When Jensen (Nvidia) was doing interviews at his recent public talks, he was asked something along the lines of: "Why release these new laptops which are a low margin market, if your other businesses are vastly more profitable?" and his answer was basically that if they can build the coolest and best technology and push the frontier, they will do it. It's not all about making tons of money. He seemed genuinely excited about the tech.
It highlights the difference between companies like Nvidia and Anthropic to me, where one is clearly all about the money and power, and the other is doing it because they genuinely want to accelerate progress and make cool stuff as the driving factor. It's no surprise therefore, that Nvidia is the worlds largest open-source contributor to AI, with over 800 open-weight models.
Of course, these models run on Nvidia hardware, so they benefit from it as a company. But with that healthy mindset, they found a way to contribute that not only benefits everyone, but also benefits themselves.
Contrast to Anthropic, who has gone the complete opposite direction. Closed off everything, restricting everything, fearmongering progress, regulatory capture attempts, the list goes on. I mean, they won't even agree on using AGENTS.md as a standard because CLAUDE.md is free marketing for them. That's the level of disgusting greed we are dealing with...
From a game theory perspective, the cooperative strategies tend to win. As a result, Nvidia has set themselves up for a lifetime. Anthropic however, is playing a strategy of winner takes all, and they're happy to see the world and the entire AI industry collapse in the process.
Nvidia not doing it out of goodness of their hearts and love to open source. If at anynpoint their CUDA vendor lock-in moat will faik because Intel or AMD manage to get working software they'll return to keep everything locked and proprietary ASAP.
Basically everything Nvidia does in open source is there to make sure their proprietary stack have a good moat and no competitor stack can catch up.
The proof is in the pudding though. I'm judging based on their actions, not on their words. They're making AI models and AI research widely accessible, including selling consumer grade hardware to run them locally, and to use open-weight models. They could have just gone all in on selling to Anthropic, OpenAI, and all the other big tech companies, but they aren't. Meanwhile, Anthropic is trying to price people out of the market, increasing their restrictions, cutting the latest model from subscription plans, etc.
That's not really the impression I get from Anthropic, but if you have the links to back it up, I'm always willing to change my mind.
Compared to bizes like Oracle, Microsoft, or Facebook, I felt that Anthropic was more interested in progress (not to the neglect of business―AI training is expensive at the end of the day), but maybe I've just not seen what you've seen.
This is a good idea. I've been hoping that a large player with enough social reach would create an open-source fund that everyone can contribute to, to develop a company that trains and releases open-source models at the cutting edge. We can crowdfund the training costs, and the whole world benefits.
It's the most logical solution for AI anyway, considering that it's training on humanities collective knowledge. It should be more of a public-funded and public-access resource, rather than something greedy tech companies distribute like crumbs while they use unlocked powers internally to clone all of our businesses and swallow the economy.
It's actually the opposite. Democratization of intelligence is the only way to stop existential threats and render them useless.
Right now, and likely forever, because biological threats can be sanctioned at a supply-chain level, the risk of AI is all digital. Fraud, phishing scams, spam, hacks, etc.
The only way we harden the worlds infrastructure to the point that it can withstand attack from bad AI is if we have an abundance of access to frontier intelligence to develop countermeasures.
Otherwise, bad actors will develop these capabilities behind closed doors and use them to hold the world hostage and cause irreparable harm. There's no putting the genie back in the bottle. Good and open-access AI and the people using it are the digital immune system.
If there's an asymmetry where bleeding edge is gated off to only a small group, and allowed to gain exponential power over the immune systems defense grid, the slightest infection will lead to death of the host.
It's not only tenable, it is a necessity. Unless you want humanity to be enslaved in perpetuity to a single figurehead.
Bad AI is only countered by having a majority of good, open-access and open-source AI to keep it in check, where the good AI can overpower the bad. The moment you destroy that balance is the moment a bad actor gains exponential advantage and the ability to hold the whole world hostage forever.
Anthropic is almost solely responsible for the fear narrative around AI at this point. It has been their culture since the beginning, strongly pushing this into the zeitgeist at every opportunity, releasing bogus papers to frame things as highly dangerous and that their AI is a conscious sentient being.
Step 1: "OMG, the AI hacked a researcher eating a sandwhich in the park!"
Step 2: Journalists use that great clickbait to generate profit, which generates publicity for Anthropic
Step 3: Rinse repeat
If the threat of LLMs was treated relative to the actual capabilities of them, and we weren't all being lied to by Anthropic and their army of millions of social media bots and backing media companies and mouthpieces, we'd be going in a much healthier direction.
Working out the kinks/supply chain risks and developing sound, long-term countermeasures to the ACTUAL risks.
The only threat to the world is if progress is not open-sourced, democratized and in lockstep with capability. The moment it becomes a scenario of: Only a small group get access to frontier intelligence, is when it gives that small group power over everyone else in the world, and wildly increases the risk of a nuclear level event that WILL be exploited eventually - as the divide between the haves and the have nots accelerates in an exponential fashion. Bad AI is countered with an abundance of good AI that has been used to stay ahead of bad AI. The moment your bad AI outpowers the army of good AI it is game over for humanity. The strength of open-source and open-access AI is the difference between humanities permanent enslavement or extinction versus a prosperous future.
It doesn't help that most of the employees at Anthropic have willingly sold their souls out of short term greed and gaslight themselves into thinking that they're actually doing the right thing to justify their own greed to themselves, while building up an echo-chamber and culture of feel good lies within the company so they can sleep at night, and pat each other on the back. They go along with this because they get paid massive chunks of money from Anthropic, and their shares will be worth more money if Anthropic can swallow the worlds economy at the expense and enslavement of everyone else. What good is that money when you have to sell out humanity in the progress though. You, at Anthropic, is that the legacy you want to leave?
People need to start calling this out before it's far too late. If you work at Anthropic - time to start talking to your colleagues in an honest manner.
It's Anthropic facing consequences for their years long marketing plays. They're so greedy and narcissistic as a company and culture they believed they were special enough to be excluded from sanction internally, and that their behavior would only affect their competitors or would lead to outcomes positive for themselves: ergo, they get to hold the keys to the castle. Like Dario said in his negotiations with the DoW, he wants a seat at the big boys table. It's all about power for him.
Unfortunately though, they're not smart enough to realize the long term damage to the industry that they're doing without any hint of remorse will negatively affect them and will have the opposite effect: Highlighting how imperative it is we all switch to open-source and remove our reliance entirely from them.
So not only are they going to take the whole industry down out of their own greed and stupidity and ruin it for everyone in the short term, but they're going to put themselves and the other labs out of business in the long term. Well done Anthropic. Well done Dario. You played yourself. 5d chess.
Not at all. The writing is on the wall, and they want you to be locked into paying absurd subscription rates for neutered models while they internally use all of that money to run the unrestricted models to clone all of our businesses and swallow the economy. It really does not take a genius to see the long term play by Anthropic. They're a scummy company and have done everything in their power to lead to a scenario like this, but this isn't the exact scenario they bargained for because it affects their own employees and big foreign buyers. Instead, they'd rather have all of the decision making power themselves.
I really hope this is just an 'fu' to Anthropic for their disgusting business behavior.
The funny thing is that the model isn't even impressive. I'd still use ChatGPT over it for anything other than design work. As soon as OpenAI cracks design, I'll never touch an Anthropic model again.
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