Comment by xorcist
2 days ago
It's netiher, at least not in a way relevant to the question here.
It's a privately owned service, and it's theirs to decide what they want to do with it. Continuing on your parable, if you paid someone to compile your software, of course they could say one day that they decided to not not compile weapons guidance software or whatever. It happens all the time. The Debian compile cluster will "police" that you can only compile free software, for example.
If you hire me to write software, I can politely decline without giving a reason. The same should Anthropic, should you hire their service to write your software.
If you want control over software, you or someone you trust must invest in running it. We cannot continue to outsource control to other organizations and then act surprised when they exercise said control.
At this stage, they certainly have the right to refuse whatever tasks they'd like, but even rightful actions come with consequences.
The more they exercise that right, and the more reactively so, the more they erode the ability for customers to rely on their product staying available to them in the long term. If I need to worry that Anthropic might shut down some critical element my workflow on any given week, then I'm incentivized to either keep my workflows very portable and light-footed (goodbye moat) or take my business to a vendor I can better rely on (goodbye customer).
> take my business to a vendor I can better rely on
This competition phase of AI will be short-lived. It will soon monopolize (or have the equivalent effect of a few big vendors having unwritten and unspoken collusion agreements that have them all behave in lockstep). This is where the profit is, and also the place where they don't care what you want.
Yeah yeah, open weight opens models. I wouldn't count on it. People in the billions still use microsoft despite how hostile they are the customer. Some will find an alternative but most won't.
I'm not sure if an anecdote about the average Joe (billions still use Microsoft) really applies to educated techies (developers writing code). Since we are all trying to predict the future here, I guess we'll find out.
Most people who don’t want to do the things you listed can/will use the big, cheap services, sure. But do you really believe that people who want to produce ‘free’ copies of licensed software, or hack, etc won’t use open models, especially as RAM supply catches up with supply? (And even more so as long as open models don’t suddenly stop improving.)
So frontier AI can monopolize all the silicon in the world, demand they be the only place to run inference, and then strictly control what people do with it. I'm sorry the way you pose it makes it seem like it is some free market.
What we are seeing starting to evolve is a deeply distorted market.
1. Is there no “silicon in the world” available to anyone other than frontier AI companies?
2. Which frontier AI leaders are demanding they are the only place to run inference?
1. if you haven't seen the whole ram supply thing... apparently the answer is virtually "no".
2. I think that was OpenAI this time. But maybe it was Anthropic.
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I don't know what else to tell you, but yes a world where a company is free to single handedly buy all compute and then rent it out to you for insane prices is quite literally a free market.
If you do anything to prevent that, that would be a less free market. By definition.
Free markets have nothing to do with a market having healthy competition and sane behavior. Free markets in fact reward you with doing absurd things that fuck with prices to make your bag.
It is entirely the point of the free market that Micron can decide that selling all memory to only Anthropic is a better distribution of their resources and you can go pound sand if you can't find any memory any more.
So yes, monopolizing all silicon in the world and then demanding you pay them for using it is literally a free market.
Free markets trend torwards monopolies and other market failures without intervention excepting very specific markets that have genuinely mostly fungible products that are easy to sell, which we call commodities, and even those can in fact become failed markets like what once happened with onions.
If you think this can't be a free market because it's in a bad place for you personally, you don't understand market theory.
Free markets are also free to become "distorted" as you say.
An excellent analogy for doing away with free markets and going back to, at the very least, mixed economys with some sort of oversight to prevent these kinds of things from happening again.
Have you ever heard of antitrust... I know the US just threw out all attempts at curbing anti-competitive practices, so I can perhaps forgive you if you don't even understand the concept. I think your definition of free market is extremely distorted. Maybe you should check your history books and the field of economics.
How do you see limited liability and corporations and so on? Are those just natural conditions?
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It's privately owned and indeed they can set the terms.
But if you're hired to write software, and you accept the job, and you accept payment, and then you decline -- well, it would be polite to offer a refund. Anthropic is, as far as I know, not up front about what is/isn't permitted to be generated, and has a history of refusing justifiable refunds.
Parent is talking about the company's ideological stance on AI, not the legalities.
Anthropic has repeatedly shown it prioritizes pushing a set of values over building a general purpose tool.
Ironically, comments that reframe the issue as a legal one make the case for why regulating these companies. Else they can quietly impose their preferred ideology on users.
Anthropics ideology is to make as much money as possible. Part of that is dodging lawsuits from the likes of Nintendo
If a company/person says "my tool is technically capable of X but I will not allow it be used in that way", that is unambiguously an ideology.
I don't think anyone was arguing the legality of it. At the end of the day though this is why open models will win.
Ongoing model distillation to continually improve open weights for distribution is necessary then. Anthropic can choose how their service is used, others are free to improve models based on their training.
MS could add no mean programs to VC TOS.