10 ms·

They're actively trying to use lobbying power to make open weight models illegal. So I'm just not going to use their services at all anymore. I don't think they

They're actively trying to use lobbying power to make open weight models illegal. So I'm just not going to use their services at all anymore. I don't think they're a net gain if you're a skilled senior, and the hidden cost in terms of technical debt and skill atrophy is just being swept under the rug. I'll be okay without their bullshit generator.

andsoitis 3mo ago
> They're actively trying to use lobbying power to make open weight models illegal. What is your evidence?
- jimbo808 3mo ago
  https://www.judiciary.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/2023-07-26_-_testimony_-_amodei.pdf https://www.judiciary.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/2023-07-26_-_... https://xcancel.com/coinbureau/status/2071330294452666695 https://xcancel.com/coinbureau/status/2071330294452666695 https://www.techpolicy.press/transcript-senate-hearing-on-principles-for-ai-regulation/ https://www.techpolicy.press/transcript-senate-hearing-on-pr... > "Once the weights of a model are public, they cannot be retrieved. If a model possesses dangerous capabilities, it is permanently out in the wild... We need to consider regulatory frameworks that account for the unique risks of open-source distribution of highly capable frontier models."
  - TurdF3rguson 3mo ago
    That's true I guess. If someone decides a model needs more guard rails, anthropic can adjust it, whereas with open weights it's too late. It definitely sounds like the kind of thing that ends the world in B sci-fi thrillers.
    - TurdF3rguson 3mo ago
      Curious if I'm being downvoted by people who think there will never be a model with dangerous capabilities? Or people who think when it happens we shouldn't add guard rails?
- Robdel12 3mo ago
  Dario’s own mouth https://x.com/coinbureau/status/2071330294452666695/mediaviewer https://x.com/coinbureau/status/2071330294452666695/mediavie...
  - jquery 3mo ago
    Yeesh. “What shall we do sire, when the peasants learn to read?” vibes
    - entropicdrifter 3mo ago
      You mean to tell me that anyone can own a nail-gun? We can't have people buying their own nail-guns, next thing you know they might build things that aren't up to code!
  - anon373839 3mo ago
    He has also been telling bald-faced lies about open source/open weights models that are easily disproved. For example, he claimed that they lack the collaborative benefits of open source because "we can't see inside the model". Open weights models are responsible for enabling reams of research on interpretability methods that do just that. And they have facilitated so much collaboration on architecture, inference optimizations, training and steering methods, and other topics that were completely out of reach with closed models like Anthropic's. It's really staggering to me.
    - andsoitis 3mo ago
      Doesn’t this seem true / self-evident: “His warns that once powerful models are released openly, companies lose the ability to monitor misuse, revoke access, or update safety guardrails.”
      - anon373839 3mo ago
        The premise (that "powerful models" implicate "safety" concerns that must be controlled by "companies") does not seem true or self-evident to me. This tired fearmongering campaign centered on GPT-4 three years ago, a model now surpassed by open models that run on laptops. Did fearmongers like Amodei say, "Oops, we were wrong! It wasn't that dangerous after all"? No. Of course they didn't.
mastazi 3mo ago
good luck actually enforcing that.
anonzzzies 3mo ago
Sure about Dario (and all billionaire) weirdness, but no gains if you are a skilled senior is well, very far out in our experience (our company is 30 years old with mostly the original employees and founders): what we deliver now at the speed and quality we deliver it would have been impossible 10 years ago with our team size of skilled seniors. We replaced all the commercial products our clients and ourselves used with our own, giving us millions more revenue and profit with the upselling and efficiency benefits. We work for regulated clients: our code is reviewed, pentested and audited regularly by us and 3rd parties so its not slop either. You are definitely leaving money on the table. We do mostly use chinese models on our own hardware (we colocate cages of racks) so this is not about Anthropic but about AI in general. Skill athrophy is a real thing though; we try to prevent this by have hackethons (for lack of a better word) without AI where I pick something extremely non trivial and we implement it for fun and profit without AI (with would not matter much as they are currently bad at these things); last one was flex paxos for our in house db with obvious metrics for the endresult: data integrity (duh) under failure and performance better or at least the same as our raft production version.
- andyroid 3mo ago
  > We replaced all the commercial products our clients and ourselves used with our own You’ll never guess what product your clients are looking to replace with their own next.
  - anonzzzies 3mo ago
    Sure, that is why you need to be early. I fully believe my company won't make it another 30 years (or 10), so we prepare for that. Also, I will be dead by then, but that is unrelated. For now everyone is still sufficiently crap at using AI to need help. We had enough clients trying to build something themselves and then come crying to us.
    - topato 3mo ago
      Having a health problem that puts an end date on your effort must tint your business choices in a unique and interesting way. I find your ideas intriguing, and wish to subscribe to your newsletter.
pmarreck 3mo ago
> I don't think they're a net gain if you're a skilled senior I'm a skilled senior (I'm 54 and been coding since I was about 8; I've been 100% AI-generated code for at least 6 months now and have produced a combination of speed and quality that has astonished me; my velocity is apparent at https://github.com/pmarreck/ https://github.com/pmarreck/) and this has been a massive net gain, so your claim is now officially in sheer defiance of reality. In a skilled senior's hands, this is like an expert power tool. In the hands of someone less-skilled, it is likely also... less-skilled. It's a magnifier. > and the hidden cost in terms of technical debt and skill atrophy is just being swept under the rug. Nope, no it's not. It's being reviewed, measured, and controlled against. Because... you WILL need more controls to take full advantage. Look, I even invented a whole new control methodology around it called MFIC: https://gist.github.com/pmarreck/b30aa3ca69cb70a5526f8a63ab8c8d7e https://gist.github.com/pmarreck/b30aa3ca69cb70a5526f8a63ab8...
- byzantinegene 3mo ago
  you're right, but if skills atrophy so will the efficacy of the tool.
  - pmarreck 3mo ago
    Skills atrophying in terms of what? Remembering specific API's that you always had to look up anyway? You don't lose developer intuition, analytical thinking or technical inclination, and those are the things that matter, anyway. I recently did a fleetwide upgrade to Zig 0.16. Do I remember every single change from 0.15? No. Do I have to? Also no. Both because I can look it up if I need to, but also because the LLM already does. If I don't look at a codebase that I myself haven't looked at in a year, I will not recognize some things when I return to it. Is this sense of "atrophy" meaningful when this was a problem long before LLMs came on the scene?
    - wesleywt 3mo ago
      How do you deal with the lack of cognitive engagement? I think it is the primary driver of developing and maintaining skills as well as generating new ideas. Letting an agent do it for you will just get you average but well formatted code. Not something new.
kelnos 3mo ago
Why even bother posting, especially as a reply to a completely unrelated comment? This is just not substantive or useful to the conversation. (And I say this as someone who agrees with you that it's garbage that these companies are trying to legislate their way into an oligopoly.)
- casey2 3mo ago
  If you give Anthropic money they will make your life worse in another aspect, it's relevant to all their models. The best principle is to not give money to people who want to harm you. Anthropic has gone past fearmongering and well into terrorism. I think people on Hacker News should not recommend working with terrorist orgs.
  - brookst 3mo ago
    “Terrorism” is so ludicrous a hyperbole that it completely discredits your position.
  - theshrike79 3mo ago
    Should we work with companies that give the "Department of War" full access to their tools (OpenAI) or Chinese companies with completely opaque ownership and dev structures? Or the largest ad company in the world (Google)?
- jimbo808 3mo ago
  > Why even bother posting, especially as a reply to a completely unrelated comment?
throwaway27448 3mo ago
Making software illegal is not an easy task.
lemonteaau 3mo ago
The irony is that an authoritarian country is leading the world in open models
- deleted 3mo ago
  [deleted]
- pjerem 3mo ago
  How is that ironic knowing that an authoritarian imperialist country is leading the world in closed models ?
vidarh 3mo ago
> I don't think they're a net gain if you're a skilled senior I've had Claude Code running a /loop for the last week driving down complex crashing bugs in a prototype compiler entirely unilaterally. I occasionally glance over. A few of those crashing test cases were ones I've spent more than a week trying to track down myself. I have 30 years of experience of doing this. It's worked 24/7. So far it has fixed over 500 of them. Will there be technical debt? Yes. But nothing that remotely compares to the cost I'd have incurred of fixing all of those myself. It is hard to reconcile those gains without thinking that if people are saying these are not a net gain, they haven't really tried learning how to get the full benefit. If you sit and watch a model work and keep intervening all the time, then sure, they're not going to be a net gain.
- vidarh 3mo ago
  Btw, since this morning it's fixed another 200+ crashing test cases.

andsoitis 3mo ago

> They're actively trying to use lobbying power to make open weight models illegal. What is your evidence?

jimbo808 3mo ago
https://www.judiciary.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/2023-07-26_-_testimony_-_amodei.pdf https://www.judiciary.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/2023-07-26_-_... https://xcancel.com/coinbureau/status/2071330294452666695 https://xcancel.com/coinbureau/status/2071330294452666695 https://www.techpolicy.press/transcript-senate-hearing-on-principles-for-ai-regulation/ https://www.techpolicy.press/transcript-senate-hearing-on-pr... > "Once the weights of a model are public, they cannot be retrieved. If a model possesses dangerous capabilities, it is permanently out in the wild... We need to consider regulatory frameworks that account for the unique risks of open-source distribution of highly capable frontier models."
- TurdF3rguson 3mo ago
  That's true I guess. If someone decides a model needs more guard rails, anthropic can adjust it, whereas with open weights it's too late. It definitely sounds like the kind of thing that ends the world in B sci-fi thrillers.
  - TurdF3rguson 3mo ago
    Curious if I'm being downvoted by people who think there will never be a model with dangerous capabilities? Or people who think when it happens we shouldn't add guard rails?
Robdel12 3mo ago
Dario’s own mouth https://x.com/coinbureau/status/2071330294452666695/mediaviewer https://x.com/coinbureau/status/2071330294452666695/mediavie...
- jquery 3mo ago
  Yeesh. “What shall we do sire, when the peasants learn to read?” vibes
  - entropicdrifter 3mo ago
    You mean to tell me that anyone can own a nail-gun? We can't have people buying their own nail-guns, next thing you know they might build things that aren't up to code!
- anon373839 3mo ago
  He has also been telling bald-faced lies about open source/open weights models that are easily disproved. For example, he claimed that they lack the collaborative benefits of open source because "we can't see inside the model". Open weights models are responsible for enabling reams of research on interpretability methods that do just that. And they have facilitated so much collaboration on architecture, inference optimizations, training and steering methods, and other topics that were completely out of reach with closed models like Anthropic's. It's really staggering to me.
  - andsoitis 3mo ago
    Doesn’t this seem true / self-evident: “His warns that once powerful models are released openly, companies lose the ability to monitor misuse, revoke access, or update safety guardrails.”
    - anon373839 3mo ago
      The premise (that "powerful models" implicate "safety" concerns that must be controlled by "companies") does not seem true or self-evident to me. This tired fearmongering campaign centered on GPT-4 three years ago, a model now surpassed by open models that run on laptops. Did fearmongers like Amodei say, "Oops, we were wrong! It wasn't that dangerous after all"? No. Of course they didn't.

mastazi 3mo ago

good luck actually enforcing that.

anonzzzies 3mo ago

Sure about Dario (and all billionaire) weirdness, but no gains if you are a skilled senior is well, very far out in our experience (our company is 30 years old with mostly the original employees and founders): what we deliver now at the speed and quality we deliver it would have been impossible 10 years ago with our team size of skilled seniors. We replaced all the commercial products our clients and ourselves used with our own, giving us millions more revenue and profit with the upselling and efficiency benefits. We work for regulated clients: our code is reviewed, pentested and audited regularly by us and 3rd parties so its not slop either. You are definitely leaving money on the table. We do mostly use chinese models on our own hardware (we colocate cages of racks) so this is not about Anthropic but about AI in general. Skill athrophy is a real thing though; we try to prevent this by have hackethons (for lack of a better word) without AI where I pick something extremely non trivial and we implement it for fun and profit without AI (with would not matter much as they are currently bad at these things); last one was flex paxos for our in house db with obvious metrics for the endresult: data integrity (duh) under failure and performance better or at least the same as our raft production version.

andyroid 3mo ago
> We replaced all the commercial products our clients and ourselves used with our own You’ll never guess what product your clients are looking to replace with their own next.
- anonzzzies 3mo ago
  Sure, that is why you need to be early. I fully believe my company won't make it another 30 years (or 10), so we prepare for that. Also, I will be dead by then, but that is unrelated. For now everyone is still sufficiently crap at using AI to need help. We had enough clients trying to build something themselves and then come crying to us.
  - topato 3mo ago
    Having a health problem that puts an end date on your effort must tint your business choices in a unique and interesting way. I find your ideas intriguing, and wish to subscribe to your newsletter.

pmarreck 3mo ago

> I don't think they're a net gain if you're a skilled senior I'm a skilled senior (I'm 54 and been coding since I was about 8; I've been 100% AI-generated code for at least 6 months now and have produced a combination of speed and quality that has astonished me; my velocity is apparent at https://github.com/pmarreck/ https://github.com/pmarreck/) and this has been a massive net gain, so your claim is now officially in sheer defiance of reality. In a skilled senior's hands, this is like an expert power tool. In the hands of someone less-skilled, it is likely also... less-skilled. It's a magnifier. > and the hidden cost in terms of technical debt and skill atrophy is just being swept under the rug. Nope, no it's not. It's being reviewed, measured, and controlled against. Because... you WILL need more controls to take full advantage. Look, I even invented a whole new control methodology around it called MFIC: https://gist.github.com/pmarreck/b30aa3ca69cb70a5526f8a63ab8c8d7e https://gist.github.com/pmarreck/b30aa3ca69cb70a5526f8a63ab8...

byzantinegene 3mo ago
you're right, but if skills atrophy so will the efficacy of the tool.
- pmarreck 3mo ago
  Skills atrophying in terms of what? Remembering specific API's that you always had to look up anyway? You don't lose developer intuition, analytical thinking or technical inclination, and those are the things that matter, anyway. I recently did a fleetwide upgrade to Zig 0.16. Do I remember every single change from 0.15? No. Do I have to? Also no. Both because I can look it up if I need to, but also because the LLM already does. If I don't look at a codebase that I myself haven't looked at in a year, I will not recognize some things when I return to it. Is this sense of "atrophy" meaningful when this was a problem long before LLMs came on the scene?
  - wesleywt 3mo ago
    How do you deal with the lack of cognitive engagement? I think it is the primary driver of developing and maintaining skills as well as generating new ideas. Letting an agent do it for you will just get you average but well formatted code. Not something new.

kelnos 3mo ago

Why even bother posting, especially as a reply to a completely unrelated comment? This is just not substantive or useful to the conversation. (And I say this as someone who agrees with you that it's garbage that these companies are trying to legislate their way into an oligopoly.)

casey2 3mo ago
If you give Anthropic money they will make your life worse in another aspect, it's relevant to all their models. The best principle is to not give money to people who want to harm you. Anthropic has gone past fearmongering and well into terrorism. I think people on Hacker News should not recommend working with terrorist orgs.
- brookst 3mo ago
  “Terrorism” is so ludicrous a hyperbole that it completely discredits your position.
- theshrike79 3mo ago
  Should we work with companies that give the "Department of War" full access to their tools (OpenAI) or Chinese companies with completely opaque ownership and dev structures? Or the largest ad company in the world (Google)?
jimbo808 3mo ago
> Why even bother posting, especially as a reply to a completely unrelated comment?

throwaway27448 3mo ago

Making software illegal is not an easy task.

lemonteaau 3mo ago

The irony is that an authoritarian country is leading the world in open models

deleted 3mo ago
[deleted]
pjerem 3mo ago
How is that ironic knowing that an authoritarian imperialist country is leading the world in closed models ?

vidarh 3mo ago

> I don't think they're a net gain if you're a skilled senior I've had Claude Code running a /loop for the last week driving down complex crashing bugs in a prototype compiler entirely unilaterally. I occasionally glance over. A few of those crashing test cases were ones I've spent more than a week trying to track down myself. I have 30 years of experience of doing this. It's worked 24/7. So far it has fixed over 500 of them. Will there be technical debt? Yes. But nothing that remotely compares to the cost I'd have incurred of fixing all of those myself. It is hard to reconcile those gains without thinking that if people are saying these are not a net gain, they haven't really tried learning how to get the full benefit. If you sit and watch a model work and keep intervening all the time, then sure, they're not going to be a net gain.

vidarh 3mo ago
Btw, since this morning it's fixed another 200+ crashing test cases.