[energy123]

It's the same reason Meta open sourced Llama and AMD open sourced FSR. When you're behind it is a prudent strategy because it undermines investment in the private frontier. Once you're on top you pull the rug and go closed source. There are no morals in this anywhere to be found.

> 100s of Millions

That is utter peanuts given the stakes. This is competition between two super powers for the most important technology in human history.

[tjwebbnorfolk]

Are you saying if someone gives you something for free, it's immoral if they don't continue giving it to you for free forever?

The children's book "if you give a mouse a cookie" was about exactly this phenomenon

[kasey_junk]

A more charitable reading of this comment is that you can make a game theoretical argument for these behaviors that doesn’t require altruism. And that argument therefore doesn’t preclude going closed at a later date.

[weitendorf]

“He’s only being good because he likes how it feels, or values goodness, or exists in a social context where doing the right thing is socially rewarded! That has no bearing on whether he, intrinsically, is good!”

Not to get all philosophical but this makes no sense outside of the context of a very specific post-Protestant, engagement/outrage-driven social media context.

If people are “only being good because it’s in their best interest” the last thing you should be doing is arguing against valuing good things, or making it impossibly difficult for someone capable of doing good to be trusted. Also literally the basis for Western (Plato, good as attractor state, res publica) and Eastern (kongzi, filial piety, social harmony) civilization btw.

[kelnos]

If the cookie in this analogy is crack cocaine, then yes, I'd say it's immoral.

[hgoel]

I think what they're saying is that any morality related arguments during the free phase are irrelevant because their actions are not based in morality. Put differently, they aren't giving you something for free out of the goodness of their hearts.

[tough]

"The first hit is always free" - Your dealer

[weitendorf]

I think it’s one thing to give you something free forever, and another to deliberately foster dependency / suck all the oxygen out of the room just to abuse it.

It’s also not a binary thing. You could truly start off with the noblest intentions but succumb to lesser-evil thinking or unforeseen political/personal complexities, lose influence or control to those with less pure intentions, be bought or become a political pawn in a more extractive endeavor without realizing it, etc.

Reasonable adults generally understand that “free stuff” costs real time and money to provide, and that businesses can only sustain it when it helps them sell their products. Unfortunately that means “free” appeals most to people with lots of time, no money, or lacking in the reasoning/adulthood departments.

[monsieurbanana]

Nobody isn't giving anything to you for free

[33MHz-i486]

pretty sure the lesson of that book was for the boy, to not indulge freeloaders. not for the mouse, to not accept free services

[hnfong]

In an extreme sense, yes. If the free stuff was given for a prolonged period of time with the expectation that it would continue indefinitely.

In modern terms, it's enabling others' pathological dependency on your free stuff.

The same way a normal parent would teach their child to become self sufficient instead of providing for them for their first 30 years of life and then tell them to figure out how to live after being used to not working.

I mean, it's pretty sad but there are examples of these things happening, and I definitely wouldn't say the parent is blameless for allowing this to happen.

[verdverm]

Google on it's own is spending 1000x that in a single year $280B in '26 alone iirc

I could also argue with GP's comment that some US companies are driving towards commoditization as well. One released a model this week and another announced their series d today.

[OccamsMirror]

> most important technology in human history.

Do you really believe this?

[chongli]

You don't have to believe it. It's a bet. If you're wrong, everybody loses their money. If you're right, you want to be the biggest winner.

[Certhas]

Not the person you are asking, but... In my view, the two most important technology clusters in human history are writing and industrialization. The former made culture (cognitive work) cumulative. The latter made physical work approximately free, with the result that we now have 5% instead of 95% working on producing food. Now we have a technology that could potentially be a culmination of these two: The industrialization of cognitive work/culture.

It isn't absurd to think this is one of the most consequential technologies ever. It probably doesn't make sense to rank technologies (which build on top of each other after all) by importance, but it's fairly clear this is a historic breakthrough.

[jerojero]

Agriculture is the most important set of techniques and technologies in human history, it gave us the possibility of staying in a place.

There's also fire.

Writing was very important, I'm not so sure about industrialization, maybe as modern men we might think that way. But human life was perfectly liveable and conceivable without it. Even writing. Big civilizations like the Inca empire didn't really have writing (although they had the quipu system for record keeping).

If there's a civilization collapse, we will still be doing fire and agriculture. We probably won't be doing industrialization and computers.

[Certhas]

Fire predates modern humans. I will concede agriculture as up there with the two I mentioned, but I think you underestimate how radical the shift of industrialisation was/is, and I think this is because history teaches us about highly atypical lives from the past. City dwellers, kings, etc...

In fact you could reasonably argue that life for most people didn't change that much from establishing agricultural settlements all the way up to industrialization. Most people spent most of their time procuring food and clothing/shelter using roughly similar methods.

[olalonde]

It depends what you mean by "technology" but if you include hypothetical milestones like AGI/ASI, it is the last technology we need to invent.

[neonstatic]

> This is competition between two super powers for the most important technology in human history.

Photonic computing?

[ethbr1]

I'd vote fire, but people say Grug brain ethr1 know too much about old technology.

[monster_truck]

There's only one superpower left and it isn't America.

You ever seen a swan drown something before? It ain't quick

[gerdesj]

What sort of swans are you on about?

All the ones I'm familiar with are veggies, with webbed feet and squawk a lot.

[gerdesj]

"most important technology in human history"

So far it rates "quite important" and certainly not "paradigm shift".

I've just spent most of the day wading through vibed blogs and what not to glean info on ... setting up LLMs! The content on the web is already in a parlous state and rapidly getting nicely but rather the same presentation and mostly right but somewhat wrong, often in crucial parts.

On the bright side I did find an absolute belter of a vibed site and it was only mildly wrong but I was able to sort that bit out and to be fair I think it was written up by an expert with help from a LLM and had a genuine human mistak in it.

Anyway, I suggest you might like to look at the internet as a whole as a paradigm shift and reserve judgement on LLMs and this decade's version of AI.