sholain

A complete mischaracterization.

George Floyd ingested quite a lot of fentanyl, enough to die though it was inconclusive - it's a biological and medical reality that characterized the situation in a very real way.

Snowden released a lot of information that had nothing to do with 'whistle blowing' and enormously benefited very bad actors such such as China and Russia - it was a windfall for them, and destroyed years of work by Western intelligence agencies.

This was right after China had discovered and executed a handful of CIA personnel, whereupon it was very, very clear the possible repercussions of such a release.

His actions were inconsistent with those of someone interested only in whistle-blowing and or 'showing hypocrisy' on espionage; there are any number of ways to whistle-blow in a manner that does not result in the negative outcomes. Since he's smart enough to know better, it's rational to conclude the possibility of ulterior motives.

Russia's espionage and influence campaigns are having a severely negative effect on the political situation in the US and West in general, where they have deeply penetrated many nations security and political apparatus, especially Germany.

Whistle-blowing is not illegal (in the US) that's what the laws are there for, though obviously it's dicey and depends on media portrayal, and those laws could stand to be reinforced.

The Abu Ghraib (Iraq prison scandal) whistle-blower was protected by the system even if some people were very upset.

One cannot just release whatever one wants, and some of the docs should not have been released.

There were huge variations in the nature of the content that he released, and this is the problem with the narrative.

He's a 'whistle blower' and 'broke the law' at the same time.

A lot of people seem to have difficulty with that.

Edit: we need better privacy laws and transparency around a lot of things, that said, some state actors are going to need to be around for a long while yet. It's a complicated world, none of this is black and white, it's why we need vigilance.

+ Once again: 1000 K people coming up with some arbitrary bit of content is already understood in basically every legal regime in the world as 'public domain'.

"Can you explain how you think this works? Can a person's work just automatically become public domain somehow by being too common?"

Please ask ChatGPT for the breakdown but start with this: if someone writes something and does not copyright it, it's already in the 'public domain' and what the other 999 people do does not matter. Moreover, a lot of things are not copyrightable in the first place.

FYI I've worked at Fortune 50 Tech Companies, with 'Legal' and I know how sensitive they are - this is not a concern for them.

It's not a concern for anyone.

'One Person' reproduction -> now that is definitely a concern. That's what this is all about.

+ For OSS I think 20% number may come from those that are explicitly licensed. Out of 'all repos' it's a very tiny amount, of those that have specific licensing details it's closer to 20%. You can verify this yourself just by cruising repos. The breakdown could be different for popular projects, but in the context of AI and IP rights we're more concerned about 'small entities' being overstepped as the more institutional entities may have recourse and protections.

I think the way this will play out is if LLMs are producing material that could be considered infringing, then they'll get sued. If they don't - they won't.

And that's it.

It's why they don't release the training data - it's fully of stuff that is in legal grey area.

- I don't think it's even reasonable to suggest that 1000 people all coming up with variations of some arbitrary bit of code either deserve credit - or certainly 'financial remuneration' because they wrote some arbitrary piece of code.

That scenario is already today very well accepted legally and morally etc as public domain.

- Copyleft is not OSS, it's a tiny variation of it, which is both highly ideological and impractical. Less than 2% of OSS projects are copyleft. It's a legit perspective obviously, but it hasn't bee representative for 20 years.

Whatever we do with AI, we already have a basic understanding of public domain, at least we can start from there.

Yes agree with the sentiment - G has the reach for sure.

RAG and LLMs are not the same thing, but 'Agents' incorporate both.

Maybe we could resolve the bit of a conundrum by the op in requiring 'agents' to give credit for things if they did rag them or pull them off the web?

It still doesn't resolve the 'inherent learning' problem.

It's reasonable to suggest that if 'one person did it, we should give credit' - at least in some cases, and also reasonable that if 1K people have done similar things ad the AI learns from that, well, I don't think credit is something that should apply.

But a couple of considerations:

- It may not be that common for an LLM to 'see one thing one time' and then have such an accurate assessment of the solution. It helps, but LLMs tend not to 'learn' things that way.

- Some people might consider this the OSS dream - any code that's public is public and it's in the public domain. We don't need to 'give credit' to someone because they solved something relatively arbitrary - or - if they are concerned with that, then we can have a separate mechanism for that, aka they can put it on Github or Wikipedia even, and then we can worry about 'who thought of it first' as a separate consideration. But in terms of Engineering application, that would be a bit of a detractor.

"it would struggle to honor its long-term agreements. That failure would cascade. Oracle, for example, could be left with massive liabilities and no matching revenue stream,"

No, there's a not of noise about this but these are just 'statements of intent'.

Oracle very intimately understands OpenAI's ability to pay.

They're not banking $50B in chips and then waking up naively one morning to find out OpenAI has no funding.

What will 'cascade' is maybe some sentiment, or analysts expectations etc.

Some of it, yes, will be a problem - but at this point, the data centre buildout is not an OpenAI driven bet - it's a horizontal be across tech.

There's not that much risk in OpenAI not raising enough to expand as much as it wants.

Frankly - a CAPEX slowdown will hit US GDP growth and freak people out more than anything.

We need strong regulation.

" Switching between models can be done by a single person in an afternoon (often just 5 minutes). That's what we're talking about."

Good gosh, no, for comprehensive systems it's considerably more complicated than that. There's a lot of bespoke tuning, caching works completely differently etc..

"That means that none of these products can ever have a high profit margin."

No, it doesn't. Most cloud providers operate on a 'basis' of commodity (linux, storage, networking) with proprietary elements, similar to LLMs.

There doesn't need to be any 'breakthroughs' to find broad use cases.

The issue right now is the enormous underlying cost of training and inference - that's the qualifying characteristic that makes this landscape different.

There are quite large 'switching costs' from moving a solution that's dependent on on model and ecosystem, to another.

Models have to significantly outperform on some metric in order to even justify looking at it.

Even for smaller 'entrenchements' like individual developers - Gemeni 3 had our attention for all of 7 days, now that Opus 4.5 is out, well, none of my colleagues are talking abut G3 anymore. I mean, it's a great model, but not 'good enough' yet.

I use that as an example to illustrate broader dynamics.

Open AI, Anthropic and Google are the primary participants here, with Grok possibly playing a role, and of course all of the Chinese models being an unknown quantity because they're exceptional in different ways.

Gemeni does not have 'the lead' in anything but a benchmark.

The most applicable benchmarks right now are in software, and devs will not switch from Claude Code or Codex to Antigravity, it's not even a complete product.

This again highlights quite well the arbitrary nature of supposed 'leads' and what that actually means in terms of product penetration.

And it's not easy to 'copy' these models or integrations.

"don't have anything else of any value. " ?

OpenAI is still de facto the market leader in terms of selling tokens.

"zero moat" - it's a big enough moat that only maybe four companies in the world have that level of capability, they have the strongest global brand awareness and direct user base, they have some tooling and integrations which are relatively unique etc..

'Cloud' is a bigger business than AI at least today, and what is 'AWS moat'? When AWS started out, they had 0 reach into Enterprise while Google and AWS had infinity capital and integration with business and they still lost.

There's a lot of talk of this tech as though it's a commodity, it really isn't.

The evidence is in the context of the article aka this is an extraordinary expensive market to compete in. Their lack of deep pockets may be the problem, less so than everything else.

This should be an existential concern for AI market as a whole, much like Oil companies before highway project buildout as the only entities able to afford to build toll roads. Did we want Exxon owning all of the Highways 'because free market'?

Even more than Chips, the costs are energy and other issues, for which Chinese government has a national strategy which is absolutely already impacting the AI market. If they're able to build out 10x data centres at offer 1/10th the price at least for all the non-Frontier LLM, and some right at the Frontier, well, that would be bad in the geopolitical sense.

Don't really think the thesis is fair.

SDD as it's presented is a bit heavy weight, if you experimented with a bit, there is a lighter version that can work.

For some mini modules, we keep a single page spec as 'source of truth' instead of the code.

It's nice but has it's caveats but they are less of a concern over time.

You started by saying 'There's no way to judge!' - but then bring out 'Benchmarks!' ... and hypocritically infer that I have 'dual standards'?

The snark and ad hominem really undermine your case.

I won't descend to the level of calling other people names, or their arguments 'A Joke', or use 'It's Common Sense!' as a rhetorical device ...

But I will say that it's unreasonable to imply that Kimi, Qwen etc are 'Frontier Models'.

They are pretty good, and narrowly achieve some good scores on some benchmarks - but they're not broadly consistent at that Tier 1 quality.

They don't have the extended fine tuning which makes them better for many applications, especially coding, nor do they have the extended, non-LLM architecture components that further elevate their usefulness.

Nobody would choose Qwen for coding if they could have Sonnet at the same price and terms.

We use Qwen sometimes because it's 'cheap and good' not because it's 'great'.

The 'true coding benchmark' is that developers would chose Sonnet over Qwen, 99 out of 100 times, which is the difference between 'Tier 1' and 'Not Really Tier 1.

Finally, I run benchmarks with my team and I see in a pretty granular way what's going on.

What I've said above lines up with reality of our benchmarks.

We're looking at deploying with GLM/Z.ai - but not because it's the best model.

Google, OAI and Anthropic score consistently better - the issue is 'cost' and the fact that we can overcome the limitations of GLM. So 'it's good enough'.

That 'real world business case' best characterizes the overall situation.

Kimi is plausibly near the frontier but definitely not up to GPT5 spec, the rest are definitely not 'frontier models'.

There are objective ways of 'judging' them.

Why 'host' just to tap a few prompts in and see what happens? Worst case, you loose an account. Usually the answer has to do with people being less sophisticated than otherwise.

Nobody has access to 'frontier quality models' except Open AI, Anthropic, Google, maybe Grok, maybe Meta etc. aka nobody in China quite yet. And - there are 'layers' of Engineering beyond just model that make quite a big difference. For certain tasks, GPT5 might be beyond all others, same for Claude + Claude.

That said, the fact that they're doing this while knowing that Anthropic could be monitoring implies a degree of either real or arbitrary irreverence: either they were lazy or dumb (unlikely), or it was some ad hoc situation wherein they really just did not care. Some sub-sub-sub team at some entity just 'started doing stuff' without a whole lot of thought.

'State Backed Entities' are very numerous, it's not unreasonable that some of them, somewhere are prompting a few things that are sketchy.

I'm sure there's a lot of this going on everywhere - and this is the one Anthropic chose to highlight for whatever reasons, which could be complicated.

The author is mixing a lot of issues here.

Especially the GPL vs Permissive License conflation with the Corporate Hosting problem.

Also, the sociological phenom of tech people falling into culty ideals is really interesting and maybe a bit problematic.

$TRUMP is managed by World Liberty. The money is coming into $TRUMP and WLF at the same time as Trump is announcing deals with those parties.

Trump's personal, newfound multi-billion dollar crypto fortune is hosted by Zhao.

I don't mean to be breaking any etiquette her by re-indicating this, but it's I think it's unreasonable to suggest that Trump could not know who this person is.

This is Trump's new 'personal banker' , who doesn't have to play be the constrained rules of $USD denominated financial regulations.

To the contrary, this is possibly an extremely dangerous and corrupt action (I'm saying 'possible' here).

Zhao manages Binance upon which Trump's nefarious crypto operation - World Liberty Financial is hosted.

Zhao is guilty of wilfully ignoring a lot of very bad and illegal activity by all sorts of bad actors.

World Liberty Financial is receiving $100's of millions inbound, coincident with 'deals' made by US and Middle East actors etc..

WLF is co-managed by Steve Witkoff, the 'real estate magnate' who has been charged with Middle Easter nand Russia negotiations (who by the ay has absolutely no diplomatic background, historical context or understanding of this situations and is deeply unqualified) and who notably has been entering into negotiations and discussion with foreign parties without any US State Dept personnel. Sometimes not even translators.

Subsequent to those 'deals' with Qatar etc. which the Administration indicated there would be up to $1T invested in the US ... Qatar and other regimes have been flushing massive amounts of noney into WLF, hosted on Binance, overseen by Zhao.

The potentiality fore corruption is hard to overstate.

The US President and his family's newfound crypto fortune, worth billions, managed by himself, his sons and 'Steve Witkoff' (his business partner who is 'negotiating' deals in the Middle East and Russia, and whereupon 100's of Millions of $ is coming unto World Liberty backed coins) is called 'World Liberty Financial' ...

... and is hosted by Binance which is the crypto platform owned by Zhao.

Zhao was found guilty of ignoring oversight regulations allowing nefarious actors (ISIS, Cartels, sex traffickers) to transact on his platform.

There's no way in high heaven that the President could be unaware of the fact that Zhao is the CEO who of the platform that hosts almost all of Trump's wealth.

Moreover, this man is convicted specifically for ignoring the lighter oversight regulations, with operations in parts of the world that are out of reach of US investigators and justice system.

Share buybacks are are at least nominally a financially neutral exercise - it generally does not benefit either shareholders or executives.

They can however signal 'strength' in stock price by creating more demand and signalling to the market that the company itself which has 'insider information' believes the stock price is worth less than the price they're bought for.

It's a fair point about Jobs - but - Jobs was never sitting on more money than the economies of most nations.

Jobs Apple was a consumer product company, Tim Cook Apple is a Private Equity Operating Entity in a way. Their financial operations dictate as much about their valuation as anything else.

The West is relatively clean at least in this; they had fair and open terms for China which were not reciprocated.

Even those 'local partnerships' in China were not above board - they existed to steal the intellectual property from the partnered Western company.

It seems the only thing that can be nailed down are 'consumer brands' which are difficult to duplicate.

[1] https://www.planetizen.com/node/47241

At least in the context of trade over the last 35 years, there has been an imbalance.

As for 'Arbitrary Rules' - it's a fair claim and the US, EU etc. need to establish clear and fair terms. So should China, India, Brazil, everywhere else.

"enforces restrictions that are similar to the ones China "

No; the restrictions the West places on Chinese companies are not remotely comparable in proportionality or form.

But worse - China does not just have the opportunity to operate in the West in an asymmetrical fashion, but they're fairly aggressively openly stealing intellectual property etc., not just as a matter of 'national security' but as a matter of normal business operations.

The Chinese government operates police stations in foreign countries to surveille and oppress local citizens of the Chinese diaspora, and to coordinate activities.

There are always geopolitical shenanigans, but the West acted in roughly good faith inviting China into the WTO and was happy to play by some reasonable set of rules.

It's fair to use the label 'hypocritical' for what seems like arbitrary action in the West, but it's not truly arbitrary because it's a reaction to what was lack of good faith at least on the terms that were understood, and the term 'hypocritical' could be used tenfold in the other direction.

Also - even if everyone was playing roughly fair according to their own competitive advantages, the imbalances in some areas would be so problematic that there would have be some kind of reckoning anyhow.

The terms need to be reset, capital flows need to be adjusted, the USD cannot maintain such a high ranking position if they don't want to import, vast offshore tax shelters need to be shut down. Dubai is 'Mos Eisley' on Tatooine it's really just bad money.