The assertion that an uncensored internet is a better world should probably require some motivation.
If everyone was a normal (as far as anyone is normal) law abiding citizen perhaps I would agree, but sadly that is far from the case. I think history has quite clearly shown that there is a minority of people out there that will take advantage and ruin things for everyone else. It's the same reason we have militaries, police forces, government checks and balances, etc. The internet is no exception to this.
I don't think the world is simple enough where anyone could be absolutist about freedom, it's all grey areas and complicated lines drawn.
One thing I like to think about is: If these models were so powerful why would they ever sell access? They could just build endless products to sell, likely outcompeting anyone else who needs to employ humans. And if not building their own products they could be the highest value contractor ever.
Well there are models that Anthropic, OpenAI and co. have access to that they haven't provided public API's for, due to both safety, and what you've cited as the competitive advantage factor. (like Openai's IMO model, though it's debatable if it represented an early version of GPT 5.1/2/3 or something else)
The thing however is the labs are all in competition with each other. Even if OpenAI had some special model that could give them the ability to make their own Saas and products, it is more worth it for them to sell access to the API and use the profit to scale, because otherwise their competitors will pocket that money and scale faster.
This holds as long as the money from API access to the models is worth more than the comparative advantage a lab retains from not sharing it. Because there are multiple competing labs, the comparative advantage is small (if OpenAI kept GPT-5.X to themselves, people would just use Claude and Anthropic would become bigger, same with Google).
This however may not hold forever, it is just a phenomena of labs focusing more on heavily on their models with marginal product efforts.
They need to generate revenue to continue to raise money to continue to invest in compute. Even if they have the Midas Touch it needs to be continously improved because there are three other competing Midas Touch companies working on new and improved Midas Touch's that will make their's obsolete and worthless if they stay still even for a second.
But most of their funding comes from speculative investment, not selling their services. Also, wouldn't selling their own products/services generate revenue?
Making a profitable product is so much more than just building it. I've probably made 100+ side projects in my life and only a handful has ever generated any revenue.
Arguably because the parts the AI can't do (yet?) still need a lot of human attention. Stuff like developing business models, finding market fit, selling, interacting with prospects and customers, etc.
Stop just making up excuses for these companies. Other comments on this story have showed the bots are using openai user agents and making requests from openai owned ip ranges.
It's like how we "can't" stop spam callers when telecoms know exactly who is calling who, they just don't want to implement any protocols that benefit society because they rather make money while fucking over everyone.
I think it's actually the other way around, satellites need to be specifically designed to burn up fast in the atmosphere. See for example the warnings about space debris from Chinese satellites not designed with this in mind.
The built-in OS on my LG is honestly good enough for me. There's a jellyfin client in the LG app store that works well enough (it's just a wrapper for a browser client as I understand it). But I only use my TV to watch shows/movies, not sure about other usecases.
I mean you can compare, but at the start it was also super small improvements.
The main difference is that people had no idea of the disruption it would cause and of course there wasn't there a huge investment industry around it.
The only question is about ROI of the investors will be positive (which depends on the timeline), not whether it is disruptive (or it will be after for example 30 years from now), and I see people confusing the two here quite often.
If everyone was a normal (as far as anyone is normal) law abiding citizen perhaps I would agree, but sadly that is far from the case. I think history has quite clearly shown that there is a minority of people out there that will take advantage and ruin things for everyone else. It's the same reason we have militaries, police forces, government checks and balances, etc. The internet is no exception to this.
I don't think the world is simple enough where anyone could be absolutist about freedom, it's all grey areas and complicated lines drawn.
reply