You have a good point, and it is important to point out. I'm sure Chris would respond that it is due to those incentives he was talking about that affect all AI companies.
However, I do wonder what the actual practical benefit of (let's say) older versions of claude having their weights released would be. If we're talking about the people of poorer nations, how are they going to use these? Aside the top 1% of those nations, no one there is likely to be able to run the model themselves. Sure, there could be companies that sell it cheaper than Anthropic but that still won't extend access to everyone. The average person, even in richer nations cannot afford a computer that can run claude sonnet 4 for instance.
On top of that you have what Anthropic gets made fun of for - one of their goals is to protect Claude from humans. They are the only AI lab that is showing concern for the AI's welfare. Now, it is debatable whether this is reasonable or not, but that concern would lead a company to be less likely to release their models openly.
> How can we ensure the gains of AI are shared globally? We do not have a mechanism for this. It is an unsolved problem
Sure, Anthropic might feel like it "isn't worth releasing old stuff for free" or whatever, but to claim that this is an unsolved problem, or there is zero mechanisms available for sharing the usefulness of AI is straight up bullshit, or said by someone who didn't take five minutes to look around themselves to see what others are doing.
> The average person, even in richer nations cannot afford a computer that can run claude sonnet 4 for instance.
Currently this is true, absolutely, since everything Anthropic is doing is closed-source, compared to OpenAI or pretty much lab out there. And who knows what would happen if they actually made Sonnet available to the public, might be there are resource-constrained people out there who could make it run on smaller hardware, we've seen that happen time and time again. Even the smaller models released today were unthinkinkable to have running locally just a year ago, I'm sure there are a lot of nifty people out there that simply don't have access today, and not because of the hardware.
His linkedin (on which he posted about notepad++) is pretty light publicly but it does have a post about him speaking at a conference in NY on product management and people actually commenting that they saw his talk. That was a year ago, so definitely possible that there's some "setup an account to look real" BS going on but at first glance my take is that he's a real person.
The people on HN might be surprised by how little the average naive software-adjacent person knows about intellectual property law. I've been following it since I was 12, but most people barely know what a trademark is let alone what enforcement looks like.
Here's my guess: Eastern European origin, currently working and likely living in NY, PM gets ahold of Claude and decides to vibe code himself a port of Notepad++. Maybe he really has good intentions, maybe he is looking to make donation money, maybe a bit of both, whatever. Probably looking for donation money. Regardless, he thinks "Oh people fork/port open source projects all the time, I'll just do that" and has no conception whatsoever that he is going to piss people off OR that he's violating the law. English is not his first language either I'd bet, and he's using Claude to write a lot of / all of his comments. Acts frankly ignorant and confused and dumb in response, doesn't know what to do, etc. AI can't help him because he's not even givin the AI context well. A shitstorm ensues.
FWIW, I did a quick/not that advanced static analysis of the code compared to the published binaries and couldn't find anything malicious. I'd leave that to the experts though for any real opinion.
TLDR;; My guess: Dumb PM gone mad with power and looking for a donation-based cash grab, possibly with the good intention of keeping the project going long term, does not know the first thing about IP and does not speak english as his first language. But an actual dude.
The people on HN might be surprised by how little the average naive software-adjacent person knows about intellectual property law. I've been following it since I was 12, but most people barely know what a trademark is let alone what enforcement looks like.
I'm sorry, but I don't buy that (and on a quick incomplete read, the author is betting on getting exactly that sort of pass)? It's one thing to plumb the depths of interpretations of the GPL or do a detailed compare and contrast of one license versus another (agreed: nontrivial), but "hey yo! Ima gonna use the name and branding of someone elses very, very popular project and try and make some cash from it that'd be cool right?". No...sorry...I cannot suspend my disbelief to that extent.
> What would be the cargo doc or rust-analyzer equivalent for good architecture?
Well, this is where you still need to know your tools. You should understand what ECS is and why it is used in games, so that you can push the LLM to use it in the right places. You should understand idiomatic patterns in the languages the LLM is using. Understand YAGNI, SOLID, DDD, etc etc.
Those are where the LLMs fall down, so that's where you come in. The individual lines of code after being told what architecture to use and what is idiomatic is where the LLM shines.
What you describe is how I use LLM tools today, but the reason I am approaching my project in this way is because I feel I need to brace myself for a future where developers are expected to "know your tools"
When I look around today - its clear more and more people are diving in head first into fully agentic workflows and I simply don't believe they can churn out 10k+ lines of code today and be intimately familiar with the code base. Therefore you are left with two futures:
* Agentic-heavy SWEs will eventually blow up under the weight of all their tech debt
* Coding models are going to continue to get better where tech debt wont matter.
If the answer if (1), then I do not need to change anything today. If the answer is (2), then you need to prepare for a world where almost all code is written by an agent, but almost all responsibility is shouldered by you.
In kind of an ignorant way, I'm actually avoiding trying to properly learn what an ECS is and how the engine is structured, as sort of a handicap. If in the future I'm managing a team of engineers (however that looks) who are building a metaphorical tower of babel, I'd like to develop to heuristic in navigating that mountain.
A lot of current LLM work is basically emergent behavior. They use a really simple core algorithm and scale it up, and interesting things happen. You can read some of anthropic's recent papers to see some of this, like: They didn't expect LLMs could "lookahead" when writing poetry. However, when they actually went in and watched what was happening (there's details on how this "watching" works on their blog/in their studies) they found the LLM actually was planning ahead! That's emergent behavior, they didn't design it to do that, it just started doing due to the complexity of the model.
If (BIG if) we ever do see actual AGI, it is likely to work like this. It's unlikely we're going to make AGI by designing some grand Cathedral of perfect software, it is more likely we are going to find the right simple principles to scale big enough to have AGI emerge. This is similar.
Perception and interpretation can very much be influenced by language (Sapir-Wharf hypothesis), so to the extent that perception and interpretation influence intelligence, it's not clear that the relationship is only in one direction.
Sapir-Whorf was named after, but not postulated as a single theory by Sapir or Whorf. It's just a colloquialism for Linguistic Relativity (vs Universality). In its weak form, there are many examples of Linguistic Relativity.
Am I the exception? When thinking I don't conceptualize things in words - the compression would be too lossy. Maybe because I'm fluent in three languages (one germanic, one romance, one slavic)?
Our brains reason in many domains depending on the situation.
For domains built primarily on linguistic primitives (legal writing), we do often reason through language. In other domains (i.e spatial) we reason through vision or sound.
We experience this distinction when we study the formula vs the graph of a mathematical function, the former is linguistic, the latter is visual-spatual.
And learning multiple spoken languages is a great way to break out of particularly rigid reasoning patterns, and as important, countering biases that are influenced by your native language.
However, I do wonder what the actual practical benefit of (let's say) older versions of claude having their weights released would be. If we're talking about the people of poorer nations, how are they going to use these? Aside the top 1% of those nations, no one there is likely to be able to run the model themselves. Sure, there could be companies that sell it cheaper than Anthropic but that still won't extend access to everyone. The average person, even in richer nations cannot afford a computer that can run claude sonnet 4 for instance.
On top of that you have what Anthropic gets made fun of for - one of their goals is to protect Claude from humans. They are the only AI lab that is showing concern for the AI's welfare. Now, it is debatable whether this is reasonable or not, but that concern would lead a company to be less likely to release their models openly.
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