Until the industry addresses the Original Sin of Generative AI (and the ascendance of Thievery Corporations), we should expect more and more of this. So far, theft has been rewarded. As long as you make enough money, people seem to be okay with ignoring long-lasting impacts of intellectual theft. As long as you become King of the Cannibals, it seems many are happy to remember you as King and not as the Cannibal.
IP infringement is not theft. There’s a whole “you wouldn’t download a car” meme about this.
Intellectual property has always been a made up idea that has been abused for years by big companies far in excess of its societal value. I’m not sad that the force of IP restrictions seems to be weakening, but I am surprised to see so many people in tech that previously were pretty lassez faire on IP to suddenly take it so seriously now that it’s become a useful means to criticize AI companies with.
The “tech worker” of today is nothing like the SF based hackers and early product designers of Web 2.0, twitter era.
Artists in their own right and yet fundamentally pirates who opened the browser ecosystem, pioneered open APIs, invented ad blocking, embraced open source, engineered browser based telephony and streaming, gave us modern services like PopcornTime carrying the torch from torrents/piratebay into the modern era.
Give me Photoshop and JavaScript and I care not who makes the laws.
Today we have charlatans, hackademics, and heavily moderated sites like HN. The tech industry is nothing like it used to be - if anything it’s inverted with all the corporate replicas in every role and the creatives kicked out. There is no rebellion even slightly, no originality - they sound like hens, predictable and unprofound in every way.
The real creative hacker type needs a new vertical, this one has been taken over like ants on a sandwich.
I think this comment is quite disingenous -- it's like if there's a rule that says "nobody can walk on the grass" that you object to because you'd like to have a picnic with some friends; your claim is that if someone gets out a bulldozer and drives it across the lawn to make a parking lot followed by an army of lawyers that anyone who wanted to picnic is objecting purely because it's a convenient way to criticise the bulldozers.
You can continue to enjoy the books and articles etc
They are just also used to create a new thing
In the picnic example, the picnickers can't use the lawn anymore.
As an aside: as somebody who lives in a dense area, I also would stay off the lawn. There's a utilitarian element where you have to rotate which lawns are used, and avoid using them when wet etc so as to maximize their utility. The picnickers should find a lawn that's open.
> You can continue to enjoy the books and articles etc
No you can't, because those people have stopped creating because the creation economy was destroyed by AI. We just keep getting recycled slop based on what existed in 2025.
All of the people who I was reading and listening to and watching before AI are all still creating. Many of them are even creating new things or new types of things
I imagine breaking into the creative industry is "harder" today than it was five years ago and much harder than it was ten years ago etc, but in some ways everything is still so new.
This dismissal of creativity or people's drive to create or anything created after "the ChatGPT moment" is simply wrong and lazy thinking
But then there's the morality of it, because you're essentially expecting people to be highly motivated by not-money for your own pleasure. Which might be the case today, but I don't necessarily think will be the case forever.
Yes, musicians for instance will always create music, even if they're dirt poor. That doesn't mean though we should strive to make them as dirt poor as possible to maximally optimize the agreement in our favor. That's a separate issue.
> You can continue to enjoy the books and articles etc
Except for the books that Anthropic bought and destroyed?
There's also the cultural displacement element: while yes, some people (including me) would seek out original content, AI slop is drowning it out. This is decreasing my and others' enjoyment.
They are free to use the mechanisms available to them to act (within the law) in their own best interest, exactly as every independent entity is. You and I are free to criticize stances that look like hypocrisy (and I’ll certainly stipulate that the behavior you point out is hypocritical) and vote for reps that will respond appropriately.
I’m not sure if “theft” is the right word or not but selling copied dvds on the street is completely different from “sharing is caring” piracy. These companies took the entirety of human knowledge for free and now want to sell it back to you, and even openly tout that it will put most of us out of our jobs.
It’s not the same thing as downloading a car or a purse for private individual use.
Well, the problem is, they are not held accountable, but heaven forbid you as a simple citizen engage in that much IP infringement, holy moly are they gonna be at your doorstep quickly.
It's rules for thee but not for me. On an enormous scale. If it was fair, then we would have a global announcement, that the US are abandonning IP laws and copyright, and no one needs to worry about infringing on any such a thing any longer.
Didn't Anthropic pay like $3 billion dollars or something for their IP theft? And yes, I'm going to keep calling it theft. Comparing a kid stealing a song off limewire to a company stealing the entire internet is not the same thing.
Yes, they paid for actually using pirated books for their training. They were like the kid, except that it was worth suing them.
At the same time, more broadly, judge in the Anthropic case found that training LLMs was "exceedingly transformative" and “among the most transformative we will see in our lifetimes”
Copyright doesn't protect ideas or let IP owners lock up knowledge, it protects specific expression.
Yes, I understand how copyright law works. Disagree with the judge -- googling a book summary worked just as well in the past. "It can write a book report" is not that amazing.
Because the AI companies also stole from things society values extremely high: artists, workers, children, and humans.
I don't really care about IP for the exact same reasons you say, but what I hate even more are rich elites thinking they can continue stealing massively from the commoners unabated.
We just spent the last 15 years seeing big tech literally making society worse, and I think people are finally fed up with the results.
Ignoring patent law has done great things for 16th century continental Europe and more recently China. Rent-seekers and ladder kickers shouldn't always be respected, they'll slow down societal advancement to a crawl if you let them. The question is whether the gains these AI companies are making from their transgressions are overly privatized.
I think significantly fewer people would have an issue with this if the profit was socialized. The fact that a company took all of humanity’s data and is profiting from _is_ the issue.
And we can also ignore model law; we should require OpenAI/Anthropic to provide unrestricted access (at standard API rates) to their competitors so they can use this to train new models.
Unlike Uber and Airbnb that did break local laws and got away with it because people wanted their service (and also deep pockets for handling litigation and encouraging politicians to see your way), training an ai is generally not theft.
If I read a physics textbook and now I know some physics do I perform a theft when I use it practice or teach someone else?
It's time for this bubble to pop already. We need to get past this centralized, unsustainable, undesirable, Big Brother stage of AI and get on to the "AI hosted in your kitchen" phase before we mess up the balance of power too much and effectively backdoor the US constitution to power hungry technocrats.
What happened to the early wave of IP lawsuits against the first wave of model makers? Did anything stick/make a difference? Did _any_ frontier model company retroactively-migrate to consent-based models?
NYT vs openAI is still on going. Anthropic had to pay $1.5 billion for pirating books but I dont think that case had anything about training which is why all the labs are going the google route and scanning the entire corpus of books
As I understand it, the courts in the US rubber-stamped it as “transformative work” and allowed the theft of literally everything to stand, while establishing a legal precedent that everything they did was A-OK.
How so? How did stealing the entire works of humanity act as “transformative”? Please, this is a serious question I just don’t see it. Perhaps my mind only acknowledges the theft of the sum of human works for private gain.
Also my preferred outcome isn’t knownto you or to me. My feelings on this subject aren’t clear at all and the reports I’ve read were probably all pushing their point of view.
For as long as I've known of Gabe from working in the game industry, I somehow always forget about his not-so-little hobby of being a sea-faring cyber pirate.
SpaceX serves a large market that was underserved, via Starlink, and via satellite launches.
There's nothing comparably easy (for some values of "easy") to monetize underwater, except in shallow places like the continental shelves, and these areas are already being heavily developed (oil, wind).
There are many, many wonders deep underwater, but they are mostly not commercially interesting, alas.
Only when we have reached the far reaches of this planet, life as it used to be will cease to exist. Some may argue that it's the natural course of the universe but others would argue that a paradise should be left untouched when found, as it may be the only one.
I’ve always wanted to start a company that builds automated underwater swarms of “probes” that just search and return info and carry out small exploration tasks but over long amounts of time and space.
Do it right and you can send the first underwater explorers to Europa.
Hard to find the right way to monetize in the early stages though. SpaceX had a variety of options.
> Hard to find the right way to monetize in the early stages though.
Fugro got a tonne of money for sidescan surveys of large areas north of this Diamantina fracture zone up to the equator .. looking for traces of the lost Malaysia Airlines Flight 370.
The search for the missing aircraft became the most expensive search in the history of aviation. It focused initially on the South China Sea and Andaman Sea, before a novel analysis of the aircraft's automated communications with an Inmarsat satellite indicated that the plane had travelled far southward over the southern Indian Ocean.
After a three-year search across 120,000 km2 (46,000 sq mi) of ocean failed to locate the aircraft, the Joint Agency Coordination Centre heading the operation suspended its activities in January 2017. A second search launched in January 2018 by private contractor Ocean Infinity also ended without success after six months.
They're relatively big players in geodesy with fleets of ships, aircraft, land vehicles gathering all manner of multi channel and spectral data at, above, and below surface level (for all the surfaces, geodetic, gravitational, magnetic, Mean Sea, etc).
They tie in with the majors that build and deploy infrastructure for oil, gas, mineral exploration and exploitation.
Make several modular probes and give them fancy names.
Have various support classes like signal relay, charge stations, camera cleaning, resque etc
Sell rent lease the vehicles to customers who get to pilot them in vr.
Create a simulator where one can explore some already explored areas with the probes projected in real time. Create a market for map chunks.
I think it will make one hell of a game.
Roberts Space Industries Legatus bundle costs $48,000 USD and you only get pixels.
If you can have your own exploration submarine without having to deal with all the boring logistcs yourself people will gladly pay many times that and hire other players to do ingame jobs like keeping the signal alive.
If you can build the mothership with investors and crowdsourcing then maintain it with subscription fees and insurance policies it would be hilarious even before anyone finds anything interesting.
I actually work in this space. The difficulties of long-running underwater probes should not be discounted. Comms bandwidth without a tether is… quite slow. Dealing with even the tiniest drops of water inside the system is… a real problem. Salt water is also quite a problem. Deploy and retrieve is a real problem.
I won’t say I think outer space is easier, but the problem space is very different.
As a boat owner, I have had quite a time with salt water issues. Anything with an electrical current going through it exposed to salt and water is subject to serious, rapid corrosion. What you might imagine is "stainless" steel will, in fact, rust (unless correctly passivated and treated). The galvanic scale is not to be trifled with :). I can only imagine it gets exponentially worse the further below the surface you go.
> I won’t say I think outer space is easier, but the problem space is very different.
You didn't even mention pressure. Space is only 1 atm off of sea level. 100 meters below the surface is 10 atm more than at sea level ... all sorts of cool stuff you might want to explore is way deeper than that.
Less of a problem for robots than people, but still a problem.
There are a lot of tricks to deal with pressure, related to filling electronic “bottles” with 1 atm of pressure via nonconductive fluid. You are correct though, pressure is also a phenomenon that has to be accounted for or you’re gonna have a bad time.
AUVs are a thing, but it's a very expensive area to be in, and there's a lot of challenges, especially the extremely high degree of autonomy you need in a much less predictable environment. Maybe recent advances in AI could move the needle there.
Well if you ever find a monetization path this is what I wanted to do for years. I don't know where Schmidt landed in the court of public opinion but I appreciate that the Schmidt Ocean Institute is a thing. I just wish these things didn't reek of billionaire vanity.
The zone this whale necropolis has been found within is named after the Australian Navy hydrographic, meteorological and oceanographic research vessel that first coarsely mapped this deepest part of the Indian ocean in 1960, during my father's time of service onboard.
Mind you, if you go the service path you might end up scrubbing toilets or close sampling atomic bomb sites ... so your mileage (and lifespan) may vary.
>I feel like maybe we've needed an "OceanX" before a "SpaceX"
SpaceX is based on the idea that our planet will someday be uninhabitable, so we need to be ready to colonize other planets. The sooner we start, the sooner we get there.
OceanX might be fun science, but it's not going to save us.
The human condition is delicate and mortal, when you realise this you realise how important it is to do everything you can for Elon Musk while he's still alive
No, spaceX is based on the idea that Elon Musk likes rockets but loves money. The IPO proves that - the company pivoted to renting server capacity through xAI and pushing a ridiculous plan to put server farms in space via their constantly exploding starship as a means to inflate stock and make him a trillionaire.
The implication that SpaceX will "save us" is quite funny. If that was something the world truly worried about, our hopes cannot be on an american private company that might or might not save someone depending on their preferences or their political views.
The whole idea that we can simply pop off earth and colonize another planet is literally insane. There is a reason why no governement across the world is treating colonizing mars as a serious mission.
It is the same marketing technique as "AI WILL DESTROY THE WORLD so we must make it" fear-mongering based marketing. Of course a rocket company wants people to colonize mars, doesn't mean its going to "save" humanity.
>The implication that SpaceX will "save us" is quite funny.
nobody implied that. some people state the hope for it but that does not include me, I simply explained why OceanX does not satisfy SpaceX's goals.
everybody on this site is interested in the topic of exploring other planets in any solar system. that's all SpaceX is trying to do, but because of extraneous irrational unmet emotional needs people here simply lose their shit when the topic of SpaceX comes up.
Meanwhile, SpaceX will continue to be NASA's primary subcontractor. "Les chiens aboient, la caravane passe." (The dogs bark. The caravan passes.)
If this can happen to Anthropic, imagine all the companies building on top of Claude Code for live products. Hopefully the industry is learning that competent problem solving human engineers are still very much needed when you have increasingly deceptive non-deterministic genies running your production stack.
The fact API is available, does not mean you will actually get the model it states you get. Today Opus 4.7 was noticeably dumber than yesterday. It performed worse than my local Qwen.
Presumably you'd buy really beefy laptops. The price delta between buying the most basic MacBook Pro possible (14", M5, 16 GB unified memory, 1 TB SSD) and one with the M5 Max with 40 GPU cores, 128 GB unified memory, 2 TB SSD is $3400. How much Claude usage does that get you/in what time does it pay itself back?
That doesn't get you any Claude usage. Claude models obviously aren't open, but equivalent models to Opus take about 400GB of memory to run.
You can run the versions with fewer parameters or quantized weights but depending on how much quality you're sacrificing, now you'd have to compare the price against cheaper Claude models like Sonnet.
Working on Snow Leopard was one of my most rewarding experiences at Apple. Loved the ethos behind that update. No new fluff, just make everything work better.
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