You have to admit there is now some lovely schadenfreude to be had from the whole ‘Chinese free LLM companies be stealing our theft! Stop them!’ whining.
There is nothing funny about $9Tn in FOSS getting misappropriated, and sold as isomorphic plagiarism tokens... or the estimated $4.6Tn in loan debts these 7 companies incinerated when the bubble pops.
Anyone that lived through the dot-com or housing market bubble know what a collapsing Ponzi scheme does to real businesses, and peoples retirement funds.
Flourishing life? Where is your data leading to the conclusion that AI models are leading to the world populace leading a ‘flourishing life’? Are taxes on revenue of companies like OpenAI somehow being collected and turned into a UBI and I just didn’t hear about it?
I said a glimpse. I didn't say it's here now or it would be easy.
It is however, achievable. Certainly more so than engaging in the fantasy that we can criminalize LLMs out of existence. And it is likely more desirable than such an effort anyway.
Or, perhaps, the companies forming the for profit LLMs could be made to pay a license fee for the copyrighted data they lifted from behind the paywall and then used to form a for profit entity with.
Nothing about banning technology. How about enforcing DMCA and then applying a penalty for the knowing theft rather than negotiating a license?
This is solid but how many people you reckon would benefit if they paid every single penny for any copyrighted data? I am in my 50's with 30 years in the industry and I know maybe 2 people that might benefit from this... certainly not something general public would benefit from
We’re likely looking at a new world where physical and mental work from humans holds much less value.
So if the world still generates value ( think AI inventing new drugs, robots planting and harvesting fields of corn ), who is able to make income? The people who have the capital to purchase and run the systems.
So our future world probably looks like a system where effort/knowledge/skill has little to no reward and capital (e.g. inheritance, passive income) has all the reward.
So, we can have a world where you are born rich or you live in abject poverty, or we can figure out something else.
The state runs the system. Or really at a certain point, the state runs itself. In 100 years or so, the CEO becomes a barbaric relic of the past age, like our ancestors who beat each other over the head with clubs. Nevertheless, such a future will necessarily owe a debt to both.
Wealth and states are often connected. In this case if the state is properly aligned (this is what the coming battles are to be about - as they always have been) to be egalitarian, then redistribution can occur unblocked by human enclaves of greed.
> We’re likely looking at a new world where physical and mental work from humans holds much less value.
Or, perhaps, we're regressing to the mean after a century where this work was over-valued, because companies like Disney succeeded in regulatory capture and created artificial protections to maximize their own revenue.
How much money did Bach earn from royalties (ok, there's a pun there, but I mean payment for reproduction of his work)? How much power did Melville have over who published Moby Dick, and where, and how it was used (hint: very little in the US, none at all overseas).
We are seeing a weakening of control and revenue extraction from copyrighted works. But on the chart of history, the 1900's were a very anamolous spike in that area. And it saddens me that so much of HN is unhappy about more of a return to the commons.
> So if the world still generates value ( think AI inventing new drugs, robots planting and harvesting fields of corn ), who is able to make income? The people who have the capital to purchase and run the systems.
On the bright side, I think you're wrong here. Or (as Claude likes to tell me), you're half-wrong. If this were true, it would already be the norm and only big companies could bring new products to market. Yet startups are a thing, and many succeed (more fail, but still.
The trick in entrepreneurship and creative work has always been knowing what to ask the system to do. You might as well say that music is dead because the synthesizer and music software companies can produce as much as they want at zero cost. It turns out that owning the means of production only loosely correlates to producing things people want.
> So, we can have a world where you are born rich or you live in abject poverty, or we can figure out something else.
Already done. There are kids in Africa studying with AI tutors today, getting insight that they would likely never have had access to before. One-person shops are releasing board games and business services that they would never have had the capital to do before.
Where you see centralization of capital and control, and the masses reduced to abject poverty... I see the complete collapse of barriers to entry and switching costs in many fields.
But who am I? Some random guy. But I've heard very senior execs, at Microsoft and other companies, in absolute panic that the IP and systems they've spent billions of dollars to build over decades of work are suddenly subject to disruption by teenagers who are great at using AI. Seriously, panic.
It's a complex subject, and sorry for writing a book, but your prompt apparently got me. None of us know for sure what will happen but I think yours is a needlessly pessimistic view, ironically informed by the exact abuses of th past century that you're worried might not continue.
I spent a few years studying the ‘startup economy’ after a 20 year career at MSFT that left me with some meager capital, including a half dozen Angel investments and running an Angel investment fund LLC (SPAC as they would call it today).
Never saw a startup succeed that didn’t come with substantial founder capital, across a couple hundred evaluations. Does it happen? Sure. Is it the model for new product generation that people with <$250k of personal liquid assets can bring a new product to market? Not really.
‘You got to have money to make money’ is a real thing.
Yeah, I know I’m posting on YComb’s forums, but if you think the capital YComb itself gives to ‘good ideas’ is enough to succeed, that’s silly. It’s the follow on investment capital that brings a new concept to market, and that comes with odious strings for people underendowed with their own capital.
There's an analogy I've read before, couldn't tell you where, that goes something like:
Startups are like a roulette wheel at a fancy casino. Most people can't even afford to get in the door. Middle class people can afford to maybe take one or two spins on it, if they go all in. Rich people can spin it as many times as they like
As someone who grew up on the lower end of middle class this rings really true to me. I don't have access to the kind of capital to build a dream business. I could probably take one shot at it, if I put my house up as collateral for a loan to get me started
It's too risky for me. But if I were a multi millionaire I don't think I'd think twice about giving it a shot
> There are kids in Africa studying with AI tutors today, getting insight that they would likely never have had access to before. One-person shops are releasing board games and business services that they would never have had the capital to do before.
So like, there are kids in Africa getting new for of substandard bad education instead of old for of cheap education. Congrats.
> Where you see centralization of capital and control, and the masses reduced to abject poverty... I see the complete collapse of barriers to entry and switching costs in many fields.
Problem is that you are imagining the collapse of barriers that is simply not happening in economic data. Those barriers were weak 25 or so years ago and were going up last years.
> So like, there are kids in Africa getting new for of substandard bad education instead of old for of cheap education. Congrats.
Yikes. I don't think you understand Africa at all. The question isn't "a crappy calculus tutor in a rural village or no calculus tutor". The question is "a good but imperfect tutor or nothing". It's VERY different.
> Problem is that you are imagining the collapse of barriers that is simply not happening in economic data. Those barriers were weak 25 or so years ago and were going up last years.
Economic data is a trailing indicator. It would be shocking to see modern frontier models reflected in the 2020-2025 data, right?
But you're right it's a qualitative opinion. But FWIW execs at Fortune 500's are terrified, as the codebase itself is no longer a barrier. This is not a secret; it's being said in all-hands meetings.
I mean I'm producing more and better art and software each month than I used to do in a year. I feel like I'm flourishing because of AI. Tell me I'm wrong?
You’re not wrong. Me too. I spend most of my waking hours using AI for new product development.
But can you bring it to market and turn it into a reliable revenue stream? And will this still be true in a few years when the duo or trio -opolies corner the AI market enough that the $200 subscriptions go away to be replaced by API pricing only?
I’m already seeing my subscription use slow to a crawl during peak hours so I now code before 8 am or after 6 pm. And turning on ‘Opus Fast’ with API pricing is already financially impossible for me as a small business.
Ironically, China may be the savior here, with open source models that may be good enough to ‘put the means of production in the hands of the working class’.
I mean, is QWEN a 4d chess game to replace capitalism with communism? Who knew (outside of the CCP central committee)?
>is QWEN a 4d chess game to replace capitalism with communism?
No. The Chinese labs pay much less to train their models because they distill Western models. Western labs can't do it that way because they'd immediately be sued.
To distill a model requires high-quality prompts (and responses). Here's how the Chinese labs get these prompts: when a user sends a prompt to www.kimi.ai, Kimi immediately forwards it to Claude or another leading US model (using a vast network of laundered subscriptions), waits for the response from Claude, then forwards that response to the user via www.kimi.ai. All the Chinese labs do this. Of course, they never inform the user that their conversation is being routed to a US model.
Beijing is angry at them because they did this indiscriminately without filtering out the conversations of high Chinese government officials and military officers, so now the US labs have those conversations, which contain information useful to US intelligence because the officials and officers assumed the conversations would remain inside China's borders and that the Chinese labs would care about confidentiality.
The Chinese labs release model weights under permissive licenses to get any attention and usage share at all for the model.
I'm going to take your comment as a request for supporting details.
I believe what I wrote is an accurate summary of information in a report published this month by Anthropic. I haven't seen the report, but have seen this next summary written by someone who I trust to summarize accurately: https://thezvi.substack.com/p/the-bad-guy-with-an-ai-named-c...
OpenAI reported similar behavior last year. The assertion that the other (two) leading US models are being distilled in a similar manner is an assumption on my part. Where I wrote, "Claude or another leading US model" I initially had just "Claude", but it felt silly to imply that the same thing is not happening to the other leading US models.
You are correct, the driving controls in AVP don’t use dwell, that is the wrong (and dangerous) approach. They use something more akin to hover activation.
It’s the hardware I designed coupling the power wheelchair to the AVP, and I’ve driven it myself.
Yes, daily, as a virtual screen for my Macbook using a BLE mouse and keyboard paired to the Macbook not the AVP. Then I supplement the Mac with the occasional AVP side app using fingers and eye gaze control.
If only the AVP ran MacOS natively on the M2. Somewhat ironic that I have to park an M1 Macbook on a table next to my AVP, screen open so I can unlock it (requirement for the screen pairing).
I’m considering putting my Mac Studio into ‘never screen lock’ and then using a long range Logitech dongle for the wireless keyboard and mouse so I can use my AVP without an opened Macbook by my side all the time.
A big bonus for me was VisionOS 2 added lower latency screen mirroring (and I think foviated rendering of the mirrored screen). Prior to that I had to use a developer strap with a second usb cable to the Macbook to get no noticeable latency on the screen and cursor.
Strongly disagree. As a dev who’s been in the business since the days of the first gui apps and OSes, UI can be very straightforward, but we have designed modern systems such that they are immensely complex.
Styles and inheritance and asynchronicity have turned what could be a simple approach into an inscrutable problem.
Ui can only be as straightforward as a user wants it to be - if all user wants is pressing couple buttons to open couple windows - then yes, it is straightforward.
Asynchronicity is not a problem it is one of the many solutions to help alleviate the problem.
Having submitted a number of “product breaking bug reports” through official channels while using a paid support incident, can confirm Kafkaesque and a multi year support process.
Oh, I can get a person to “respond” to a problem with a paid support incident. But the person responding is clearly hired only based on their ability to respond to an English email, once a week, with either, “thank you, I will forward that to our engineering team” or “thank you for your patience, our engineers are still looking into that issue.”
Severity, impact, paid support, none of that matters. Heck, it’s impossible to tell if it’s an actual person or just a sophisticated shell script.
Spoken like someone who hasn’t put a match to gasoline.
Having recently used gas to help start a wood slashings pile on fire, gasoline is very explosive and dangerous.
Diesel will burn in place when lit. Gasoline vaporizes when let out if its container in ‘room temperature’ conditions and creates a vapor fireball when it finds a nearby ignition source.
Never use gasoline as an ‘accelerant’ to start something else on fire —- it’s way too dangerous.
Gave me a chuckle. I think this is my personal ‘best sentence of the year’.
Great way to summarize how we will likely look back on 2026.
reply