361–370 of 951 posts
A concern: More and more plainly, OpenAI and Anthropic are making plays to own (and lease) the "means of production" in software. OK - I'm a pretty happy renter right now. As they gobble up previously open software stacks, how viable is it that these stacks remain open? It seems perfectly sensible to me that these providers and their users alike have an interest in further centralizing the dev lifecycle - eg, if Clau…
It would seem to me that purchasing a piece of software as an AI company is just an outright admission that they could not generate an equivalent piece of software for a better price? If it was cheaper to use their internal AI to create these tools, they would.
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If it becomes too antagonistic, people will change. The desire to build things is larger than any given iron fist du jour. Just ask Oracle or IBM.
Could you say the same about the Chrome browser? Google is using it to EEE the web (Embrace, Extend and Extend it till it's a monstrosity that nobody else can manage). That's pretty antagonistic. But did people change?
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If LLMs turn out to be such a force multiplier, the way to fight it is to ensure that there are open source LLMs.
The problem is even if an OSS had the resources (massive data centers the size of NYC packed with top end custom GPU kits) to produce the weights, you need enormous VRAM laden farms of GPUs to do inference on a model like Opus 4.6. Unless the very math of frontier LLMs changes, don’t expect frontier OSS on par to be practical.
If the open weights models are good, there are people looking to sell commodity access to it, much like a cloud provider selling you compute.
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Would you please stop breaking the site guidelines? We've warned/asked you countless times. You should know not to post like this by now. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
While I do see that the tone of the comment was stingy, it was aimed towards the frustration I have experienced while developing for Python and this piece of news as well.
I didn't see it as a bad thing as it not really aimed at anybody in particular, more like an opinion on Python's shortcomings.
I will try to post more substantive/less emotional comments going forward.
Company that repeatedly tells you software developers are obsoleted by their product buys more software developers instead of using said product to create software. Hmm.
For our teams, Codex is a massive productivity booster that actually increases the value of each dev. If you check our hiring page, you’ll see we are still hiring aggressively. Our ambitions are bigger than our current workforce, and we continue to pay top dollar for talented devs who want to join us in transforming how silicon chips provide value to humans.
Akin to how compilers reduced the demand for assembly but increased the demand for software engineering, I see Codex reducing the demand for hand-typed code but increasing the demand for software engineering. Codex can read and write code faster than you or me, but it still lacks a lot of intelligence and wisdom and context to do whole jobs autonomously.
While I -- like most other commenters -- am dubious of both OpenAI and this acquisition, I think it's pretty reasonable to wait to see how this turns out before rushing to final judgment. Everything I've seen from Astral and Charlie indicates they're brilliant, caring, and overall reasonable folks. I think it's unfair to jump to call them sell-outs and cast uv and the rest as doomed projects.
Charlie's fine. OpenAI are the problem here. Similar situation to steipete. Happy for the person, sad for the tool/ecosystem/everyone else.
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It's not any different from the launch of the FSF. There's a simple solution. If you don't want your lunch eaten by a private equity firm, make sure whatever tool you use is GPL licensed.
The biggest scam the mega-clouds and the Githubs ever pulled was convincing open source developers that the GPL was somehow out of vogue and BSD/MIT/Apache was better. All so they could just vacuum it all up and resell it with impunity.
The ones pushing for permissive licenses are rather companies like Apple, Android (and to some extent other parts of Google), Microsoft, Oracle. They want to push their proprietary stuff and one way to do that in the face of open source competition is by proprietary extensions.