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OpenAI is Visa – Buttering up the government to retain a monopoly

sherwood.news

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Re: OpenAI is Visa – Buttering up the government to retain a monopoly

#61

Post by insane_dreamer »

ADeerAppeared wrote: post #16
insane_dreamer wrote: post #6

Doesn't explain what regulations Visa pushed for and got which helped it maintain its monopoly. Would be helpful to have some concrete examples of what it did and what OpenAI is trying to do. The point of the article sounds plausible, but doesn't really present any evidence to support it. Also OpenAI in no way has a monopoly of the kind that Visa/MC has.

> Also OpenAI in no way has a monopoly of the kind that Visa/MC has. I think this is misreading how literal the comparison is meant to be; Sherwood's running a bunch of "OpenAI is X" articles today. This is not about the massive duopoly which has been catastrophic for US payments, but about the way companies entrench themselves. > Doesn't explain what regulations Visa pushed for and got which helped it maintain its m…

> Those details are in the linked WSJ article; https://www.wsj.com/finance/banking/visa-wanted-a-vast-empir...

if you're trying to make a point in an article, summarize your evidence rather than link to a paywalled article that your readers may not be able to access

Re: OpenAI is Visa – Buttering up the government to retain a monopoly

#62

Post by insane_dreamer »

jpcom wrote: post #51
insane_dreamer wrote: post #6

Doesn't explain what regulations Visa pushed for and got which helped it maintain its monopoly. Would be helpful to have some concrete examples of what it did and what OpenAI is trying to do. The point of the article sounds plausible, but doesn't really present any evidence to support it. Also OpenAI in no way has a monopoly of the kind that Visa/MC has.

are you allergic to doing your own research like everyone else on hacker news? someone took the time to write a thought provoking article and all i see is critical reception.

> allergic to doing your own research like everyone else on hacker news

if an article wants to make a point, then the onus in on the article author to present evidence that supports their view, not on the readers to try to find the evidence supporting the author's view

Re: OpenAI is Visa – Buttering up the government to retain a monopoly

#64

Post by reissbaker »

insane_dreamer wrote: post #6

Doesn't explain what regulations Visa pushed for and got which helped it maintain its monopoly. Would be helpful to have some concrete examples of what it did and what OpenAI is trying to do. The point of the article sounds plausible, but doesn't really present any evidence to support it. Also OpenAI in no way has a monopoly of the kind that Visa/MC has.

It's written by Taylor Lorenz. I wouldn't expect it to be particularly well-researched; just to have a maximally anti-tech slant.

Re: OpenAI is Visa – Buttering up the government to retain a monopoly

#65

Post by ADeerAppeared »

delichon wrote: post #7
chvid wrote: post #2

Not much of a monopoly when they are being outcompeted by open source models done by companies with a fraction of OpenAIs resources. Sure - a government sanctioned monopoly might have been their fantasy but now it is getting obvious it is not the way things are going to go …

And it's less likely after the election. Trump pledged to repeal Biden's 2023 executive order on AI. He put out a very different executive order in 2019 that sought to reduce barriers. He is an enthusiastic deregulator compared to the current chief. That helped more than a little to get Andreessen, Musk, etc., to climb on the bandwagon. It can all be reversed at the wave of a very transactional presidential hand, but…

Do keep in mind that both Trump and Andreessen & co are not interested in deregulation for ideological reasons, only because this specific deregulation is favourable for the men in question.

It's not about "open AI" but just opposition to the tech giants. And as a consequence, there's a danger that they may pivot on AI regulation the moment anything happens to the current AI bubble that makes it unappealing for VC funding. (OpenAI & co raising the prices on the models to above operating costs would almost certainly eviscerate the AI startup scene)

Re: OpenAI is Visa – Buttering up the government to retain a monopoly

#67

Post by echelon »

nottorp wrote: post #33
insane_dreamer wrote: post #6

Doesn't explain what regulations Visa pushed for and got which helped it maintain its monopoly. Would be helpful to have some concrete examples of what it did and what OpenAI is trying to do. The point of the article sounds plausible, but doesn't really present any evidence to support it. Also OpenAI in no way has a monopoly of the kind that Visa/MC has.

> Also OpenAI in no way has a monopoly of the kind that Visa/MC has. They've been working very hard on getting one for at least a year though. Every time Altman whines about the dangers of AI, he's lobbying for government regulation that would raise barriers to entry into the market. And please no, god forbid there are any free solutions. Let's drown them in regulation worth a few hundred million per year.

Open source is going to eat "Open"AIs lunch.

Llama and Qwen are giving GPT and o# a run for their money. And you can build actual applications atop them.

Hunyuan is as good as Sora and works with ComfyUI and a robust set of open tooling and controlnets. LTX runs blindingly fast on consumer hardware.

Nobody talks about Dall-E anymore which is how far the open models have progressed. Why use a shitty web UI when you can have Invoke's incredible inpainting, brushes, and layers for free? Or fine tune your own style?

This game isn't going to be about foundation models. The value of a foundation model is fungible and will go to zero. The switching costs are zero and there are too many players.

This is a game about compute and applications.

Thanks for speed running the game OpenAI and showing everyone the way. We don't need you anymore.

Re: OpenAI is Visa – Buttering up the government to retain a monopoly

#68

Post by SllX »

lesuorac wrote: post #46
mdasen wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yea, I don't want to defend Visa, but a lot of their dominance came from network effects. Merchants want to accept Visa because it's what people have in their wallet. Customers want Visa because it's what merchants accept. That cycle keeps reinforcing itself. That's not to say that Visa hasn't worked toward favorable regulations, but the biggest problem with alternative payment networks (to Visa/MC/Discover/AMEX) is…

> but the biggest problem with alternative payment networks (to Visa/MC/Discover/AMEX) is that most retailers don't take them Who? I thought it was just like Costco that didn't take Discover/Amex/MC due to Visa contract. Aren't all the credit card terminals pretty much from 3p vendors who support everything including Apple Pay + Square + etc?

Plenty of places don't take American Express or Discover even now, but most will usually take VISA and Mastercard.

Costco's a weird one though because they resisted credit cards for a long time until they had their Amex contract with the dual-branded Costco Amex card, but then dropped them for a dual-branded VISA card in 2016.

Re: OpenAI is Visa – Buttering up the government to retain a monopoly

#69

Post by 1659447091 »

bdangubic wrote: post #57
dangerwill wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What's the difference if they want to force customers to use cash or Visa. I'll leave the cash option aside because the provider of cash is the US treasury. But yes, I do think it is wrong for a merchant to only allow mastercard or visa or discover. I understand merchants not taking Amex because their fees are significantly higher on the merchant side, but discover, mastercard, and visa are all similar for the merc…

I don’t understand this line of argument at all… Costco has competitors, you do NOT have to go to Costco. I choose not to go to many places because I disagree with their business practices or politics or whatever I feel like - it is my right. I do not understand this at all - especially in America. You don’t want my MasterCard or Discover or WhateverNewPaymentThingy? Great, imma head over to XYZ and spend my money th…

> And excusing Amex - why is that?! Fees alone?

To be fair, the core AMEX product is a charge card, not a credit card. They have more recently expanded into a few credit card products. I don't know the exact details, but my understanding is that the charge card system is more merchant hostile than the credit card system and more than simply larger fees.

Re: OpenAI is Visa – Buttering up the government to retain a monopoly

#70

Post by pentagrama »

> Dozens of other companies, including Google, Meta, and most recently Amazon, have come out with their own foundational models. Some, including Meta’s Llama and Mistral’s 7B, are open source, meaning they can be downloaded and used in other companies’ products free of charge.

To say that these models are open source is debatable. At least by the OSI definition, they aren't [1].

The models are free of charge for commercial use, but it may have restrictions (eg. Llama [2]).

[1] https://opensource.org/ai/open-source-ai-definition

[2] > Can anyone access Llama models? What are the terms? Llama models are broadly available to developers and licensees through a variety of hosting providers and on the Meta website. The Llama models are licensed under the applicable Llama Community License Agreement and accompanying Acceptable Use Policy, which provides a permissive license to the models along with certain restrictions to help ensure that the models are used responsibly. Hosting providers may have additional terms applicable to their services. https://www.llama.com/faq/

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