Microsoft exec called AI scraping 'the largest theft of labor in human history'
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Microsoft exec called AI scraping 'the largest theft of labor in human history'
Unofficial Hacker News client; not affiliated with Y Combinator.
jacquesm · · focus · HN ↗
It is said that at the heart of every great fortune there is a great crime, so it should be no surprise that the most valuable companies on the planet will most likely result from this crime. And given that justice can be bought by those with the most money you can forget about anything coming of this.
TeMPOraL · · focus · HN ↗
Except, of course, no one has actually been robbed, the culture has not been stolen - it's still there - nor are the people involved selling it back in any form. This rhetoric sounds impressive, but really looks more like "piracy is theft" line from early 2000s, similarly flawed in basic premise.
Whether the end result threatens the form in which culture is created, at least beyond just threatening the business models of the gatekeepers, is a separate discussion, but you can't draw the heart-string-pulling "life's work got appropriated" arguments there so easily.
And let's not forget what we got back for this: reified intelligence on a chip almost too cheap to meter, available to everyone across the world - not just rich West, inference is so dirt cheap that whole world uses it. It exploded in popularity organically, because of how many real problems of real people, including individuals and non-profits, it addresses.
There's plenty to hate about how AI is transforming the world, but one thing it's not, is "robbery of all of our culture to sell it back to us at a mark-up".
fwlr · · focus · HN ↗
“On a chip” is also stretching the truth. The kinds of models that you might point to in support of “reified intelligence” run on things the size of a desktop computer and cost more than a car, which is way off from the scale that “on a chip” suggests.
And “almost too cheap to meter” is aggressively false. Users of this service are known to talk incessantly about being metered, it is a daily fact of life for them. Individuals who have free usage for a project commonly report that, had they paid, it would cost five or six figures. Companies have seen enormous bills, some approaching the size of their payroll. And all of this is true for tokens that are dramatically subsidized, by one of the most intense and largest concentrations of capital in history. It is the polar opposite - “almost too expensive to even do, and absolutely must be carefully metered”.
In summary, let us indeed not forget what we got back for this: extraordinary distortions of reality evenly intermingled with bald-faced lies.
TeMPOraL · · focus · HN ↗
It's not complete or that well-rounded. But it's something that was the domain of speculative science fiction only 5 years ago, and it's rounded enough to be applicable to ~everything to some degree.
> The kinds of models that you might point to in support of “reified intelligence” run on things the size of a desktop computer and cost more than a car, which is way off from the scale that “on a chip” suggests.
By "on a chip" I meant more "in silica" than literally on a single chip" - though this actually is* true, but those chips aren't cheap.
> And “almost too cheap to meter” is aggressively false. Users of this service are known to talk incessantly about being metered, it is a daily fact of life for them.
You are looking at power users that use LLMs in agentic coding sessions. Most people just run off free tier of ChatGPT, which is free for them. There are equivalent open-weight models at this level, and while hardware to run one for yourself is expensive even for most westerners, the marginal inference cost is literally dirt cheap, which is why you can get that for near-free from smaller inference providers - or pony up some money, rent a bunch of compute with friends, and become an inference provider yourself.
(It's only a tough market because the major vendors are giving out better models than you can run for ~same or lower price than you can offer. Which either way is too cheap to meter in terms of solving useful problem for real people. Again, developers are a special case of power users, as usual.)