achrono

The word "beat" and "mercenaries" are also quite important here -- to me, this is Altman's way of saying "you losers who left OpenAI, you will pay a steep price, because we will mess with you really deeply". The threat to Meta is just a natural consequence of that, to the extent that Meta clings onto said individuals.

You know that because you're in tech. But the average person who is reading the news, and is likely to participate in a large protest in the next few years, would not naturally make a distinction between incremental and extant code.

That's a reasonable interpretation, but that is not what Microsoft has said. Satya talks of "30% of the code that is inside of our repos today".

Source: https://www.cnbc.com/2025/04/29/satya-nadella-says-as-much-a...

No, because Satya's claim is about "30% of the code that is inside of our repos today".

Source: https://www.cnbc.com/2025/04/29/satya-nadella-says-as-much-a...

I wish an org like IEEE would be way more rigorous than what's revealed with the first paragraph:

>In April, Microsoft’s CEO said that artificial intelligence now wrote close to a third of the company’s code. Last October, Google’s CEO put their number at around a quarter. Other tech companies can’t be far off.

Take a moment to reflect -- a third of the company's code? Generative AI capable enough to write reasonable code has arguably not been around longer than 5 years. In the 50 years of Microsoft, have the last 5 years contributed to a third of the total code base? This itself would require that not a single engineer write a single line of code in these 5 years.

Okay, maybe Microsoft meant to say new/incremental code?

No, because Satya is reported to have said, "I’d say maybe 20%, 30% of the code that is inside of our repos today [...] written by software".

I think it's time for creative solutions on this front. This plugin business is a little like a cop living in a house of thieves.

For instance, how about an app that will basically detect an ad and visually overlay a blank blob over the ad video (and of course mute, or even just transmute, the audio).

We'd still pay that tax in terms of time, having to sit through those 30-60 seconds, but it's way better than also surrendering your mind to the utter intrusion.

Let me answer those questions with actual evidence.

To begin with, this very case of Perlmutter getting fired after her office's report is interesting enough, but let's keep it aside. [0]

First, plenty of lobbying has been afoot, pushing DC to allow training on this data to continue. No intention to stop or change course. [1]

Next, when regulatory attempts were in fact made to act against this open theft, those proposed rules were conveniently watered down by Google, Microsoft, Meta, OpenAI and the US government lobbying against the copyright & other provisions. [2]

If you still think, "so what? maybe by strict legal interpretation it's still fair use" -- then explain why OpenAI is selectively signing deals with the likes of Conde Nast if they truly believe this to be the case. [3]

Lastly, when did you last see any US entity or person face no punitive action whatsoever despite illegally downloading (and uploading) millions of books & journal articles; do you remember Aaron Swartz? [4]

You might not agree with my assessment of 'conspiracy', but are you denying there is even an alignment of incentives contrary to the spirit of the law?

[0] https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/trump-fires-head-us...

[1] https://techcrunch.com/2025/03/13/openai-calls-for-u-s-gover...

[2] https://www.euronews.com/next/2025/04/30/big-tech-watered-do...

[3] https://www.reuters.com/technology/openai-signs-deal-with-co...

[4] https://cybernews.com/tech/meta-leeched-82-terabytes-of-pira...

If anyone was skeptical of the US government being deeply entrenched with these companies in letting this blatant violation of the spirit of the law [1] continue, this should hopefully secure the conclusion.

And for the future, here's one heuristic: if there is a profound violation of the law anywhere that (relatively speaking) is ignored or severely downplayed, it is likely that interested parties have arrived at an understanding. Or in other words, a conspiracy.

[1] There are tons of legal arguments on both sides, but for me it is enough to ask: if this is not illegal and is totally fair use (maybe even because, oh no look at what China's doing, etc.), why did they have to resort to & foster piracy in order to obtain this?

The point is, the self-policing is needed because there isn't a better policing mechanism outside of oneself for something so fundamental, so much at the frontier.

As the AI leaders themselves admit [1], they are doing what they're doing (i.e. capability-maxxing without caring deeply about actual risks this opens up for humanity) because they can and because the other guy's doing it, so why should they be left behind?

They're asking for some external force to bring the morality that they agree on paper ought to exist. There is a segment among them that are even okay with millions of people dying before the risk of AI gets taken seriously. [2]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wrESBnPYoZU, seek to 2:45 [2] same as above, seek to 3:25

Despite me having (almost) nothing to do with the Victorians, I have to regularly shake off a vague sense of respecting the Greeks for having "laid the foundation" for us in the 21st c. Because they did nothing of the kind -- they were just doing things they wanted to do, just like we are today. Heron's aeolipile was a mechanical curiosity, not a steam engine. Big difference.

Some NDAs can effectively be life-long. (It's the non-solicits that are time-bound.)

What a neat sleight of hand. "We're actually Truly Good, but those annoying lawyers won't let us call ourselves that, so we kind of take that back, but you get the idea right?"

Market cap is not money in the bank.

There are a far greater number of speakers of Arabic in Germany (1.4M) [1] than in Afghanistan (420K) [2].

So properly speaking, they should be advertising the target region as Europe, Middle East and Africa. [3]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_Germany [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_Afghanistan [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_territor...

True but also, what actually is the best alternative that's also free? Non-rhetorical question, because I am averse to paying for what feels like a universal/commons piece of tech.

>but wages are like 50x that these days

How is that even comparable? Said wage earners aren't even getting to choose which tool they use; let alone those two expenses being remotely comparable in qualitative terms.

Sorry but even keeping aside the poor presentation (as others have pointed out), the functionality itself is not clear at all.

I read the "What This AI Calendar Does" three times over and I'm still at a loss. Is this a test to recognize AI slop?

Long-time enterprise SaaS PM here, and sorry, this does not make any sense. The SMB segment is likely to be the least exposed to AI, and software, and the concept of DIY software through AI.

As you visualize whole swaths of human workers getting automated away, also visualize the nitty gritty of day-to-day work with AI. If it gets something wrong, it will say "I apologize" until you, dear user, are blue in the face. If an actual person tried to do the same, the blueness would instead be on their, not your, face. Therein lies the value of a human worker. The big question, I think, is going to be: is that value commensurate to what we're making on our paycheck right now?

> I don't think OpenAI called in a hit job

Why? What do you know about OpenAI beyond the cute 12 days videos or Sam Altman's modest demeanor in interviews?

On the other hand, what makes you think they spent "millions of dollars" to cause him desperation?

> We don't even need them to.

Why not? What's so special about 7-14 days? I can see plenty of reasons one might want to predict accurately the weather even a year out, just one example: will the weather support an outdoor bbq event this late in fall next year?

No, even if you just type "David de Rothschild", it glitches similarly.

As others have pointed out, it's happening even if you do non-trivial encoding. I've tried with languages other than English too.

It might be a little hard to trivialize this one away.

With this one, they'd be at least partly right -- while this secrecy is (probably) not illegal, it is planned secrecy. Or are you saying this is a mere mistake on the part of OpenAI?

>This process exhibits a dynamics that, on closer inspection, turns out to be caused to a large extent by the necessity to adhere to early modern marketing rules for academic prints. These rules required the rapid introduction of scientific works in various formats to the market, with multiple editions of each work released in close temporal proximity to one another

As a singular case study, Darnton's study on the Encyclopedie is a masterpiece on showing how commerce, yes, good old commerce, was such a big driver of the Enlightenment.

To me, it's also a much more satisfying explanation than Jared Diamond's speculations on the whole "why Europe" question. The unique confluence of factors -- including the very key commercialization of knowledge -- was not quite to be found elsewhere, even though Europe only a few centuries before the Enlightenment was arguably well behind multiple knowledge production traditions across the world.

Darnton, Robert (1987): The Business of Enlightenment: A Publishing History of the Encyclopédie 1775–1800 https://books.google.ca/books?id=kP1sgbO_Hh0C&

Assume that I am one of your half-brain individuals drinking the Kool-Aid.

What do you say to change my (half-)mind?

this name flux

Sure. But why do you think changing human nurture is any easier than changing human nature? I suspect that as your set of humans in consideration tends to include the set of all humans, the gap between changeability of human nature vs changeability of human nurture reduces to zero.

Perhaps you are implying that we sign up for a global (truly global, not global by the standards of Western journalists) campaign of complete and irrevocable reform in our behavior, beliefs and knowledge. At the very least, this implies simply killing off a huge number of human beings who for whatever reason stand in the way. This is not (just) a hypothesis -- some versions of this have been tried and tested. *

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Totalitarianism

I'm drawing attention to the irony inherent in both these cases. To wit, a study on dishonesty suffering from dishonesty, and a study on rigor suffering from lack of rigor.

And sure, mistakes in data analysis are entirely possible. But there are lines to be drawn, always. Ariely and Gino, and now Protzko, Krosnick and company are not in the category of reasonable and honest mistakes.

On the other hand, even something with widespread effects such as the mess Excel created for genetics papers is not something that most people would find as deliberate sabotage.

And a prominent study on dishonesty was itself found to have fabricated data [1].

Like too much refined sugar, this is too much refined irony. What is going on?

1: https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2023/08/gino-ari...

>Somehow I can tell instantly that it’s a chatbot [...] because of that I find it harder to use than just typing to it.

That to me is precisely the reason to still use it without hesitation, because once it starts getting very-much-human, I don't know if I want to use it unless I really have to.

I think there's a lot of merit in keeping it sounding just a little artificial so that it is easier to have some psychological distance from what is already an overly anthropomorphic experience.

In religion/religious studies, there is the occasional debate of whether or not deities are/ought to be anthropomorphic, and atheism of course finds the whole notion ridiculous. Considering that our hopes and dreams with AGI can often feel religious -- maybe it's time to take that same lens towards AI.

Did Apple start their company by saying they will be selling apples?