It’s not dystopian. You are thinking up a conspiracy based on absolutely nothing, when a far simpler and more obvious answer exists(that they decided it would make them more money), and then calling it dystopian. You’re basically saying “here’s a crazy idea that could potentially have been a motivation. Isn’t it crazy that they did that?!?”
Let’s try a couple more using your own thought process:
“McDonalds could have added child play places so that poor children would get exercise and be physically fit enough to join the military when they turn 18. Isn’t that dystopian?”
“Home builders might build homes with wood in order to remove natural resources from the planet to make Earth less of a target for alien invasion. Isn’t that dystopian?”
“Baskin Robins might have been created to make me fat. How dare they? Isn’t that dystopian?”
I don’t want to make unsubstantiated guesses, but we should remember that GPT3.5 was originally just GPT3.5 and when they came out with turbo it not only sped it up but also reduced the cost (to us) by like 10x of what it used to be if I remember right. So they are (or at the very least “were”) working on and succeeding on reducing its cost to run.
As others have noted, there is a “temperature” parameter that defines how much randomness gets injected in its process. With a temperature of 0 it’s results would be repetitive and lack any type of creativity. With a temperature set to max it would hallucinate a ton and have wild answers.
I just tested it in the playground using gpt4 and when I used the default temperature of 1, it’s answers carried from like 303k to 305k where each answer was slightly different. Then I tested it several times with temperature of 0 and it gave the same exact result every time 303820. So the algorithm thinks that 303820 is the most correct answer, but the injected randomness makes it pick slightly less optimal answers. I don’t know if the other answers are completely out of thin air or if it’s training data just had a bunch of different sources that varied slightly.
I don't imagine the average person will approach ChatGPT with this level of understanding. My class didn't struggle with the varied output of creative prompts, "write a story". We were confused regarding factual information.
I hate it, but this is a good move by Musk(if intentional). I learned more about x.ai than I cared to just during my confusion when I typed “ai.com” and this came up. It’s like advertising that’s targeted directly to people that care about AI and because of the initial confusion it caused me to investigate the ad rather than block it out like I do with all other ads.
You might not like it, but the Caymans are absolutely known as a tax haven. You can’t really be arguing that people stash money in the Caymans “because of the transparency”…
“The Cayman Islands are considered a tax haven because the Caymans do not impose a corporate tax, making it an ideal place for multinational corporations to base subsidiary entities to shield some or all of their incomes from taxation. The Cayman Islands do not impose taxes on residents. They have no income tax, no property taxes, no capital gains taxes, no payroll taxes, and no withholding tax.”
By the way, Cayman has pretty substantial taxes. We operate a thriving country with no national debt and a great social safety net.
We just charge them differently. There’s an effective 22% consumption tax (with carve-outs for basics), levied on all imports and increased on luxuries. We have 7% taxes on all property transfers (for both income and to minimize house flipping). We have a ton of fees on any government interaction which aligns regulatory burdens with income.
Entities DO hide their money in tax havens to avoid paying taxes. They avoid paying taxes BECAUSE tax havens have low or no taxes. Those two definitions are defining two ends to the same thing.
The caymans have low or minimal taxes. The caymans are also used by entities to hide their money so they don’t have to pay taxes. Entities are not incorporating in the Caymans for any reason other than avoiding taxes.
And the actual definition of a tax haven specifically is “a country or independent area where taxes are levied at a low rate.”
True, but if you're looking to hide your money you want two things: 1) low taxes within the country and 2) low transparency as to who owns what in the country.
That's why Switzerland used to be a great place to hide your money decades ago - low taxes and numbered accounts where it was illegal to reveal the true identify of the account holder.
Based on DelaneyM's comment - Caymans has the 1st but not the 2nd.
My point is that the ability of a company to put money offshore for tax benefits is on the home/operating country, not the offshore location.
Cayman invests a lot of energy in sensible and globally integrated financial regulations. We specialize on that as a country. So when companies are moving money around globally we often feature in that. But we can’t be held responsible for what those funds transfers are used for.
We can be transparent (and we are exceptionally so), we can be responsive to global financial crimes queries (we are that as well). But what are we supposed to do about another country’s laws?
the home country is the Cayman islands, the operating country may be different, and either way, the motivation and ability to use the Cayman Islands as a tax haven derives from both countries
> Cayman invests a lot of energy in sensible and globally integrated financial regulations. We specialize on that as a country.
the reason the Cayman islands may have made all those investments is because that is what is expected of a mature tax haven
> we can’t be held responsible for what those funds transfers are used for
> what are we supposed to do about another country’s laws?
I mean, if you don't want to be a tax haven, you could raise taxes to be less favorable to businesses, but I'm not saying you should do anything, because this conversation is descriptive, not prescriptive
Companies are not putting money in Cayman to hide it.
Some companies put money outside of their operating or home country to minimize taxes, but Cayman has no part of that besides being “not their operating country”.
And it’s actually less often the tax treatment of funds which brings companies to Cayman, and much more often the simpler regulations. Operating globally often means a geometric growth in financial complexity. Cayman is a neutral third country, which simplifies things tremendously. Think of us like a financial cache.
“I would not take anonymous crypto for ethical reasons”
Lmao. You’re sitting here telling us that if you got a a real, anonymous donation of $100k, you would not accept it because of a moral objection to the type of currency? Of all the fake high horses…
It’s pretty simple, really. There is “wink wink nod nod” collusion going on across the industry to suppress wages right now. They know that if everybody else is suppressing wages right now, they can without too much “trouble” as well.
Their calculus is just “how low can we keep wages without too much attrition”. Knowing that they have the backdrop of what feels like “always imminent recession”, it gives them a lot more confidence in holding wages down. Similar to how some (but by no means all) inflation was caused by companies knowing that since other companies were raising prices, they could also raise prices because consumers were already primed to think it was inflations fault and necessary.
Nobody affirmatively says “yes, my goal is to violate copyright law, and Copilot is the best tool I’ve found”. But it doesn’t seem impossible to me that the value of Copilot comes partially from the fact that it can copy paste code from copyrighted repositories in ways which would be illegal for you or I to do. I’m not sure it’s proven yet but I wouldn’t be shocked if it is in the future.
It provides the same value as someone who copies and pastes code from Stack Overflow or any of the predecessors without concerning themselves with the license.
I am certain that I can find code from Linux or gcc or emacs on Stack Overflow that is under a GPL license and not compatible with the CC license Stack Overflow uses... and yet it's there. What's more, people will copy that code into their own ignoring the CC license too.
How is that really any different than using Copilot if the original license and attribution are something to respect.
Note that I do think that the original license is something to respect which is why for any of the code that I write that has copyright that matters on it (toy program for home? meh. Hobby project repo that I'm working on that I'll publish? yep. Employer's code for work? absolutely.) I either don't touch questionable sources or run a license check on it when using it.
The key thing is that I don't consider the use of Copilot to be any more controversial than copying from Stack Overflow - which has been done by countless programmers for a decade before Copilot existed and no one got up in arms about it then.
Browsing Stack Overflow and even blindly copy and pasting is an intentional action done by research by the user, and the source of the material pasted is known or discoverable.
Using Copilot is an automated process, and the source of the material used in learning is deeply obfuscated in the learning model.
That's why I make the analogy back to cryptocurrency mixers.
Copilot is a product -- at least indirectly -- of Microsoft, a company who for about a decade made very public pronouncements about how they disagreed with the GPL (or copyleft generally), found it problematic, and tried actively to discourage its use.
Today's MS isn't really the same, and they've clearly made their peace with Linux. But it still happens that the GPL is in some fundamental ways at odds with commercial exploitation of open source code. So any corporate entity is going to struggle with it because at best it requires being very careful in distribution, or trying to negotiate or cut a deal with the licensee. At worst it can lead to legal problems and IP leakage on your own product.
So, not claiming any conspiracy. Or intent to violate intentionally. But it is in the convenient interests of companies like MS/OpenAI/GitHub to treat open source work as effectively public domain rather than under copyright, and to push the limits there.
The risk to an employer is of course the accidental introduction of such copylefted material into their code-base through copilot or similar tools.
I suspect two sources of disconnect with the broader community on hackernews that doesn't seem to see the issue here:
a) Much of the folks on this forum are working in the full-stack/web space where fundamentally novel, patented, or conceptually difficult algorithms and datastructures are rare. For them Copilot is an absolute blessing in helping to reduce the tedium of boilerplate. However in the embedded systems, operating systems, compiler, game engine dev, database internals etc. world there are other aspects at work. In certain contexts, Copilot has been shown to reproduce complicated or difficult code taken from copyrighted or copylefted (or maybe even patented sources) without attribution. And apparently now with some explicit obfuscation.
To put it another way: it's unlikely that Copilot's going to violate licenses with its assistance with turning your value/model objects from one structure to another, or writing a call into a SQL ORM. But it's quite possible that if I'm writing a DB join algorithm or some complicated math in a rendering engine or a compiler optimization phase that it could "crimp notes" from a source under restrictive license... because those things are absolutely in its learning set and the LLM doesn't "know" about the licensing behind them.
b) Either misunderstanding of, or lack of knowledge of, or outright hostility to... copylefted or attribution licenses which require special handling.
“McDonalds could have added child play places so that poor children would get exercise and be physically fit enough to join the military when they turn 18. Isn’t that dystopian?”
“Home builders might build homes with wood in order to remove natural resources from the planet to make Earth less of a target for alien invasion. Isn’t that dystopian?”
“Baskin Robins might have been created to make me fat. How dare they? Isn’t that dystopian?”