OpenAI's super PAC is funding AI-generated news site attacking industry critics

I’ve noticed this too. I’ve seen a ton ai defenders and hype people here. It’s embarrassing.

It would be cool to see HN internal stats over the last 5 years. New users, posts from different accounts and etc.

I'm not gonna say where we're at now is better, but as someone who has never had any interest in webdev, the perpetual JavaScript frameworks baffled me. How could they still be interesting and how was there not one that was good enough yet?

Yeah but that's just how things have gone. My enthusiasm about a new JavaScript framework is practically zero these days compared to several years ago, and I do genuinely use AI for all of my coding especially since I developed a health issue that prevents me from typing

Or, you know, many people genuinely find it exciting to see AI pumping their long overdue side-projects, just like many people once found bikeshedding their frontend frameworks exciting?

I don’t suppose that could have anything to do with the fact that AI has become a huge part of day to day business in the tech industry and elsewhere? Totally mystifying that anyone would say anything about that!

What's missing is a balanced view.

People are easily divided and suddenly in a binary position.

You're either totally pro AI and can't stop talking about it all the time, it's like your new god.

Or you're a hater. And old-school person, who deceived themselves and got a good portion of their self-worth from typing strange invocations in an even stranger electronic device.

Both are bullshit, but if you're not in either camp you get flack from both.

My (!) reality is that it's useful technology, but far from the claims that were made by the people trying to sell (!) it.

I've seen quite some improvements over the years, but I haven't seen the claims materialized in any release in the last 18+ months.

Yes, it's impressive, yes, it's probably here to stay in some form or another.

But it's not Skynet, GLaDOS or even HAL ...

You know whats crazy? We’re in bizarre times were this can actually be true. Things we joked about before which was obviously too nonsensical to be true is no longer the case in my world.

There are only two industries left in america.

It would have to be state law so the president can't pardon them.

Unfortunately you're not going to see any sort of legal redress against American oligarchs in any sort of American legal venue.

A country like France has shown that they're willing to take no an oligarch[0], and they have the nuclear means to protect themselves from American oligarchs leveraging the American military to punish France for doing so.

This kind of stuff will continue until a country like France forces a jet carrying someone like Musk, Altman, Thiel, or Zuckerberg to land so that they can be arrested, tried, convicted, and forced to spend a few years to decades in a drab little room.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrest_and_indictment_of_Pavel...

Recent events have shown that it's a double-edged sword. Sure the Mythos hype probably drove a lot of sales and investment, but it also led to a crackdown from the government.

Regulatory capture. They are the hyperscalers who invested and still invest heavily in hard tech, like data centers. They need regulation of "uncontrolled" AI models, so that Joe Smoe doesn't ditch his ChatGPT subscription and uses his local LLMs and agent harness setup in his home lab. Or some open weights model, or the condensed Chinese ones... it's "regulate everything else to death that is better than our enshittified OG models behind a paywall".

The trajectory is clear and the hyperscalers are in an disadvantage: they need to become bigger and bigger while models, frameworks and harnesses that are "good enough" for 95% of all people become smaller and specialized hardware becomes cheaper and less energy hungry. In the end the only viable customers that are left for the big ones is the military and... the military. But even the Pentagon realizes that a decentralized less fragile approach is actually safer instead of having big data centers that could be Wildberried by an adversary, that is if the alcoholic in charge isn't firing some generals who act too smart again. Machine vision which isn't even real AI is capable of destroying targets in Ukraine for instance. Dirt cheap. And Palantir's Maven Smart System was incapable of predicting the most obvious flaws in the Iran war, like how easy it is to to strike US bases or close the Strait of Hormuz. I'm not saying condensing the killchain is useless, I'm saying that it's not everything.

People aren't dumb. So they must be strong-manned and cheated into submission.

I agree that the connection to OpenAI is very speculative here. It's true that Pangram is also very unreliable, and the match is pretty weak anyways: "69% came back flagged as fully AI-generated, with another 28% flagged as partially AI-generated".

But the analysis of the internal admin pages for generating articles, the API and the interview structure are pretty damming evidence that this is largely driven by AI.

If anything this shows how pangram is unreliable. Chances are, if someone is running an article generation thing, it'll be 100% generated. Writing 3 / 100 articles "by hand" doesn't make any sense.

I'm now suspicious this author (had AI) built the blog they're referencing just so they could make claims against OpenAI.

Regardless of that claim, here’s a good test for how real this site is - it’s called “The Wire by Acutus”, but try to find a site for “Acutus”.

Is it Acutus Medical, a “cardiac arrhythmia management company”, or Acutus Partners, “Expert healthcare consulting for transformative growth strategies that empower healthcare organizations to thrive and succeed”?

Neither seem obviously correct, and there are no other good candidates, not to mention that the lack of a link from “The Wire” to its supposed parent is suspicious.

Certainly money well spent and technology properly utilized. Could have learned an actual skill instead.

Had to look this up to see they really named it that, but then again, probably not surprising considering Musk's cars have a "ludicrous mode".