If I were anthropic I’d force that too. They offer the harness and if they control the entire pipeline then they can optimize the entire experience. It doesn’t have to be nefarious.
This is kind of a strange comment as it implies a false dichotomy.
Its not 'nefarious' in that its in their best business interests.
But it'd be difficult to take anyone serious who thinks Anthropic's motivation was to improve the UX, and the other effect were by accident. At the time they specifically started blocking based on openclaw prompt text. Its a walled-garden tactic.
A walled garden is nefarious to people who do not want to be inside one.
Sounds like they're modeling their PR on the classic Apple playbook: "choice is bad, and you should appreciate the constraints we've generously imposed"
The nefarious part is because it's non optional. They could give you an option and compete by being better, instead you're given the finger as the option is taken from you. Competition is hard and banning people to create more FUD serves business need better.
You've obviously been gaslit so badly you're desperate to find a way to defend a shitty move and pretend it's the only way to increase usability. But you don't have to deny really! You're allowed to admit control is easier for a company than competition, and that they didn't have to, but did because it increases their control of the ecosystem.
If you want to defend someone, good? But at least save it for someone who actually deserves it. They don't; and you insult you and your readers intelligence by trying.
It’s hilarious to me that there are people that think just a few people will control everything and the rest of the population will just accept whatever handouts they get. It’s like they’ve ignored all of human history.
For the first time in human history, military power doesn't require advantage in numbers. The rich will simply build an artificial army and use it to control everything. Kinda like Mr House from Fallout New Vegas.
Drones aren't terribly expensive these days, and an "artificial army" requires a long production pipeline even if parts are printed.
I reckon the hypothetical plutocracy wouldn't want to live immediately next to the land they stripmine or otherwise experience the environmental consequences they would wish to ignore, thus it would be difficult for their supply lines to be fully encapsulated.
Alternatively, the hypothetical plutocrats could engage in trade with the people they attempt to wall off, become better off than autarky, and ideally approach some of the better systems that exist today.
It must be awful tempting for dictators to steal the commanding heights of the economy -- we see it happen so often -- and little do they realize the prosperous world they want comes when these institutions they steal are protected, enforced, and respected.
It's absolutely speculation (unless you have specific inside information) to claim that they are doing this. It's a fact that they could be doing this.
Edit: From your other comments, you seem to be heavily insinuating that you do in fact have inside information. If you do have such information, it's not clear to me what consequences you think you are avoiding by adding this flimsy veneer of supposed deniability.
They do all of this, plus far worse. Including but not limited to flooding the internet with guerrilla marketing and sentiment-shifting bots across all social media platforms.
This is the sort of company they are, and it's just the tip of the iceberg: https://clawd.rip
They systematically violated copyright when they grabbed whole internet to train their models. Do you really believe that they will stop stealing because they signed some funny ToS? Especially when every bit of data they have and competition does not have is making their model better.
This. People repeat stuff they suspect might be happening like it's facts. Would I be surprised? Only a little. Does that mean it's definitely happening? of course not.
Blame copyright law. AI training is very comparable to compiling an inverted index, which is considered transformational even though you can recover the input documents from an inverted index.
To be maximally charitable, while creating large language models has been ruled to be transformative and thus fair use under current copyright law, Anthropic did separately violate copyright law when procuring copyrighted text from LibGen and Pirate Library Mirror. That being said, I agree with you, creating LLMs from copyrighted material is very clearly not a violation of copyright under the current legal regime, so long as you procure the text legally, be that through web scraping or by purchasing books directly. And it’s annoying that people try to muddy the water on this.
People downvote you like you're being paranoid, but we're literally discussing this in a thread that shows how little respect those companies have for any sort of trade secrets.
AI labs can hardly just throw random confidential data into the training and then hope it does not leak into the output of their model in an obvious way.
If that would be found it would destroy their main source of revenue, it could became a major national security or healthcare enforcement matter, and result in criminal investigations.
Some of the smartest people on the planet all in the same room, data at their fingertips… they randomly add it to the training set?
Labs at least must study prompts in an airgapped fashion. From there, consider how they could generate synthetic data to train another model. After, require trusted staff to do multiple levels of independent granular reviews of all fruits of the highest-value stolen inputs. (Or for model training data only, data never has to leave the airgap.)
Definitely risky, anyway. Surely some AI user has sent data, in confidential mode, with a unique shape they expect to be able to recognize if a later model recreated a facsimile even with heavy substitutions… but labs could bring risk of getting caught (over next few years) down quite low with extraordinarily ultraparanoid strategy. (But hopefully everybody is just behaving!)
They could run some sort of analysis to find high value input, such as proprietary technology, algorithms, or strategy.
Then they could group them together for one specific topic, and produce a report that analyzes if the information is plausible.
If so, they can have it send to staff for review, who could then create a test set that rewards the model for going into the direction of the proprietary solutions known to work.
I'm no expert, but at least something like that sounds plausible to me. I still very much doubt they are doing this.
It's actually simpler: your code is not the valuable part, it's the telemetry/metadata/conversation surrounding your session that's valuable. Every time you press escape, every time tell Claude/Codex that it's being an idiot, your back-and-forth conversations, etc. "when/why did we fail and how can we improve?" is what they want to know.
They can use LLMs to launder confidential customer sessions into trainable data. Then they can claim that they don't train on "your data" without it being technically incorrect.
Exactly. They can also feed you a stupider model to goad you into handing over more of this training guidance as well. The incentives are aligned for evil behavior. Open source really needs to win this race, or we need much tighter scrutiny on these AI companies.
That's not at all how they do it. They wash the data. The end result is they can steal your IP insights without it being explicitly tied to your business. All of the decisions you made to build your product? Those become the standard suggestions in the next model for people building the same sorts of products. All of that error correcting you did, which in a normal business would be considered hard-earned IP (like in the case of Apple's lawsuit - the "what not to do" is just as valuable as the "what to do"), is now free correction for the next model to produce the perfect result in a one-shot. Now the AI company can commoditize your labor and your industry, or compete against you if they so wish.
And yet it seems quite clear that they have been directly instructing Apple employees on how to steal data from Apple and bring it to OpenAI - explicitly stealing internal trade secrets from the largest company in the world, one known for its paranoia about leaking any company secrets.
I downvoted because the reply has nothing to do with the argument.
If I know for a fact that you're cheating on your wife, and someone else asks how I know that, then a third person chirping about your sketchy business dealings is entirely irrelevant to the question, no matter how much suspicion it might otherwise raise.
Your parent comment isn’t saying they doubt the assertion, they’re asking for details.
If you say you know for certain, it makes sense to ask how. It makes a big difference if the answer is “I used to work there”, or “I implemented those systems myself”, or “I heard my cousin’s second ex-wife say she heard it from her hairdresser”, or “aliens visited me in my dreams and told me”.
I don’t doubt these companies are lying through their teeth. We have plenty of proof of several cases where they did, to the point believing they are liars is a sensible default, but still I could not say I know for certain of every instance of their lies. Knowing how empowers you to do something about it and convince others.
> No one is going to admit to having an inside source on HackerNews.
Not only is that not true (people make throwaway accounts specifically to share insider info), no one has said this was insider information, there are plenty of other ways to know these details.
> Read between the lines.
That means nothing. There’s no information given, there’s nothing to read between.
Not entirely true. I work in "boring" State government as a programmer. I constantly see juniors starting private industry jobs at close to what I make after being with my employer for 10 years straight.
However, money is not everything to me. While the salary is not truly impressive, my job has a lot of benefits. People sleep on these jobs while chasing MegaCorp clout which is cool and all, but I am just a redneck clever enough to write bad code. I don't want FAANG, and FAANG doesn't want me.
> Unless you have a family, want to travel
We have generous PTO, sick leave, bereavement leave, 6 weeks of paternity leave for mothers AND fathers, 16 holidays off, etc.. Plus, many offices are 100% remote (mine is 3/5 days a week).
> want an ample retirement fund
I have a Pension, 401k, and a 457(b) all through my employer. I am fortunate that the pension is also fully funded for over 30 years in advance. Plus, PTO rolls into sick time annual and sick time can be used to purchase service time, thus one can retire even faster than the typical 30 year timeframe.
> have complex health issues
We have great health insurance plans, and my office has been wonderful in dealing with people with very complex health issues. Way more than what I expect the private industry would do.
Guess how many people have been laid off from my office? ;)
That assumes one has the chops to get into FAANG. I highly doubt I could pass a basic interview -- even with ample time to prepare. Besides, if I were truly anything special, then I am sure one of the FAANG companies would have tried to contact me already.
Sure, if one was FAANG caliber, then a few mill would be left on the table periodically. However, when is enough ever enough? I seriously feel like I do not need millions to be happy in life.
> And it’s really good hosting! Chatto Cloud is launching with fully European and European-owned infrastructure, with more regions slated for launch in early 2027
Yes, at least with the 2.0 version (which is the "really bad one"), on-device scanning would be the big issue. But then it also doesn't matter where you're hosted, unless you only allow users with some custom OS that doesn't support it on your server.
It’s foolish to be completely dependent on anyone else, no matter how stable the CURRENT situation is. We’ve seen this with the gulf countries and Strait of Hormuz, China with rare earth metals, Ukraine with grains, etc. Once China goes to take Taiwan all bets are off…
Your example are somewhat funny (in a not-so-funny way), the most obvious example for "foolish to be completely dependent on anyone else, no matter how stable the CURRENT situation is" is the US, from a european perspective
If US educational policy says don’t educate the people because we have H1B, then that’s a total dependence and is foolish. If instead, you welcome smart talented people from all around the world then that’s a winning strategy. It’s up to those host countries to offer more so as to avoid a brain drain.
The Mac beats it in all benchmarks, is probably more energy efficient, can add more ram, and is more cost efficient (?)… plus you get a Mac. This doesn’t even give you cuda. I’m not sure who this is for.
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