"Cancel ChatGPT" movement goes mainstream after OpenAI closes deal with U.S. Dow

153 points by AndrewKemendo a day ago on hackernews | 47 comments

> There are no virtuous participants in the artificial intelligence race

A bit of an insulting way to start the article.

Plenty of researchers and smaller companies would disagree, but they won't get articles written about them because they're not embroiled in DOW killbot drama.

We might not be in this situation if all of this money was given to them instead.

: Terr_ | a day ago
In a similar vein, a shout out to all my software homies out there who are just trying to fix data entry input field bugs instead of constructing the Torment Nexus.
: JohnTHaller | a day ago
The AI race refers to the big companies that through shady tactics are currently in the 'lead'. None of them are virtuous.

ssl-3 | a day ago

"DOW" here is an acronym for Department of War, and really should be fully capitalized in the title.

marginalia_nu | a day ago

Yeah title is currently likely to be interpreted as Dow Jones.

: cls59 | a day ago
Or Dow Chemical.

Svip | a day ago

It's also still the Department of Defense; only Congress can change its name, and they haven't.

ssl-3 | a day ago

The article's title says "Department of War".

(I didn't write the title.)

dudefeliciano | 10 hours ago

it's a subtle kowtow to the administration, to call the DoD the DoW

: blazespin | 2 hours ago
I'd say it's more a kowtow to his voters and democracy. Whatever you think of him, he was democratically elected. Do remember to show up this November, though, and remind all your friends..

Retric | a day ago

DoW or more accurately DoD like WoW is less ambiguous than fully capitalized.

ssl-3 | a day ago

I considered the small "o". But the precedent for US government TLAs seems to be to capitalize the whole thing: https://www.justice.gov/nsd-ovt/us-government-acronym-list

: Retric | a day ago
Capitalizing everything is the new direction, but I doubt it’s going to stick around. There’s a long legacy of DoD vs DOW, for a current military example that wasn’t updated: https://dodtap.mil/dodtap/app/about/DoDTAP
Here the DoD pattern makes it clear what part of the larger acronym is representing.

thatcat | a day ago

wouldn't it be DoW, like DoD?

system2 | a day ago

Only liberals. HN partially, and Reddit in general. Average Joe doesn't hear these things. Here is my proof. I go to a dog park every morning and talk to people, and you might know how close you get at the parks with casuals. I asked around about this subject this morning. Absolutely no one knew about it. And these people are working in relatively techy workplaces. Most people I spoke to this morning said something similar to "yeah, cool, USA should get the most of the tech they can to fight the bad guys".

This is an echo chamber. Nothing more.

RalfWausE | a day ago

[flagged]

: system2 | a day ago
I doubt others in other countries would even know who owns ChatGPT. People just use it as an app, and they do not care what the U.S. government does with American companies.

ryandvm | a day ago

Find a smarter dog park

: system2 | a day ago
I tried, this is the most upper-class I could find in LA. Most of the people make over 6 figures and own their own houses. Try to go out and talk to people yourself and let us know your findings. What we are talking about on HN or Reddit does not reflect reality. This is an echo chamber.

Simulacra | a day ago

This article makes no sense. ChatGPT is a search engine and knowledge base with an anthropomorphic front end. It's Google with human characteristics. I think, IMHO, people take AI way too seriously and see in it a boogeyman to conquer.

procone | a day ago

It is certainly not a "search engine". Perhaps you should do some reading on how LLMs function.

: Simulacra | a day ago
It is. It pulls it out. Maybe you're too into it.

andy_ppp | a day ago

I know this is very picky but I find the font choices of Claude quite distracting and difficult to read. I might try Gemini but the Trump admin would probably force Google to sell YouTube to Larry Ellison so they will capitulate. Are any of the Chinese frontier models available on neutral infrastructure?

drewolbrich | a day ago

There's a Claude settings option to use the system font instead.

delecti | a day ago

It seems like Claude's settings let you pick the system font. Is there a reason to not change your system font to something you don't find distracting? It seems like it would have knock-on benefits by making every application less distracting.

: andy_ppp | a day ago
Nice I didn’t know this I’ll give it go then…

Imustaskforhelp | a day ago

> are any of the Chinese frontier models available on neutral infrastructure?

Yup, Check out Openrouter providers for your particular chinese frontier model/ open weights model in general and you could find the location of all providers who host that model and where they are hosted (US/EU countries etc.) as well.

You can also change Claude font as others are mentioning.

andy_ppp | 7 hours ago

So about the font thing... now the content of chats uses the default font but the UI all uses anthropicSans which is horrible and also causes a clash as two fonts that are extremely similar fall into a weird uncanny valley for me. I wish the setting to choose a font was across the whole UI.

jedberg | a day ago

It’s DoD. It’s still not officially changed. But if you insist on using the nickname it should be DoW.

siva7 | a day ago

Says windowscentral.com... People outside of Big Tech haven't heard of Anthropic nor do they care about this dispute. What normal poeple might have heard is probably more something along the lines of Anthropic and supply-chain-risk and unpatriotic...

3rodents | a day ago

The top post on Reddit is about it, it has escaped the nerdsphere.

siva7 | a day ago

Reddit is an algorithm-based aggregator so of course it will show some hn dude also the same nerd stuff

delecti | a day ago

Reddit's "hot" algorithm (the default view in most contexts) is not persomalized. It's basically just the rate of upvotes.

siva7 | a day ago

Sure? I visited Reddit just now and i don't even know how to get to this non-personalized algo. At least they make a really good job to hide this view as good as possible so i doubt it's the default view for most logged users.

: delecti | a day ago
That's my point, you don't generally have to "do" anything to get to "hot". If you open a /r/all or an individual subreddit, the default view is the "hot" algorithm.

mi_lk | a day ago

> People outside of Big Tech haven't heard of Anthropic

"Claude by Anthropic" is currently #2 Top Free App in US App Store

siva7 | a day ago

According to the US App Store a rule-based proxy utility is the #1 paid app. So not sure how much relevance the App store charts have at all in real life.

: xienze | a day ago
I think you're both right. Prior to the other day, Claude had nowhere near as much mindshare with regular people as ChatGPT did. But now that they've stood up to Orange Man, they're heroes to a large segment of the population who would otherwise have never given them a second thought.
On a related note, since OpenAI is playing ball with Orange Man, they're public enemy #1 for this same segment, hence the calls to cancel subscriptions and boycott OpenAI.
By this time next week, most people will have forgotten about all of this.

journal | a day ago

I refuse to use anything but OpenAI API.

: hypercube33 | a day ago
I can't tell if this is satire but if not, you're only holding yourself back. It's far from the leading model family for a while now for almost any workload.

firefoxd | a day ago

One thing to take into account, this will now be a large source of revenue for them. You thought you would get away with the free tier, but now as a tax payer, we are all funding it.

: cpeterso | 23 hours ago
And they can get “too build to fail” bailouts from the US government after they are dependent on ChatGPT.

hbarka | a day ago

Dario Amodei direct interview today on CBS News:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MPTNHrq_4LU

nialv7 | a day ago

i don't have an openai subscription, but i still want to participate

mickle00 | 22 hours ago

Great to see this going mainstream

Jordan-117 | 22 hours ago

*DoD

Headline makes it sound like Dow Chemical/Jones.

ChrisArchitect | 19 hours ago

[dupe] Discussions:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47190997

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47193478