I'm rather scared of US models - if Anthropic was the only AI provider in the world, it's easy to see that common people would have no access at all. Thankfully there is OpenAI which compete 1:1 with Anthropic (at a slightly lower cost) but most importantly the Chinese models keep Anthropic, but also OpenAI in checks.
And I'm saying this as someone working for American companies.
it's a real paradox, that chinese models are what guards democratization and private use of ai while us models are moted castles with "kings" crying that you are stealing their legally stolen goods... what times we are living in...
It blows my mind that these two companies are going to mint billionaires, meanwhile https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Swartz was bullied to death by the state for sharing academic papers which were at least in part, if not largely, paid for by tax dollars.
ethics and other details are for humans. AI companies just proving it, even highest IQ teams are against ethics because they want more, even several millions is not enough for them.
AI has forced a dramatic shift in my view on intellectual property. The laws as they exist only protect corporations now.
They do not protect individuals no matter how much people want to think they do. AI has proven this.
I think to level the playing field all copyright, trademarks, and patents laws should be eliminated.
If I want to make a marvel movie, I should be allowed to and profit from it.
AI let the cat out of the bag and there is no going back. We need to let individuals profit just like corporations can from what is considered theft right now.
Or we could build on and enforce the 300+ years of thought and trial that went into copyright law so that individuals are re-empowered.
But nah, let's do the most radical, least thought out thing, and absolutely destroy small scale creators. I'm sure Amazon will be benevolent and continue to pay writers in your scenario.
What is with 2026 and just conceding civilization to the worst actors, and then adopting the worst tactics/thoughts/concepts?
Writers will be forced to go on tour like musicians in order to get anything from their work, and they may not release the works to the public until after their death. So much for the last of the troubadours.
> AI has forced a dramatic shift in my view on intellectual property. The laws as they exist only protect corporations now.
Even this isn't quite right. Publishers unambiguously have been screwed.
What has happened is if you can give the political/investment classes enough upside opportunity in the entities doing the IP theft then you're golden, and they increasingly have no problem with even pretending to hide it.
You are on to something. The extensive copywrite terms have ensured that the work of everyone except the oligarch corporations vanishes into the ether since it cannot be reproduced for over a century if the author lives another 30 years.
There will be no one debating the great minds of the twentieth century because the corporations made it illegal for people to republish critical editions of any such works.
The greats were recirculated every twenty or thirty years for centuries.
The smaller authors will vanish into the nothing and Western Civilization's 20th century onward will vanish and be almost forgotten forever because of that mouse. There will be more ancient literature remembered than literature after the invention of the printing press because they made it illegal to share printed materials for nigh on two centuries if an author was young when they wrote it. There will be more ancient scrolls preserved for the future than books of 20th century philosophy and science because the latter is a crime.
Only the oligarchs who pirated the books will have a cultural memory. They have cursed our era to oblivion when it comes to intellectual property because they can generate billions now for the mouse's henchmen.
The technique is called "accusation in a mirror". By accusing the enemy of doing what you are doing, when they call out what you are doing, they look like they are just weakly repeating your own accusations because they don't have any truth. And the anger that should be directed against you (because of your practices) gets directed at the enemy.
Thank you for this, I've noticed this often in politics and didn't know it has a name. Some politicians do this so often, that any accusation to me reads a confession instead.
I'm sure all those stackexchange experts will be getting their checks for helping launch countless software projects over the last 20 years any day now...
You're basically saying that since open source projects can be reused by others, the people making closed source projects shouldn't complain when the same thing happens to them.
Everyone posting on Stack Overflow knew it would be public and free. Book authors put an explicit copyright notice, which includes derivations of their work.
It’s not their IP, they never created data they were training on in the first place, at best they derived existing data without asking if they can commercialized it
It is also good for the technology itself, just image if there would be just one company that does "just well enough", they will be unmotivated to improve their ai models
The Chinese models keep American financial markets at "To the Moon" levels rather than "Igniting Jupiter as a binary star" levels. This amount of capital pressure exerts its own gravitational pull in markets and in geopolitics, and every additional dollar of valuation can propel acquisitions, which propels valuation, et cetera. Undiluted, very quickly Amazon owns countries like it today owns county governments.
this has been my tinfoil hat theory. Investors in US models might be supporting "open" models as a means to create FOMO for other investors to supply more cash to US model providers, which in turn increase their investment value. Package it so they can beat those "adversaries", equate that success with global power struggles etc etc. Seems to be quite effective.
Re: common people, yes, and given all the talk of job instability AI is creating, why hasn’t Anthropic or OpenAI offered discounted plans for laid off or displaced workers? Wouldn’t this be a tangible way to display goodwill and build adoption?
> why hasn’t Anthropic or OpenAI offered discounted plans for laid off or displaced workers?
Because it's not a widespread phenomenon. A few large tech cos laid off large swaths of people a handful of times. That's only happening in those large tech cos. Most cos are empowering their employees with AI as a tool, not a replacement, and they're not letting anyone go (unless they refuse to use this new tool).
Of course, they're not hiring as much either, since their current teams can accomplish more with AI as a tool. Maybe the AI companies could give job seekers a bit of a discount, but that would be abused to all hell without crazy administrative overhead costs, so why would they?
I'm sure this will be a terribly unpopular opinion, but I've long held the view that a Chinese AI company might screw me over at some point for a complex geopolitical reason that I don't fully understand. An American AI company will screw me over tomorrow for a quick buck.
As to the argument is that (only?) the Chinese labs are training on my data, I find this almost comical given the amount of highly-personal data companies such as Meta and Google have been harvesting for decades.
I don't trust any American company because they will switch into extraction mode eventually and squeeze every cent they can out of you.
Even if the founders didn't want that, eventually the upper ranks will fill with MBAs and the board with private equity and they will make it that way. Their bonuses are based on quarterly performance not customer experience
Long gone are the companies who served their communities for decades or centuries, providing a stable return to the owners, jobs for the workers and value to the customers.
I'd rather China have my data than America. China might do something with it one day but America built exploiting it into the business model (disclaimer that I'm not Uyghur or Taiwanese though)
No doubt Fable can outperform on many coding tasks, but the way you phrase it really exaggerates the gap and I'd suggest that for 95% of tasks, most devs simply don't need Fable level, and in fact, despite mostly using Claude, I have found codex is generally quicker at most tasks and can be even better than Fable with certain languages.
Right, it's about how much time the human spent - the time spent by the machine itself is irrelevant. As you rightly point out: that is why we measure programmer experience by wall clock time, not CPU time :)
And I'm saying this as someone working for American companies.