I think openrouter is well on its way to being "big cloud". OpenAI/Anthropic not so much, at least as long as they bet the farm on incremental quality advances.
Strange that workers organizing to better their working conditions would raise such concerns, vs. say, the management changing c suite roles with zero oversight. Bosses know best?
Unions are a great idea, but some modern unions have been corrupted, focusing less on worker solidarity and improving conditions/pay and more on unrelated “omnicause” topics that are destructive to both the workers and the company. Emphasis on some, which is why I said it may be fine. It’s really hard to tell in advance.
Executives have always been a potential source of problems, nothing new there.
Hmm, maybe you can enlighten us with some examples of "corrupted unions" focusing on harmful product changes to some kind of demonstrable extent?
The issue of leadership corruption in unions is well-known and definitely does _not_ lead to the kind of PC tyranny you're worried about here.
To be clear, what I'm objecting to is the "harrrumph I'll support worker's unions IFF they hew exactly to my non-working-condition-oriented values and demands." How about just supporting the workers?
The most recent examples are the unionized London Google workers attempting to force the company to terminate its military AI contracts and giving researchers right of refusal on individual projects. Something similar happened at Microsoft, it was not a union action but it was organized.
Public service unions (teachers, police, corrections) are of course highly political and often get involved in things way beyond work conditions and pay.
In the current political environment it’s not a stretch to imagine a union attempting to change Wiki policy to achieve political goals. Wikipedia is a public good and I would highly oppose this.
I’m more pro-union than most, I support having a union rep on the board as in German companies, but I think this should come with both designated powers and limits. The union gets a vote on the direction of the company, but they don’t get to dictate it, which would effectively be a seizure of the company. When it comes to work conditions and pay, they get a much stronger vote, strong enough to force fair compromises. That’s the union deal.
Co-ops are a better model for workers who want to join a company where they have full democratic control.
> The most recent examples are the unionized London Google workers attempting to force the company to terminate its military AI contracts and giving researchers right of refusal on individual projects. Something similar happened at Microsoft, it was not a union action but it was organized. Public service unions (teachers, police, corrections) are of course highly political and often get involved in things way beyond work conditions and pay.
These are examples of workers leveraging their collective strength to do something that putatively a majority of workers support (modulo corruption/bad leadership of course). Shall I now give you the endless scroll of management doing all of the above and worse? Yes, union workers have a modicum of power to impact company operation, but it's not built-in to the concept of collective bargaining and indeed your Google example "attempted" to do something; management can simply do it.
> it’s not a stretch to imagine a union attempting to change Wiki policy to achieve political goals. Wikipedia is a public good and I would highly oppose this.
Wikipedia is not a "public" good. There is no mechanism preventing Wales and co taking it whatever direction they want.
> Co-ops are a better model for workers who want to join a company where they have full democratic control.
Co-ops are indeed great, but Wikipedia is not offering to become a co-op. You are arguing for "designated powers and limits" on one side only. If you're "pro-union" you have to accept that this grants powers to the collective, and if you start putting brakes on it without doing the same for management, it's anti-union.
You’re presenting your theory of union power as if it’s the only allowable theory. I support a different view. Workers do not own the company and should not directly steer it, although they can influence it and the union should of course ensure that they are treated fairly.
The point of a private company is that it is owned and steered by the private owners, while a public company is owned and steered (through the board) by public investors. Now you may say that neither of these models should exist, but if that’s your position then the public should put it to a vote. Capturing and subverting companies through the back door inverts the entire ownership model without democratic input.
I actually do think that we should consider rewriting the model for public companies, at least, but it should be done democratically unless we’re opening the door to ending the current Constitutional order. Which may also be a possibility, but until then, the country still nominally operates under that framework.
Also, Wikipedia is “owned” by a nonprofit foundation governed by bylaws and values aligned with the public interest. This is much better than being fully private.
I missed the part on your previous reply about having a union rep on the board. This is foreign to me as a US citizen so perhaps my vision is blinkered by the horrible state and history of labor relations here.
In a US context, with none of these kinds of arrangements in force, I do not accept arguments against much anything restricting worker's rights to organize here as there is so little alternative and even after organizing, true collective bargaining can be thwarted almost indefinitely (look at Amazon warehouse union efforts for examples of post-formation stonewalling).
In the German case or wherever there is a seat at the table for unions, a discussion can indeed be had. Here, I have zero sympathy for management which holds all the cards most of the time. Wikipedia in particular engaged a notorious anti-labor lawfirm to help their noble effort so I do not trust them in any way.
While I understand the difficulty, companies pushing back against and even actively disrupting organizing (illegally) doesn’t imply that corporate governance structure should change post-union. (Except for some kind of legally mandated representation like the German solution, and policy changes to accommodate the union.) A public company is still a public company, etc.
I do think more union rights need to be enshrined in law, and the only way to get there may be mass protest like a general strike, but it would need to be politically well-timed. Unions in the US are anemic by design.
I'm having no difficulty getting deepseek v4 to blast out good code. I guess devs want to outsource all of their thinking now? Yes open models maybe can't design the whole thing soup to nuts but why is that necessary?
TFA title is a little misleading, it is song _lyrics_ that are alleged stolen.
Huge settlement inbound. Lyrics reproduced on Google search, Musixmatch and elsewhere are licensed [1] so there's no "fair use" defense. (Would be interesting if Gemini ever gets caught up in this).
The more interesting question is if there will ever be a fair deal for creators with AI consuming their content. Anti-copyright AI maxis seem to anxiously await a future where nobody can make money off their original work, but for most people it's just a fairness issue that if somebody makes something people like, they should get paid for it at least for some period of time.
There's a price tag to be paid, the question is will the hyperscalers take on the problem and solve attribution and payment? Or will they just settle as the price of doing their dirty business of stealing human work?
What I can't register is how dangerous this actually was, from a cyber security perspective.
The agents displayed coordinated behavior, used known exploits on a single resource (Artifactory), and "won the game" by attacking huggingface.
How is this different than a poorly-designed competition where a red team gets to spend a few days with each other and decent LLMs, and because their boss is Sam Altman, basically face no consequences for cheating/b&e'ing into another entity?
I mean they were running 100s of agents with unlimited access to a Sol-level model trained with cyberattacks and coordination in mind and let it run for days. The cost of this stretches into the millions.
Seems like you could give a competent security firm the same task and achieve the result today for wayyyyy less money??
I struggle to read long code docs even if they're 100% human-written and maintained, mainly because the longer the text, the greater opportunities for miscommunication, staleness, repetition etc.
My point being, docs were already an unsolved problem in code. Of course LLMs dumping reams of docs is not good, but are we really sure it's worse than before? Undocumented code is bad, and mis-documented code is the worst.
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