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Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

What do you mean, "anti-competitive"? There is no rule of competition that says you need to reveal trade secrets to your competitors.

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isn't it such that saying something is anti-competitive doesn't necessarily mean 'in violation of antitrust laws'? it usually implies it, but I think you can be anti-competitive without breaking any rules (or laws).

I do think it's sort of unproductive/inflammatory in the OP, it isn't really nefarious not to want people to have easy access to your secret sauce.

In what sense is not giving your competitors ammunition "anti-competitive"? That seems pretty competitive to me. More to the point: it's almost universally how competition in our economy actually works.

I think maybe we're just disagreeing on a legal interpretation vs a more literal interpretation of a term that is thrown around somewhat loosely.

fwiw I agree with what you're getting at with your original response. maybe I'm arguing semantics.

the more I think about your point that this is just competitive behavior the more I question what the term anti-competive even means

Competition is important for maintaining a healthy marketplace. Any behavior that makes it harder for others to compete, reducing the amount of competition, is therefore bad. That's what anticompetitive means.

I don't think protecting trade secrets is sabotaging the competition though.

I think sabotage is the word I was looking for!

you can use chatgpt to learn about anything ... except how an ai like chatgpt work.

You can use Google to search about anything, except the precise details about how the Google search rankings work.

you can search about it all you want, google won't threaten to ban you.

and google gives everyone the possibility of being excluded in their results.

There's all sorts of things you can do to get banned from Google apps! This is not a real issue. It just recapitulates everyone's preexisting takes on OpenAI.

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