Comment by WinstonSmith84
7 days ago
I'm rather scared of US models - if Anthropic was the only AI provider in the world, it's easy to see that common people would have no access at all. Thankfully there is OpenAI which compete 1:1 with Anthropic (at a slightly lower cost) but most importantly the Chinese models keep Anthropic, but also OpenAI in checks.
And I'm saying this as someone working for American companies.
it's a real paradox, that chinese models are what guards democratization and private use of ai while us models are moted castles with "kings" crying that you are stealing their legally stolen goods... what times we are living in...
It blows my mind that these two companies are going to mint billionaires, meanwhile https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Swartz was bullied to death by the state for sharing academic papers which were at least in part, if not largely, paid for by tax dollars.
> which were at least in part, if not largely, paid for by tax dollars
They were all in the public domain too.
I'm afraid law and morality are two separate concepts. You make a good point.
"You need to understand that Sam can never be trusted ... He is a sociopath. He would do anything."
ethics and other details are for humans. AI companies just proving it, even highest IQ teams are against ethics because they want more, even several millions is not enough for them.
AI has forced a dramatic shift in my view on intellectual property. The laws as they exist only protect corporations now.
They do not protect individuals no matter how much people want to think they do. AI has proven this.
I think to level the playing field all copyright, trademarks, and patents laws should be eliminated.
If I want to make a marvel movie, I should be allowed to and profit from it.
AI let the cat out of the bag and there is no going back. We need to let individuals profit just like corporations can from what is considered theft right now.
5 replies →
The technique is called "accusation in a mirror". By accusing the enemy of doing what you are doing, when they call out what you are doing, they look like they are just weakly repeating your own accusations because they don't have any truth. And the anger that should be directed against you (because of your practices) gets directed at the enemy.
Well implemented by the current US administration. Every accusation is a confession
2 replies →
Thank you for this, I've noticed this often in politics and didn't know it has a name. Some politicians do this so often, that any accusation to me reads a confession instead.
1 reply →
why is it a paradox? guarding their IP overseas has been the modus operandi of American software companies since their inception
The paradox is that their IP was obtained by distillation of the collective IP of humanity.
2 replies →
It’s not their IP, they never created data they were training on in the first place, at best they derived existing data without asking if they can commercialized it
Competition is a good thing for consumers.
It is also good for the technology itself, just image if there would be just one company that does "just well enough", they will be unmotivated to improve their ai models
The Chinese models keep American financial markets at "To the Moon" levels rather than "Igniting Jupiter as a binary star" levels. This amount of capital pressure exerts its own gravitational pull in markets and in geopolitics, and every additional dollar of valuation can propel acquisitions, which propels valuation, et cetera. Undiluted, very quickly Amazon owns countries like it today owns county governments.
this has been my tinfoil hat theory. Investors in US models might be supporting "open" models as a means to create FOMO for other investors to supply more cash to US model providers, which in turn increase their investment value. Package it so they can beat those "adversaries", equate that success with global power struggles etc etc. Seems to be quite effective.
Re: common people, yes, and given all the talk of job instability AI is creating, why hasn’t Anthropic or OpenAI offered discounted plans for laid off or displaced workers? Wouldn’t this be a tangible way to display goodwill and build adoption?
> why hasn’t Anthropic or OpenAI offered discounted plans for laid off or displaced workers?
Because it's not a widespread phenomenon. A few large tech cos laid off large swaths of people a handful of times. That's only happening in those large tech cos. Most cos are empowering their employees with AI as a tool, not a replacement, and they're not letting anyone go (unless they refuse to use this new tool).
Of course, they're not hiring as much either, since their current teams can accomplish more with AI as a tool. Maybe the AI companies could give job seekers a bit of a discount, but that would be abused to all hell without crazy administrative overhead costs, so why would they?
> why hasn’t Anthropic or OpenAI offered discounted plans for laid off or displaced workers?
because they are profit maxing. the AI world would be a completely different place if it's not for the open models.
I'm sure this will be a terribly unpopular opinion, but I've long held the view that a Chinese AI company might screw me over at some point for a complex geopolitical reason that I don't fully understand. An American AI company will screw me over tomorrow for a quick buck.
As to the argument is that (only?) the Chinese labs are training on my data, I find this almost comical given the amount of highly-personal data companies such as Meta and Google have been harvesting for decades.
I don't trust any American company because they will switch into extraction mode eventually and squeeze every cent they can out of you.
Even if the founders didn't want that, eventually the upper ranks will fill with MBAs and the board with private equity and they will make it that way. Their bonuses are based on quarterly performance not customer experience
Long gone are the companies who served their communities for decades or centuries, providing a stable return to the owners, jobs for the workers and value to the customers.
I'd rather China have my data than America. China might do something with it one day but America built exploiting it into the business model (disclaimer that I'm not Uyghur or Taiwanese though)
the article isn't saying you should be scared of chinese models
Saying GPT 5.6 Sol is 1:1 with Fable is laughable. OpenAI models are braindead in comparison and I have hundreds of hours with both.
No doubt Fable can outperform on many coding tasks, but the way you phrase it really exaggerates the gap and I'd suggest that for 95% of tasks, most devs simply don't need Fable level, and in fact, despite mostly using Claude, I have found codex is generally quicker at most tasks and can be even better than Fable with certain languages.
You have hundreds of hours with a model that was barely even released hundreds of hours ago?
The perception of capability varies greatly between task. For my needs for example sol xhigh consistently outperforms fable xhigh.
You could run hundreds of agents in parallel and arguably that counts.
3 replies →