> I like hyperbole as much as the next guy. And I'm cynical by nature. But this just seems like a wildly pessimistic view that gives literally zero charity to anyone working at or leading a frontier lab.

Reading TFA, I too paused on that sentence, thinking "This is overstated and feels like overheated rhetoric." My reasoning though is a bit different than yours. In addition to being too extreme and absolute as stated, it also misses that it's not uncommon for startup entrepreneurs, scientists, researchers, or really, anyone working intensely on something, to fall into single-focus myopia around what they're working on.

As you observed, the basic point about valuing open models is valid and worthwhile on its own, making the overheated rhetoric and asserting unevidenced intent and underlying political motivations an unnecessary distraction which unfortunately weakens a strong main point.

_That wasn't hyperbole_...

Why do those working at frontier labs deserve charity?

> that gives literally zero charity to anyone working at or leading a frontier lab

With all due respect, dude, who cares.

Oh noes! We are not giving the billionaire steering reality without a democratic mandate enough benefit of the doubt. I'm sure they will feel mildly sad now.

It is a valid and admirable goal to defend people that are being shat on online, but keep in mind that you are in fact not a billionaire + it is in fact in your own best interest that people without a democratic mandate do not get to control the world.

The "think they're building the Machine God" part and "think they're the only ones that can be trusted to build it" parts are true.

Controversially: I agree with them. They're correct to think that. They are, and they are.

At the very least, the former is true even if the latter is murky. I trust them over Facebook and Google and China and open source "raze the commons" labs.

I trust Anthropic more than OpenAI when it comes to ASI catastrophe prevention, but I still trust OAI more than those other parties. But both still might fuck it up.

Read End Times Fascism and the Fight for the Living World.

> ...that they're fine with burning down the world to bring about AGI...

I like the odds and am happy to play this lottery. Bring it on!

My hunch is that if you do not share the same opinions on Ai, you cannot get a job working at a frontier lab. Contemporary "cultural fit" reduces thought diversity and leads to echo chambers. I've seen a few HN comments about lab interviews that indicate this is a possibility.

Talk about a bad faith reading.

>American frontier labs are run by unhinged lunatics

good faith reading of this would interpret this as meaning Altman, Amodei, and perhaps Musk. The title of the article focuses on OpenAI snd Anthropic directly after all. Also the comment literally refers to those "running" the labs so claiming that the author is also applying that description to "anyone working at the labs" like you claim again seems like a bad faith take.

You should come out and state directly which Americam frontier labs deserve a charitable view. Maybe you believe Google and Meta are more deserving, you should state that if so.

Secondly, the investment ecosystem for American frontier labs results in their CEOs managing obscene amounts of money, and thus power. This concentration of power in a few private individuals seems to have little comparison with the power excercised by the leaders of European and Chinese frontier labs in their own respective countries. If one believes in the dictum, "Absolute power corrupts absolutely," then it is not a stretch to view American frontier labs as being more susceptible to its consequences.

I’m not sure this is actually hyperbole. There have been credible links between Dario Amodei and the Effective Altruism movement, Effective Altruism off course being a cult-like movement with weird believes that rhyme a lot with the eugenics movement. Sam Altman, while not as bad as Dario Amodei, has also weathered many weird believes which likens AI to some god-like entity, including doomsday prediction which share a lot of themes with Christian doomsday cults.

> But this just seems like a wildly pessimistic view that gives literally zero charity to anyone working at or leading a frontier lab

Actually believing that the people working or leading OpenAI/Anthropic are fucking lunatic weirdos is the most charitable interpretation.

Because the least charitable interpretation is that they are either grifters that know this to be bullshit, or they are actively evil and want to bring about the end times anyway.

None of this is a hyperbole. If you think it is, you're just part of the cult.

> who genuinely believe they're creating the Machine God,

I promise you none of them believe that. It takes 10 minutes with an LLM and the right set of questions to figure out that were are maybe like 10% of the way there towards AGI.

Indeed - Azure also has a ZDR (even for security purposes) option. You have to fill out a form, and a (likely) human evaluates and decides if you get it.

My guess is the average Joe will get rejected, but if you're a big company who cares about trade secrets, etc - of course the major cloud providers will provide a ZDR option.

by considering that this is not the main way most humans interact with Ai, the vast majority of people do not pay for Ai, ergo they are the product

If you think any company capable of even coming close to competing with frontier labs aren't "evil" in the same way these frontier labs are, then you're a sucker.

You either practice enough nuance to know that labeling a company like these "evil" is doing a disservice to the critical thinking needed in this discourse, or any company in this space (and likely just any company in general) is fundamentally evil. Picking and choosing based on your feelings is pointless.

>They are chinese, but they should get my money since they do good for the world.

Love the implication that them being Chinese is the moral dilemma lol. Also love that a company just operating in a competitive space is doing "good for the world" because... what, they offer this service cheaply? lol

You don't have to give z.ai any money. GLM is an open-weight model.

OpenRouter lists a few dozen providers for GLM 5.3 and GLM 5.3 Flash. Pick a provider in your country and keep at least some of that money from going to china (not counting all the hardware).

If there were an International AI Club which trained models and all the members sat down each year and voted for the board I would trust it even if it had a cutthroat commercial arm.

I think the only thing that matters is control.

From both experience and the continued state of the incentives that lead to the behavior, it seems unreasonable to trust any company at their word about such things

Secure enclaves

You have not been paying attention then. It's been posted on HN millions times already: Chineese models, Chinese vendors. /s

I was skeptical about this too. I used to have the $100/month Claude subscription. I'm still on my first month of just using open weight models, but so far I think the costs will be comparable. Maybe even less some months. But obviously it depends on your actual usage. I think it's worth trying it out instead of just assuming it will cost much more.

Using Deepseek v4.1 Flash on something like GreenGPT is probably about a euro a day if you use it all day. Hard to see how that is 5x more expensive.

> except that both companies offer insane subscription benefits to individuals

For now.

The level of astroturfing and hate on HN whenever a non-US AI story is posted is really quite shocking. HN has always had a US bent, but it's gotten to the point where you can't even have a technical discussion of non-US AI because it will be drowned out by a very vocal anti-everyone-else-but-the-US crowd.

But yes, great piece. It really captures why I use open models on european hardware. It's like we haven't learned by now that competition is good and we should be encouraging a diverse and open ecosystem.

Has the HN population really been skeptical? I think most see the scam (uber, WeWork, Airbnb, etc) for what they are (mostly illegal efforts to steamroll laws and blitz scale to a monopoly), and they want in.

What mistakes did media / political ecosystem make with big tech and social?

Also I don't understand how 'the media' is separate from social media. People decided to shift their media consumption from magazines, cable tv, corp news outlets to social media. Aren't they all the media (in function)?

Everything's a grift to our current leaders and media. The specifics are wholly irrelevant and replaceable. crypto, AI, it's buzzwords and the important thing is how much money they can make off the grift du-jour.

Of course there are differences with the impact AI is having economically and the devastation wrought by datacenters -but that doesn't matter to the media or the politicians; they simply want their greenbacks, specifics and effects be damned.

Yeah, I see these takes a lot. A bunch of people saying e.g. they use DeepSeek 4.1 flash for all their coding and notice no difference to frontier models

I tried it for a day running everything twice, once with opus 5.5 and once with deepseek. If you notice no difference... I don't know what to say.

I think maybe it's people working on tiny self contained things where code quality doesn't matter that much? But in a big codebase, the open models just aren't good enough to make good changes

At this point in time I'd rather China have my data than the U.S. I don't do anything sensitive and China can't arrest me under NPSM-7 for putting the wrong proper noun and active verb in the same sentence.

Not using AI is also an option.