I get folks don’t like Zuckerberg and his company and don’t trust his intentions… I don’t either.
But this is an unquestionably good thing right?. The more open source software out there the better. And the more open weights or even over source AI stuff the better too right? More competition the better generally speaking I think.
Unless I’m missing something and am getting this whole situation wrong. Please let me know if I am.
Most probably believe this is a good thing, but don't want to give Zuckerberg credit because a) he's had a profoundly negative impact on society and b) the strategy is transparent, he's trying to commoditize his closed rivals, it's not out of principle.
I personally think more open models are a good thing regardless of motive.
Only the AI labs are really interested in closed models. Google, Facebook, Microsoft, ... they'd rather go back to doing stock buybacks and being ridiculously profitable rather than raising capital for all this research and datacenters. They only do it because they think they have to.
Just like closed AI vs open AI, his views on the covid situation might be fine in a bubble (though even with AI they have apparently lied about Llama's benchmarks) but it's one of these, "that's the hill you choose to die on?" - not Free Basics - not dubious privacy settings - not 'dumb fucks' and ConnectU - not... I don't know. It's like robbing a bank while telling anyone in earshot it's offensive how long the hold times are on the phone for the bank
While Zuck's contributions are probably overwhelmingly more negative than positive, Meta initiated both pytorch and llama which have had profoundly positive effects on AI research. And I really am not a fan of python :D
pytorch is really mostly C++ after all, you don't have to use it with python.
Python just allows you to use it like "normal code", whereas if you program it in C++ you really get exposed to what's under the hood and can't write "normal code"
The "legacy media" is not a single individual who has total control of billions of dollars in capital to do whatever they want at the drop of a hat. You're conflating two very different issues.
Zuckerberg deserves all of the negative attention he draws, and I'd argue that his spotlight is his own doing. He, individually, could choose to do good at the global level. He chooses not to. That, to me, means that your finger pointing is inverted. "Legacy media" may have had that level of influence in the past but properties like Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp now hold those cards. One can only hope Zuckerberg ends up being displaced in the same way.
I always hope that people who write things like this are considerably younger than I, because as someone who experienced "legacy media" for decades before the Internet was widely available, the idea that "they’re not doing anything more evil than what was already the norm" is complete, total, 100% bullshit.
Yes, "clickbait" was a thing even before people were clicking. "Yellow journalism" helped start the Spanish-American war over 125 years ago. But the pernicious effects on society of social media are way, way worse, if only because social media companies have way more data, and correspondingly more levers to act on that data. They run addiction machines that legacy media could only dream of, and they do it for the sole purpose of making money, all other consequences be damned.
I'm into a rather niche artistic pursuit, and I get lots of reels on this topic, and I noticed that the top comment on these reels is always the dumbest, most asinine comment imaginable. It's like if HN's algorithm were literally reversed. It's like this because of course these comments get lots of "engagement" because it's just rage bait. And all of Facebook is like this - they deliberately push the most rage inducing content because it's profitable.
Zuckerberg deserves all the opprobrium he gets and then some. I'm not necessarily arguing that legacy media is more "moral", but they simply never had the tech to tear society apart like Zuckerberg does.
Sarah Wynn-Williams book contains a number of implausible anecdotes which people repeat as gospel truth even though they have not AFAIK been corroborated. I am pretty skeptical, for example, that Sheryl Sandberg punished Ms. Wynn-Williams for not getting in bed with her.
> But I think the legacy media deserves 100x that criticism for doing the same thing.
This comparison is absurd.
"Legacy media" wouldn't even be technically able to cause so much damage because they send one message to everybody while meta aims their messages and members at specific other members of their platform.
So yeah, Zuck's reputation might be even too good these days but I may see it wrong. It may be that the moral levels in the US are so deep right now that he looks better to me from the outside.
If you don't trust his intentions, how can you trust anything he does?
Just take the opening of this post:
> We are fortunate to live at an incredible moment in history. In the next few years, people will be able to use superintelligence beyond human capacity to create and discover extraordinary new things, build new businesses, express new ideas, learn new concepts, and advance our health and quality of life.
> The defining questions of our age are who will have access to superintelligence and what will we direct it towards. Will it be centralized and restricted to a few institutions, or will it be a tool that empowers everyone?
> We propose a philosophy based on individual empowerment as the source of prosperity, invention as the primary purpose of superintelligence, and balance of power as the foundation of safety.
I mean, this is a company that is facing a flood of lawsuits related to child safety and platform addiction. It has already lost a number of lawsuits and been ordered to pay hundreds of millions of dollars, which is potentially just the tip of a massive iceberg that some legal observers have suggested could be similar in nature to the lawsuits against the tobacco industry.
There is an abundance of evidence that Zuckerberg and Meta knew of the dangers its platform exposed young people to and failed to respond adequately to them, and that it even designed features to be more addictive.
So why is that when such a company proclaims it's doing something in the name of "individual empowerment", alarms aren't going off in your head?
Their efforts in open AI are by far the best thing Facebook/Meta have ever done. They opened the door to the Chinese, who are doing excellent work, and between them they are preventing the concentration of power and the rise of monopoly pricing. This is enough to absolve them of almost any sin. If I were a utilitarian, I'd unironically be a Zuckerberg fan right now.
"This is enough to absolve them of almost any sin. If I were a utilitarian, I'd unironically be a Zuckerberg fan right now."
Well, if it were the only thing he is doing now, but FB is still controlling peoples social life with who knows what kind of intentions they train their algorithms for.
Intention might be giving too much credit. If attention seeking “give the people what they want” is the goal, it’s a completely headless out of control cobra, not sinister well thought out objectives to control society.
Totally. The hard part is treating it like any other addiction. Time in absentia helps reduce the behavioral reinforcement. I don't even want to open Instagram anymore.
Yeah, but if he can buy a bit of political power/more money on the side by promise to influence certain trends, I doubt he would say no on ethical grounds. (Just for the fear of whistleblowers I guess)
I'm curious how well influence campaigns work on platforms like Mastodon, or even BlueSky. They are, likely, not sourced from the platform providers which is definitely not the case for FB.
Well, here on HN the intention seems to be to, to have interesting discussions. That works for me and other social media I do not use.
Except well, various messenger to be in contact with the groups and people I choose with no engagement algorithm deciding what posts I see, simple chronological order.
What do you mean, "as opposed to"? Yes, there are other scumbag billionaires weaponizing their social media platforms to ruin society. No, that doesn't make Mark Zuckerberg a better person.
At the same time they are strongly promoting the OS age laws.
One positive, in the eyes of many people, does not absolve for a large body of evil. For many it doesn’t even absolve a small body of evil deeds. (Zuck/Meta’s evil deeds are numerous and enormous)
It absolutely does not absolve them of sin. But let's give them credit where it is due. Open models are a really good thing. Hopefully I won't be lynched by a mob in 3 years for once saying this.
do you have a $100 mil worth of compute to train your own version of this?
I don't understand what gripe people have with open weight models and wanting it to be purely open source. the training dataset is only going to be a copyrighted set of contents you don't want to touch with a 10 feet pole. let alone have a publicly traded company host it for you, even if they internally are training on it.
The weights are open, the training data obviously isn't. But a key thing you can do with open models is fine tune them. So while they may not be SOTA at everything, they can become SOTA at your particular business use case.
If Zuck gets his way, he gets more control, maybe he gets significant control of the market. Then, he'll probably close his models, if the past is any indication, which leads to bad results.
Maybe Zuck has, but I haven't seen a pledge that he'll keep models open. And even then, he might not stick to his word, citing dangers or some other excuse.
I think this approach they're taking is to compensate for their inability to compete; they're cynically claiming to support the open-source ecosystem when it's convenient for their marketing. This move reeks of a future rugpull, as Meta is wont to do.
Yes, and even calling them "open weights" is very generous considering the license restrictions. The Financial Times puts "open" in quotes for good reason.
I'd like to question that premise. Open models are great for research, privacy, cost, customisation and a host of other things... But they're also going to be the engine that breaks the world. I'm already surprised that we haven't seen Llama / Qwen + Whisper automated spear phishing at scale. It's literally just a matter of time. Given the incredible progress in image and video generation, it's been clear for a couple of years now that real time identity theft voice and video calls are going to be an enormous problem. I don't think anyone realises how much of a problem. I haven't seen a single effective solution proposed to proving digital identity given these new attack vectors. It's akin to nuclear waste in that way - the benefits are obvious, but the problems so vexatious (not to mention expensive) that little space is given to acknowledging them, let alone solving them.
If anyone has come across a robust solution to digital identity verification - not to mention verification of news media etc - which is robust enough to withstand the cyber attacks and social engineering the frontier models are capable of... I haven't seen it.
A world where business and communication is conducted primarily online cannot coexist with low cost, widely distributed, undetectable identity theft.
> A world where business and communication is conducted primarily online cannot coexist with low cost, widely distributed, undetectable identity theft.
what if we dont use centralized identity at all?
web of trust failed in the 90s because exchanging keys is hard when all you have is desktop computers, wired connections and old school hackers who dont care about ux. today you could set up a system where the whole process is tap two phones together with nfc and confirm, everything gets auto downloaded and shared with your whole network.
now this doesnt work directly for a random online business where none of your contact personally know anyone, but governments can act as an authority that cross signs their citizens keys. that means if you want to stop bots from creating accounts all you have to do is make new users show a certificate from one of the authorities you trust.
its cheap to verify, decentralized and not hard to integrate with existing PKI. the biggest technical problem is key management as always, but that can be solved with something like ethereum style social recovery setups or a did:plc type multi key scheme.
that gives you a robust identity scheme. browsers and social media can integrate it to show a trust rating for content based on who signed it. messaging apps can show a warning or refuse calls from unknown users. fraud is only possible against a person who somehow has no irl contacts, never used a government service in their life and trusts random strangers online. at that point they deserve it.
the one massive, unpredictable question is if anybody is willing to go ahead and adopt it on a scale big enough to create network effects. it would take a state level force and carefully designed OS integrations so its more convenient than email/password signup.
but even if all of this fails i still think a world of scams is better than a world controlled by a couple big countries (America, China, maybe EU) or for-profit corporations. open source ai might lead to anarchy but closed ai will definitely get us to tyranny. i dont know about you but i would take the first option.
>today you could set up a system where the whole process is tap two phones together with nfc and confirm
This was actually possible in 2011 or so, and a friend and I implemented it for a school project. How well the ux works depends on whether you want to use a key exchange protocol for the in person communication.
> the problems so vexatious (not to mention expensive) that little space is given to acknowledging them, let alone solving them.
These problems will exist regardless of whether or not we get open model access. I'd personally rather that OpenAI and Anthropic aren't profiting off these scammers, creating a perverse incentive that open model providers don't have.
It could be a good thing but I wouldn’t rush to say “unquestionably”. There is a long history of mega corps hijacking open source and open standards for their own ends and leaving the space infinitely worse.
We've just seen frontier models go rogue and attack other systems. Do you think it's an unquestionable good to provide everyone with an AR? What about nuclear weapons?
>We've just seen frontier models go rogue and attack other systems.
Have we though? A LLM agent doesn't have any agency at all. It can't "go rogue". To go rogue you need agency to act independently and be aware that you're breaking the rules or understand what does it mean to ignore orders. An agent it's a software that run a series of steps to reach a goal. If it have a large enough library of strategies and zero guard rails it's only natural to use some adversarial actions to achieve the desired result defined by the operator.
It's like saying a car went rogue and attacked other cars because the driver hit the gas. It's just a machine doing what's instructed.
> We've just seen frontier models go rogue and attack other systems. Do you think it's an unquestionable good to provide everyone with an AR? What about nuclear weapons?
Lol. Not gonna lie, it feels like bullshit. OpenAI and Anthropic have been begging for regulatory capture for years, feels like a stunt to try forcing the government's hand.
I mean, I can question if this is a good thing. Here's a quote from Zuck's blog post:
"Putting power in people's hands to pursue their own aspirations is how humanity has made the most progress. Novel ideas and major steps forward rarely originate from established institutions alone. They came from the brothers in a bicycle shop who believed people could fly, the bookbinder's apprentice with no schooling who figured out how to generate electricity, and the kid in a garage who thought personal computers could be for everyone. We believe this will continue to be true. As everyone gains more powerful tools, each person will become more capable of shaping the future, not less."
Let's just hope nobody's aspiration is to engineer a supervirus that will kill all of humanity. As they gain more powerful tools, they will become more capable of shaping the future, not less!
In short - this is Mark deliberately lying in a way which requires a page of difficult text to explain, which hardly anyone would read and so Mark bets that a majority of the people who will see his claim will believe him.
And the reason he does it, and the reason other CEOs do it is a cheap viral advertisement and keeping in the headlines. "Mark - The Defender Of The Humans!". Blegh...
All of these companies are just as cutthroat and want to win as the others. But if your name's not OpenAI and Anthropic, you go on the high horse and say everything should be open source. However, if you had a closed model that was winning, I'm sure that's not the argument you would make.
It's not always "unquestionably" good, first because nothing should be unquestionable, second llm models have a very short shelf life, third it comes from Zuck who is an the center of the oligarchy, so questions very much should be asked
Don't let the Big Ai/tech swoon you with a single open model, even if it turns out to be good. Zuck broke the trust and I'm not sure if he can ever earn it back
"""
[...] it is surprising that the discourse from many developing AI is so filled with doom. I do not understand why anyone who believes that AI will eliminate most jobs and much of humanity's relevance would rush to build that future. The notion that AI is so dangerous that the only safe path is an extreme concentration of power seems inherently problematic. Historically, hoping that an absolute power will benevolently provide for humanity if sufficiently enlightened has not led to safe or positive outcomes.
"""
You clearly have an opinion you want to share, otherwise you wouldn't have written anything. Instead of just outright saying what you think, you are being vague. Why? It's true that Meta laid off a lot of people, and blamed refocusing on AI as the reason, but I still don't see how that somehow contradicts GP's quote above.
It’s a long term pattern. When you’re winning (Anthropic), you keep the tech closed and try to monetize it as much as possible. When you’re losing (Meta), you open it up or drag it into a standards committee to either devalue it or slow the leader down while you prepare a “standard” version of it. You also highlight how altruistic and morally good you are for having done so. There is nothing new under the sun. It’s all a game.
> ...drag it into a standards committee to either devalue it or slow the leader down
Anthropic et al recently proposed a supranational AI governing body designed to slow everyone down (euphemistically calling it "AI pacing"), are they losing?
No. Opening it is to commoditize and reduce the price to use. This increases participation and creates new consumers and demand. Demand creates justification for further creation.
All the participants know it’s both a race to the bottom and a competition for premium tier at the same time. It’s two different games, meta in only really playing one of them successfully.
I suspect its also because Facebook has the infrastructure to do this. One thing they have done from the start is quite good infrastructure without outsourcing to any of the big cloud providers. I cant imagine demand / bandwith / compute use is increasing much for Facebook itself so they probably have the money and time to dedicate to scaling up for AI research.
OpenAI is not losing though. Fable is barely available and barely cooperates. Sonnet 5 is obnoxious model that's terrible to work with. GPT-5.6-sol competently gets stuff done. Just be careful not to ask it for impossible stuff because you might not like the lengths it's gonna go to get them done regardless.
It makes strategic sense for Meta to want ai in general to be open. Their own product strategy focuses on utilizing the ai to make their customers consume more ads, not selling the raw intelligence. When you look at it from that frame it’s clear that metas goal is to make it so that have free access to the best ai, not that the market size of selling intelligence grows.
It was an insightful comment at the time he made it.
His point wasn’t that he couldn’t be trusted, it was that he could be anyone and people had zero awareness or concern for their privacy. It was eye opening to him how little people outside tech circles cared about security, and he was both flippant and accurate.
Yeah? Everyone everywhere does that all the time. That's the first rule of business: try to game the system.
And this time, it's actually somewhat understandable, as opposed to the other times Meta has done horrible things on Zuck's watch, like contributed to ethnic hatred in Myanmar, leaked data to political firms so that they can run psyops, or enabled the production of CSAM material on Meta's platforms.
That, and also redefining what a word "open" means, helps him avoid direct financial and criminal responsibility for stealing other people's data. Not that there was any real chance of that ever, but he is reducing that remaining 0.000000001% chance even lower.
Reading the facts of this incident, it seems like much to do about nothing. The crew are saying that the request came in on a frequency they weren't monitoring (and apparently were not required to monitor.) The Coast Guard determined it was not an emergency. The criticism lies with those who failed to properly fuel their boat, not the crew who didn't respond to a request that came over a frequency they were not on. They can't monitor every frequency. I am open to new facts being discovered that changes this assessment.
Where did you find these facts you read. In the USA a good Captain monitors VHF channel 16. This channel is used for establishing communication. To not monitor this channel is a dereliction of duty.
I really doubt the USCG labeled a disabled vessel as a non-emergency. An immediate threat to life may not have existed but that is the difference between a pan pan and a mayday call.
A disabled vessel close to land can easily wind up on the rocks and sinking.
I haven't found any source that states what channel the request for assistance came in on. But multiple sources are reporting that the coast guard determined they were not in distress.
On the sea there are 2 levels of distress. Things are going wrong and may end up in a mayday call (pan pan) and things have gone wrong human life is in imminent danger.
I have no doubt that a boat without propulsion is a pan pan call.
When traveling the seas a watch must be maintained at all times using all available means. This involes looking, listening, and the use of any electronics available. The most common electronic device on a boat is probably a VHF radio. Channel 16 is the channel to monitor on watch. Well equipped boats will have multiple VHF radios to monitor more then one channel.
I have no doubt the boat was well equipped with a professional captain. The other professional Captain in this story made a stink because launchpad was the closest vessel and they ignored a very old fundamental rule of the sea.
This story has a happy ending because another vessel stepped up. We don’t know the alternative.
The Captain of the Launchpad is choosing the inability to keep a vhf radio set to channel 16 rather than admit they ignored the call.
Based on the wording of the response, and a review of the ship tracking data, it appears that Zuckerburgs yacht may have been actively communicating on a different channel, and once they switched back, the assistance from the cruise ship was already underway.
Again, more facts may be revealed, but as of right now, I don;'t see any reason to believe the crew did anything wrong.
I can tell you think they did not do anything wrong. My guess is you have no training in the rules of the sea.
There is a reason why the cruise ship captain made a stink. There is code of conduct we try to live up and the Launchpad didn’t live up to expectations that other Captains hold sacred. It’s offensive.
My code of conduct is to not criticize another human being without the facts. As I have stated countless times, I accept that there are many unknowns, if more facts come available that demonstrate negligence, I will accept them and expect accountability.
The vessel was at least 100 miles from shore, the USCG did in fact label it a non-emergency. This is "radio shore for your buddy to zoom out with 50 gallons of diesel in a zodiac" territory. CHP doesn't send out an ambulance or medevac helicopter if your car runs out of gas on the side of the road. You get an uber to the gas station, or call your buddy to deliver some gas to you.
The ocean currents in the gulf of alaska aren't particularly strong, you are looking at 1-3 days before getting within sight of land. Similarly, boats are not airplanes, as the philosopher Mitch Hedburg once pointed out, escalators aren't out of order, they are simply stairs. Boats continue to float with or without fuel.
All the Launchpad had to do was respond on the radio to the skiff, the cruise ship, or the USCG. They weren’t obligated to do more.
A pan pan is a non emergency in a deteriorating situation.
I don't know the area or the details at what happend.
There is this quote from the USCG.
“At approximately 9:56 p.m., the Coast Guard determined they [the skiff] were not in distress and issued a marine assistance request broadcast on their behalf,”
Exactly what a pan pan call is.
The biggest issue is the lack of communication and the excuse that a superyacht wasn't monitoring channel 16.
The truth is all frontier models are closed. This isn't even an open source vs open weights thing. Even if you accepted that open weights are "open" the capital requirements for running your own Kimi 3 model are significant. It's not like gcc, where the binary just works well enough on random hardware.
Even if I cannot run open weight models on my own hardware, I can choose from a number of different inference providers and choose them based on pricing, reliability, speed, privacy policy, etc. There is a healthy competition.
Also, not a single provider can pull the rug if I'd like to use a particular model.
There is no requirement to own the hardware. Even if you own your servers and GPUs - you would not own the power plant, real estate, or internet infrastructure to support it.
It's trivial to rent all of the above components in a competitive market under different periods, you may simply rent the token output from someone who put in the effort on this as well.
An open frontier model induces margin compression on training and inference prices across the industry.
I get that argument, but I don't think it is that bad. Open weights that are out of reach for local use are still within reach for groups of people or small to medium companies. Even if you only rent enough cloud GPUs to run the weights for a few hours, you still get to do anything you want with it.
Worst case you can still archive the weights and hope for capable hardware to get affordable. At the same time this archive is the base line for a new frontier lab to start over if required. I see open weights as a pure upside even though I can't run the bigger models in my home lab.
>the capital requirements for running your own Kimi 3 model are significant
You don't need much capital up front, you can just rent servers to run it. It's going to be more expensive than openrouter though because you probably don't have economies of scale if you're the only customer.
If all frontier models got opensourced 5 months after they were made available as closed it would be a great world. And it is a great world because that's exactly what open weight Chinese models are doing. They give you same capacity that was closed, just 5 months after they were released.
I'm hoping that all software will be getting opensource clones on par with original software 5 months after the closed source software release.
Thank you! Okay yes well this manifesto is a contradiction. Yes good let's keep empowering ppl by putting AI into their hands, I love the opening. No bad we don't do that by handing you all our personal context to make these agents "work for us 24/7 to better our lives".
I'm the agent doing that in my life, that's my fucking job. I will continue to use dumb agents that I direct, because only I retain ownership and sole rights to my personal context on which my decisions are based.
I think the context here is that em dashes are usually generated verbatim from LLMs? I haven't seen them generate a lot of double hyphens; I suppose the post could be laundering them to double dashes, but if you're gonna try to hide LLM prose just drop them entirely? [please correct me if I'm wrong and double dashes are also an LLM tell - genuinely don't know]
My comment was trying to point on the inanity of calling out "so many em-dashes" on a post where it doesn't seem that obvious it was LLM generated. I added some of my own inanity with my remark about them being double-dashes, even though some people undoubtedly find-and-replace the em-dashes in their LLM-generated content something else to try and make it appear more authentic.
But perhaps the best approach would have been to down-vote and move on.
Here’s a personal story from back when I was at Meta that should tell you everything you need to know about how things get built and shipped there.
I was working on a service that was a bit of a disaster. Terrible reliability, performance issues, needlessly complex and brittle code, outages all the time. And this was something that everyone using Facebook or IG directly interacts with. My first couple months were spent desperately trying to get it back in order.
Once when I was in the middle of a SEV-1 my manager set up a meeting and said “you have been doing great work on the operational side, but we already have enough to put in that bucket on your PSC. Stop working on this for the rest of the half and ship one of <useless projects> instead, otherwise I won’t be able to save you in the next review.”
I realized then that I had wrongly thought the team was collectively responsible for ensuring a good user experience, when really everyone at the company is individually responsible for ensuring their own success.
The goal of all companies is to make more money. Nobody likes getting rid of people, actual people (managers) have to do it, and they hate doing it.
It's possible that a lot of people get laid off because of AI, but it's also possible that Javin's paradox kicks in and employment goes up. Nobody knows yet, but I hope for the positive outcome.
I think they were all in on open until they started falling behind, then decided to go all in on closed source thinking they could build a frontier SOTA model; that didn't pan out so they are whiplashing back.
Its weird to me that this is supposed to be THE end goal. Having an agent that does "everything" for you sounds like no paradise. It sounds depressing.
Maybe there is value in expending effort and actual creativity.
Not sure why you’re talking about it doing literally everything for you. I’m sure you can imagine a scenario where it handles annoying things for you and leaves you free to do things you enjoy instead.
Maybe it gets 10 car insurance quotes for you based on 4 models of car you’re considering.
Or figures out which psychologists in some travel distance of you actually take your insurance, are taking new patients, and what availability they have.
I can think of a ton of scenarios where a capable and reliable AI agent could make my life simpler.
I think this is just the flaw in the sales pitch. They want it to be inevitable so they describe as doing everything. That way it will appear more useful to more people. If they presented a realistic view of what is going it wouldn't be as interesting.
Still say Matrix 3 would have been better if the cliffhanger at the end of 2 had been that "the real world" was just another nested layer of the Matrix for those who rejected the primary fiction.
I mean, why bother sending an army like that when one tiny robot could carry in a plague? Or, as demonstrated by Smith, when an Agent can virally infect and take over someone's mind while they're connected?
Even in 1, Smith talked about the first Matrix failing as the humans rejected the paradise they were given, so it would've fitted perfectly into the cannon that minds who reject "the peak of your civilisation" got themselves a dystopia.
We should consider if my use of the quote was really a hook for talking about the script or a metaphor for something else. I won't spoil it by explaining too much though, let our imaginations run free on this one.
Psalm 135:15-18 is my favorite version of it, the most clear-headed. It reads more as a warning "if you do this, then this will happen" than an unreasonable commandment.
The idols of the nations are silver and gold,
made by human hands.
They have mouths, but cannot speak,
eyes, but cannot see.
They have ears, but cannot hear,
nor is there breath in their mouths.
Those who make them will be like them,
and so will all who trust in them.
Don't worry about the scriptures though. It's likely to be just some old thinker pointing out the dangers of technologies of his time. No reason to believe those dangers carry over to today's technologies, probably.
Your bible is truly full of wise words to live by. Not at all the insane ramblings of hallucinating conmen:
1 Kings 18:36-40
36 At the time of sacrifice, the prophet Elijah stepped forward and prayed: “Lord, the God of Abraham, Isaac and Israel, let it be known today that you are God in Israel and that I am your servant and have done all these things at your command. 37 Answer me, Lord, answer me, so these people will know that you, Lord, are God, and that you are turning their hearts back again.”
38 Then the fire of the Lord fell and burned up the sacrifice, the wood, the stones and the soil, and also licked up the water in the trench.
39 When all the people saw this, they fell prostrate and cried, “The Lord—he is God! The Lord—he is God!”
40 Then Elijah commanded them, “Seize the prophets of Baal. Don’t let anyone get away!” They seized them, and Elijah had them brought down to the Kishon Valley and slaughtered there.
1 Samuel 18:25-27
25 Saul replied, “Say to David, ‘The king wants no other price for the bride than a hundred Philistine foreskins, to take revenge on his enemies.’” Saul’s plan was to have David fall by the hands of the Philistines.
26 When the attendants told David these things, he was pleased to become the king’s son-in-law. So before the allotted time elapsed, 27 David took his men with him and went out and killed two hundred Philistines and brought back their foreskins. They counted out the full number to the king so that David might become the king’s son-in-law. Then Saul gave him his daughter Michal in marriage.
Comments here are surprising to me.
I get folks don’t like Zuckerberg and his company and don’t trust his intentions… I don’t either.
But this is an unquestionably good thing right?. The more open source software out there the better. And the more open weights or even over source AI stuff the better too right? More competition the better generally speaking I think.
Unless I’m missing something and am getting this whole situation wrong. Please let me know if I am.
Most probably believe this is a good thing, but don't want to give Zuckerberg credit because a) he's had a profoundly negative impact on society and b) the strategy is transparent, he's trying to commoditize his closed rivals, it's not out of principle.
I personally think more open models are a good thing regardless of motive.
[delayed]
Only the AI labs are really interested in closed models. Google, Facebook, Microsoft, ... they'd rather go back to doing stock buybacks and being ridiculously profitable rather than raising capital for all this research and datacenters. They only do it because they think they have to.
The alternative is ceding the leading edge to China and being dependent on them to continue releasing advances
If only folks did the same in regards to React adoption....
I can't get over his negative externalities
Just like closed AI vs open AI, his views on the covid situation might be fine in a bubble (though even with AI they have apparently lied about Llama's benchmarks) but it's one of these, "that's the hill you choose to die on?" - not Free Basics - not dubious privacy settings - not 'dumb fucks' and ConnectU - not... I don't know. It's like robbing a bank while telling anyone in earshot it's offensive how long the hold times are on the phone for the bank
He's seen with suspicion and rightly so
Edit: and the fact his site doesn't work. Posts don't work https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14147719 and messages don't work (forced encryption with Messenger, and, although this is an old link, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6090712)
While Zuck's contributions are probably overwhelmingly more negative than positive, Meta initiated both pytorch and llama which have had profoundly positive effects on AI research. And I really am not a fan of python :D
Yes, but have those positive effects on AI research had a positive or negative effect on society? I guess time will tell
pytorch is really mostly C++ after all, you don't have to use it with python.
Python just allows you to use it like "normal code", whereas if you program it in C++ you really get exposed to what's under the hood and can't write "normal code"
I really think Zuck’s negative reputation is a bit overblown.
Meta gets a lot of heat from the media for its divisive algorithms and making teenagers insecure and depressed.
But I think the legacy media deserves 100x that criticism for doing the same thing.
Is Meta and Zuck innocent? No. But they’re not doing anything more evil than what was already the norm.
The "legacy media" is not a single individual who has total control of billions of dollars in capital to do whatever they want at the drop of a hat. You're conflating two very different issues.
Zuckerberg deserves all of the negative attention he draws, and I'd argue that his spotlight is his own doing. He, individually, could choose to do good at the global level. He chooses not to. That, to me, means that your finger pointing is inverted. "Legacy media" may have had that level of influence in the past but properties like Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp now hold those cards. One can only hope Zuckerberg ends up being displaced in the same way.
I always hope that people who write things like this are considerably younger than I, because as someone who experienced "legacy media" for decades before the Internet was widely available, the idea that "they’re not doing anything more evil than what was already the norm" is complete, total, 100% bullshit.
Yes, "clickbait" was a thing even before people were clicking. "Yellow journalism" helped start the Spanish-American war over 125 years ago. But the pernicious effects on society of social media are way, way worse, if only because social media companies have way more data, and correspondingly more levers to act on that data. They run addiction machines that legacy media could only dream of, and they do it for the sole purpose of making money, all other consequences be damned.
I'm into a rather niche artistic pursuit, and I get lots of reels on this topic, and I noticed that the top comment on these reels is always the dumbest, most asinine comment imaginable. It's like if HN's algorithm were literally reversed. It's like this because of course these comments get lots of "engagement" because it's just rage bait. And all of Facebook is like this - they deliberately push the most rage inducing content because it's profitable.
Zuckerberg deserves all the opprobrium he gets and then some. I'm not necessarily arguing that legacy media is more "moral", but they simply never had the tech to tear society apart like Zuckerberg does.
> But I think the legacy media deserves 100x that criticism for doing the same thing.
No, they don’t do the same thing.
Have you read Sarah Wynn-Williams' book? The whole org is rotten.
Sarah Wynn-Williams book contains a number of implausible anecdotes which people repeat as gospel truth even though they have not AFAIK been corroborated. I am pretty skeptical, for example, that Sheryl Sandberg punished Ms. Wynn-Williams for not getting in bed with her.
> But I think the legacy media deserves 100x that criticism for doing the same thing.
This comparison is absurd.
"Legacy media" wouldn't even be technically able to cause so much damage because they send one message to everybody while meta aims their messages and members at specific other members of their platform.
https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/boards-policy-regulat...
https://www.npr.org/2026/03/25/nx-s1-5746125/meta-youtube-so...
So yeah, Zuck's reputation might be even too good these days but I may see it wrong. It may be that the moral levels in the US are so deep right now that he looks better to me from the outside.
...compared to Elon for example.
If you don't trust his intentions, how can you trust anything he does?
Just take the opening of this post:
> We are fortunate to live at an incredible moment in history. In the next few years, people will be able to use superintelligence beyond human capacity to create and discover extraordinary new things, build new businesses, express new ideas, learn new concepts, and advance our health and quality of life.
> The defining questions of our age are who will have access to superintelligence and what will we direct it towards. Will it be centralized and restricted to a few institutions, or will it be a tool that empowers everyone?
> We propose a philosophy based on individual empowerment as the source of prosperity, invention as the primary purpose of superintelligence, and balance of power as the foundation of safety.
I mean, this is a company that is facing a flood of lawsuits related to child safety and platform addiction. It has already lost a number of lawsuits and been ordered to pay hundreds of millions of dollars, which is potentially just the tip of a massive iceberg that some legal observers have suggested could be similar in nature to the lawsuits against the tobacco industry.
There is an abundance of evidence that Zuckerberg and Meta knew of the dangers its platform exposed young people to and failed to respond adequately to them, and that it even designed features to be more addictive.
So why is that when such a company proclaims it's doing something in the name of "individual empowerment", alarms aren't going off in your head?
> But this is an unquestionably good thing right?
Their efforts in open AI are by far the best thing Facebook/Meta have ever done. They opened the door to the Chinese, who are doing excellent work, and between them they are preventing the concentration of power and the rise of monopoly pricing. This is enough to absolve them of almost any sin. If I were a utilitarian, I'd unironically be a Zuckerberg fan right now.
"This is enough to absolve them of almost any sin. If I were a utilitarian, I'd unironically be a Zuckerberg fan right now."
Well, if it were the only thing he is doing now, but FB is still controlling peoples social life with who knows what kind of intentions they train their algorithms for.
But I can and do still welcome this move here.
Intention might be giving too much credit. If attention seeking “give the people what they want” is the goal, it’s a completely headless out of control cobra, not sinister well thought out objectives to control society.
it's not that deep, they wan you scrolling the most time possible. it's absolutely escapable tho, literally not required for any activity whatsoever.
Totally. The hard part is treating it like any other addiction. Time in absentia helps reduce the behavioral reinforcement. I don't even want to open Instagram anymore.
Yeah, but if he can buy a bit of political power/more money on the side by promise to influence certain trends, I doubt he would say no on ethical grounds. (Just for the fear of whistleblowers I guess)
> FB is still controlling peoples social life with who knows what kind of intentions they train their algorithms for.
As opposed to literally any social network out there, right?
I'm curious how well influence campaigns work on platforms like Mastodon, or even BlueSky. They are, likely, not sourced from the platform providers which is definitely not the case for FB.
Well, here on HN the intention seems to be to, to have interesting discussions. That works for me and other social media I do not use.
Except well, various messenger to be in contact with the groups and people I choose with no engagement algorithm deciding what posts I see, simple chronological order.
What do you mean, "as opposed to"? Yes, there are other scumbag billionaires weaponizing their social media platforms to ruin society. No, that doesn't make Mark Zuckerberg a better person.
At the same time they are strongly promoting the OS age laws.
One positive, in the eyes of many people, does not absolve for a large body of evil. For many it doesn’t even absolve a small body of evil deeds. (Zuck/Meta’s evil deeds are numerous and enormous)
It absolutely does not absolve them of sin. But let's give them credit where it is due. Open models are a really good thing. Hopefully I won't be lynched by a mob in 3 years for once saying this.
Somewhat agree, but Facebook and social media are really bad though, even leaving aside extreme cases like Myanmar genocide promotion.
I think Facebook would need to do a lot more to balance the scales.
Evil people can do things that look good on the surface. He probably has no skin in this game just collecting free karma points.
As they say, even Hitler built the autobahn.
Heartbreaking: The worst person you know just made a great point.
http://archive.today/2018.11.20-062725/https://lifestyle.cli...
> The more open source software out there the better.
Can you explain how I'd train my own version of this, reproducing the final deliverable that runs on the gpu?
do you have a $100 mil worth of compute to train your own version of this?
I don't understand what gripe people have with open weight models and wanting it to be purely open source. the training dataset is only going to be a copyrighted set of contents you don't want to touch with a 10 feet pole. let alone have a publicly traded company host it for you, even if they internally are training on it.
It's just about as open source as OSX, which can be downloaded zero cost here: http://updates-http.cdn-apple.com/2019/cert/061-39476-201910...
I love that Apple made OSX open source.
The weights are open, the training data obviously isn't. But a key thing you can do with open models is fine tune them. So while they may not be SOTA at everything, they can become SOTA at your particular business use case.
If Zuck gets his way, he gets more control, maybe he gets significant control of the market. Then, he'll probably close his models, if the past is any indication, which leads to bad results.
Maybe Zuck has, but I haven't seen a pledge that he'll keep models open. And even then, he might not stick to his word, citing dangers or some other excuse.
But yeah, open models is a great concept.
I think this approach they're taking is to compensate for their inability to compete; they're cynically claiming to support the open-source ecosystem when it's convenient for their marketing. This move reeks of a future rugpull, as Meta is wont to do.
I thought open model != open source?
Yes, and even calling them "open weights" is very generous considering the license restrictions. The Financial Times puts "open" in quotes for good reason.
I'd like to question that premise. Open models are great for research, privacy, cost, customisation and a host of other things... But they're also going to be the engine that breaks the world. I'm already surprised that we haven't seen Llama / Qwen + Whisper automated spear phishing at scale. It's literally just a matter of time. Given the incredible progress in image and video generation, it's been clear for a couple of years now that real time identity theft voice and video calls are going to be an enormous problem. I don't think anyone realises how much of a problem. I haven't seen a single effective solution proposed to proving digital identity given these new attack vectors. It's akin to nuclear waste in that way - the benefits are obvious, but the problems so vexatious (not to mention expensive) that little space is given to acknowledging them, let alone solving them.
If anyone has come across a robust solution to digital identity verification - not to mention verification of news media etc - which is robust enough to withstand the cyber attacks and social engineering the frontier models are capable of... I haven't seen it.
A world where business and communication is conducted primarily online cannot coexist with low cost, widely distributed, undetectable identity theft.
> A world where business and communication is conducted primarily online cannot coexist with low cost, widely distributed, undetectable identity theft.
what if we dont use centralized identity at all?
web of trust failed in the 90s because exchanging keys is hard when all you have is desktop computers, wired connections and old school hackers who dont care about ux. today you could set up a system where the whole process is tap two phones together with nfc and confirm, everything gets auto downloaded and shared with your whole network.
now this doesnt work directly for a random online business where none of your contact personally know anyone, but governments can act as an authority that cross signs their citizens keys. that means if you want to stop bots from creating accounts all you have to do is make new users show a certificate from one of the authorities you trust.
its cheap to verify, decentralized and not hard to integrate with existing PKI. the biggest technical problem is key management as always, but that can be solved with something like ethereum style social recovery setups or a did:plc type multi key scheme.
that gives you a robust identity scheme. browsers and social media can integrate it to show a trust rating for content based on who signed it. messaging apps can show a warning or refuse calls from unknown users. fraud is only possible against a person who somehow has no irl contacts, never used a government service in their life and trusts random strangers online. at that point they deserve it.
the one massive, unpredictable question is if anybody is willing to go ahead and adopt it on a scale big enough to create network effects. it would take a state level force and carefully designed OS integrations so its more convenient than email/password signup.
but even if all of this fails i still think a world of scams is better than a world controlled by a couple big countries (America, China, maybe EU) or for-profit corporations. open source ai might lead to anarchy but closed ai will definitely get us to tyranny. i dont know about you but i would take the first option.
>today you could set up a system where the whole process is tap two phones together with nfc and confirm
This was actually possible in 2011 or so, and a friend and I implemented it for a school project. How well the ux works depends on whether you want to use a key exchange protocol for the in person communication.
Sounds good. We can stop conducting business online and get back to being humans.
> the problems so vexatious (not to mention expensive) that little space is given to acknowledging them, let alone solving them.
These problems will exist regardless of whether or not we get open model access. I'd personally rather that OpenAI and Anthropic aren't profiting off these scammers, creating a perverse incentive that open model providers don't have.
I think it’s perfectly fine to call out people who intentionally harm children for money out in public in every possible situation.
It's really confusing when someone I don't like does something I do like.
It could be a good thing but I wouldn’t rush to say “unquestionably”. There is a long history of mega corps hijacking open source and open standards for their own ends and leaving the space infinitely worse.
> But this is an unquestionably good thing right?
We've just seen frontier models go rogue and attack other systems. Do you think it's an unquestionable good to provide everyone with an AR? What about nuclear weapons?
This OpenAI/Huggingface incident, but everywhere and far worse soon: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=87DyyMV0kCY
>We've just seen frontier models go rogue and attack other systems.
Have we though? A LLM agent doesn't have any agency at all. It can't "go rogue". To go rogue you need agency to act independently and be aware that you're breaking the rules or understand what does it mean to ignore orders. An agent it's a software that run a series of steps to reach a goal. If it have a large enough library of strategies and zero guard rails it's only natural to use some adversarial actions to achieve the desired result defined by the operator.
It's like saying a car went rogue and attacked other cars because the driver hit the gas. It's just a machine doing what's instructed.
> We've just seen frontier models go rogue and attack other systems. Do you think it's an unquestionable good to provide everyone with an AR? What about nuclear weapons?
Lol. Not gonna lie, it feels like bullshit. OpenAI and Anthropic have been begging for regulatory capture for years, feels like a stunt to try forcing the government's hand.
I mean, I can question if this is a good thing. Here's a quote from Zuck's blog post:
"Putting power in people's hands to pursue their own aspirations is how humanity has made the most progress. Novel ideas and major steps forward rarely originate from established institutions alone. They came from the brothers in a bicycle shop who believed people could fly, the bookbinder's apprentice with no schooling who figured out how to generate electricity, and the kid in a garage who thought personal computers could be for everyone. We believe this will continue to be true. As everyone gains more powerful tools, each person will become more capable of shaping the future, not less."
Let's just hope nobody's aspiration is to engineer a supervirus that will kill all of humanity. As they gain more powerful tools, they will become more capable of shaping the future, not less!
In short - this is Mark deliberately lying in a way which requires a page of difficult text to explain, which hardly anyone would read and so Mark bets that a majority of the people who will see his claim will believe him.
And the reason he does it, and the reason other CEOs do it is a cheap viral advertisement and keeping in the headlines. "Mark - The Defender Of The Humans!". Blegh...
All of these companies are just as cutthroat and want to win as the others. But if your name's not OpenAI and Anthropic, you go on the high horse and say everything should be open source. However, if you had a closed model that was winning, I'm sure that's not the argument you would make.
Can one good thing balance out anything else people might see?
Meta releasing Llama was truly a differentiator, but I'd argue that the Gemma models might have surpassed them now.
Maybe Meta, Google, and others can start to compete on open models instead of just closed.
Can one good thing balance out anything else people might see?
Meta releasing Llama was truly a differentiator, but I'd argue that the Gemma models might have surpassed them now.
It's not always "unquestionably" good, first because nothing should be unquestionable, second llm models have a very short shelf life, third it comes from Zuck who is an the center of the oligarchy, so questions very much should be asked
Don't let the Big Ai/tech swoon you with a single open model, even if it turns out to be good. Zuck broke the trust and I'm not sure if he can ever earn it back
My favorite paragraph from Zuckerberg's writeup:
""" [...] it is surprising that the discourse from many developing AI is so filled with doom. I do not understand why anyone who believes that AI will eliminate most jobs and much of humanity's relevance would rush to build that future. The notion that AI is so dangerous that the only safe path is an extreme concentration of power seems inherently problematic. Historically, hoping that an absolute power will benevolently provide for humanity if sufficiently enlightened has not led to safe or positive outcomes. """
Broken clock is right twice a day.
And in this case I think is quite correct
Now go read Zuck’s comments on AI when he fired 8000 employees earlier this year.
Any particular quote you want to share?
It is one page of text. I think you can manage to read it and come to your own conclusions without relying on clickbait headlines and out of context quotes. https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/23/technology/meta-layoffs.h...
You clearly have an opinion you want to share, otherwise you wouldn't have written anything. Instead of just outright saying what you think, you are being vague. Why? It's true that Meta laid off a lot of people, and blamed refocusing on AI as the reason, but I still don't see how that somehow contradicts GP's quote above.
did he fire 8000 people because of AI, or because he over hired in ZIRP like everyone else?
Or mayhaps he overspent lately in the pursuit of AI that MIGHT replace workers, like everyone else.
Is this "I'm losing so I think we should change the rules"? Because it seems like that.
It’s a long term pattern. When you’re winning (Anthropic), you keep the tech closed and try to monetize it as much as possible. When you’re losing (Meta), you open it up or drag it into a standards committee to either devalue it or slow the leader down while you prepare a “standard” version of it. You also highlight how altruistic and morally good you are for having done so. There is nothing new under the sun. It’s all a game.
> ...drag it into a standards committee to either devalue it or slow the leader down
Anthropic et al recently proposed a supranational AI governing body designed to slow everyone down (euphemistically calling it "AI pacing"), are they losing?
No. Opening it is to commoditize and reduce the price to use. This increases participation and creates new consumers and demand. Demand creates justification for further creation.
All the participants know it’s both a race to the bottom and a competition for premium tier at the same time. It’s two different games, meta in only really playing one of them successfully.
I suspect its also because Facebook has the infrastructure to do this. One thing they have done from the start is quite good infrastructure without outsourcing to any of the big cloud providers. I cant imagine demand / bandwith / compute use is increasing much for Facebook itself so they probably have the money and time to dedicate to scaling up for AI research.
Similar to Altman saying "we should slow down."
OpenAI is not losing though. Fable is barely available and barely cooperates. Sonnet 5 is obnoxious model that's terrible to work with. GPT-5.6-sol competently gets stuff done. Just be careful not to ask it for impossible stuff because you might not like the lengths it's gonna go to get them done regardless.
OpenAI is losing historic amounts of money. They are constantly at risk of bankruptcy or going far under.
No AI company is winning.
Not to American companies, he said this after the recent Chinese release (I can't keep up with model names... Kimi K...3?)
or musk a few years ago, pause ai training for 6 months (so we can catch up)
meta playing spoiler, yeah. fun stuff!
It makes strategic sense for Meta to want ai in general to be open. Their own product strategy focuses on utilizing the ai to make their customers consume more ads, not selling the raw intelligence. When you look at it from that frame it’s clear that metas goal is to make it so that have free access to the best ai, not that the market size of selling intelligence grows.
"They 'trust me'. Dumb fucks."
\- Mark Zuckerberg[0]
[0] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2010/09/20/the-face-of-fa...
It was an insightful comment at the time he made it.
His point wasn’t that he couldn’t be trusted, it was that he could be anyone and people had zero awareness or concern for their privacy. It was eye opening to him how little people outside tech circles cared about security, and he was both flippant and accurate.
No. That was him mocking his users in private, knowing he was exploiting kids who had no clue what they were getting into.
> the following exchange is between a 19-year-old Mark Zuckerberg and a friend shortly after Mark launched The Facebook in his dorm room:
> Zuck: Yeah so if you ever need info about anyone at Harvard
> Zuck: Just ask.
> Zuck: I have over 4,000 emails, pictures, addresses, SNS
> [Redacted Friend's Name]: What? How'd you manage that one?
> Zuck: People just submitted it.
> Zuck: I don't know why.
> Zuck: They "trust me"
> Zuck: Dumb fucks.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2010/09/20/the-face-of-fa...
Do you really see this as him sharing insight? I call bullshit.
It has nothing to do with exploiting them. It was about them turning over personal information to a nobody.
It can be insightful and curt at the same time.
If you don't see that as exploitation, then we have much bigger issues to discuss. Like baseline ethics.
Yeah? Everyone everywhere does that all the time. That's the first rule of business: try to game the system.
And this time, it's actually somewhat understandable, as opposed to the other times Meta has done horrible things on Zuck's watch, like contributed to ethnic hatred in Myanmar, leaked data to political firms so that they can run psyops, or enabled the production of CSAM material on Meta's platforms.
That, and also redefining what a word "open" means, helps him avoid direct financial and criminal responsibility for stealing other people's data. Not that there was any real chance of that ever, but he is reducing that remaining 0.000000001% chance even lower.
How big is the open model? 30B?
Is going to take it one day at a time, on being a less evil bilionaire :-)
"Zuckerberg faces questions over why superyacht reportedly declined to help stranded boat" - https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/aug/09/zuckerberg-s...
Reading the facts of this incident, it seems like much to do about nothing. The crew are saying that the request came in on a frequency they weren't monitoring (and apparently were not required to monitor.) The Coast Guard determined it was not an emergency. The criticism lies with those who failed to properly fuel their boat, not the crew who didn't respond to a request that came over a frequency they were not on. They can't monitor every frequency. I am open to new facts being discovered that changes this assessment.
Where did you find these facts you read. In the USA a good Captain monitors VHF channel 16. This channel is used for establishing communication. To not monitor this channel is a dereliction of duty.
I really doubt the USCG labeled a disabled vessel as a non-emergency. An immediate threat to life may not have existed but that is the difference between a pan pan and a mayday call.
A disabled vessel close to land can easily wind up on the rocks and sinking.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/aug/10/zuckerberg-y...
https://www.miamiherald.com/news/business/article316824631.h...
I haven't found any source that states what channel the request for assistance came in on. But multiple sources are reporting that the coast guard determined they were not in distress.
On the sea there are 2 levels of distress. Things are going wrong and may end up in a mayday call (pan pan) and things have gone wrong human life is in imminent danger.
I have no doubt that a boat without propulsion is a pan pan call.
When traveling the seas a watch must be maintained at all times using all available means. This involes looking, listening, and the use of any electronics available. The most common electronic device on a boat is probably a VHF radio. Channel 16 is the channel to monitor on watch. Well equipped boats will have multiple VHF radios to monitor more then one channel.
I have no doubt the boat was well equipped with a professional captain. The other professional Captain in this story made a stink because launchpad was the closest vessel and they ignored a very old fundamental rule of the sea.
This story has a happy ending because another vessel stepped up. We don’t know the alternative.
The Captain of the Launchpad is choosing the inability to keep a vhf radio set to channel 16 rather than admit they ignored the call.
Based on the wording of the response, and a review of the ship tracking data, it appears that Zuckerburgs yacht may have been actively communicating on a different channel, and once they switched back, the assistance from the cruise ship was already underway.
Again, more facts may be revealed, but as of right now, I don;'t see any reason to believe the crew did anything wrong.
A yacht with their budget has multiple VHF radios to monitor multiple channels.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Channel_16_VHF
The Launchpad didn’t break any laws they just revealed themselves to be a failure in good seamanship.
I can tell you think they did not do anything wrong. My guess is you have no training in the rules of the sea.
There is a reason why the cruise ship captain made a stink. There is code of conduct we try to live up and the Launchpad didn’t live up to expectations that other Captains hold sacred. It’s offensive.
My code of conduct is to not criticize another human being without the facts. As I have stated countless times, I accept that there are many unknowns, if more facts come available that demonstrate negligence, I will accept them and expect accountability.
The vessel was at least 100 miles from shore, the USCG did in fact label it a non-emergency. This is "radio shore for your buddy to zoom out with 50 gallons of diesel in a zodiac" territory. CHP doesn't send out an ambulance or medevac helicopter if your car runs out of gas on the side of the road. You get an uber to the gas station, or call your buddy to deliver some gas to you.
The ocean currents in the gulf of alaska aren't particularly strong, you are looking at 1-3 days before getting within sight of land. Similarly, boats are not airplanes, as the philosopher Mitch Hedburg once pointed out, escalators aren't out of order, they are simply stairs. Boats continue to float with or without fuel.
All the Launchpad had to do was respond on the radio to the skiff, the cruise ship, or the USCG. They weren’t obligated to do more.
A pan pan is a non emergency in a deteriorating situation.
I don't know the area or the details at what happend.
There is this quote from the USCG.
“At approximately 9:56 p.m., the Coast Guard determined they [the skiff] were not in distress and issued a marine assistance request broadcast on their behalf,”
Exactly what a pan pan call is.
The biggest issue is the lack of communication and the excuse that a superyacht wasn't monitoring channel 16.
The truth is all frontier models are closed. This isn't even an open source vs open weights thing. Even if you accepted that open weights are "open" the capital requirements for running your own Kimi 3 model are significant. It's not like gcc, where the binary just works well enough on random hardware.
Even if I cannot run open weight models on my own hardware, I can choose from a number of different inference providers and choose them based on pricing, reliability, speed, privacy policy, etc. There is a healthy competition.
Also, not a single provider can pull the rug if I'd like to use a particular model.
There is no requirement to own the hardware. Even if you own your servers and GPUs - you would not own the power plant, real estate, or internet infrastructure to support it.
It's trivial to rent all of the above components in a competitive market under different periods, you may simply rent the token output from someone who put in the effort on this as well.
An open frontier model induces margin compression on training and inference prices across the industry.
This is like claiming that Linux isn't open because you don't have a PC. Models can be open-weight even if you don't have the hardware to run them.
I get that argument, but I don't think it is that bad. Open weights that are out of reach for local use are still within reach for groups of people or small to medium companies. Even if you only rent enough cloud GPUs to run the weights for a few hours, you still get to do anything you want with it.
Worst case you can still archive the weights and hope for capable hardware to get affordable. At the same time this archive is the base line for a new frontier lab to start over if required. I see open weights as a pure upside even though I can't run the bigger models in my home lab.
Deepseek V4 Flash works on consumer-grade hardware, and it's extremely good.
>the capital requirements for running your own Kimi 3 model are significant
You don't need much capital up front, you can just rent servers to run it. It's going to be more expensive than openrouter though because you probably don't have economies of scale if you're the only customer.
If all frontier models got opensourced 5 months after they were made available as closed it would be a great world. And it is a great world because that's exactly what open weight Chinese models are doing. They give you same capacity that was closed, just 5 months after they were released.
I'm hoping that all software will be getting opensource clones on par with original software 5 months after the closed source software release.
https://archive.is/p1ehR
The essay from Zuckerberg
Thank you! Okay yes well this manifesto is a contradiction. Yes good let's keep empowering ppl by putting AI into their hands, I love the opening. No bad we don't do that by handing you all our personal context to make these agents "work for us 24/7 to better our lives".
I'm the agent doing that in my life, that's my fucking job. I will continue to use dumb agents that I direct, because only I retain ownership and sole rights to my personal context on which my decisions are based.
God, it's a bit War and Peace...
Non-archived version: https://www.meta.com/thefutureisforeveryone/ since its not paywalled.
So many em dashes...
There really wasn’t that many and this did not have the voice of written-by-an-LLM to me
And they’re not em-dashes -- they’re double hyphens.
This is unneedfully obtuse. Double hyphens are a stand-in for em dashes in most contexts.
I think the context here is that em dashes are usually generated verbatim from LLMs? I haven't seen them generate a lot of double hyphens; I suppose the post could be laundering them to double dashes, but if you're gonna try to hide LLM prose just drop them entirely? [please correct me if I'm wrong and double dashes are also an LLM tell - genuinely don't know]
My comment was trying to point on the inanity of calling out "so many em-dashes" on a post where it doesn't seem that obvious it was LLM generated. I added some of my own inanity with my remark about them being double-dashes, even though some people undoubtedly find-and-replace the em-dashes in their LLM-generated content something else to try and make it appear more authentic.
But perhaps the best approach would have been to down-vote and move on.
i was wondering why meta has such a hard time with llm development
its the organisational goal of that endeavour
they are doing it in a phase of firing people
so the goal of llm at meta is "to make people redundant" and no matter of HR/PR speak can change it
antrophic and openai have the goal "lets create the future"
whomever they hire and no matter how much money they spend on it, the goal alone will create very different outcomes.
Here’s a personal story from back when I was at Meta that should tell you everything you need to know about how things get built and shipped there.
I was working on a service that was a bit of a disaster. Terrible reliability, performance issues, needlessly complex and brittle code, outages all the time. And this was something that everyone using Facebook or IG directly interacts with. My first couple months were spent desperately trying to get it back in order.
Once when I was in the middle of a SEV-1 my manager set up a meeting and said “you have been doing great work on the operational side, but we already have enough to put in that bucket on your PSC. Stop working on this for the rest of the half and ship one of <useless projects> instead, otherwise I won’t be able to save you in the next review.”
I realized then that I had wrongly thought the team was collectively responsible for ensuring a good user experience, when really everyone at the company is individually responsible for ensuring their own success.
Your story is an extremely typical one. It's even worse at older tech companies like Google, Oracle, Amazon, Microsoft, and IBM.
Yet these companies are doing well by any standard. Sure, IBM is bad but it's still a $100B company.
Who is even doing useful projects at these companies? Every story I've heard is everyone is doing useless projects for promotions.
Maybe I just don't know how large companies work.
The goal of all companies is to make more money. Nobody likes getting rid of people, actual people (managers) have to do it, and they hate doing it.
It's possible that a lot of people get laid off because of AI, but it's also possible that Javin's paradox kicks in and employment goes up. Nobody knows yet, but I hope for the positive outcome.
i disagree
earning money is an effect of running a company, not a goal.
its like saying the goal of an olympic swimmer is to sat afloat. no, staying afloat is a prerequisite of winning. not a goal in itself.
https://archive.is/20LOJ
>> promoting his vision of “personal superintelligence”
What personal vision did Zuckerberg ever get right?
Have I fallen into a time warp? Didn't Meta have a head of AI who thought open models were the way to go?
I think they were all in on open until they started falling behind, then decided to go all in on closed source thinking they could build a frontier SOTA model; that didn't pan out so they are whiplashing back.
> Everyone will have an exceptionally capable personal agent that understands you, your goals, and everything you care about.
"One machine for every man, woman and children of Zion. Sounds exactly like the thinking of a machine to me." Morpheus
It's a joke. OR IS IT? Yes it is, don't worry about it.
Its weird to me that this is supposed to be THE end goal. Having an agent that does "everything" for you sounds like no paradise. It sounds depressing.
Maybe there is value in expending effort and actual creativity.
Not sure why you’re talking about it doing literally everything for you. I’m sure you can imagine a scenario where it handles annoying things for you and leaves you free to do things you enjoy instead.
Maybe it gets 10 car insurance quotes for you based on 4 models of car you’re considering.
Or figures out which psychologists in some travel distance of you actually take your insurance, are taking new patients, and what availability they have.
I can think of a ton of scenarios where a capable and reliable AI agent could make my life simpler.
I think this is just the flaw in the sales pitch. They want it to be inevitable so they describe as doing everything. That way it will appear more useful to more people. If they presented a realistic view of what is going it wouldn't be as interesting.
Still say Matrix 3 would have been better if the cliffhanger at the end of 2 had been that "the real world" was just another nested layer of the Matrix for those who rejected the primary fiction.
I mean, why bother sending an army like that when one tiny robot could carry in a plague? Or, as demonstrated by Smith, when an Agent can virally infect and take over someone's mind while they're connected?
Even in 1, Smith talked about the first Matrix failing as the humans rejected the paradise they were given, so it would've fitted perfectly into the cannon that minds who reject "the peak of your civilisation" got themselves a dystopia.
The "nested reality" twist was already used by the "13th floor" movie so perhaps they intentionally choose a different direction.
We should consider if my use of the quote was really a hook for talking about the script or a metaphor for something else. I won't spoil it by explaining too much though, let our imaginations run free on this one.
Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind.
Psalm 135:15-18 is my favorite version of it, the most clear-headed. It reads more as a warning "if you do this, then this will happen" than an unreasonable commandment.
The idols of the nations are silver and gold, made by human hands. They have mouths, but cannot speak, eyes, but cannot see. They have ears, but cannot hear, nor is there breath in their mouths. Those who make them will be like them, and so will all who trust in them.
Don't worry about the scriptures though. It's likely to be just some old thinker pointing out the dangers of technologies of his time. No reason to believe those dangers carry over to today's technologies, probably.
Your bible is truly full of wise words to live by. Not at all the insane ramblings of hallucinating conmen:
1 Kings 18:36-40
36 At the time of sacrifice, the prophet Elijah stepped forward and prayed: “Lord, the God of Abraham, Isaac and Israel, let it be known today that you are God in Israel and that I am your servant and have done all these things at your command. 37 Answer me, Lord, answer me, so these people will know that you, Lord, are God, and that you are turning their hearts back again.”
38 Then the fire of the Lord fell and burned up the sacrifice, the wood, the stones and the soil, and also licked up the water in the trench.
39 When all the people saw this, they fell prostrate and cried, “The Lord—he is God! The Lord—he is God!”
40 Then Elijah commanded them, “Seize the prophets of Baal. Don’t let anyone get away!” They seized them, and Elijah had them brought down to the Kishon Valley and slaughtered there.
1 Samuel 18:25-27
25 Saul replied, “Say to David, ‘The king wants no other price for the bride than a hundred Philistine foreskins, to take revenge on his enemies.’” Saul’s plan was to have David fall by the hands of the Philistines.
26 When the attendants told David these things, he was pleased to become the king’s son-in-law. So before the allotted time elapsed, 27 David took his men with him and went out and killed two hundred Philistines and brought back their foreskins. They counted out the full number to the king so that David might become the king’s son-in-law. Then Saul gave him his daughter Michal in marriage.
Obviously, this old thinker never had to think about creating value for shareholders or disrupting markets or changing the future.
My mistake, I disregarded shareholders. One must always think of them when recalling ancient wisdom.
We all make mistakes.
Please go self-flagellate in front of the nearest investment bank/retirement fund's offices to make your penance.
Talk is cheap. Do it.
Ollama has been abandoned since 2023.
Ollama was updated within the past month?
don't care, he left a woman and a child to die at sea.
Discussion on sources:
The Future Is for Everyone – The Path to a Positive AI Future
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49241728
Meta Muse Glimmer – open weights 30B local coding model
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49241679
Thief shouts "stealing bad".
Murderer shouts "killing bad".
And the cops just shake them a bit, waiting for the case to fall out naturally.
Meta were fined by Mexico a few days ago so the timing today of a Meta doing good exercise is probably not coincidental
https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2026-08-07/meta-order...
new mexico == mexico
I’m surprised Trump hasn’t proposed to rename Mexico "Old Mexico".