zlacker

>>nickth+(OP)
Unsurprising but disappointing none-the-less. Let’s just try to learn from it.

It’s popular in the AI space to claim altruism and openness; OpenAI, Anthropic and xAI (the new Musk one) all have a funky governance structure because they want to be a public good. The challenge is once any of these (or others) start to gain enough traction that they are seen as having a good chance at reaping billions in profits things change.

And it’s not just AI companies and this isn’t new. This is art of human nature and will always be.

We should be putting more emphasis and attention on truly open AI models (open training data, training source code & hyperparameters, model source code, weights) so the benefits of AI accrue to the public and not just a few companies.

[edit - eliminated specific company mentions]

>>mgreg+A5
The problem is research into AI requires investment and investors (by and large) expect returns, and, the technology in this case actually working is currently in the midst of it's new-and-shiny-hype-stage. You can say these organizations started altruistic; frankly I think that's dubious at best given basically all that have had the opportunity to turn their "research project" into a revenue generator have done; but much like social media and cloud infrastructure, any open source or truly non-profit competitor to these entities will see limited investment by others. And that's a problem, because the silicon these all run on can only be bought with dollars, not good vibes.

It's honestly kind of frustrating to me how the tech space continues to just excuse this. Every major new technology since I've been paying attention (2004 ish?) has gone this exact same way. Someone builds some cool new thing, then dillholes with money invest in it, it becomes a product, it becomes enshittified, and people bemoan that process while looking for new shiny things. Like, I'm all for new shiny things, but what if we just stopped letting the rest become enshittified?

As much as people have told me all my life that the profit motive makes companies compete to deliver the best products, I don't know that I've ever actually seen that pan out in my fucking life. What it does is it flattens all products offered in a given market to whatever set of often highly arbitrary and random aspects all the competitors seem to think is the most important. For an example, look at short form video, which started with Vine, was perfected by TikTok, and is now being hamfisted into Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube despite not really making any sense in those contexts. But the "market" decided that short form video is important, therefore everything must now have it even if it makes no sense in the larger product.

>>Toucan+Od
> As much as people have told me all my life that the profit motive makes companies compete to deliver the best products, I don't know that I've ever actually seen that pan out

Yes, you have; you're just misidentifying the product. Google, Facebook, Twitter, etc. do not make products for you and I, their users. We're just a side effect. Their actual products are advertising access to your eyeballs, and big data. Those products are highly optimized to serve their actual customers--which aren't you and I. The profit motive is working just fine. It's just that you and I aren't the customers; we're third parties who get hit by the negative externalities.

The missing piece of the "profit motive" rhetoric has always been that, like any human motivation, it needs an underlying social context that sets reasonable boundaries in order to work. One of those reasonable boundaries used to be that your users should be your customers; users should not be an externality. Unfortunately big tech has now either forgotten or wilfully ignored that boundary.