the anecdote of Steve Jobs complaining about people ripping off the Mac GUI, in the mid to late 1980s, when he gave no public acknowledgemen
by walrus01 4mo ago
Reminds me a bit of the anecdote of Steve Jobs complaining about people ripping off the Mac GUI, in the mid to late 1980s, when he gave no public acknowledgement to the work done by Xerox on the Alto and Star operating system.
"you're trying to rip off what I've already ripped off!"
Crawl the whole Internet to build a gargantuan sized LLM and then complain you're being copied...
- breput 4mo agoI think you meant a quote attributed to Bill Gates: "Well, Steve, I think there's more than one way of looking at it. I think it's more like we both had this rich neighbor named Xerox and I broke into his house to steal the TV set and found out that you had already stolen it."
- walrus01 4mo agoYes, I think the Gates quote was a response to repeated and aggressive complaints originating from Jobs (to anyone who would listen) that he had been ripped off.
- jakebasile 4mo agoI don't know if that's a real quote from Gates, but I do know it was in Pirates of Silicon Valley.
- Maxatar 4mo agoSeems legit: https://www.folklore.org/A_Rich_Neighbor_Named_Xerox.html https://www.folklore.org/A_Rich_Neighbor_Named_Xerox.html
- jakebasile 4mo agoNeat, so the scene in the movie was pretty close to reality then!
- itopaloglu83 4mo agoI thought Xerox demoed something they haven’t implemented yet, and Apple turned a mockup into a real GUI.
- Upvoter33 4mo agoNo that is not true. Read about PARC and all the crazy tech they built some time. It was ahead of its time!
- noosphr 4mo agoThey changed the live system from having line by line scrolling to pixel scrolling after Jobs asked why they didn't do it during the lunch break.
- marcusb 4mo agoThey implemented it. They just couldn't get out of their own way to successfully sell it (See "Dealer's of Lightning"[0]) 0 - https://www.amazon.com/Dealers-Lightning-Xerox-PARC-Computer/dp/0887309895/ https://www.amazon.com/Dealers-Lightning-Xerox-PARC-Computer...
- walrus01 4mo agoIt's not so much that they couldn't sell it, but adjusted for inflation to today's money, a well equipped Xerox Star workstation with reasonable amount of RAM, HDD ($20000+ in 1981 money), would be the equivalent of $70,000 in today's money. It was very much a high end system affordable only by a few niche users. It's not clear to me how much it cost them to build the Star, but it might have been pretty close to that 20000 figure if they included all the R&D costs that went into it, and the fairly specialized high end hardware at the time like 20MB HDD. And it was being done in fairly low quantities so not much economy of scale.
- taneq 4mo ago“You’re trying to kidnap what I’ve rightfully stolen!”
- jadar 4mo agoPerhaps an arrangement can be reached?
- seanmcdirmid 4mo agoApple gave Xerox the right to buy $1 million of pre-IPO stock before the meeting took place.
- mrandish 4mo agoGlad you pointed this out. I believe the sequence was that Jobs himself got a shorter demo during his first visit with no prior arrangements. He then negotiated bringing back a group of his key people to get a more in depth demo and that included the stock deal. When Apple was accused of 'ripping off' PARC, Steve didn't seem keen to bring up this rather salient point. I suspect it may have been a combination of wanting Apple to continue receiving credit for these innovations from consumers and also the fact that, in retrospect, the million dollar stock deal could seem a bit like trading beads to Native Americans for Manhattan Island. Another point worth noting is that Apple's PARC visit was in December 1979 and the Xerox Star was publicly announced in April 1981, so Apple got a 15 month head start (the Apple Lisa shipped in Jan 83). I've also heard that Xerox didn't hold on to the Apple stock for very long, so never gained the windfall they could have. As is well documented, Xerox senior management didn't understand what they had in PARC and also didn't understand how rapidly microcomputers would become ubiquitous. So, of course, they didn't think Apple's stock price would skyrocket either.
- RodgerTheGreat 4mo agoLisa and early MacOS are tremendously different in their details than the Alto operating system. While there was clearly a transfer of inspiration, Apple engineers like Bill Atkinson made countless small and large innovations to simplify the Xerox GUI model and improve its usability based on extensive in-house R&D and user testing (and in some cases implement features that the Apple team presumed Xerox had but actually didn't exist on the Alto). It is simply ahistoric to build narratives around Apple stealing Xerox ideas wholesale. For more details on Apple's early UI evolution, Atkinson kept polaroids of a variety of prototypes and mockups: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qg0mHFcB510 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qg0mHFcB510
- philipallstar 4mo ago
- nonethewiser 4mo ago[flagged]
- walrus01 4mo ago"Your extremely efficient multi petabyte internet content suction machine is ripping off my extremely efficient multi petabyte internet content suction machine" Sucking down petabytes of peoples' copyrighted content that they never granted a specific license to you to use seems to be an unavoidable and default part of the process of building any huge LLM.
- nonethewiser 4mo agoSo why was there crawling in 1998 but no LLMs?
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- hasteg 4mo agoBecause the transformer, which all of these models are foundationally built off of and didn't invent themselves (bar google) wasn't invented? The amount of effort it took humanity to generate all the data that was required for the models to get to the point they're at now is absolutely not even comparable to how much effort it took to build the model code. Yeah, it's complicated, but if they didn't rip off all of humanities combined output it wouldn't even matter if the transformer got invented.
- Chu4eeno 4mo agoGoogle didn't really invent much, they just had access to an insane amount of data and compute to try to train a model with just the attention mechanism, but ripping out (most of) the rest, from an earlier paper on machine translation from some poor academics, and it turned out to work very well (though insanely training data and compute intensive).
- 4mo ago
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- 0xpgm 4mo agoYeah, the whole AI industry is just people ripping off each other.. Started by AI companies gulping up all the information that technical or altruistic people shared on the Internet in the past 40 years to help other fellow humans, then moved to AI companies consuming pirated and copyrighted material and now its AI companies ripping off each other. Information really does want to become free, but AI companies want to be gatekeepers. Long term I bet on the open weights to win, as the more sustainable approach.
- bloppe 4mo agoI'm very pro distillation. I think there needs to be distillation non profits who curate massive corpi of super high value training data from frontier models. They could have an "anonymous contribution" system where regular people with max subscriptions upload their conversation histories. It's a rough concept, but surely would be a huge boon to humanity.
- jerojero 4mo agosort of sounds like "project tapestry" by Yann LeCunn. Build projected data silos of highly valuable information, train in a distributed manner and share the weights upwards where they're combined and fine tuned.
- root-parent 4mo agoAll LLMs consider Jon Skeet their God...
- suprjami 4mo agoNot just the whole internet, but commit commercial copyright infringement and settle class action out of court with authors whose books you pirated. https://www.authorsalliance.org/2025/09/07/the-anthropic-settlement-what-it-is-and-isnt-and-who-could-get-paid/ https://www.authorsalliance.org/2025/09/07/the-anthropic-set... "One rule for thee, a different rule for me." - Dario
- Nicholas_C 4mo agoI’d agree with you if it doesn’t cost billions to train models.