The world runs on incentives. Altruism/Self-serving are down stream of that.

Wikipedia is altruistic, and serves humanity quite well.

theturtletalks 8 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Open-source is also altruistic. If DeepSeek does become self-serving once they get the top spot, it doesn’t take away from the altruistic contributions that they made towards open models.

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wqaatwt 7 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> Open-source is also altruistic

Contributing to it might not necessarily be. Most open source development is funded by large companies after all and from their perspective it can function as a cost saving measure. Allowing them to focus on their core products and removing the possibility of their rivals from getting a competitive advantage due to having a superior low level stack under their product.

Which is why open source is so successful in areas where software is a cost-center but mostly failed for consumer products (since spending resources on them would actually be altruistic unlike e.g. Linux kernel development)

	▲	spongebobstoes 5 hours ago \| parent [-]
		altruism is not discernable from the outside any altruistic act can be perceived as self serving

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brookst 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

And ultimately the motivation for those contributions just doesn’t matter, except to those who like to anthropomorphize company and argue about their souls.

	▲	Dibby053 7 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		People who donated to OpenAI in its early years might disagree on that.
	▲	kelipso 6 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Or if they want to do anything close to predicting what they will do in the future, like curious and interested humans tend to want to do.

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threethirtytwo 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

No parent is right. The core root driver of the world is capitalism, open source exists downstream of that.

Software engineers need money to survive. If they exclusively work on open source stuff where are they getting money from to survive? Follow the money trail… even a donation… eventually it leads to an incentive based source or action.

	▲	mejutoco an hour ago \| parent [-]
		> If they exclusively work on open source stuff where are they getting money from to survive? From open source. You can earn money from open source. Open source is not opposed to capitalism, idk where you got that idea.

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microgpt 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Is it though? A large number of people get to experience a lot of power over others because they moderate Wikipedia. That's certainly why some of them do it, just like on Reddit

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nozzlegear 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I hate to quote pithy proverbs, but "the road to hell is paved with good intentions." One can have an altruistic goal which ends up harming people too, which is where that proverb comes from. Prohibition and The War on Drugs in the US are two good examples of something that had altruistic origins[†] but ended up doing way more harm than good.

[†] Another problem with altruism: we don't all agree on whether a goal is altruistic, and what's altruistic in the enactor's eyes might not be in yours. Curating a fountain of human knowledge like Wikipedia? Probably altruistic. Protecting humanity from itself by installing your company as the stewards of frontier LLMs? Not so altruistic in my view.

	▲	dragonwriter 3 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		> Prohibition and The War on Drugs in the US are two good examples of something that had altruistic origins The War on Drugs had the purpose (not just in its origin but in its perpetuation) of inflicting harm on elite-disfavored subsets of the population that could not be openly targeted for Constitutional reasons, which is about as far from an altruistic reason as it possible to get.
	▲	intended 4 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		[dead]

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threethirtytwo 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

This statement is factually true and you are voted down because many people lack knowledge.

Any individual that provides free labor cannot survive off of said free labor. He must work for money to survive or get donations from someone who earned that money from incentive based labor in order to even buy the food he needs to exist as a living human being. Much of the time that labor is actually closed source.

This is a logistical reality. A lot of open source advocates are unable to get their brains out of the whole mentality that open source literally cannot exist without incentive based software supporting it. Who pays for GitHub to exist? Who pays for the food swes eat? I just code for open source all day and money falls out of the sky.

My smart friend says there are jobs that pay you to work on open source exclusively. Smart guy. In this case you follow the money trail. How does that company get enough money to pay a guy to work exclusively on open source?

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docfort 3 hours ago | parent [-]

Free labor enables capitalism, especially if you consider labor arbitrage as a mixture of free labor and properly compensated (according to the real value) labor. From literally being born, to family culture, education, and whatever level of broad social cohesion, it’s all free labor. Without that background, money itself loses its value, since an individual cannot have reasonable confidence in trading it for something of actual tangible value. It is abstract stored value, banked into society for free. Indeed, in many cases, the free labor is in the rational self interest of a group. But stability and love and peace aren’t monetized to their true value. Otherwise, markets should be much less stable. Bubbles are only notable for the large impact of a small group of bad actors. Overall, it’s pretty amazing what free labor does. Open source is just another instance of this long and critical tradition.

	▲	threethirtytwo 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Free labor is derivative to incentivized labor. Your statement here doesn’t disprove or counter what I said. Again, follow the money trail. Everything you said if you follow the origin of the money it comes from paid, incentivized labor. Parents need money to raise kids… where do they get that money?? Our economy is called capitalism for a reason there is literally zero reference to charity or altruism in the vocabulary or even standard models that describe our economy and economic theory. Put it another away: if we removed your ability to do incentivized labor and all you can do is charity work… you would run out of money and die from starvation. If we did the opposite and we removed your ability to do charity work… you’d be fine. All of this re-emphasizes the point of this thread: In our objective reality, the world is driven by incentive based work while altruism is a side effect of surplus wealth generated by incentive based work. That is the fundamental reality.

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Der_Einzige 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Go read Max Stirner. True "Alturism" doesn't exist. It's all egoism, even if and especially if you think it's not.