When Jensen (Nvidia) was doing interviews at his recent public talks, he was asked something along the lines of: "Why release these new laptops which are a low margin market, if your other businesses are vastly more profitable?" and his answer was basically that if they can build the coolest and best technology and push the frontier, they will do it. It's not all about making tons of money. He seemed genuinely excited about the tech.
It highlights the difference between companies like Nvidia and Anthropic to me, where one is clearly all about the money and power, and the other is doing it because they genuinely want to accelerate progress and make cool stuff as the driving factor. It's no surprise therefore, that Nvidia is the worlds largest open-source contributor to AI, with over 800 open-weight models.
Of course, these models run on Nvidia hardware, so they benefit from it as a company. But with that healthy mindset, they found a way to contribute that not only benefits everyone, but also benefits themselves.
Contrast to Anthropic, who has gone the complete opposite direction. Closed off everything, restricting everything, fearmongering progress, regulatory capture attempts, the list goes on. I mean, they won't even agree on using AGENTS.md as a standard because CLAUDE.md is free marketing for them. That's the level of disgusting greed we are dealing with...
From a game theory perspective, the cooperative strategies tend to win. As a result, Nvidia has set themselves up for a lifetime. Anthropic however, is playing a strategy of winner takes all, and they're happy to see the world and the entire AI industry collapse in the process.
The proof is in the pudding though. I'm judging based on their actions, not on their words. They're making AI models and AI research widely accessible, including selling consumer grade hardware to run them locally, and to use open-weight models. They could have just gone all in on selling to Anthropic, OpenAI, and all the other big tech companies, but they aren't. Meanwhile, Anthropic is trying to price people out of the market, increasing their restrictions, cutting the latest model from subscription plans, etc.
Nvidia not doing it out of goodness of their hearts and love to open source. If at anynpoint their CUDA vendor lock-in moat will faik because Intel or AMD manage to get working software they'll return to keep everything locked and proprietary ASAP.
Basically everything Nvidia does in open source is there to make sure their proprietary stack have a good moat and no competitor stack can catch up.
That's not really the impression I get from Anthropic, but if you have the links to back it up, I'm always willing to change my mind.
Compared to bizes like Oracle, Microsoft, or Facebook, I felt that Anthropic was more interested in progress (not to the neglect of business―AI training is expensive at the end of the day), but maybe I've just not seen what you've seen.
Definitely not. Kurtzman Star Trek is not really Star Trek in any spiritual sense, it’s a vessel for political messaging (they’ve pretty much said as much)
Not really. It had a strong perspective on some things, and stories were occassionally commentary on real world issues, but at the end of the day Star Trek had its own viewpoint. Modern Stark Trek isn't run or written by people that are Star Trek fans, it's written by people that want to use an existing IP to attach their agenda to. They care about the agenda not the show.
Even if it could, it probably ought not makes this precise episode, because the technological, philosophical and social context is remarkably different.
A similar episode, actually informed by what we know or can forsee about AI and LLMs, and addressing our hopes and fears about what they mean would be interesting though.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47881678
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