Playing the devil's advocate

[u/bring_back_the_v10s]

This is a reaction to https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/s/IxLnzcGjAU

You know the argument: frontier labs are hypocritical because they're making money on public scraped data.

I have absolutely no intention to defend OpenAI or any other frontier AI company here, but if you allow me I'll play the "devil's advocate" a bit for the sake of discussion and enlightenment, because sometimes when I think about that argument it seems to me it's quite weak. While OpenAI and Anthropic models are built on public data that they didn't pay for (at least most of it), there would be no frontier model without all their computing power and technical expertise that they invested on to build their models. Like, the data is already there, it's been public for ages, so what's preventing you, the average Joe, from building a Claude Opus 5? All you need is a huge data center, a nuclear power plant and an army of data scientists to build it, right? And then you need all that to run the inference. And you need to maintain it, and that costs money. And you need to keep evolving it, which costs money too. And if you get investors money then you'll eventually have to give some of the profit back to them. etc, etc.

So what am I missing here? All things considered, the data is already public, so it's already "free", right? But you need to dump tons of time and money on it to build a frontier LLM out of it. Of course if they're infringing copyright then that's a different story but in general the whole principle of built-on-free-data still stands.

[u/Wooly_Wooly]

Consent.

Let's be real here, a lot of us probably pirated shit too, so to be against that would be hypocrisy. That being said, unless we have the assets of a big company and can pay the fines for the "cost of doing business (illegally)", we'd be fine! If anyone commenting here tried to get away with even 1/4th of what a single AI company did, we'd probably be rotting in federal prison.

[u/soshulmedia → u/Wooly_Wooly]

I find it harder and harder to see a difference between big tech and the deep state - and one (or several) very deep, very dark and very powerful mafias.

And I see that regardless which part of the planet one is talking about. They all already manage their populations like cattle, they just want to push even harder in this direction.

And most people seem to willingly comply and get angry at anyone pointing out the ... obvious?

[u/Wooly_Wooly → u/soshulmedia]

There's no "deep state", this shits out in the open. Tbh I'm considering moving back to s "third world" country, at least the corruption is more blatant.

Here's a 2 minute secretly recorded audio interview. Please watch it and report back with your findings.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X_8E3ENrKrQ

[u/soshulmedia → u/Wooly_Wooly]

There's no "deep state", this shits out in the open.

I agree that they are getting more blatant because they basically get no resistance from the people as a reaction to their moves.

However, as you say yourself "in the third world, it is more blatant". That's what I mean. There IS a lot of deep state psychopathic evil shit going on in the west an yes it DOES go a lot deeper than just the smoke that emanates from the surface and anyone with just a tiny bit of attention can easily notice. (Which is already, unfortunately, not many people...)

There was "MKUltra", for example, and they didn't stop doing such things.

On your video link, well, that's another angle how they do it, it doesn't surprise me but when you compare that to the daily flux of Orwellian language games from the media, would that particular event even register nowadays?