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#altman#musk#more#sam#openai#tech#point#don#elon#open

Discussion (102 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

pj_mukh•about 4 hours ago
This is a weird fantasy among the literati that AI is a "scam", that we can "expose" them with lots of palace intrigue coverage and SBF or Elizabeth Holmes them away and then everything will be right in the world. Some of the best models are Chinese and Open-source and so-so good and Sam Altman is wholly irrelevant to them.

Some folks are in for a very rude awakening.

tjsquared•about 1 hour ago
I've noticed the disconnect between tech moguls and enthusiasts and the rest of the media in AI coverage.

AI can invoke existential dread for writers, educators, and artists just as much as for software developers and engineers, although on perhaps a more delayed schedule.

I think public sentiment among journalists will eventually catch up with the pros and cons of AI in a nuanced way, but it's a bit harder to appreciate how impactful it already is if you're not using it to write software every day.

This is a point made by Andrej Karpathy.

1vuio0pswjnm7•about 1 hour ago
"This is a fantasy among the literati that AI is a "scam", that we can "expose" them..."

Who is "them"

Is it "AI" that the literati are trying to "expose" or is it certain individuals

"Some of the best models are Chinese and Open-source and so-so good and Sam Altman is wholly irrelevant ot them."

Made with a small fraction of the budget available to Altman

But is this article about "AI" models. Or is it about Altman

"Some folks are in for a very rude awakening."

Who are the folks and what is the awakening

Is it "AI" investors

Once Altman starts taking the public's money, then it is possible he could end up like Holmes or SBF

If that happens, journalists ("literati") will publish stories about it, these stories will be submitted to HN and HN commenters ("??????") will complain

goldenarm•about 4 hours ago
Using unlicensed intellectual property to build a plagiarism machine that is wrong 10% of the time, could be interpreted as a scam by many folks.
BobbyJo•about 3 hours ago
Is there anyway to build intelligence that doesn't meet the definition of plagiarism you are using here?

I remember when IP laws were looked at like a form of oppression in the tech community...

hallway_monitor•about 3 hours ago
Yes, it is called paying for the use of copyrighted material which people put a lot of time and money into creating. Is this not obvious?
comfysocks•about 3 hours ago
To me, the problem is when IP laws are stretched and abused by big corporations (like, say Disney) or by patent trolls. If IP laws could work in a way that gave limited and reasonable protections to actual creators and innovators, then I don’t have a problem with them.
salawat•about 2 hours ago
It still is oppression. What many of us object to now is how starkly it's revealed the 2 tier illegitimate judicial system that on the one hand ruins grandmas and teenagers, but gives multinationals a free pass for charging everyone to get access to the human corpora. Anna's Archive, while equally illegal in a sense, but at least operates itself in a way compatible with uplifting everyone is getting more backlash than these tech companies that are dead set on "renting out access to intelligence". At this point, if you can't see the absurdity of the System as it functions past the "bing bing wahooness" of AI, I don't know what to tell ya.
sublinear•about 1 hour ago
> I remember when IP laws were looked at like a form of oppression in the tech community...

This is not true. Otherwise, why is open source licensing so popular? Have you simply never read those licenses?

Craighead•about 3 hours ago
ahh yes the perfect world fallacy
stalfie•about 3 hours ago
That sentence could easily be applied to the human baseline.
Keyframe•about 3 hours ago
Yes, if you're equating same rights to soulless corporations and humans as well as their motives.
warkdarrior•about 3 hours ago
What exactly is your complaint about Anna's Archive?
anuramat•about 3 hours ago
> wrong 10% of the time

that doesn't sound nearly as bad as you think it does; I don't see how ethics are relevant here either, unless oil is also somehow a scam

regardless, one must be delusional to deny the fact that it's useful tech

"but they're evil" is not an argument

jgalt212•about 4 hours ago
On a certain level it is a scam. AI slop, vibe coding, tokenmaxxing, blaming employee layoffs on AI, pretty much any comment CEOs make about AI, etc.
libraryofbabel•about 3 hours ago
Well yes, there is tons of AI bullshit about and all sorts of scammy behavior, but I don’t think that says anything at all either way about whether the core technology is a “scam”, theranos-style. In fact I’m not sure how it could be otherwise: of course there’s going to be all sorts of hype and scamming around a novel, rapidly-progressing and potentially transformative tech like this, even if it works.

If you want an analogy, look at the history of the early railroads. Full of hype, bullshitters, scammy investments, robber-barons, unrealistic promises, and with their own legion of naysayers at the time. Yet the core technology worked and it did transform the world in the end.

standardUser•about 4 hours ago
Jargon isn't a scam. I get more and better work done with AI, to my own satisfaction and to the benefit of my employer. People using dumb terms to describe this doesn't make it less true.
jmull•about 3 hours ago
We're in a "both are true" situation here.

AI has real benefits, that are game-changing in some areas, even if AI never improve from their current capabilities.

People are claiming (whether they truly believe it or not) that AI has incredible capabilities and benefits that they don't currently have, and may never have.

There's plenty of scamming going on. The fact that AI has real game-changing capabilities just makes the scams harder to detect. People tend to like to see things as more black-and-white than they actually are, and scammers take advantage of that.

watwut•about 3 hours ago
But none of what OP said was jargon. All except one of those terms are things that are either harmful to employer or kind of fraud.
koutakun•about 3 hours ago
> I get more and better work done with AI, to my own satisfaction and to the benefit of my employer

In the short run, because Anthropic and other providers are heavily subsidizing coding agents to maximize user base. Will your employer still benefit and be satisfied in a couple of years when Anthropic jacks up the price by 5x and dumbs down Opus to the point where 50% of changes are easier to do manually than via an agent?

metalliqaz•about 4 hours ago
Rude how?

The fact that Chinese open weight models are useful does not really say anything about whether AI is hyped well beyond its actual worth, or whether the technology will be used for benevolent or nefarious purposes by American oligarchs.

pj_mukh•about 4 hours ago
"AI is hyped well beyond its actual worth, or whether the technology will be used for benevolent or nefarious purposes by American oligarchs."

This article is asking none of those questions. It's mostly a high school gossip column about what was said and with what tone and who used Butt pillows by The New Yorker, it reeks of desperation. If they could just find something nefarious on Sam Altman or show him in a bad light that sticks, they could fix it all and make AI go away.

My point stands, they're in for a Rude awakening.

dude250711•about 4 hours ago
Trying to justify current valuations by misrepresenting current model capabilities is a scam.

A fair valuation of ~$5B each for Anthropic and OpenAI for the occasionally useful tools that they had created would be more reasonable.

heipei•about 4 hours ago
$5B valuation on a $30B run rate for Anthropic?
reenorap•about 4 hours ago
40B ARR and profitable next month.
avarun•about 4 hours ago
Lol. What exactly have you based this "fair valuation" off of? Vibes?
varjag•about 4 hours ago
Come on. LinkedIn was bought for 6B.
trotro•about 4 hours ago
These companies are selling subscriptions for what is basically AGI, yet you think they should have the same valuation as Crocs (yes, the footwear company) ?
root_axis•about 4 hours ago
> These companies are selling subscriptions for what is basically AGI

This type of rhetoric is exactly why people think it's a scam

grey-area•about 4 hours ago
It’s nowhere near AGI, and LLMs are not going to lead to it either.

They do seem to be good at fooling people though.

monocasa•about 4 hours ago
> These companies are selling subscriptions for what is basically AGI

That is the point under contention.

ru552•about 4 hours ago
Regardless of the marketing material, LLMs are still just using probabilities to guess what the next token is.
trollbridge•about 4 hours ago
... where can I get a subscription to this AGI?
ryandrake•about 4 hours ago
"When elephants fight, it is the grass that suffers."

There's really nobody for normal people to root for in this battle. They're fighting over who gets to wield the dick that is going to screw us all.

pdonis•about 4 hours ago
While I have a great deal of sympathy for this point of view, I think the article makes an interesting observation that suggests it actually doesn't matter whether these people are intentionally trying to screw everybody or not--the actual problem is much bigger even than that:

To claim that OpenAI’s mission of cultivating beneficial A.I. was compromised by Sam Altman is to let the entire industry off the hook. Yes, Altman seems to have a rather casual relationship with the truth. But it is far more interesting, complicated, and useful to take his self-defense at face value—to interpret the many sins of OpenAI, and its competitors, as the result of a good-faith exercise in futility. What if we imagined that he did in fact set out to do good? And discovered—or, perhaps better, failed to discover—along the way that this was structurally impossible?

cma•about 4 hours ago
Leaked emails I think showed the open source part at the heart of the concept of OpenAI was never serious and was just to help recruit.
pdonis•about 4 hours ago
I don't know that the hypothetical I described requires that the open source part was sincere. The article focuses on Altman's belief that someone was going to develop AI and he thought it would be bad if Google did it first--meaning, by implication, that it would be good if an organization that he started did it first. But what if it turns out to be bad no matter who did it first?
watwut•about 4 hours ago
> But it is far more interesting, complicated, and useful to take his self-defense at face value—to interpret the many sins of OpenAI, and its competitors, as the result of a good-faith exercise in futility. What if we imagined that he did in fact set out to do good? And discovered—or, perhaps better, failed to discover—along the way that this was structurally impossible?

But that is not what happened. It is neither complicated or interesting, it is just an alternative timeline sci-fi exercise. It can be fun to engage in, but it is not anything that would had anything to do with the current world as it is.

A people interested in good faith attempt to do good dont end up in Sam Altman position. They do good and focus on doing good rather then lie to get more investments so that they can corner the market and become powerful.

pdonis•about 2 hours ago
> A people interested in good faith attempt to do good dont end up in Sam Altman position.

I strongly disagree. Human history is full of examples of people who made good faith attempts to do good that backfired tremendously. A good faith desire to do good isn't enough: you also need to be in a domain where your beliefs and intuitions about what doing good actually is are reasonably trustworthy. And you need to have some way of getting feedback from reality that pushes back on you if you start crossing certain lines.

None of this proves that Altman was making a genuine good faith attempt to do good. That wasn't my point. My point was that, in a domain like AI, it doesn't matter whether the people involved have good faith intentions to do good or not, because this domain is not one where any human has reasonably trustworthy beliefs and intuitions about what doing good actually is. And the current AI bubble shows that it's also a domain where nobody can get feedback from reality that pushes back when they start crossing certain lines. In other words, just as the article says, it's "structurally impossible" to do good in this domain, no matter what your intentions are, at least with the humans we have now.

hsuduebc2•about 3 hours ago
It’s ridiculous to accuse someone of having a “somewhat loose relationship with the truth” when Elon Musk is sitting right across from him, accusing him of dishonest behavior.
tsimionescu•about 3 hours ago
There is nothing implausible about two known liars accusing each other of lying and both being truthful this one time - though extremely hypocritical, of course.
adrian_b•about 2 hours ago
It is an extremely common thing to see 2 liars accusing each other of lying, thus telling the truth in this special occasion.
stronglikedan•about 3 hours ago
I think Elon had the moral high ground in principle, but him waiting so long makes me think it was never about the moral high ground to begin with.
javier_e06•42 minutes ago
Musk was not going to win due to the statue of limitations. Altman was wrong to turn a non-profit to a for-profit because they need it more money (really?). Was not the whole point of Open AI to shield artificial intelligence from the amoral practices of capitalistic controls? This is yet another example of our legal system falling short due to the fast an unforeseen changes of society and technology.
nightski•about 4 hours ago
It's too valuable of a tech to remain in the control of any corporation. Open models will find a way. Compute requirements will go down and there will be many of us making it a priority to transform the tech into something open like the Linux kernel vs a closed cloud tech.

Nvidia has 75% profit margins right now. That won't continue forever. It may take quite some time but it will normalize.

root_axis•about 3 hours ago
Unfortunately, there's really no clear path to viable local models for the common folk, the hardware requirements are just too extreme. I say this as someone with a pair of A100s that is absolutely delighted by what the open source models are capable of, but even with the best harnesses, tiny quantized models are just not even close to the same league as something like Kimi-k2.

Of course, here on HN it's easy to find folks who get a lot out of tinkering with tiny models, but the masses don't want to tinker with toys, they want something fast with a large context and approximating at least Opus 4.6 level reliability and capability, which simply can't be squeezed into a quantized 60b model.

nightski•about 2 hours ago
Right now, yes but I am fairly confident this will change. Not only do I truly believe we will see massive efficiency gains in inference, I also believe the cost of hardware will come down. Again Nvidia's getting a 75% margin on this hardware. Usually hardware margins are significantly smaller. More supply will come online even if that takes years.
reenorap•about 4 hours ago
I read this quote from a bottle cap of Honest Tea. I’ve used it so many times since then because it speaks so much truth about life today.
alfiedotwtf•about 3 hours ago
Oddly enough, the normal people you’re forgetting, who I think not only will win but already have won, are the Chinese.
fumar•about 2 hours ago
How so?
alsetmusic•about 4 hours ago
> There's really nobody for normal people to root for in this battle.

I believe the reports that Sam Altman is an egomaniacal liar. But I haven't been privy to any of it other than seeing him hype his company's tech in a clearly dishonest manner. That's not great.

I've seen Elon be an active piece of shit, white nationalist, conspiracy promoter, etc, for years. I don't root for Sam Altman. I root against Elon.

In a dystopian world where everything is terrible (the one we live in), I can at least take some pleasure in seeing a person I dislike have a bad time. It still makes me angry that he can just waste the time of the courts out of spite. Can't prevent it, might as well find the silver lining.

_verandaguy•about 3 hours ago
You don't have to root for or against anyone in this fight. It's perfectly valid to oppose both actors and both outcomes, and the stakes of the fight.
graemep•about 4 hours ago
> I've seen Elon be an active piece of shit, white nationalist, conspiracy promoter, etc, for years. I don't root for Sam Altman. I root against Elon.

A stopped clock is right twice a day Even Elon is sometimes right.

dominotw•about 4 hours ago
I think paul graham needs to really come clean about why he did this

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41034829

adrian_b•about 2 hours ago
Not being an US citizen, I have not been affected by any action of Elon Musk, even if I despise many of the things done by him in USA, like the results of DOGE.

On the other hand, I have much more reasons to hate Sam Altman, who has stolen a significant amount of money from my own pocket and from a very great number of other people around the world, by causing the huge increases in the prices of DRAM, SSDs and HDDs.

Moreover, Elon Musk has some positive achievements, even if it is hard to put them in balance with his bad actions, while I see absolutely nothing good done by Sam Altman. Successfully luring fools to invest hundreds of billions in AI does not count as something good.

GuinansEyebrows•about 3 hours ago
> There's really nobody for normal people to root for in this battle.

his name is Luigi Mangione :)

Curosinono•about 5 hours ago
E.H. promised her investors a magic cure -> sharlatan

Sam B. stole money from everyone -> thief

Sam A. did what?

And Musk wanted to do the same thing. Both agreeded, that a non profit will not make enough money to push the frontier. He is only pissed that he didn't get control of openai and he is now pissed again because he apparently should have done the lawsuite a few years back. Despite him having unlimited money and probably very good laywers

I'm not here to defend the richest of the richest, but E.H. and S.B. are complet different storries to OpenAI

hawkice•about 4 hours ago
Non-profits are not the property of their donors, but of the general interest, with obligations to the public. It is part of the legal and social obligations of the legal structure of non-profits.
Curosinono•about 4 hours ago
It wasn't illegal so there is some reason why the USA allowed it.

And as mentioned, they agreeed that they will not get the capital openai needs, so what did the USA people loose? A company which whouldn't have been able to do what they are known for anyway.

Again i'm not protecting the rich, i just don't think there is a real scandal and its not the same as the other 2 the newyorker mentioned

hawkice•about 4 hours ago
Their stated non-profit goal was to benefit all of humanity. Changing OpenAI to benefit their financial backers in a formal sense could be a loss of nearly unbounded value.
gaws•about 3 hours ago
> E.H. promised her investors a magic cure -> sharlatan

*charlatan

xbar•about 5 hours ago
A favorite quote: "The dubiousness of Altman’s character is [...] priced into his reputation."
vlucas•about 5 hours ago
Sam didn't "win" the case in the sense that most people will think of when reading this headline.

In the 20th paragraph of the linked article, finally getting to the actual reason:

> On Monday, the jury took only two hours to reach its verdict. Musk’s complaint, the panel found, had indeed exceeded the statute of limitations

Musk is appealing. This fight is far from over.

lokar•about 4 hours ago
What is the substance of the appeal? IANAL, but AIUI, it's pretty hard to appeal a finding of fact from a jury.
Tangurena2•about 1 hour ago
The word used will be toll. Basically the clock measuring the statute of limitations can be stopped/paused for certain things. It could be that the victim was under the age of 18 and therefore couldn't sue until they hit 18. Or the incident was concealed, so the victim couldn't take action until the concealment was gone.

0 - https://www.trustwelllaw.com/resources/legal-term-faq/statut...

zozbot234•about 4 hours ago
The substantive point of law will most likely be that OpenAI's salami slicing tactic for becoming a for-profit does not properly fall under the statute of limitations. To think otherwise is basically no different than arguing that you can rob a person twice and not be prosecuted for the second robbery because of "double jeopardy".
lokar•about 3 hours ago
So, the illegal activity continued, so the clock did not start?
WarmWash•about 4 hours ago
It's rare that judge's overturn jury verdicts, compared to other judge's verdicts. The constitution leans a lot on jury verdicts, and judges tend to respect that.
dathinab•about 5 hours ago
or it is pretty much over before it even began, because he sued way too late...
nashashmi•about 5 hours ago
Lawsuit filed in 2024. Too late for it. AI boomed in 2023. And elon exited in 2021. I hate to say it but Elon lost. And we all lost.
choilive•about 4 hours ago
What do you mean? Pandoras box has already been opened. Even if OpenAI disappears, there will be another one to take its marketshare. The tech is too useful to die
kryptiskt•about 5 hours ago
That Musk couldn't even get over the first stumbling block which is the statute of limitations, does not make the win any lesser. It makes it more decisive, since Musk now has to overcome that hurdle before even having a shot at the meat of the case.
ScoobleDoodle•about 4 hours ago
I think parent probably means winning on merit or a sense of justice. As in won for a deserved reason rather than a technicality. The technicality here is exceeded the statute of limitations.

A win in any manner isn’t landing the same for observers as winning for a just reason.

epistasis•about 4 hours ago
There is no "sense of justice" that will sway an appeal, it's all about the law. And this jury just found that there was zero merit under law.

Appeals are for finding legal technicalities or edge cases. They do not overturn findings of fact from a jury.

That is, it used to be that way in the US, when the courts were ruled by law. In the modern US, the Supreme Court is a partisan political body, so perhaps people are confident it will get overturned because Musk is now political enough for the Supreme Court to give Musk personal favors for all his massive political contributions.

That sort of rank corruption is the only reason to be confident that Musk could ever win this silly case.

epistasis•about 5 hours ago
This case should have never made it to a jury, there is no case here.

The judge was cowed by Musk's fame to even bring this to trial, I think. It's an example of how the justice system works differently for this with more wealth and power. There is no case, just massive ego from a person with massive wealth.

perilunar•about 5 hours ago
An entertaining and scathing writeup.
booleanbetrayal•about 4 hours ago
I believe an upset to Altman and a re-characterization of OpenAI to a charitable stance would have left investors scrambling, and would likely have hastened an unwinding of the AI bubble to some degree. It feels like we'll be on this merry-go-round a good deal longer now.
rsingel•about 5 hours ago
The kicker on this story is glorious
alper•about 4 hours ago
Will we become Musk's slave or Altman's slave?
rgbrenner•about 3 hours ago
musk sued long after the statute of limitations because what openai did was only objectionable to musk once he decided to become their competitor.

and in this scenario, i’m supposed to root for musk who tried to use the court to harm a competitor who’s winning in the marketplace against xAI?

no thanks. if you can’t compete in the marketplace, the court isn’t your backup plan. there’s nothing. positive about the weaponization of the courts.

thelastgallon•about 3 hours ago
Dude has 800+ billion net worth. I think he'll be okay.
gaws•about 3 hours ago
It's about pride at this point.
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thisisauserid•about 5 hours ago
Exquisite prose merely to call two billionaires insufferable.
metalliqaz•about 4 hours ago
Are there any more noble uses for exquisite prose?
nivekney•about 4 hours ago
"We"? Who "We"?