Thread

1. bubblegumcrisis · 1789996575 · focus · HN ↗

   Very interesting - I have a tangential question.

   What motivated you decide to release this. OpenAI or Anthropic will just hoover it up, maybe scale it up and use it if they are interested.

   You probably won't know if they do, and the chance they will give you something back is near zero. Why did you release rather than try to scale and build yourself?

   (I've been working on some thing, not similar, but not dissimilar in goal - and I just can't get over the fact that tech will steal without giving back)

   1. volotat · 1789998289 · focus · HN ↗

      I have no practical means of scaling it up at any compatible scale. I will not make any money on it either way as well. So there is absolutely no reason for hoarding it. And as I said I did use Claude in the process, so Anthropic already has full access to it anyway and could steal it just as easily if they really want to.

      I also doubt it is really that valuable on the OpenAI/Anthropic scale, at the same time if people will use it and it will work for them on the personal scale it is already a major win for me. New ideas and optimizations I could never have thought of might bring this up from a toy model to an actually useful model trained locally. Then people could add RL and RLHF and other cool things to it to make it even better.

      1. bubblegumcrisis · 1790010713 · focus · HN ↗

         Thanks for your response.

         Do you think if you had worked on this for years (I understand that this is hypothetical), would you feel about the same?

         I find it strange - I mean, in the past it would be: you work on something, you give it away for free, people use it, and probably give code back. Now, it's: you work on something, you give it away for free, an agent reads it and clones it, you never get anything.

         30 something years ago, I was an intern in meeting at a software company, and some guy had put some code on the internet that did this very specific thing they wanted - something to do with instrumenting code - they blatantly stole it. But they at least felt bad, and some people were pretty annoyed, that guy who did the stealing, I think he was eventually fired.

         Now, companies can be one removed, "we didn't steal, we transmogrified." Or, "Hey claude, could you take this idea and implement it to run our hardware."

         I feel like, the "original sin", the "fruit of the poisonous tree" has to be reconciled.

         The people directly involved in the decision to steal with abandon - they should lose everything - maybe their creation might live on, but they personally should go to infinite debt.

         It's like the 2008 financial crisis - the oligarchs on the tops of those banks should have been destroyed.

         Oh well, sigh.

Unofficial Hacker News client; not affiliated with Y Combinator.