The Private Capture of Public Genius • Hacker News Board

Re: The Private Capture of Public Genius

#101

Post by sfink » Tue, Jul 07, 2026, 12:01 AM UTC

stale2002 wrote: post #41

I'm surprised that the Author has missed a very important corollary to the diffusion of "genius theft" that they are bringing up. And that is the diffusion of the beneficiaries. Maybe they think that OpenAI and Anthropic are actually worth, like a trillion dollars each and can therefore have value extracted from them. I'm not so convinced. What if there aren't frontier labs spending billions on training a model. What…

> they failed to address that these labs are creating a public good as well. Who's to say that this "theft" is larger than the production of public goods that these labs give to the public in the first place.

Those aren't public goods, they're private goods. The difference is already apparent, and will become more so over time. But yes, they are "goods"; they have a lot of value.

I'm less interested in punishing the past theft that enabled these goods, and more worried about the ongoing damage they are doing to the ecosystem that birthed them. Good artists copy, great artists steal, but if a community is wholly dominated by these "great artists" then it will not survive as a community and will cease to produce anything worth copying let alone stealing.

Re: The Private Capture of Public Genius

#102

Post by MichaelZuo » Tue, Jul 07, 2026, 2:02 AM UTC

tptacek wrote: post #98

MichaelZuo wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You need to re-read the comment chain. Nobody claimed so many nations would contend for frontier models. I’m talking about training data, and so is the parent.

The only jurisdictions where training data is going to matter are in the US, Europe, and China. I think we're just talking past each other. My subtextual point is that none of this is ever going to happen.

This really makes no sense, as if half the words in the reply were garbled.

e.g. How is whether the training data from this or that jurisdiction “matter”, or not, even relevant to my comment?

I haven’t even thought of any specific “matter” enough threshold to evaluate that.

Re: The Private Capture of Public Genius

#103

Post by zombot » Tue, Jul 07, 2026, 6:58 AM UTC

> This is the private capture of public genius.

In other words, the biggest heist in human history. They took all of our collective knowledge and print money by selling it back to us.

Re: The Private Capture of Public Genius

#104

Post by scotty79 » Tue, Jul 07, 2026, 9:33 AM UTC

> returns constrained to a relatively conservative (by today’s standards) ~7% per annum

Damn, we should have something like that market wide. Progressive, with the revenue.

Forbidding vertical integration would be a tremendous blessing too.

Re: The Private Capture of Public Genius

#105

Post by zombot » Tue, Jul 07, 2026, 9:55 AM UTC

tptacek wrote: post #94

MichaelZuo wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This comment seems incoherent? Even if the UN only has a very small amount of legitimacy and credibility… that’s still far far better than literally zero.

Well, I mean, the alternative is for a US-based process to be put into place, followed (or led) by an EU process. The premise of my comment is that no matter who hosts the process, China isn't going to comply, so it really just comes down to the US and Europe.

And the US isn't going to comply either. Just like it never recognized the International Criminal Court in The Hague. In that respect it's at least as bad as China.

Re: The Private Capture of Public Genius

#106

Post by voakbasda » Tue, Jul 07, 2026, 1:55 PM UTC

MichaelZuo wrote: post #102

tptacek wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only jurisdictions where training data is going to matter are in the US, Europe, and China. I think we're just talking past each other. My subtextual point is that none of this is ever going to happen.

This really makes no sense, as if half the words in the reply were garbled. e.g. How is whether the training data from this or that jurisdiction “matter”, or not, even relevant to my comment? I haven’t even thought of any specific “matter” enough threshold to evaluate that.

There are legal matters and ethical matters being discussed. Legally, it does not matter. Ethically, it does.

Re: The Private Capture of Public Genius

#107

Post by aj_hackman » Tue, Jul 07, 2026, 3:01 PM UTC

marcus_holmes wrote: post #2

This was interesting right up until "The fund pays every eligible American the same amount each year. " I'm in Australia. I've contributed my share of dirt to the delta. Why do I not get a share of this? I get that the frontier companies are (for the moment) US companies. But that's just corporate ownership, it's not what we're talking about. We're talking about compensating the people who wrote the training data for…

Who would pay you? OpenAI has between $600 billion and $1.4 trillion in debt, and no hope for profitability. Anthropic, who have a much more modest $35 billion in debt (by using Sam Altman as a human shield), also has no chance of ever being in the black, pending some freak event.

Re: The Private Capture of Public Genius

#108

Post by MichaelZuo » Tue, Jul 07, 2026, 6:29 PM UTC

voakbasda wrote: post #106

MichaelZuo wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This really makes no sense, as if half the words in the reply were garbled. e.g. How is whether the training data from this or that jurisdiction “matter”, or not, even relevant to my comment? I haven’t even thought of any specific “matter” enough threshold to evaluate that.

There are legal matters and ethical matters being discussed. Legally, it does not matter. Ethically, it does.

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Re: The Private Capture of Public Genius

#109

Post by pgisapedo » Wed, Jul 08, 2026, 12:04 AM UTC

sfink wrote: post #100

pgisapedo wrote: post #87

It's been said a thousand times but the ability to produce copyrighted material is not copyright infringement. I'll say it again: You can produce copyrighted material all day long and it's not copyright infringement. If I draw The Simpsons on a piece of paper - whether or not I used AI to create it - it's not copyright infringement. Copyright infringement is if I tried to sell that Simpsons work as my own, putting up…

> It's been said a thousand times but the ability to produce copyrighted material is not copyright infringement. Aside from fair use, yes it is. > If I draw The Simpsons on a piece of paper - whether or not I used AI to create it - it's not copyright infringement. Only because of the fair use doctrine, which is limited. If it damages the market for the original, then a court could definitely declare it to be infringe…

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Re: The Private Capture of Public Genius

#110

Post by marcus_holmes » Wed, Jul 08, 2026, 2:22 AM UTC

dd8601fn wrote: post #85

marcus_holmes wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, yes, that's one possible outcome. I personally believe that it's more likely that the current batch of massively overleveraged AI companies go broke in the next year or so as the AI bubble bursts. Hopefully the USA manages to get its democratic shit together enough to not bail them out (as happened in 2008), and they just... stop. The OSS models are almost at the same level, and are progressing fine. The tech…

My spidey sense goes off when we refer to open weight models from Chinese companies trained against frontier models as OSS... as if it was some Torvalds types maintaining a public git repo. I think those open weight models exist because openai, anthropic, and google rule the roost. And I don't think things would continue as-is if those guys implode.

The technology has certainly moved faster because of all the money thrown at it recently, but it existed before that, and was progressing before that. So no, I think OpenAI, Anthropic only exist because of the open-weight models (that came before them) rather than the other way around. Google is a special case; they invented the transformer and then published it instead of commercialising it, so they actually weren't evil (for once), or they didn't realise what they'd done until too late.

I think things will continue perfectly fine if those guys implode. They didn't invent the technology, they're not the people who are advancing it most (because everything they do is proprietary and undisclosed), and their efforts at commercialising it are just getting in the way of the real research.