Many people here would call Putin's assassin a hero, the important distinguishing factor is whether it's a clear societal good or bad. If it's unclear then it's assumed bad.

I am not disagreeing with you here. But platitudes do nothing to convince people. You need to actually explain why the world is a better place with X politician in it, because it does actually matter.

Who knows? It could have always ended up this way anyway. But Altman had a pretty big role in summoning his own competition.

It's believable that Meta, ByteDance, etc. can catch up too. It is not certain that scaling will meaningfully increase performance indefinitely, and if it stops soon, they surely will. Furthermore, other market conditions (US political instability) can enable even more labs, like Mistral, to serve as compelling alternatives.

Uber, TSMC, etc. have strong moats in the form of physical goods and factories. LLMs have nothing even remotely comparable. The main moat is in knowledge, which is easy to transfer between labs. Do you think all the money that goes into training a model goes into the actual final training run? No, it is mostly experiments and failed ideas, which do not have to be repeated by future labs and offshoots.

I don't necessarily think he's lying, but there's so much obvious incentive for him to lie here (if only because his employees can save face).

Some other common reasons that I disagree with, but are quite defensible:

"Well-targeted advertising is a net positive, or at least not hugely negative, for the world. Better targeting has helped many small businesses succeed where they would otherwise not been able to get customers"

"I am working on account security/React/ML/etc which is a good thing. I don't endorse all the bad things"

"It is more complicated than it seems, and most people at Meta try to do the right thing"

"I might as well work at the company and try to make it better from the inside" (while making lots of money)

Get real.