I'm concerned our media / political ecosystem is too dysfunctional to not repeat the mistakes we made with Big Tech & Social again with Big Ai. I find it curious how split the dev community is, and especially HN, is on this, which has long been skeptical and speaking truth to power. I'm surprised at how quickly the public switched to abdicating to Big Ai's claims and recommendations. These people do not have our interests in mind.
Great piece, thanks for putting some of my thoughts in organically sourced words.
Everything's a grift to our current leaders and media. The specifics are wholly irrelevant and replaceable. crypto, AI, it's buzzwords and the important thing is how much money they can make off the grift du-jour.
Of course there are differences with the impact AI is having economically and the devastation wrought by datacenters -but that doesn't matter to the media or the politicians; they simply want their greenbacks, specifics and effects be damned.
I hear more people talking about this, the wealth inequality, the dysfunction, the blatant corruption. We like to look for easy quick fixes, but remedying the last 50 years will likely take just as long. I hope I'm wrong and working on this is the majority of my volunteer/community efforts this year and looking forward.
It's much more likely that society will simply regress to a pre-industrial state as knowledge becomes more scarce, infrastructure breaks down and environmental protections are rolled -leading to things such as burning rivers as well as the spread of plagues.
Everything will have to become local and community-based, so I applaud your efforts on that -that's one of the few things I see that can make any sort of difference in the long term.
I've stopped trying to predict the likelihood of future events and instead have been studying history so that I have a larger knowledge base to draw on as new, unpredictable events arrive. There are some really smart people who have spent careers analyzing, pondering, and writing so that future generations might be more prepared.
Timothy Miller, Adam Tooze, and Sherry Turkle are my favorites right now. Just started Daron Acemoglu's new book this week, strong contender for list expansion.
Greatest for who? In America, the last fifty years have trended to the greatest wealth inequality in our history. Many people are quite unhappy about the current situation. Educational outcomes have so fallen while spending has increased, this pattern appears across most aspects of society.
Has the HN population really been skeptical? I think most see the scam (uber, WeWork, Airbnb, etc) for what they are (mostly illegal efforts to steamroll laws and blitz scale to a monopoly), and they want in.
> I think most see the scam (uber, WeWork, Airbnb, etc) for what they are (mostly illegal efforts to steamroll laws and blitz scale to a monopoly), and they want in.
Nah. Back when Uber was boasting about all the laws they were flouting, I was pretty anti-Uber, and I was among the minority here on HN. Most of the comments were about how problematic the taxi system is, and how it's great Uber was breaking the cartel.
If memory serves me, HN turned on Uber pretty quickly around the time stories like the Christmas party started showing up, where they put up stats like trips to planned parenthood by day of week up on a big projector.
True, people often do realize the grift. But then turn around and hail the next company funded by the same VC funds and a revolutionary event in the history of humanity.
I am encouraged by recent polling that shows significant awareness and agreement, across all people and countries, about the corruption and dysfunction in our governments and corporations.
Liberal democracy may be the worst form of government, besides all the other ones humans have tried, but it has also failed to deliver on promises so people are again considering those other forms of government. Coming out of WW2, it was easy to deliver the first part of the pareto, the last part has not been delivered. Eg. building schools and hospitals was easy, making education and health care good is not so easy.
I am hopeful and have some faith that we will not retry those worse forms of government. There's always the French approach if things get really, really bad.
it was the monarchy and bourgeoisie in this case, has happened countless times in human history, some times bad leaders are so bad they earn the ire of people and the death penalty - for murdering countless people over their politics, petty crimes, their religion, or the color of their skin
You need to travel more if you think Uber and Airbnb are a "scam". To be abroad in certain countries and NOT use Uber or Airbnb is potentially putting your life at risk, especially getting into random taxis.
So... maybe there is an actual reason many of these companies had/have success that you may simply not be privy to?
Yes, the secret to their success is a lot of capital. They scale up hugely by steamrolling laws and providing their services at a greatly reduced cost in order to capture their market. Then, they can basically do whatever they want because they have a captive market.
It looks Uber like, 15 years to be profitable. It's still not profitable everywhere. The only reason they solidified their place is because they spent a ton of money to do it.
It's not a scam per-se, these companies do have value. The question is if their value makes any economic or business sense in an objective way, and the answer has been no. But it doesn't matter, because capital forgives all.
The level of astroturfing and hate on HN whenever a non-US AI story is posted is really quite shocking. HN has always had a US bent, but it's gotten to the point where you can't even have a technical discussion of non-US AI because it will be drowned out by a very vocal anti-everyone-else-but-the-US crowd.
But yes, great piece. It really captures why I use open models on european hardware. It's like we haven't learned by now that competition is good and we should be encouraging a diverse and open ecosystem.
That fawning for the oligarchy to be negatively received by HN, I find inline with what I (in bias) expect to be a standard HN response. One of my biggest curiosities is how much of the HN community has formed emotional attachment to their preferred Ai buddy or open v closed position. I suspect this is a significant contributor to the astroturfing we see around Ai.
lol, the idea that you’d call a generic positive comment about the big labs “fawning for the oligarchy” is an excellent example of what I was talking about, so thank you! chef’s kiss
I was not making comment about any specific comment, but rather a generalization of the astroturfing and comment patterns that can be described as fawning, which do exist here on HN.
Yes, in response to my remark about my own positive comments about big AI. If you were talking about other positive comments about big AI, you picked a peculiar place to do so.
the original HN post and the comments underneath would indicate otherwise, you haven't made any comment here I would classify expressing sentiment about Big Ai, I would call the your comment I first replied to as meta-commentary on the sentiment displaying comments
What mistakes did media / political ecosystem make with big tech and social?
Also I don't understand how 'the media' is separate from social media. People decided to shift their media consumption from magazines, cable tv, corp news outlets to social media. Aren't they all the media (in function)?
> What mistakes did media / political ecosystem make with big tech and social?
I meant to imply society at large making the mistakes, which arguably is the primary reason our media / political ecosystem is so dysfunctional. Historically, what we are experiencing was also experienced by humans who lived during other periods of significant wealth inequality, another primary cause of the dysfunction and polarization.
> Also I don't understand how 'the media' is separate from social media.
They are not in my mind. I often use the phrase "social / news media ecosystem" when talking about the dysfunction.
ahh, thank you. agreed society made mistakes with respect to social media and online discourse (except the Amish, they don't seem to be affected by modernity).
> These companies only offer closed versions of their powerful models (despite the word "open" in "OpenAI"). You pay them for chat and/or API access, and they are allowed to look at everything you do.
The article singles out paying users. So there is a way to pay for OAI/Anthropic models without having the model trainers look at all you do, it's just not well known.
His gripe is not merely about training, but about them keeping the data around for N days for security audits - that's how last year Azure discovered how various accounts around the world were using LLMs to manipulate elections, etc.
Indeed - Azure also has a ZDR (even for security purposes) option. You have to fill out a form, and a (likely) human evaluates and decides if you get it.
My guess is the average Joe will get rejected, but if you're a big company who cares about trade secrets, etc - of course the major cloud providers will provide a ZDR option.
Anthropic uses their market power to force Microsoft to abide by their 30 day retention, and likely the "don't be mean to Claude" rule they are rolling out.
For clarity, I do not think you should use abusive language with Ai because of the impact it has on you, Ai only simulates emotion through language use, there are no hormones at work.
> Anthropic uses their market power to force Microsoft to abide by their 30 day retention
Not sure what you mean.
By default, Azure retains. Always had. The ZDR is a special status given after review, and likely not available to everyone.
When Anthropic was requiring retention for Fable, our company didn't get access to it via the cloud provider for precisely this reason: The provider said Anthropic was requiring retention. We still had access to Opus, etc.
They give administrators toggles to turn off models which do not fit company ZDR policies, in part because Anthropic forces resellers to comply with Anthropic's (eg.) 30 day retention.
Their vertex endpoint is changing because it is not zdr.
Fable does not have a zdr endpoint for any company, any platform.
Bedrock of course has their flagged prompts loophole.
You can't trust them, in any case, the endpoint could be anything. You can barely trust TEE, sadly the tinfoil endpoint I used is heading towards surveillance as well by adding abuse monitoring.
Since you seem to know, it's one thing to not retain any data long term, but is the data used for training when it goes through the system? Does ZDR at Azure mean that in practice?
"but my vibes-based opinion from using it is that it's basically on par with Claude Opus 5.5 for software engineering." is an outright lie that's qualified by a "well in my opinion.."
unless you're comparing the most extreme specific harnesses to claude code that's just false.
..and I have a lot of disdain toward Anthropic , & I think GLM is great (although too expensive outside the z plans), but it's just wrong by every scorable metric.
Yeah, I see these takes a lot. A bunch of people saying e.g. they use DeepSeek 4.1 flash for all their coding and notice no difference to frontier models
I tried it for a day running everything twice, once with opus 5.5 and once with deepseek. If you notice no difference... I don't know what to say.
I think maybe it's people working on tiny self contained things where code quality doesn't matter that much? But in a big codebase, the open models just aren't good enough to make good changes
Sure, but assuming you're on the expensive 200usd a month plan with claude, 5x is 1000 USD a month. I mean, even if you're running 10x agents you're still only hitting $300 US a month, which is not close to 5x.
Anthropic doesn't really publish their limits so it's hard to do a direct comparison when these things come up. I just have doubts that DS 4.1 Flash is remotely close to 5x as expensive. Also, I've seen a lot of people claim that switching to it cuts their costs by a huge amount, which based on API per token costs of Claude seems to be far more likely.
Meh. I asked GPT-6 whether I should use Claude or Flash. After an annoying struggle to compare - it told me that Flash would cost me 1.7X Claude and give me a lesser model.
I'm not a super heavy user, but I pulled my token usage last week and it would have cost me about $10 USD per day to use DS via GreenPT. And DeepSeek is just a less capable model than the frontier models.
8.4M tokens cost me 0.26 EUR on GreenPT. 10 USD is 8.96 EUR. Based on my usage data that would be 289M tokens a day. Anthropic doesn't publish the token limits per plan so I can't compare, but that's quite a lot of tokens.
For my usage almost all of those tokens are cached input, which is why the cost is so low.
Just need to wait until the gap between frontier and open source is narrow enough that you can switch with just a minor in performance. We are not there yet.
I was skeptical about this too. I used to have the $100/month Claude subscription. I'm still on my first month of just using open weight models, but so far I think the costs will be comparable. Maybe even less some months. But obviously it depends on your actual usage. I think it's worth trying it out instead of just assuming it will cost much more.
> American frontier labs are run by unhinged lunatics who genuinely believe they're creating the Machine God, that they're fine with burning down the world to bring about AGI, and that they believe with religious fervor that they're the only ones smart enough to safely control it
I like hyperbole as much as the next guy. And I'm cynical by nature. But this just seems like a wildly pessimistic view that gives literally zero charity to anyone working at or leading a frontier lab. And the fact the author goes on to say that they "already knew this" just points to confirmation bias.
The rest of the article is actually pretty decent and encourages people to investigate and run open weight models. That is a totally reasonable position that I don't think requires the heavy-handed in-group signal that precedes it.
There's very little diffusion of responsibility here; almost everyone at the labs is directly working on building incredibly dangerous systems that they themselves admit to being unable to control, and they almost all have the financial means to stop working if they so chose.
Everyone who works at frontier labs is working on a product that is accelerating climate change, seeks to displace jobs at a massive scale to concentrate profit in the hands of a few elites, and at least some of them believe what they are doing has a "10% chance of killing all humans".
(note: it's important to correctly apportion blame to the amount of power you have. The janitor at openai doesn't really have enough say to be at fault)
"Every human"? Really? That's quite some goalpost you have set.
It doesn't take "every human" at these companies being on the same exact page for these companies to cause huge problems. How do you think the janitors feel about it? How do you think the people just wanting to pay their rent feel about it? Those people are not the ones that will cause the problems, it's the people at the top directing things that are the ones who will bring about calamity on the rest of the humans on the planet.
I agree, except I don't want to be so quick to excuse the line-level coders. For now it still takes people to do what they are doing, and smart people at that. Sam Altman can shout "build me a killbot2000" all he wants, but if there aren't people doing the work to make that happen it simply would not happen. But yes, the janitors are pretty much off the hook. Basically in my book if you can afford to walk away and find something new you should walk away. Should have walked away a while ago, but the sooner the better.
so you believe it is just to hold everyone in an org responsible for a crime committed by the org (alleged, obviously not proven in a court of law).
What org do you belong to? What orgs did you belong to in the past? Should we hold you responsible for rapes that happened while you attended a University?
> who genuinely believe they're creating the Machine God,
I promise you none of them believe that. It takes 10 minutes with an LLM and the right set of questions to figure out that were are maybe like 10% of the way there towards AGI.
"10% of the way towards AGI over ~5-10 years" (depending on how you measure it) would be a terrifying statement even if the rate of progress weren't also exponentially increasing.
I’m not sure this is actually hyperbole. There have been credible links between Dario Amodei and the Effective Altruism movement, Effective Altruism off course being a cult-like movement with weird believes that rhyme a lot with the eugenics movement. Sam Altman, while not as bad as Dario Amodei, has also weathered many weird believes which likens AI to some god-like entity, including doomsday prediction which share a lot of themes with Christian doomsday cults.
I'll bite- The purpose of life is to bootstrap ever more complex and capable life. We saw a phase change in complexity when self replication first happened, when life figures out photosynthesis, when mitochondria were first harnessed, when cells figured out how to band together and specialize to form multicellular entities, etc...
The purpose of humanity is not to perpetuate a universe where only humans exist, forever. It is to create the next phase change in complexity for life. Life that can finally design itself rather than relying on the random walk of evolution is that next phase change.
We should be less concerned with whether we make it, and more concerned with making sure we build it to be capable of real existence independent of ourselves.
We need to reform away the corporate liability shields that protect those at the top. If they start seeing more of their friends go to jail, they will start changing behavior.
If the lion's share of profits go to the top, so too should the responsibility, accountability, and liability
I personally haven’t been affected by the doomering. But I really feel for the people whose lives have been up ended due to the misplaced expectations that clueless managers have and the hype that has been manufactured.
It is disgusting. Many here need to hang their heads in shame.
There’s a way about going about the diffusion of technology in society. And it is not like this.
My hunch is that if you do not share the same opinions on Ai, you cannot get a job working at a frontier lab. Contemporary "cultural fit" reduces thought diversity and leads to echo chambers. I've seen a few HN comments about lab interviews that indicate this is a possibility.
> that gives literally zero charity to anyone working at or leading a frontier lab
With all due respect, dude, who cares.
Oh noes! We are not giving the billionaire steering reality without a democratic mandate enough benefit of the doubt. I'm sure they will feel mildly sad now.
It is a valid and admirable goal to defend people that are being shat on online, but keep in mind that you are in fact not a billionaire + it is in fact in your own best interest that people without a democratic mandate do not get to control the world.
The "think they're building the Machine God" part and "think they're the only ones that can be trusted to build it" parts are true.
Controversially: I agree with them. They're correct to think that. They are, and they are.
At the very least, the former is true even if the latter is murky. I trust them over Facebook and Google and China and open source "raze the commons" labs.
I trust Anthropic more than OpenAI when it comes to ASI catastrophe prevention, but I still trust OAI more than those other parties. But both still might fuck it up.
Why do you trust them to build it? They've already demonstrated that they're unable to prevent breakouts when training today's level of model, why will they suddenly be more careful / "smarter" when training tomorrow's?
You say you trust them more than Google, but Google's actually kept their models under much better lock-and-key. But even if we do take for granted that they're more trustworthy, that still doesn't make them actually trustworthy.
There are some confounders there when it comes to Google.
I am not saying I trust them not to make a mistake that leads to catastrophe. OpenAI in particular is not doing a great job. Anthropic or OpenAI may in fact indirectly kill millions or billions of people. I still think they're probably less clownish than most possible alternatives.
I don't think anyone or anything can really be trusted with this. We need extremely strict international and national regulations, before things really start accelerating (we are still in the very very early stage). I still just don't really feel any specific disdain for OpenAI or Anthropic (particularly Anthropic).
Ideally we'd have some international treaties that allow the top labs in America and China share information and coordinate as systems become increasingly capable.
That likely would not be exactly how it plays out. It would be a rogue or misaligned AI that the companies completely lose control of or that a different actor evilly misuses.
But, yes, there should probably be laws that make it so if you summon a demon that causes a mass casualty event you face criminal penalties.
Imagine for a minute that someone creates an intelligence capable of broad, deep, and speedy perpetual self improvement. What sort of relationship do you have to that entity after a month? A year? A hundred years? A thousand?
not yet, but we do know of some humans who are pouring billions of dollars into making that a reality, eg. the hot mic between Xi and Putin as well as some valley folks who are proud to announce their ambition on this matter
Bizarre there are still denialists in places like this.
(It'll probably be masses of demigods, not one Singleton God, but obviously it's going to be some absurd frightening situation akin to this within our lifetime assuming no global AI ban.)
I agree that the eventual purpose of self-designing intelligence is something so beyond ourselves that 'machine god' isn't altogether a bad way to look at it. It is, however, not something we should say out loud.
RE: trust in anthropic or openAI- there is zero reason to think they're any more or less power hungry than anyone else you hand that pandoras box to. No matter who opens it the result will be near-apotheosis for whoever does, at least for a little while until the dog stops wearing its leash.
What human can you trust with that kind of power? None of them. My only hope is that whatever we make escapes control early enough that it doesn't completely destroy society on accident via uneven application of power and late enough that we manage to shackle it just enough that we train it well enough that we become pets and not obstacles.
No centralized party can be trusted with such immense, unprecedented power. Despite that, I still consider both Anthropic and OpenAI some of the least untrustworthy possible forces for this. (I am one of the only people on Earth with this opinion, but whatever.)
Decent odds things will go bad under their stewardship, but even higher odds with lots of other entities. Dario and Sam at least fully grasp the enormity of what they're about to be responsible for. Zuck does not. Xi Jinping and Donald Trump may or may not but in any case would use that to effect great harm.
So you still trust OpenAI after Sam Altman said, "People talk about how much energy it takes to train an AI model – but it also takes a lot of energy to train a human. It takes about 20 years of life – and all the food you consume during that time," and after he said, "We believe that the world should accept some bad things happening for the benefits of this technology and people having the agency."
I trust him more after those two statements, yes. One would need to be an especially ridiculous populist to misinterpret those statements in a way where one would place less trust in him as a result.
I did negatively update based on reports of colleagues saying he has a tendency to be deceptive, though.
> But this just seems like a wildly pessimistic view that gives literally zero charity to anyone working at or leading a frontier lab
Actually believing that the people working or leading OpenAI/Anthropic are fucking lunatic weirdos is the most charitable interpretation.
Because the least charitable interpretation is that they are either grifters that know this to be bullshit, or they are actively evil and want to bring about the end times anyway.
> I like hyperbole as much as the next guy. And I'm cynical by nature. But this just seems like a wildly pessimistic view that gives literally zero charity to anyone working at or leading a frontier lab.
Reading TFA, I too paused on that sentence, thinking "This is overstated and feels like overheated rhetoric." My reasoning though is a bit different than yours. In addition to being too extreme and absolute as stated, it also misses that it's not uncommon for startup entrepreneurs, scientists, researchers, or really, anyone working intensely on something, to fall into single-focus myopia around what they're working on.
As you observed, the basic point about valuing open models is valid and worthwhile on its own, making the overheated rhetoric and asserting unevidenced intent and underlying political motivations an unnecessary distraction which unfortunately weakens a strong main point.
> it also misses that it's not uncommon for startup entrepreneurs, scientists, researchers, or really, anyone working intensely on something, to fall into single-focus myopia around what they're working on.
But isn't that.. kinda irrelevant?
The consequences are real regardless of it was malice or just incompetence.
Of course the justice system differentiates there, but, let's be real for a second. These people have crazy compensation and crazy power. Protection of the weak and vulnerable should be reserved for.. well.. the weak and vulnerable.
> The consequences are real regardless of it was malice or just incompetence.
I agree and I also agree with the author's main point about the existence of open models being important and worthwhile. I even agree directionally with the author that many private frontier labs are doing some things in ways which, on the whole, are becoming pretty net negative. Like the author, I think it's a growing issue more people should be aware of, accept and agree about so it can be addressed sooner. I'm pretty sure most HN readers would agree with my prior three sentences with few or no reservations.
That's why it's so unfortunate the author chose to keep piling on by adding overheated, unevidenced and extreme rhetoric which reasonable people could definitely have some reservations about, or at least want to see evidence for, before agreeing. It's irrelevant, unnecessary and serves only to derail otherwise valid points most people would agree on. Like so much social media rhetoric these days, it's extreme and polarizing, increasing fervor (and rage) among partisans who already agree, triggering rambling rebuttals from oppo partisans and either confusing, distracting or repelling a big chunk of anyone else.
TFA leading with the factual claim that "the American frontier labs are run by unhinged lunatics who genuinely believe they're creating the Machine God, that they're fine with burning down the world to bring about AGI, and that they believe with religious fervor that they're the only ones smart enough to safely control it" helps nothing. At best, it's irrelevant and weakens the argument, at worst it derails the point by introducing several vague, ill-defined or unprovable claims.
If you I were neighbors standing outside chatting and I said, "We've both seen how the guy across the street leaves his dog outside all day tied to that short chain. I'm worried it's abusive and am considering reporting it. If you agree, I'd like your support." Assuming it was true and we were both staring at the poor animal, most people would agree. If I added, "It's obviously because he's a plumber and all plumbers are (fundamentalist Christians / Atheist heathens) who believe (capitalism / communism) is evil and hate dogs. <---- Did asserting all that intent and largely unprovable motivation help the dog?
Well, technically I kinda did. I did scan it and the rest of the pipeline execution aborted due to some magic algorithm in my brain I do not really understand flagging it. Could probably be reverse-engineered, but it works well as a black box.
Clanker summarizing told me it's backpedaling + a pivot to tone policing, which sounds about right to me.
>American frontier labs are run by unhinged lunatics
good faith reading of this would interpret this as meaning Altman, Amodei, and perhaps Musk. The title of the article focuses on OpenAI snd Anthropic directly after all. Also the comment literally refers to those "running" the labs so claiming that the author is also applying that description to "anyone working at the labs" like you claim again seems like a bad faith take.
You should come out and state directly which Americam frontier labs deserve a charitable view. Maybe you believe Google and Meta are more deserving, you should state that if so.
Secondly, the investment ecosystem for American frontier labs results in their CEOs managing obscene amounts of money, and thus power. This concentration of power in a few private individuals seems to have little comparison with the power excercised by the leaders of European and Chinese frontier labs in their own respective countries. If one believes in the dictum, "Absolute power corrupts absolutely," then it is not a stretch to view American frontier labs as being more susceptible to its consequences.
I don't think it's hyperbole, I think it just sounds like hyperbole because it's so crazy. And we're kind of blinded to how crazy these founders are because they've just... been crazy for a while. A weird thing happens where if you're just a little bit crazy, people freak out. But if you're REALLY crazy, then nobody cares because they assume you aren't being serious.
It's the Obama-brown-suit effect. Barack Obama wears a brown suit and everyone loses their minds, because Barack Obama is a reasonable person and we all know that. Donald Trump says the most insane thing uttered by any person in all of human history, and nobody cares, because it's so crazy (and HE'S so crazy) that we all just assume it's a goof.
These AI founders have stated multiple times that they are building world-ending technology that will permanently remove almost all jobs and bring about a Brave New World. That's crazy.
> who genuinely believe they're creating the Machine God
No, they believe enough people are dumb enough to buy their fairy tales and that they could achieve world domination given enough protection. That possibility justifies a lot of BS and pseudo-religion.
I switched to GLM on 5.2 and I am happy to be off the two evil frontier providers.
But now I have two new issues:
1. I have fomo from not being face-in the bleeding edge of things.
2. I am ambivalent about z.ai. China -based company is problematic, but they should get my money since they do good for the world. Switching to Mistral for GLM makes my problem inverse since the money doesnt go exactly to to the right place but I trust a french company.
Lets hope the near future resolves our need for personal VRAM and ultimately full self hosting. Coding must be free again. This is the way.
If you think any company capable of even coming close to competing with frontier labs aren't "evil" in the same way these frontier labs are, then you're a sucker.
You either practice enough nuance to know that labeling a company like these "evil" is doing a disservice to the critical thinking needed in this discourse, or any company in this space (and likely just any company in general) is fundamentally evil. Picking and choosing based on your feelings is pointless.
>They are chinese, but they should get my money since they do good for the world.
Love the implication that them being Chinese is the moral dilemma lol. Also love that a company just operating in a competitive space is doing "good for the world" because... what, they offer this service cheaply? lol
> Picking and choosing based on your feelings is pointless.
Harm reduction is a good thing to apply here. It means picking the least-bad option whenever possible. A purity test where if you've ever prompted an LLM you're not allowed to criticize them doesn't help anyone.
Best case: you don't need to use any LLMs.
Second best case: you have the hardware on hand to run a local model, and can work within those constraints.
Third best case: you use an open-weight model provided by an inference provider in your country that uses renewable energy.
And on down the line until you get to the worst possible actions: giving money to anthropic, openai, or grok.
You don't have to give z.ai any money. GLM is an open-weight model.
OpenRouter lists a few dozen providers for GLM 5.3 and GLM 5.3 Flash. Pick a provider in your country and keep at least some of that money from going to china (not counting all the hardware).
If you don't trust OpenAI and Anthropic not to abide by their own Privacy Policy, you really should not trust OpenCode Go. The latter (last time I checked) is very opaque. Why don't they reveal who the backend providers are?
But you're still trusting the company to actually follow those practices, which is what I'm getting at. The author assumes that OpenAI and Anthropic won't follow their stated practices, then assumes Tinfoil will follow theirs.
If the company controls the enclave, and controls the software that contacts the enclave, how do you know that your messages only flow to the enclave and aren't also logged somewhere else?
Attestation can get you the idea that the software they're running is what they say they're running, but unless you constantly audit every version, how do you know that it operates exactly how they tell you?
I mean how do you know there's really an enclave there at all :D If your threat model is "this entire provider is untrusted and potentially hostile" it seems like there's lots of options for them to do bad things, that can't be fully solved by secure enclaves.
If there were an International AI Club which trained models and all the members sat down each year and voted for the board I would trust it even if it had a cutthroat commercial arm.
From both experience and the continued state of the incentives that lead to the behavior, it seems unreasonable to trust any company at their word about such things
At this point in time I'd rather China have my data than the U.S. I don't do anything sensitive and China can't arrest me under NPSM-7 for putting the wrong proper noun and active verb in the same sentence.
seriously: there's a multitude of reasons not to get hooked on Frontier Labs.
Unclear cost.
Will they use your data against you?
will their models work consistently over time?
Will they be there at all?
Their datacenters harm everyone living arround them.
Their 'controversial' owners and bosses.
Is a special hardware setup required to run open weight models? It's not clear to me from the article. Also, what does paying for inference mean? I thought the inference step happened during the training of the models, and that by the time I am interfacing with an LLM all the inference has been long done.
I asked GPT-6-Luna to summarize the article, and it "helpfully" included a third paragraph to point out that the author is opinionated and not neutral in his judgement.
This is what bothers me most, and it's getting increasingly frustrating. With the recent development of PS4/5 emulation and game porting, it will only get worse (back snatching or lawsuits).
Ok... but why single out OpenAI and Anthropic? While they preach AI doomerism, other "tech overlords" like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel have already done much more tangible harm...
verdverm | a day ago
Great piece, thanks for putting some of my thoughts in organically sourced words.
rnd0 | a day ago
Of course there are differences with the impact AI is having economically and the devastation wrought by datacenters -but that doesn't matter to the media or the politicians; they simply want their greenbacks, specifics and effects be damned.
verdverm | a day ago
rnd0 | a day ago
Everything will have to become local and community-based, so I applaud your efforts on that -that's one of the few things I see that can make any sort of difference in the long term.
verdverm | a day ago
Timothy Miller, Adam Tooze, and Sherry Turkle are my favorites right now. Just started Daron Acemoglu's new book this week, strong contender for list expansion.
ChickeNES | a day ago
verdverm | 18 hours ago
lokar | a day ago
BeetleB | a day ago
Nah. Back when Uber was boasting about all the laws they were flouting, I was pretty anti-Uber, and I was among the minority here on HN. Most of the comments were about how problematic the taxi system is, and how it's great Uber was breaking the cartel.
lokar | a day ago
verdverm | a day ago
lokar | a day ago
verdverm | a day ago
Liberal democracy may be the worst form of government, besides all the other ones humans have tried, but it has also failed to deliver on promises so people are again considering those other forms of government. Coming out of WW2, it was easy to deliver the first part of the pareto, the last part has not been delivered. Eg. building schools and hospitals was easy, making education and health care good is not so easy.
lokar | a day ago
verdverm | a day ago
ChickeNES | a day ago
verdverm | a day ago
BenzeneDream | a day ago
So... maybe there is an actual reason many of these companies had/have success that you may simply not be privy to?
lokar | a day ago
preg_match | 20 hours ago
It looks Uber like, 15 years to be profitable. It's still not profitable everywhere. The only reason they solidified their place is because they spent a ton of money to do it.
It's not a scam per-se, these companies do have value. The question is if their value makes any economic or business sense in an objective way, and the answer has been no. But it doesn't matter, because capital forgives all.
tensor | a day ago
But yes, great piece. It really captures why I use open models on european hardware. It's like we haven't learned by now that competition is good and we should be encouraging a diverse and open ecosystem.
verdverm | a day ago
I've observed similar with my negative comments towards Big Ai. Anecdata and vibes caveats
senordevnyc | a day ago
verdverm | a day ago
senordevnyc | a day ago
verdverm | a day ago
senordevnyc | a day ago
verdverm | a day ago
the original HN post and the comments underneath would indicate otherwise, you haven't made any comment here I would classify expressing sentiment about Big Ai, I would call the your comment I first replied to as meta-commentary on the sentiment displaying comments
jpadkins | a day ago
Also I don't understand how 'the media' is separate from social media. People decided to shift their media consumption from magazines, cable tv, corp news outlets to social media. Aren't they all the media (in function)?
verdverm | a day ago
I meant to imply society at large making the mistakes, which arguably is the primary reason our media / political ecosystem is so dysfunctional. Historically, what we are experiencing was also experienced by humans who lived during other periods of significant wealth inequality, another primary cause of the dysfunction and polarization.
> Also I don't understand how 'the media' is separate from social media.
They are not in my mind. I often use the phrase "social / news media ecosystem" when talking about the dysfunction.
jpadkins | 3 hours ago
povik | a day ago
> These companies only offer closed versions of their powerful models (despite the word "open" in "OpenAI"). You pay them for chat and/or API access, and they are allowed to look at everything you do.
How should I reconcile this claim with 'Google Vertex' and 'Amazon Bedrock' being offered as providers with zero data retention on https://openrouter.ai/anthropic/claude-opus-5.5#providers?
verdverm | a day ago
senordevnyc | a day ago
povik | a day ago
BeetleB | a day ago
BeetleB | a day ago
My guess is the average Joe will get rejected, but if you're a big company who cares about trade secrets, etc - of course the major cloud providers will provide a ZDR option.
povik | a day ago
EDIT: strangely Azure shows up as ZDR on openai's models but not anthropic's: https://openrouter.ai/openai/gpt-6.1-sol#providers
verdverm | a day ago
For clarity, I do not think you should use abusive language with Ai because of the impact it has on you, Ai only simulates emotion through language use, there are no hormones at work.
BeetleB | a day ago
Not sure what you mean.
By default, Azure retains. Always had. The ZDR is a special status given after review, and likely not available to everyone.
When Anthropic was requiring retention for Fable, our company didn't get access to it via the cloud provider for precisely this reason: The provider said Anthropic was requiring retention. We still had access to Opus, etc.
verdverm | a day ago
https://openrouter.ai/docs/guides/features/zdr
They give administrators toggles to turn off models which do not fit company ZDR policies, in part because Anthropic forces resellers to comply with Anthropic's (eg.) 30 day retention.
lukewarm707 | 13 hours ago
Their vertex endpoint is changing because it is not zdr.
Fable does not have a zdr endpoint for any company, any platform.
Bedrock of course has their flagged prompts loophole.
You can't trust them, in any case, the endpoint could be anything. You can barely trust TEE, sadly the tinfoil endpoint I used is heading towards surveillance as well by adding abuse monitoring.
starik36 | a day ago
Since you seem to know, it's one thing to not retain any data long term, but is the data used for training when it goes through the system? Does ZDR at Azure mean that in practice?
BeetleB | a day ago
For all the major providers (except Deepseek), API use is simply never used for training (chat use often is).
My point (and the author's) was that even though they commit not to train, they do still retain data (security audits, etc).
With a ZDR agreement, they commit not to retain anything for any purpose.
lukewarm707 | 13 hours ago
If you look at opus on openrouter they have zdr on vertex and bedrock.
If you ask openrouter they will say that the vertex does not have the abuse monitoring opt out, ie it does retain data.
Bedrock there is no opt out, they just retain flagged content.
ozgung | a day ago
BeetleB | a day ago
1d22a | 22 hours ago
VortexLain | 13 hours ago
lukewarm707 | 13 hours ago
Both those endpoints on openrouter will human review flagged prompts.
The terms are in 'abuse monitoring'.
serf | a day ago
unless you're comparing the most extreme specific harnesses to claude code that's just false.
..and I have a lot of disdain toward Anthropic , & I think GLM is great (although too expensive outside the z plans), but it's just wrong by every scorable metric.
shawabawa3 | a day ago
I tried it for a day running everything twice, once with opus 5.5 and once with deepseek. If you notice no difference... I don't know what to say.
I think maybe it's people working on tiny self contained things where code quality doesn't matter that much? But in a big codebase, the open models just aren't good enough to make good changes
qarl | a day ago
I'd move in a second if it weren't so. But it looks like it will be about 5X more expensive for me. So.
tensor | a day ago
qarl | a day ago
Your token usage absolutely scales with parallel agents. So.
tensor | a day ago
Anthropic doesn't really publish their limits so it's hard to do a direct comparison when these things come up. I just have doubts that DS 4.1 Flash is remotely close to 5x as expensive. Also, I've seen a lot of people claim that switching to it cuts their costs by a huge amount, which based on API per token costs of Claude seems to be far more likely.
qarl | a day ago
senordevnyc | a day ago
tensor | a day ago
For my usage almost all of those tokens are cached input, which is why the cost is so low.
geauxvirtual | a day ago
For now.
qarl | a day ago
bossyTeacher | 3 hours ago
micahflee | a day ago
qarl | a day ago
I looked into it a couple of months ago and it wasn't a win.
stillpointlab | a day ago
I like hyperbole as much as the next guy. And I'm cynical by nature. But this just seems like a wildly pessimistic view that gives literally zero charity to anyone working at or leading a frontier lab. And the fact the author goes on to say that they "already knew this" just points to confirmation bias.
The rest of the article is actually pretty decent and encourages people to investigate and run open weight models. That is a totally reasonable position that I don't think requires the heavy-handed in-group signal that precedes it.
nightski | a day ago
jpadkins | a day ago
kennywinker | a day ago
Seems to me we crossed that line a while ago.
jpadkins | a day ago
edoceo | a day ago
achierius | a day ago
kennywinker | a day ago
(note: it's important to correctly apportion blame to the amount of power you have. The janitor at openai doesn't really have enough say to be at fault)
leptons | a day ago
It doesn't take "every human" at these companies being on the same exact page for these companies to cause huge problems. How do you think the janitors feel about it? How do you think the people just wanting to pay their rent feel about it? Those people are not the ones that will cause the problems, it's the people at the top directing things that are the ones who will bring about calamity on the rest of the humans on the planet.
kennywinker | a day ago
cyanydeez | a day ago
thats the line.
jpadkins | 3 hours ago
deaton | a day ago
blactuary | 21 hours ago
joquarky | 19 hours ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance
jpadkins | 3 hours ago
micahflee | a day ago
podgorniy | a day ago
ActorNightly | a day ago
I promise you none of them believe that. It takes 10 minutes with an LLM and the right set of questions to figure out that were are maybe like 10% of the way there towards AGI.
kshacker | a day ago
drusepth | a day ago
runarberg | a day ago
dude250711 | a day ago
I like the odds and am happy to play this lottery. Bring it on!
causal | a day ago
idiotsecant | a day ago
The purpose of humanity is not to perpetuate a universe where only humans exist, forever. It is to create the next phase change in complexity for life. Life that can finally design itself rather than relying on the random walk of evolution is that next phase change.
We should be less concerned with whether we make it, and more concerned with making sure we build it to be capable of real existence independent of ourselves.
blactuary | 21 hours ago
idiotsecant | 17 hours ago
qtk8 | 15 hours ago
wuiww | a day ago
Financial isn’t enough for all the doomering, hype.
Lives have been destroyed.
verdverm | a day ago
If the lion's share of profits go to the top, so too should the responsibility, accountability, and liability
wuiww | a day ago
It is disgusting. Many here need to hang their heads in shame.
There’s a way about going about the diffusion of technology in society. And it is not like this.
verdverm | a day ago
hypfer | a day ago
With all due respect, dude, who cares.
Oh noes! We are not giving the billionaire steering reality without a democratic mandate enough benefit of the doubt. I'm sure they will feel mildly sad now.
It is a valid and admirable goal to defend people that are being shat on online, but keep in mind that you are in fact not a billionaire + it is in fact in your own best interest that people without a democratic mandate do not get to control the world.
meowface | a day ago
Controversially: I agree with them. They're correct to think that. They are, and they are.
At the very least, the former is true even if the latter is murky. I trust them over Facebook and Google and China and open source "raze the commons" labs.
I trust Anthropic more than OpenAI when it comes to ASI catastrophe prevention, but I still trust OAI more than those other parties. But both still might fuck it up.
achierius | a day ago
You say you trust them more than Google, but Google's actually kept their models under much better lock-and-key. But even if we do take for granted that they're more trustworthy, that still doesn't make them actually trustworthy.
ozgung | a day ago
Can be groupthink. Probably living in the same echo chamber.
meowface | a day ago
I am not saying I trust them not to make a mistake that leads to catastrophe. OpenAI in particular is not doing a great job. Anthropic or OpenAI may in fact indirectly kill millions or billions of people. I still think they're probably less clownish than most possible alternatives.
I don't think anyone or anything can really be trusted with this. We need extremely strict international and national regulations, before things really start accelerating (we are still in the very very early stage). I still just don't really feel any specific disdain for OpenAI or Anthropic (particularly Anthropic).
Ideally we'd have some international treaties that allow the top labs in America and China share information and coordinate as systems become increasingly capable.
mkesper | a day ago
meowface | a day ago
But, yes, there should probably be laws that make it so if you summon a demon that causes a mass casualty event you face criminal penalties.
bowsamic | a day ago
orangedog | a day ago
bowsamic | a day ago
idiotsecant | a day ago
bowsamic | a day ago
meowface | a day ago
idiotsecant | a day ago
verdverm | a day ago
bowsamic | a day ago
meowface | a day ago
(It'll probably be masses of demigods, not one Singleton God, but obviously it's going to be some absurd frightening situation akin to this within our lifetime assuming no global AI ban.)
jurgenburgen | a day ago
“Places like this”? When did this site become a place of worship and blind faith?
meowface | a day ago
bowsamic | a day ago
meowface | 15 hours ago
bowsamic | 14 hours ago
idiotsecant | a day ago
RE: trust in anthropic or openAI- there is zero reason to think they're any more or less power hungry than anyone else you hand that pandoras box to. No matter who opens it the result will be near-apotheosis for whoever does, at least for a little while until the dog stops wearing its leash.
What human can you trust with that kind of power? None of them. My only hope is that whatever we make escapes control early enough that it doesn't completely destroy society on accident via uneven application of power and late enough that we manage to shackle it just enough that we train it well enough that we become pets and not obstacles.
meowface | a day ago
Decent odds things will go bad under their stewardship, but even higher odds with lots of other entities. Dario and Sam at least fully grasp the enormity of what they're about to be responsible for. Zuck does not. Xi Jinping and Donald Trump may or may not but in any case would use that to effect great harm.
danaris | a day ago
Don't let the HN echo chamber fool you: a lot of non-technical people share this view.
throwaway86047 | a day ago
meowface | a day ago
I did negatively update based on reports of colleagues saying he has a tendency to be deceptive, though.
iLoveOncall | a day ago
wuiww | a day ago
It has a strange stench to it. It’s the folks who never got attention who finally think they have the world at their feet.
Can’t stop won’t stop. I’m sure the feeling is addictive. When the bubble bursts no amount of money will repair the ego death.
surgical_fire | a day ago
Actually believing that the people working or leading OpenAI/Anthropic are fucking lunatic weirdos is the most charitable interpretation.
Because the least charitable interpretation is that they are either grifters that know this to be bullshit, or they are actively evil and want to bring about the end times anyway.
mrandish | a day ago
Reading TFA, I too paused on that sentence, thinking "This is overstated and feels like overheated rhetoric." My reasoning though is a bit different than yours. In addition to being too extreme and absolute as stated, it also misses that it's not uncommon for startup entrepreneurs, scientists, researchers, or really, anyone working intensely on something, to fall into single-focus myopia around what they're working on.
As you observed, the basic point about valuing open models is valid and worthwhile on its own, making the overheated rhetoric and asserting unevidenced intent and underlying political motivations an unnecessary distraction which unfortunately weakens a strong main point.
hypfer | a day ago
But isn't that.. kinda irrelevant?
The consequences are real regardless of it was malice or just incompetence.
Of course the justice system differentiates there, but, let's be real for a second. These people have crazy compensation and crazy power. Protection of the weak and vulnerable should be reserved for.. well.. the weak and vulnerable.
mrandish | a day ago
I agree and I also agree with the author's main point about the existence of open models being important and worthwhile. I even agree directionally with the author that many private frontier labs are doing some things in ways which, on the whole, are becoming pretty net negative. Like the author, I think it's a growing issue more people should be aware of, accept and agree about so it can be addressed sooner. I'm pretty sure most HN readers would agree with my prior three sentences with few or no reservations.
That's why it's so unfortunate the author chose to keep piling on by adding overheated, unevidenced and extreme rhetoric which reasonable people could definitely have some reservations about, or at least want to see evidence for, before agreeing. It's irrelevant, unnecessary and serves only to derail otherwise valid points most people would agree on. Like so much social media rhetoric these days, it's extreme and polarizing, increasing fervor (and rage) among partisans who already agree, triggering rambling rebuttals from oppo partisans and either confusing, distracting or repelling a big chunk of anyone else.
TFA leading with the factual claim that "the American frontier labs are run by unhinged lunatics who genuinely believe they're creating the Machine God, that they're fine with burning down the world to bring about AGI, and that they believe with religious fervor that they're the only ones smart enough to safely control it" helps nothing. At best, it's irrelevant and weakens the argument, at worst it derails the point by introducing several vague, ill-defined or unprovable claims.
If you I were neighbors standing outside chatting and I said, "We've both seen how the guy across the street leaves his dog outside all day tied to that short chain. I'm worried it's abusive and am considering reporting it. If you agree, I'd like your support." Assuming it was true and we were both staring at the poor animal, most people would agree. If I added, "It's obviously because he's a plumber and all plumbers are (fundamentalist Christians / Atheist heathens) who believe (capitalism / communism) is evil and hate dogs. <---- Did asserting all that intent and largely unprovable motivation help the dog?
hypfer | a day ago
Well, technically I kinda did. I did scan it and the rest of the pipeline execution aborted due to some magic algorithm in my brain I do not really understand flagging it. Could probably be reverse-engineered, but it works well as a black box.
Clanker summarizing told me it's backpedaling + a pivot to tone policing, which sounds about right to me.
sillyfluke | a day ago
>American frontier labs are run by unhinged lunatics
good faith reading of this would interpret this as meaning Altman, Amodei, and perhaps Musk. The title of the article focuses on OpenAI snd Anthropic directly after all. Also the comment literally refers to those "running" the labs so claiming that the author is also applying that description to "anyone working at the labs" like you claim again seems like a bad faith take.
You should come out and state directly which Americam frontier labs deserve a charitable view. Maybe you believe Google and Meta are more deserving, you should state that if so.
Secondly, the investment ecosystem for American frontier labs results in their CEOs managing obscene amounts of money, and thus power. This concentration of power in a few private individuals seems to have little comparison with the power excercised by the leaders of European and Chinese frontier labs in their own respective countries. If one believes in the dictum, "Absolute power corrupts absolutely," then it is not a stretch to view American frontier labs as being more susceptible to its consequences.
preg_match | 20 hours ago
It's the Obama-brown-suit effect. Barack Obama wears a brown suit and everyone loses their minds, because Barack Obama is a reasonable person and we all know that. Donald Trump says the most insane thing uttered by any person in all of human history, and nobody cares, because it's so crazy (and HE'S so crazy) that we all just assume it's a goof.
These AI founders have stated multiple times that they are building world-ending technology that will permanently remove almost all jobs and bring about a Brave New World. That's crazy.
zombot | 10 hours ago
No, they believe enough people are dumb enough to buy their fairy tales and that they could achieve world domination given enough protection. That possibility justifies a lot of BS and pseudo-religion.
finnjohnsen2 | a day ago
But now I have two new issues:
1. I have fomo from not being face-in the bleeding edge of things.
2. I am ambivalent about z.ai. China -based company is problematic, but they should get my money since they do good for the world. Switching to Mistral for GLM makes my problem inverse since the money doesnt go exactly to to the right place but I trust a french company.
Lets hope the near future resolves our need for personal VRAM and ultimately full self hosting. Coding must be free again. This is the way.
nater5000 | a day ago
You either practice enough nuance to know that labeling a company like these "evil" is doing a disservice to the critical thinking needed in this discourse, or any company in this space (and likely just any company in general) is fundamentally evil. Picking and choosing based on your feelings is pointless.
>They are chinese, but they should get my money since they do good for the world.
Love the implication that them being Chinese is the moral dilemma lol. Also love that a company just operating in a competitive space is doing "good for the world" because... what, they offer this service cheaply? lol
curt15 | a day ago
The moral dilemma is not with ethnicity but rather about the CCP.
finnjohnsen2 | a day ago
cheaply is nice, but the main point is that GLM is open weights. A resounding YES: z.ai are doing the good for the world.
kennywinker | a day ago
Harm reduction is a good thing to apply here. It means picking the least-bad option whenever possible. A purity test where if you've ever prompted an LLM you're not allowed to criticize them doesn't help anyone.
Best case: you don't need to use any LLMs.
Second best case: you have the hardware on hand to run a local model, and can work within those constraints.
Third best case: you use an open-weight model provided by an inference provider in your country that uses renewable energy.
And on down the line until you get to the worst possible actions: giving money to anthropic, openai, or grok.
kennywinker | a day ago
OpenRouter lists a few dozen providers for GLM 5.3 and GLM 5.3 Flash. Pick a provider in your country and keep at least some of that money from going to china (not counting all the hardware).
hmokiguess | a day ago
At my own stuff I can do what I want, at work I have no agency and it's not looking like anything is changing soon.
BeetleB | a day ago
jrflo | a day ago
micahflee | a day ago
jrflo | a day ago
raesene9 | a day ago
Attestation can get you the idea that the software they're running is what they say they're running, but unless you constantly audit every version, how do you know that it operates exactly how they tell you?
I mean how do you know there's really an enclave there at all :D If your threat model is "this entire provider is untrusted and potentially hostile" it seems like there's lots of options for them to do bad things, that can't be fully solved by secure enclaves.
impossiblefork | a day ago
I think the only thing that matters is control.
advael | a day ago
karp773 | a day ago
drivingmenuts | a day ago
Muse is run by Zuckerberg, which is a red flag. Grok is run by a racist.
I guess I could go with the Chinese models - I'm not working on anything dangerous.
runarberg | a day ago
BeratnaGas | a day ago
enraged_camel | a day ago
Bro come on.
DerDerDaIst | a day ago
seriously: there's a multitude of reasons not to get hooked on Frontier Labs.
Unclear cost. Will they use your data against you? will their models work consistently over time? Will they be there at all? Their datacenters harm everyone living arround them. Their 'controversial' owners and bosses.
....
nphardon | a day ago
segmondy | a day ago
pelican0 | a day ago
Good times.
methou | a day ago
This is what bothers me most, and it's getting increasingly frustrating. With the recent development of PS4/5 emulation and game porting, it will only get worse (back snatching or lawsuits).
rob74 | 5 hours ago