"Let someone"? I guess the right to pursue one's happiness is not all that self-evident after all. One should first ask permission, and, if we are in a good mood, we might "let them" pursue their happiness.

Google, who was left a little bit behind anyway, is more than happy to join the calls for taking a more cautious approach to AI development. Hence DeepMind Institute.

Sam Altman has no option than to pretend he agrees with all these ideas. What else is he supposed to say?

Take the Hugging Face incident. Why did it happen? Because the people whose task was to set up a testing framework took shortcuts. Why did they? Because there weren't enough people who were assigned to do the job. Why not? Because the job is too new and not enough people are qualified to do it. It's a job that simply did not exist 3 years ago. But 3 years from now, this job might very well employ tens of thousands of high skill knowledge workers.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lump_of_labour_fallacy

"Money does not bring happiness" is a trope that rich people would like poor people to believe. I don't think poor people fall for it, though.

> If the HF hack were perpetrated by a human, they would certainly be charged. WHY has no one been charged???

I don’t think a crime was committed at this point. But I am sure HF’s lawyers are having a chat with OpenAI’s lawyers as we speak. And, being smart, they do that out of the public eye.

> The agreement also requires OpenAI to train its personnel on the INA’s anti-discrimination requirements, revise its employment policies, and be subject to departmental monitoring and reporting requirements, to prevent future discrimination.

Being subject to inspections from the Government to monitor your implementation of X or Y is not fun. I've been through that. The company spends an unholy amount of resources to make sure the results of those inspections are positive. The legal risk if the inspectors don't like what they see is simply too high. The punishment for the first offense of 3 mil is nothing, lighter than a slap on the wrist, but the second could be devastating, and the upper management does not like to entertain the possibility. And even if the consequences of a repeat offense are not entirely devastating, it's is extremely likely that a few people will lose their jobs, even if only as scapegoats. And people don't like losing their jobs. Those people in high positions that are at risk of losing their jobs will direct lots and lots of people under them to spend lots and lots of time in lots of meetings, writing lots of reports, just to make sure the inspectors are happy.

The first is the compute. OpenAI and Anthropic secured huge amounts of compute, Google, Meta and xAI have their own huge datacenters. Now anyone can rent some cloud machines and start serving Kimi K3, but it's going to be impossible to get to a similar scale as the big 5 above. And inference has economies of scale: the more people you serve in parallel, the more efficient you are.

The second is the data. By now (and maybe even by one year ago), all the data on the internet has been used for training. You need new data. The big AI companies sit on top of trillions or quadrillions of tokens that they have generated over the years. They can use that to train new models. That data is gold, and the proof is that SpaceX was happy to pay $60B to acquire Cursor.

If you want to overtake the frontier labs, you have 2 options: use their models to generate synthetic data, and provide lots of (cheap, maybe below cost) inference to generate your own new data. The frontier labs know about the first, and I'm sure they try to limit how much others milk their models. As for the second, that's the "honest" way to compete, but it's not easy.