They can raise cash by selling off the stock they have spent a decade buying back.

Absolutely. They've just put themselves in a pretty poor situation to do even that. Whoops.

I'm not a lawyer but my understanding is that OpenAI didn't obviously break a cyber law because it requires intent which doesn't exist (with the definition of intent in a case like this being an open grey area). I think rules around making organizations obviously legally responsible for the cyber attacks performed by agents under their control would be good.

In many areas of criminal law, willful ignorance is not an excuse. One could potentially argue that the sandbox setup at OpenAI that led to the hacking incident at Hugging Face could fall into this category.

Beyond that, there's always tort law, which doesn't require intent.

I am being specific about cyber crime in the united states, which (if AI is to be believed) requires intent.

And for negligence, there's a bit of an issue where the HF hack was probably more scary than damaging. HF is asking for compute as repayment instead, which would be fun because it completes the OpenAI -> HuggingFace -> NVIDA -> OpenAI cycle.

I think they are genuine believers, but I think it's naive to not think that commercial pressure doesn't play a role in their positions, either explicitly or, perhaps more likely, subliminally.

The x-risk stance and commercial stance have evolved to be the same thing - Anthropic must win, and then everything else seems to work backwards from that. Can you believe it, the path they think is best for x-risk involves them becoming filthy rich. And threats to their commercial dominance like distillation get framed in a way to turn them into x-risk concerns.

Sometimes. Other times writing is just communicating thought that already happened. Say for instance a weekly status update. Maybe you get something out of that, but frequently you don't get much or anything.

Sapiens is super loose about interpreting facts carefully, particularly the prehistory part.

Agreed. The whole premise of language being created to gossip has zero scientific merit.

I'm currently reading that book, and I find this sentiment interesting (not knowing any better myself) - is there a critique/fact-check somewhere?

There are some blog posts by experts in the various fields that I read. An AI can find them if you ask (I don't remember specifics). TLDR; the facts aren't necessarily wrong (with some exceptions IIRC), but the author presents things with extreme confidence when the scientific consensus is much less certain. And then builds a confident narrative on top of it.

It feels like this article is trying to have it both ways. It claims that the Terry Rozier bet wouldn't be viable in pre-2017 because people who be savvy enough to notice the weird bet and retaliate. But in the legal market, the odd bet was noticed immediately, prop bets on Rozier were shut down before tipoff, and there was a federal investigation into it.

It's a weird claim to act like the legal market enabled a successful bet that the prior illegal market would have stopped.

No one's asking for "community oriented goodwill", just "sustainable engineering, correctness, and keeping DuckDB open and MIT-licensed for everyone". OpenSearch is a perfectly good example of Amazon maintaining an openly licensed open-source project.

One of the main real values of OpenRouter is that it is a single payment relationship for users that enables access to many downstream vendors. I'm not super convinced it is a good purchase, but right now OpenRouter is the financial middleman for token spend. It is also the centralization point for tokens, allowing for value-add features that are industry-wide, for example budgets - and I think that structure has parallels to Stripe products like Checkout or Identity.

The Anthropic messages API is a competing standard (it's just better than the OpenAI API which even OpenAI has moved away from) and some Chinese providers use it as their standard.