Comment by w10-1 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by w10-1 | Hacker News Reader

Appears to be cheap and effective, though under suspicion.

But the personal and policy issues are about as daunting as the technology is promising.

Some the terms, possibly similar to many such services:

    - The use of Z.ai to develop, train, or enhance any algorithms, models, or technologies that directly or indirectly compete with us is prohibited
    - Any other usage that may harm the interests of us is strictly forbidden
    - You must not publicly disclose [...] defects through the internet or other channels.
    - [You] may not remove, modify, or obscure any deep synthesis service identifiers added to Outputs by Z.ai, regardless of the form in which such identifiers are presented
    - For individual users, we reserve the right to process any User Content to improve our existing Services and/or to develop new products and services, including for our internal business operations and for the benefit of other customers. 
    - You hereby explicitly authorize and consent to our: [...] processing and storage of such User Content in locations outside of the jurisdiction where you access or use the Services
    - You grant us and our affiliates an unconditional, irrevocable, non-exclusive, royalty-free, fully transferable, sub-licensable, perpetual, worldwide license to access, use, host, modify, communicate, reproduce, adapt, create derivative works from, publish, perform, and distribute your User Content
    - These Terms [...] shall be governed by the laws of Singapore

To state the obvious competition issues: If/since Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, X.AI, et al are spending billions on data centers, research, and services, they'll need to make some revenue. Z.ai could dump services out of a strategic interest in destroying competition. This dumping is good for the consumer short-term, but if it destroys competition, bad in the long term. Still, customers need to compete with each other, and thus would be at a disadvantage if they don't take advantage of the dumping.

Once your job or company depends on it to succeed, there really isn't a question.

The biggest threats to innovation are the giants with the deepest pockets. Only 5% of chatgpt traffic is paid, 95% is given for free. Gemini cli for developers has a generous free tier. It is easy to get Gemini credits for free for startups. They can afford to dump for a long time until the smaller players starve. How do you compete with that as a small lab? How do you get users when bigger models are free? At least the chinese labs are scrappy and determined. They are the small David IMO.

Well said

Just FYI, there TOS does say that inputs from API or code use will not be stored. There is an addendum near the bottom.

Yes, and the terms are much more protective for enterprise clients, so it pays to pay. Similar to a protection racket, they (Z.ai et al) raise a threat and then offer to relieve the same threat.

The real guarantee comes from their having (enterprise) clients who would punish them severely for violating their interests, and then sliding under the same roof (because technical consistency of same service?). The punishment comes in the form of becoming persona non-grata in investment circles, applied to both the company and the principals. So it's safe for little-company if it's using the same service as that used by big-company - a kind of free-riding protection. The difficulty with that is it does open a peephole for security services (and Z.ai expressly says it will comply with any such orders), and security services seem to be used for technological competition nowadays.

In fairness, it's not clear the TOS from other providers are any better, and other bigger providers might be more likely to have established cooperation with security services - if that's a concern.

> Similar to a protection racket, they (Z.ai et al) raise a threat and then offer to relieve the same threat.

Eh? The notion of a protection racket applies when you have virtually no choice. They come on your territory and cause problems if you don't pay up. Nothing like that is happening here: The customer is going on their property and using their service.

If I offered a service for free, and you weren't paying me, I would very happily do all kinds of things with your data. I don't owe you anything, and you can simply just not use my site.

They are not training on API data because they would simply have fewer customers otherwise. There's nothing nefarious in any of this.

In any case, since they're releasing the weights, any 3rd party can offer the same service.

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