Comment by jacquesm | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jacquesm | Hacker News Reader

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I just look at technology over the last 50 years and see: decreasing prices, increasing capabilities. Barring temporary hiccups. Altman & co did a very smart thing by locking up the GPUs and the RAM, they effectively created a temporary near monopoly. At the same time: that incentivized the rest of the world to look more closely at efficiency negating some of the gains of that expense.

It's just like a utility with the slight difference that it can be sold at a distance without significant cost for transportation, in many ways it is the ultimate digital good. Unlike Spotify copyright is not an issue, unlike your electricity, gas, internet or water company there is no last mile problem. Unlike Google there are a ton of qualified contenders already (Google had to be better than Altavista, which wasn't hard, but they were so much better they managed to lock up search for long enough to cement their position).

Anthropic has none of the advantages and all of the disadvantages. On top of that all AI companies seem to be run by megalomaniacs.

> On top of that all AI companies seem to be run by megalomaniacs.

Not all of them. Only those who outspend all the others and then you never really hear of any others. It's like the most basic requirement for the job.

Fair. I know of at least one other though.

> On top of that all AI companies seem to be run by megalomaniacs.

Isn’t that what it takes though? Doesn’t startup culture celebrate this attitude?

> Doesn’t startup culture celebrate this attitude?

Some do, unfortunately. But that's not all of them.

Apple certainly did.

Are you speaking specifically to Apple's 6th CEO?

You mean 'He who shall not be named' ?

That's Steve Jobs for anyone who wants the answer to this vaguepost

> they were so much better they managed to lock up search for long enough to cement their position

There is still a chance for something like this to happen with AI, no?

> On top of that all AI companies seem to be run by megalomaniacs.

I think this might genuinely going to become a problem for them in the long run. People just absolutely hate their guts. That's a very strong motivator to do everything possible to get rid of them.

We'll of course see in 5-10 years if the doom PR will work out, but that always was a rather high-risk gamble, and it already looks like it might not.

There is a significant amount of businesses and people that are very willing to switch to literally anyone else just out of spite alone.

As a French person myself, I think this antipathy is less strong in non-English speaking countries, where the population (even if they understand English) is less exposed to the antisocial rants of these megalomaniac idiots.

Someone like me who spends a lot of time in the anglosphere puts faces on companies like OpenAI or Anthropic. I doubt that's true for most people, especially outside of the USA. They're just big companies, like 3M, DHL or Toyota. Who knows what the management of these companies think of the future of humankind?

I would expect than personality-driven rejection of American tech from abroad nowadays is driven mainly by Trump and, to a much lesser extent, Musk. Everybody else is just "some guy" to 99% of the population.

I'm not so sure if that assessment is true, but regardless of that, it also doesn't matter.

Decisions in tooling are not made by the 99% of the population, but a subset that is likely a lot more tuned-in to all this. After all, that is kinda their job so that they can make good decisions

Counterpoint: if that was the case, Musk and Thiel wouldn't as successful as they are.

Our modern capitalist societies are, at the very least, amoral.

But isn't that assessment mostly just looking at the 2010s and extrapolating from that?

And back then, the world was very different. ZIRP, cryptocurrencies, infinite highs, peak social media. All that stuff

Agree, but I don't think the 1% that make the decisions share our viewpoint. They like Musk, Altman, et al

> As a French person myself, I think this antipathy is less strong in non-English speaking countries, where the population (even if they understand English) is less exposed to the antisocial rants of these megalomaniac idiots.

German here, every stupid utterance of at least the orange clown makes national headlines here. Frankly I wish our populations were more exposed to the utter buffoonery of the rest of the American wannabe elites, maybe people would then not go and type their deepest fears into ChatGPT.

It's not necessarily spite as well, it goes without saying that international relations between the US and its allies have deteriorated to the point yet another critical dependency Washington can turn off for geopolitical reasons isn't a very attractive idea for many. While I dislike a lot of Anthropic's behaviour, it was not their actions but the fact their models were subject to export controls which really motivated me to not be dependent on US providers alone.

My country has no frontier models; since I've no national grounds to support one provider over another, a strong degree of provider diversity is an obvious benefit to me. I also think a highly competitive global market is a good thing for mankind in general, any hegemonic power having a monopolistic or oligopolistic position in AI provision is probably the 'bad ending' for most of us since it represents an enormous concentration of democratically unaccountable power regardless of the power which 'wins'. I'd argue it's rational, not spiteful to favour provider diversity on those grounds.

Even inside the US, many businesses are looking at local LLMs because they don't want to get caught by USGOV restricting access to "frontier" AI models.

I really don't see any situation where local AI doesn't absolutely eat the big labs' lunch. They can't compete and the only way it makes any sense for them to exist is if the government somehow tries to ban local AI, which likely wouldn't work in the first place.

That won't stop them from trying, and is exactly why you see all the fearmongering.

I know I'm just one person, but I absolutely detest all of the rhetoric coming from these companies and what it means for software freedom - the FSF kind. I ABHOR the idea that free software developers have to either use the hosted (controlled) service, or go way slower than proprietary software devs.

So I'm doing what I can - I only use local models for 100% of my personal coding. (And their capability is amazing! Qwen 3.8 Flash Next leaves me wanting for nothing at this point.)

And I know open weights aren't enough. I'm ready to support open training if/when we get around to that. I hope once hardware prices ease, we can see homelabbers building small AI hosts (small by homelab standards yknow. So let's say 512GB host ram and 1-2 32GB cards, though i hope we also start to see AI cards with lots of vram but less compute cores). Then maybe we can do folding@home style distributed training.

In a time when software freedom is perhaps more threatened than ever, I'm happy to see that information still WANTS to be free, perhaps even more than ever. Look at how easy it is to distill claude! Despite, presumably, anthropic working very hard to prevent it.

Homelabbers pooling would be a very nice thing to do and I would definitely consider joining in.

As a homelabber, that 5090 I bought a couple years ago for 2k just sold for 9k and I paid off my car.

Heh, good for you. It's insane. A friend of mine just got ripped off here (I posted about it the other day but it never got traction), he is a student and bought what he thought was a GPU but it was actually an empty shell with the GPU and the RAM removed from the board.

https://jacquesmattheij.com/beware-gpu-scammers/

Crazy times!

Congrats on getting rid of the debt, that's really a great feeling.

That really sucks. Sorry for your friend.

Yes, quite. He's a very nice guy, this was a robbery except that a useless piece of junk changed hands.

What are you using to host Qwen Flash Next right now?

Unsloth studio, on a server that I built in 2024 that was, at the time, ludicrously oversized, but is now just ok-sized to run the q4 quant of qwen flash next. (128GB ram, 16GB vram).

I really want to build something less scuffed, but, yknow. So I'm making do atm.

There were a bunch of high performance computing efforts from the 1990s and on where, if you could work out that you'd need 5 years of "today's" compute, you should obviously hang on to the money for 4 years, then spend it on the correspondingly improved hardware and finish the job in a under a year. I've been considering building a box to run OLMO (one of the only models with training data "that you wouldn't have to defend in court" as far as I can tell?) and even with Sam Altman's supply chain attack, stalling for bigger hardware still seems like the right path...

That's a very interesting take. Unfortunately I can't wait with anything so I'll just use what's available today. But still you had me wondering for a bit.

It's interesting, because licensing is based on copyright, and copyright doesn't apply to AI code.

In theory, things will become even more free, because you can copy whatever code you like, it's all in the public domain because it was all written by an AI (or enough of it was that a court will decide that copying the whole code base is fair).

And the ability of AI's to reverse-engineer binaries means that even hiding the code won't be enough.

Companies may write T&Cs that try to cover some of this, but they'll still have lost the biggest protection they have.

So, in theory, we move to what the FOSS movement have always wanted: all the code available, all the time, with anyone able to change whatever they like about the software they run.

Somehow I don't think anyone is going to be happy about this, though.

I don't hate them. They're doing amazing work, and I'd like to believe they're genuinely trying to do good for humanity. I just think it's dangerous for any group of people to think they can impose their morality on everyone (only Dario knows what's right and wrong in military actions, only one company in the world, welfare to the current models, humanity has 10% of chance of getting destroyed by AI, and etc). For that, I'd rather see open-weighted and hopefully even open-sourced models win

>doom PR

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/ai-safety-is-not-a-corporat...

The only thing protecting America's AI industry is the cartel of hardware and embargoes against sharing resources. Once those are cracked, they have zero moat. We're talking 1's and 0's at the end of the day, not nuclear engineering or nuclear fusion or some other revolutionary way to increase the value of real property.

>not nuclear engineering or nuclear fusion or some other revolutionary way to increase the value of real property.

Is engineering the factories that make the hardware not nuclear engineering? Even if not, considering there exists only 1 supply chain in the world capable of making them, it seems pretty revolutionary. And that moat seems pretty big, given that it hasn't been crossed for many years.

This is a great analysis

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