whoever owns the hardware
currently running 2x DGX Sparks and never thought to use a commercial model again
Right now I need 4 subscriptions to do what 1 used to do. And they're tightening it further, without announcing:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50320588
(technically it isn't even legal, since changing what people get after they've agreed to the sale is obviously highly illegal)
Not that they've ever actually announced how much a subscription buys you. In fact the token use for a task on the API is also not consistent, so even on the API you don't know. And then there's Sam Altman in interviews, where he says what he wants to do: you submit a prompt, ChatGPT sends you a price and just charges it.
i felt like commercials LLMs were "good enough" for my needs about 2-3 generations ago, so this clicked into my work/life needs perfectly
i got them right before they went up in price, but honestly, for the ability to know that i wont have my thinking "questioned"... priceless
Some of us are just out of the AI race completely.
Yes and this is why self-hosting is more important than ever. The issue with LLMs is the cost of hardware if you want something close to the frontier. But there is no excuse not to host your own files, email, media center, etc.
There's no reason not to have your own domain though. I've been using Migadu and the amount of flexibility that gives you is ridiculous. The only downside is the lack of push notifications, but if your email is so important that you can't wait for a refresh then I can't help.
They are also probably intentionally trying to create differentiation between their models and open models to strengthen the regulatory capture case of having the government ban open model use.
That is not a fair fight.
Companies like autodesk with a ttm revenue of $7.8 billion would probably have fiscally compelling cases (if not legally compelling) to pursue if reverse engineered tools cut into their revenue. That's without getting into class action cases.
Exactly.
Adobe had a FY2025 operating income of 8.7b on 23.77bn revenue. They employ over 33k people..
So Adobe alone has the money for a law suite that defends themselves from an existential threat, but I would imagine a class action.. It is, IMHO, just a matter of time before these companies put it together and take their shot.
Not OK for monetization: Someone vibecoded a clumsy clone of Alley Cat to the C64!
YouTube is probably an instructive example here: they can refuse to host certain content on their servers, and this is Anthropic refusing to have the AI on their servers perform certain tasks.
I dont think Anthropic will agree with that statement.
Even without a computer, you could use a pencil and a notebook to write down some song lyrics without express written consent of Universal Music Group!
Surely the only way to be sure is to license people's hands.
Laws, ideally.
The service provider decides the terms and conditions, as long as they comply with the law. For example, Google decides whether pirated movies can be hosted on its cloud service, because it provides the cloud service. It's pretty clear.
In a pure capitalist system, competitors would emerge if the repressed service were genuinely in high demand and lawful. If it was not, then well, that's just how we regulate the world but this cannot be considered a case of one industry deciding the fate of another.
If I want to make a knitting forum, im not going to feel bad about deleting posts about reverse engineering video games.
I mean, from game company perspective, will they really care about their old games getting reverse engineered when their next big title can be clean-room recreated by anyone with the skill to write a sentence? Maybe creating a game similar to the next big release will be something that the AIs refuse to do next? Interesting times.
As an aspiring game developer myself, I guess reducing the accessibility of old games benefits me (but I don't like it)--and hey, if you can't get that old game to run, maybe we can vibe code for a weekend and make a new game that captures the same feeling.
Tetris copyright for example is still heavily policed.
I think however if games continue to be killed there should be a legal route towards the community taking ownership in whatever way is necessary.
Anyway, 99.99% of "clean room" vibe coded projects are 100% NOT putting in place the proper policies and controls.
It's the wild west out there right now.
But ofcourse the videogame industry has always turned a blind eye to it provided you don't make money from it.