The alternative is ceding the leading edge to China and being dependent on them to continue releasing advances

If the leading model companies aren't profitable long-term, how do we get the money to continually spend on more research and more compute?

I get that plenty of people don't like big corporations or stock buybacks or certain CEOs, which is fine. But as someone who wants to see AGI happen FASTER, I really want to see a clear financial reason for maximal AGI investment.

If the model labs aren't clearly profitable, or open source models eat all the 'model layer' profit - what financial force will push forward very expensive experiments/scaling, etc.?

The model release is nice. I won't sing their praises for it because that plays into the long term strategy of a company I despise.

Is that intellectually dishonest?

There's a bunch of influencers who go help struggling people. I'm certain the majority of them aren't doing it out of principle, but at the end of the day people still get helped.

I don't know for sure, but I suspect it's like a lot of other things on the internet, with a bimodal distribution between people who get helped a lot ('Sir Hype surprises homeless former billionaire with a MILLION DOLLARS!') with many other similarly deserving people getting nothing. I prefer systems with a lot of people who get helped sufficiently to avoid hitting rock bottom in the first place.

Besides the fact that these undertakings are about promoting the benefactor (and the near certainty that some of these professional philanthropists will later turn out to devils LARPing as angels), it also makes the determination of moral worthiness turn on the public's fickle opinion about whether the recipient is sufficiently beautiful/ ugly/ unlucky/ desperate/ degraded enough to qualify. Charitable undertakings involving cameras are always a bit suspect.

> those in power will just learn to ignore us.

This has already been the case for at least my whole lifetime. So no, I don't feel like praising them when they do one seemingly "good" thing, while simultaneously doing 99 "bad" things.

pytorch is really mostly C++ after all, you don't have to use it with python.

Python just allows you to use it like "normal code", whereas if you program it in C++ you really get exposed to what's under the hood and can't write "normal code"

Wasn't LLaMA or Llama 2 the first ever open weight LLM through a leak, and weren't there speculations that Zuckerberg himself might be involved in it? He does seem like a good-ish guy at the most crucial moments of truths.

Yes, but have those positive effects on AI research had a positive or negative effect on society? I guess time will tell

The "legacy media" is not a single individual who has total control of billions of dollars in capital to do whatever they want at the drop of a hat. You're conflating two very different issues.

Zuckerberg deserves all of the negative attention he draws, and I'd argue that his spotlight is his own doing. He, individually, could choose to do good at the global level. He chooses not to. That, to me, means that your finger pointing is inverted. "Legacy media" may have had that level of influence in the past but properties like Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp now hold those cards. One can only hope Zuckerberg ends up being displaced in the same way.

legacy media is not proactively manipulating us via algorithmically amplifying division to increase 'engagement', all to sell us some ads... I do think Zuck is one of the more harmful figures in modern history. That being said, good open models? great!

> But I think the legacy media deserves 100x that criticism for doing the same thing.

No, they don’t do the same thing.

I always hope that people who write things like this are considerably younger than I, because as someone who experienced "legacy media" for decades before the Internet was widely available, the idea that "they’re not doing anything more evil than what was already the norm" is complete, total, 100% bullshit.

Yes, "clickbait" was a thing even before people were clicking. "Yellow journalism" helped start the Spanish-American war over 125 years ago. But the pernicious effects on society of social media are way, way worse, if only because social media companies have way more data, and correspondingly more levers to act on that data. They run addiction machines that legacy media could only dream of, and they do it for the sole purpose of making money, all other consequences be damned.

I'm into a rather niche artistic pursuit, and I get lots of reels on this topic, and I noticed that the top comment on these reels is always the dumbest, most asinine comment imaginable. It's like if HN's algorithm were literally reversed. It's like this because of course these comments get lots of "engagement" because it's just rage bait. And all of Facebook is like this - they deliberately push the most rage inducing content because it's profitable.

Zuckerberg deserves all the opprobrium he gets and then some. I'm not necessarily arguing that legacy media is more "moral", but they simply never had the tech to tear society apart like Zuckerberg does.

Have you read Sarah Wynn-Williams' book? The whole org is rotten.

> But I think the legacy media deserves 100x that criticism for doing the same thing.

This comparison is absurd.

"Legacy media" wouldn't even be technically able to cause so much damage because they send one message to everybody while meta aims their messages and members at specific other members of their platform.

https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/boards-policy-regulat...

https://www.npr.org/2026/03/25/nx-s1-5746125/meta-youtube-so...

So yeah, Zuck's reputation might be even too good these days but I may see it wrong. It may be that the moral levels in the US are so deep right now that he looks better to me from the outside.

...compared to Elon for example.