alt Hacker News"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.
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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.
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.
> 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.
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?