Microsoft is investing $1B in OpenAI - <AUTHOR> http://openai.com/blog/microsoft <comment><USER2> New York Times has a bit more context

> Mr. Nadella said Microsoft would not necessarily invest that billion dollars > all at once. It could be doled out over the course of a decade or more. > Microsoft is investing dollars that will be fed back into its own business, > as OpenAI purchases computing power from the software giant, and the > collaboration between the two companies could yield a wide array of > technologies.

[https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/22/technology/open-ai- micros...](https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/22/technology/open-ai- microsoft.html)

<comment><AUTHOR> (I work at OpenAI.)

> It could be doled out over the course of a decade or more.

The NYT article is misleading here. We'll definitely spend the $1B within 5 years, and maybe much faster.

We certainly do plan to be a big Azure customer though!

<comment><USER3> >>"We certainly do plan to be a big Azure customer though!"

That's great, one question where can I use GYM or universe in the cloud with the render() option.

I've spend many hours trying to set up the environment in cloud [1] without success.

[1]: [https://stackoverflow.com/questions/40195740/how-to-run- open...](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/40195740/how-to-run-openai-gym- render-over-a-server/48237220)

<comment><USER4> Check out this example: [https://nbviewer.jupyter.org/github/yandexdataschool/Practic...](https://nbviewer.jupyter.org/github/yandexdataschool/Practical_RL/blob/81981aa/week01_intro/seminar_gym_interface.ipynb)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Despite all the negativity in replies, I try to remain optimistic that this investment in AGI-related research is going to be a net positive.

Congrats to the team, and break a leg!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you!

<comment><USER6> The research that OpenAI's doing is groundbreaking and the results are often beyond state-of-the-art. I aim to work in one of your research teams sometime!

<comment><USER7> Watch the Kool-Aid intake and you'll be just fine. Dreams are great and an absolute necessity for success but create your own. Don't buy into everything you hear, especially Elon Musk talking about Artificial General Intelligence.

<comment><USER6> Oh, I'm well aware of the hype around AGI. My personal view is that AGI is kind of an asymptotic goal, something we'll get kind of close to but never actually reach. Nevertheless, I would like to work on more pragmatic goals, like improving the current state-of-the-art language models and text generation networks. I'm actually starting by reimplementing Seq2Seq as described by Quoc Le et al.[1] for text summarization[2] (this code is extremely messy but it'll get better soon). It's been interesting to learn about word embeddings, RNNs and LSTMs, and data processing within the field of Natural Language Processing. Any tips on how to get up to speed within this field would be helpful, as I'm trying to get into research labs doing similar work at my university.

[1]: [https://papers.nips.cc/paper/5346-sequence-to-sequence- learn...](https://papers.nips.cc/paper/5346-sequence-to-sequence-learning- with-neural-networks.pdf) [2]: [https://github.com/applecrazy/reportik/](https://github.com/applecrazy/reportik/)

<comment><USER8> AGI is not something unnatural that could never be attained. If biological systems can somehow attain it, there is no reason other kinds of man-made system cannot attain it.

The first main issue is that of compute capacity. Human brain has equivalent of at least 30 TFLOPS of computing power and this estimate is very likely 2 orders of magnitudes off.

Assume that somehow simulating 1 synapse takes only 1 transistor (gross underestimate). To simulate number of synapses in a single human brain then would need same number of transistors as in 10,000 NVidia V100 GPUs, one of the largest mass produced silicon chip!

The second main issue is of training neurons that are far more complex than our simple arithmetic adders. Back prop doesn't work for such complex neurons.

The 3rd big problem is that of training data. Human child churns through roughly 10 years of training data before reaching puberty. The man-made machine perhaps can take advantage of vast data already available but still there needs to be some structured training regiment.

So current AI efforts in relative comparison of human brain are playing with toy hardware and toy algorithms. It should be surprising that we have gone so far regardless.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Congrats on the fundraise Greg and team!

Does this mean that OpenAI may not disclose progress, papers with details, and/or open source code as much as in the past? In other words, what proprietary advantage will Microsoft gain when licensing new tech from OpenAI?

I understand that keeping some innovations private may help commercialization, which may help raise more funds for OpenAI, getting us to AGI faster, so my opinion is that could plausibly make sense.

<comment><AUTHOR> We'll still release quite a lot, and those releases won't look any different from the past.

> I understand that keeping some innovations private may help > commercialization, which may help raise more funds for OpenAI, getting us to > AGI faster, so my opinion is that could plausibly make sense.

That's exactly how we think about it. We're interested in licensing some technologies in order to fund our AGI efforts. But even if we keep technology private for this reason, we still might be able to _eventually_ publish it.

<comment><USER10> Eventually open ai?

<comment><USER11> I thought from day one that the name «OpenAI» would at best be a slight misnomer, and at worst indicative of a misguided approach. If AGI is close to being achieved, sharing key details of the approach to any actors at all could trigger a Manhattan Project-type global arms race where safety was compromised and the whole thing became insanely risky for the future of humanity.

Glad to see that the team is taking a pragmatic safety-first approach here, as well as towards the near-term economical realities of funding a very expensive project to ensure the fastest possible progress.

In the early days of OpenAI, my thoughts were that the project had good intentions, but a misguided focus. The last year has changed that, though. They absolutely seem to be on the right track. Very excited to see their progress over the next years.

<comment><USER12> The atomic bomb was based on science theory. A computer can run many programs and do a great many things, but it will never be able to think by itself.

<comment><USER13> > The atomic bomb was based on science theory.

Our study of (automated) intelligence is based on science too.

> A computer ... will never be able to think by itself.

Turing wrote an entire paper about this (Computing Machinery and Intelligence), where he rephrases your statement (because he finds it to be meaningless) and devises a test to answer it. He also directly attacks your phrasing of "but it will never":

> I believe they are mostly founded on the principle of scientific induction. > A man has seen thousands of machines in his lifetime. From what he sees of > them he draws a number of general conclusions. They are ugly, each is > designed for a very limited purpose, when required for a minutely different > purpose they are useless, the variety of behaviour of any one of them is > very small, etc., etc. Naturally he concludes that these are necessary > properties of machines in general.

> A better variant of the objection says that a machine can never "take us by > surprise." This statement is a more direct challenge and can be met > directly. Machines take me by surprise with great frequency. This is largely > because I do not do sufficient calculation to decide what to expect them to > do, or rather because, although I do a calculation, I do it in a hurried, > slipshod fashion, taking risks.

<comment><USER14> > A better variant of the objection says that a machine can never "take us by > surprise." This statement is a more direct challenge and can be met > directly. Machines take me by surprise with great frequency. This is largely > because I do not do sufficient calculation to decide what to expect them to > do, or rather because, although I do a calculation, I do it in a hurried, > slipshod fashion, taking risks.

This seems like a cop out. Sure, if you do your calculations wrong, it doesn't behave as you expect. But it's still doing exactly what you wrote it to do. The surprise is in realizing your expectations were wrong, not that the machine decided to behave differently.

<comment><USER13> I think any AI researcher has a tale where an algorithm they wrote genuinely took them by surprise. Not due to wrong calculations, but by introducing randomness, heaps of data, and game bounderaries where the AI is free to fill in the blanks.

A good example of this is "move 37" from AlphaGo. This move surprised everyone, including the creators, who were not skilled enough in Go to hardcode it: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HT- UZkiOLv8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HT-UZkiOLv8)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I want to take everything OpenAI says at face value (seem like good folk), but I can't help but wonder at the recent choice to keep GPT2 closed, on what seemed like pretty thin safety arguments to me.

Now, the demonstrated ability to produce new models which are closed, but maybe can be used as services on a preferred partner's cloud, looks very commercially relevant? How will these conflicts be managed, or is it more like "we are just a commercial entity now, of course we'll do this"?

<comment><USER16> Their handling of OpenAIFive rubbed me the wrong way as well. The whole operation smelled very PR-ish to me personally -- unnecessarily/unjustifiably HYPE representatives, complaining that the Dota community wanted to see OpenAIFive play a normal Dota match against pros rather a heavily constrained environment to benefit the bots, among other things.

<comment><USER17> Same. They left the OpenAI project half baked and thats very disappointing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> $1B dollar is a lot of money. Microsoft is not a charity foundation, so the suspicious is obvious.

> We're partnering to develop a hardware and software platform within > Microsoft Azure which will scale to AGI. We'll jointly develop new Azure AI > supercomputing technologies, and Microsoft will become our exclusive cloud > provider—so we'll be working hard together to further extend Microsoft > Azure's capabilities in large-scale AI systems.

Maybe it's because I'm not an expert, but what does it really mean? Do people understand what "Microsoft will become our exclusive cloud provider" means?

OpenAI is great, but suspicious is understandable from the users side when so much commercial money is involved.

<comment><USER19> My "guess" is they're offering $1B worth of Azure services. Which costs MSFT probably much less than $1B.

My "guess" is that it means MSFT has access to sell products based off the research OpenAI does to MSFT's customers. Having early access to advanced research means MSFT could easily make this money back by selling better AI tools to their customers.

Also a great time to point out that while "Microsoft is not a charity foundation" it does offer a ton of free Azure to charities. [https://www.microsoft.com/en- us/nonprofits/azure](https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/nonprofits/azure) This has been an awesome thing to use when helping small non-profits with little money to spend on "administrative costs".

<comment><AUTHOR> > My "guess" is they're offering $1B worth of Azure services. Which costs MSFT > probably much less than $1B.

It's a cash investment. We certainly do plan to be a big Azure customer though.

> My "guess" is that it means MSFT has access to sell products based off the > research OpenAI does to MSFT's customers. Having early access to advanced > research means MSFT could easily make this money back by selling better AI > tools to their customers.

I'm flattered that you think our research is that valuable! (As I say in the blog post: we intend to license some of our pre-AGI technologies, with Microsoft becoming our preferred partner for commercializing them.)

<comment><USER20> Sorry for the cowardice of this throwaway account, but it freaks me out that Musk left, and Thiel is still there.

Going back in time:

> Musk has joined with other Silicon Valley notables to form OpenAI, which was > launched with a blog post Friday afternoon. The group claimed to have the > goal "to advance digital intelligence in the way that is most likely to > benefit humanity as a whole, unconstrained by a need to generate financial > return."

What happened here?

I know it's far off, but I am concerned about AGI misanthropy and the for- profit turn of OpenAI. Who is the humanist anchor, of Elon's gravitas, left at OpenAI?

What happened to the original mission? Are any of you concerned about this? Can you get rid of Peter Thiel please? Can we buy him out as a species? I respect the man's intellect yet truly fear his misanthropy and influence.

Apologies for the rambling, but you all got me freaked out a bit. I had, and still do have such high hopes for OpenAI.

Please don't lose the forest for the trees.

<comment><USER21> They left in good terms, Musk was competing in terms of talent (e.g Andrej Karpathy leaving OpenAI for Tesla).

See: [https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1096987465326374912?lang...](https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1096987465326374912?lang=en)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> > We think its impact should be to give everyone economic freedom to pursue > what they find most fulfilling, creating new opportunities for all of our > lives that are unimaginable today.

The cynic in me thinks this will never happen, that instead it will make a small subset of the population super rich, while the rest are put to work somewhere to make them even more money. Microsoft will ultimately want a return on their billion, at least.

<comment><USER23> Well, the super rich getting richer is the status quo, so I kind of feel like nothing much changes if this never happens. Now, riding that happy PR wave and failing to deliver would be lame, but perhaps they really believe this. I think it will depend entirely on how much really gets open sourced in the end. I want to believe they'll really do it.

<comment><USER24> Open sourcing still may not level the playing field if it turns out it requires corporate (or state) level resources to operate

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Genuine question: In what sense is OpenAI open ?

<comment><USER26> Its just like the bag of sugar I have in my cabinet that claims to be low calorie. It says "ONLY 16 CALORIES (per 4 grams in tiny letters)".

I mean, sugar is pretty much the definition of a high calorie food. Its like, pure calories. And can affect insulin regulation, etc. That's why they need to put some marketing on it.

<comment><USER22> Off topic, I know, however, this reminded me of TV adverts we used to have in my country when I was young where they were saying how great sugar is because it has 0% fat... If only the butter companies responded with adverts about how they're 0% sugar, that would have been fun. :/

<comment><USER27> Low carb / no carb is gaining in popularity (and some products label it). Sugar is finally becoming the bad guy despite enormous lobbying efforts over a very long time (since the 60s?).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Hmmm.... it reads to me that someone has co-opted an open standard. How much of this is really an investment and how much is an in-kind contribution of Azure resources?

Also this sounds dangerous: "exclusive cloud provider".

When an OpenAI group starts to make exclusively partnerships with one vendor, I wonder how "Open" it is.

I can not imagine Khronos Group, which runs similarly named OpenGL, etc having a "exclusive" graphics card supported for their open standards. Cloud computing is to OpenAI as graphics cards are to OpenGL/Vulkan.

<comment><USER29> How open is the computer world anyway? Not very. At the hardware level not at all. So yes take it with a grain of salt. It's still the product of billionaires and tech giants.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> I'm quite suspicious about private companies helping open source.It seems to me that by relying on private companies open source is tailored to create standards that work best in platforms that are doing financing and cementing monopolies and oligopolies.In my opinion open source should have same status as science and be financed by government.

<comment><USER31> I dunno, Google has made hugely important contributions to open source and the practice of software engineering in general. Would we have all that if it was purely government backed? Like Bell Labs, having an effective monopoly on a new tech product has spun off a ton of innovation for technology in general.

<comment><USER32> I think there is a difference between public funding for research (it's how majority of research is funded) and public funding for open-source software (isn't happening yet, to my knowledge, so it's an interesting and potentially powerful unexplored idea).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Can we talk about the usage of the term "AGI" here? Considering its connotations in popular culture it sounds terrifically inappropriate in terms of what we can feasibly build today.

Can we assume that marketing overrode engineering on the terminology of this press release?

<comment> pure-awesome The purpose of OpenAI is to eventually lead to safe AGI. It's part of their core business purpose. Whatever they do with Machine Learning today is merely instrumental in leading up to that goal.

We certainly cannot feasibly build AGI today, hence OpenAI's use of the term "pre-AGI technologies".

<comment><USER34> I can't see how pure AGI can be "safe". Huge part of human intellect revolves around the need to survive,be it danger,lack of food,or less rational choices based on emotions.If computers can rationalise positive behaviour of humans,they may not be able to do so well with greed, jealousy, hunger for power,that aren't very logical processes but create a lot of positive and negative nonetheless.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> OpenAI => CloseAI

<comment><USER36> So a highly sophisticated sales bot is the end goal :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> I feel pretty bad for people working in ML/AI at Microsoft Research right now. Microsoft is sending a clear signal that they would pay $1B in outside AI research than spend the same amount internally.

</comment><comment><USER38> What's this "Pre-AGI" arrogance? Why are they so certain that it "will scale to AGI"? Is it an attempt at branding, or have they forgotten that AI is a global effort?

And do people really want to be "actualized" by "Microsoft and OpenAI's shared value of empowering everyone"?

</comment><comment><USER39> So is this the open-ai exit?

<comment><AUTHOR> (I work at OpenAI.)

Quite the opposite — this is an investment!

<comment><USER40> Is all this talk of AGI some kind of marketing meme that you guys are tolerating? We haven't figured out sentiment analysis or convnets resilient to single pixel attacks, and here is a page talking about the god damned singularity.

As an industry, we've already burned through a bunch of buzzwords that are now meaningless marketing-speak. 'ML', 'AI', 'NLP', 'cognitive computing'. Are we going for broke and adding AGI to the list so that nothing means anything any more?

<comment><USER41> At what point would you deem it a good idea to start working on AGI safety?

What "threshold" would you want to cross before you think its socially acceptable to put resources behind ensuring that humanity doesn't wipe itself out?

The tricky thing with all of this is we have no idea what an appropriate timeline looks like. We might be 10 years away from the singularity, 1000 years, or it might never ever happen!

There is a non-zero chance that we are a few breakthroughs away from creating a technology that far surpasses the nuclear bomb in terms of destructive potential. These breakthroughs may have a short window of time between each of them (once we know a, knowing b,c,d will be much easier)

So given all of that, wouldn't it make sense to start working on these problems now? And the unfortunate part of working on these problems now is that you do need hype/buzzwords to attract tallent, raise money and get people talking about AGI safety. Sure it might not lead anywhere, but just like fire insurance might seem unnecessary if you never have a fire, AGI research may end up being a useless field altogether but at least it gives us that cushion of safety.

<comment><USER42> > At what point would you deem it a good idea to start working on AGI safety?

I don't know, but I'd say _after_ a definition of "AGI" has been accepted that can be falsified against, and actually turn it into a scientific endeavour.

> The tricky thing with all of this is we have no idea what an appropriate > timeline looks like.

We do. As things are it's undetermined, since we don't even know what's it's supposed to mean.

> So given all of that, wouldn't it make sense to start working on these > problems now?

What problems? We can't even define the problems here with sufficient rigor. What's there to discuss?

<comment><USER43> > I don't know, but I'd say after a definition of "AGI" has been accepted that > can be falsified against, and actually turn it into a scientific endeavour.

Uhh, that's the Turing Test.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> What do they mean by: "Microsoft will become our exclusive cloud provider"?

Being forced to use Azure for all your ML workloads seems a stupid constraint. For example, you might be comfortable with tensorflow/TPU and changing frameworks/tooling might be costly.

<comment><USER45> Azure has full support for Tensorflow, Keras, PyTorch and the rest of the popular stuff. Shouldn't be a problem at all

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> I could be wrong on this. I think the AI/AGI problem isn't so much about money and more about not having discovered the unique insight that will make it happen. In other words, someone in a garage might be far more likely to find how to trigger the proverbial inflection point.

Throwing money at a problem doesn't always produce solutions. It can sure accelerate a project down the path it is on...but, if the path is wrong...

In some ways it reminds me of the battle against cancer.

Not being critical of this project or donation, just stating a point of view on the general problem of solving AI, a subject I have been involved with to one degree or another since the early 80's.

<comment><USER47> I dont think this is true at all. I think that NLP models, especially the state of the art ones (in the coming years), will cost a few million to train. Massive volumes of data sucked up by a model.

<comment><USER46> That is exactly the issue that supports my perspective on this. The fact that we need millions of dollars and massive volumes of data is an indication that we might be going down the wrong path.

Think about how far we are from being able to even get close to what an ant can do. Work it backwards from there.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> Congrats! So what's OpenAI's current valuation?

</comment><comment><USER49> Given their stated mission:

> OpenAI's mission is to ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits > all of humanity.

I'm struck by the homogeneity the OpenAI team.

[https://openai.com/content/images/2019/07/openai-team- offsit...](https://openai.com/content/images/2019/07/openai-team- offsite-2019.jpg)

It seems to be mostly white people and a few Asians, without a single black or Hispanic person.

<comment><USER50> How does that matter? Does diversity for the cause of diversity lead to better results? Is there any data around this?

Hiring the most qualified people is the most important thing. As long as there isn't an inherent bias for not hiring someone who is hispanic, black, or brown, it should b e fine.

<comment><USER51> What you're posing is an age-old counterargument based around an irrational fear of white people experiencing prejudice and losing out on opportunities to underqualified people they would have otherwise had.

There have been studies done around diversity, conducted both privately and publicly, which consistently conclude that increased diversity does result in enhanced decision-making, collaboration, and organizational value-add due to the different perspectives having a net positive influence rather than neutral or negative.

Beyond pragmatism, from an idealist perspective aiding in increasing organizational diversity is the morally right thing to do. That doesn't mean hiring underqualified people; it means refusing to fill the position until the right person is found, which is a whole other problem on its own.

Here are some resources to get started: [https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/insights/diversity-work- group-p...](https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/insights/diversity-work-group- performance) [https://journals.aom.org/doi/abs/10.5465/1556374](https://journals.aom.org/doi/abs/10.5465/1556374)

<comment><USER52> Those studies are a pretty weak argument. The first link isn't about the type of diversity grandparent was talking about, but "informational diversity". The paper produces no direct correlation. The pragmatic angle is overblown.

It being the right thing to do is a much stronger argument imo. Which I agree with, but companies generally aren't interested in it, unless they can use it for marketing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> Excellent way to reallocate some of that record breaking revenue they just announced.

</comment><comment><USER54> Does anyone have any thoughts on Vicarious, the non-deep-learning competitor to OpenAI?

<comment><USER55> I'm also curious about this, haven't heard anything about them in a while

</comment></comment><comment><USER56> Hopefully this is good news for Bing.

<comment><USER57> Well, hopefully if someone creates a benevolent AGI then it should be good news for everyone.

<comment><USER5> [EDIT]: friendly -> non-friendly oops.

That's what seems so confusing about HN replies here. (Non-friendly) AGI is an extreme existential risk (depending on who you listen to).

I'm perfectly fine with rewarding the org that's responsible for researching friendly AGI to do it _right_ (extremely contingent on that last bit).

<comment><USER58> the thing is, nobody knows how to do that. it's not a money problem.

<comment><USER57> OpenAI is a research company - that's what research is, working out how to do things we don't know how to do. Research requires _some_ money so at one level it is a money problem.

<comment><USER58> but this is alchemy isn't it? there isn't even a theoretical framework from which we can even begin to suggest how to keep any "general intelligence" benign. good old fashioned research notwithstanding, a billion dollars is not about to change this. it reads to more to me like this is an investment in azure (ie microsoft picking up some machine learning expertise to leverage in its future cloud services). that's not a judgement, and i'm sure lots of cool work will still come from this, given the strength of the team and massive backing they have. it just smells funny.

<comment><USER56> Alchemy wasn't entirely wrong; it is indeed possible to turn lead into gold, it was just beyond the technology of the time: [https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/fact-or- fiction-l...](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/fact-or-fiction-lead- can-be-turned-into-gold/).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER59> Azure has a supercomputer emulator, and even if OpenAI doesn't get a full $1B in cash but gets to use it as credits on the emulator, that could be huge.

</comment><comment><USER60> Why is it called an investment? Is OpenAI a corporation that plans to pay out dividends? I thought it's more of a non-profit. This deal looks more like a donation of cloud compute resources. Still a great idea (moves ML research closer to their platform, eating more of Google's lunch), but it's not an investment in OpenAI.

<comment><USER61> Because Microsoft has calculated a reasonable ROI to make it worth it.

<comment><USER60> Yeah but how's the return exactly going to come about (dividends? merger and talent takeover?), that's the question. I can see it returning itself via better ML sales on Azure.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER62> Exciting announcement for the OpenAI team.

The wording in the press release reminds me of a question I haven't been able to answer for a while now. Can anyone point me to the moment in time when general purpose artificial intelligence was re-branded to artificial general intelligence? Is GAI that much worse of an acronym than AGI? What's the deal here?

</comment><comment><USER63> Can we actually expect OpenAI to remain "open" with investments like this getting dumped into the project?

I'm still waiting for the 1.5G GPT-2 set to get released, but they're still going with that "too dangerous for society" BS that they're using to get journalists' attention...

<comment><USER64> They need to prove it's safe for society before releasing it. If they don't believe it is then not releasing it is of course the smart thing to do. Furthermore, anyone else in the future who creates something they think might be dangerous now has a better argument, because they can point to OpenAI playing it safe and say "I'm just doing the same thing"

<comment><USER63> I think you're making a silly mistake actually giving this "too dangerous for society" line any validity.

I understand that this tech could be used for nefarious purposes, but this isn't world-ending tech. This is just hard to differentiate from human writing...

The choice to keep their "too powerful model" unreleased is more an attempt to stoke sensationalism out of journalists eager to report on "The AI too dangerous to release" than it is actually an earnest attempt at protecting society.

The dangerous rogue-AI is a Hollywood trope. We don't live in the Ghost In the Shell universe, we live in reality, and a text-generating algorithm isn't particularly dangerous when you think about it.

<comment><USER64> > I understand that this tech could be used for nefarious purposes, but this > isn't world-ending tech. This is just hard to differentiate from human > writing...

When, in any OpenAI communication, have they ever implied GPT2 is world ending tech?

> We don't live in the Ghost In the Shell universe, we live in reality, and a > text-generating algorithm isn't particularly dangerous when you think about > it.

Are you sure it won't be used to automatically post fake news or create artificial group cohesion by bad state actors? We can already do stuff like that, but this allows you to do it faster and cheaper. Don't you think that's at least a little scary?

<comment><USER63> Again, I already made it clear that this has nefarious purposes.

But there is zero utility in keeping the larger dataset secret. Society is not safer as a result.

The only reason they ever framed it the way they did was to get media attention.

"This AI is so dangerous, the creators are refusing to release it to the public!" is going to get way more clicks than "This AI writes English sentences that almost appear coherent.".

If you want more funding and attention towards your project, you're going to say stuff that gets journalists' attention.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER65> > As the waitress approached the table, Sam Altman held up his phone. That > made it easier to see the dollar amount typed into an investment contract he > had spent the last 30 days negotiating with Microsoft.

> "$1,000,000,000," it read.

Wow, Sam Altman sounds like an asshole.

</comment><comment><USER66> OpenAi to for-profit OpenAI to billion dollar partnership with Microsoft doesn't give me the warm and fuzzy feelings I had when I first heard of OpenAI. I saw it as "we're going to save the world by building an AGI before someone builds SkyNet" today it is "We've got in bed with a company that had one of the most famous anti-trust cases in the United States and one of the most famous anti-competition cases in the EU".

And of course going after high school student Mike Rowe for registering MikeRoweSoft.com (Seriously Microsoft, exactly no one thought he was you).

While Microsoft isn't inherently evil, I mean one could argue that via Windows Microsoft is largely responsible for the widespread adoption of computers, it definitely makes me feel slightly uneasy.

I'd rather see OpenAI continue to be funded by donation, and eventually royalties/licensing of technologies it develops, not partnerships with companies like 'IBM 2: Electric Boogaloo'.

But what do I know, I'm a Morlock not an Eloi.

<comment><USER67> The whole MikeRoweSoft thing was 15 years ago. I don't think it's fair to judge the company now based on that.

<comment><USER66> If it was the only instance, I'd say sure, but:

\- Lindows

\- Microwindows

\- wxWindows

\- Windows Commander

\- Suing Amish Shah

\- MikeRoweSoft

Then all of the various anti-trust/anti-competition lawsuits against them by both companies and government entities (Be Inc, Nescape, the EU, Spain, the US Government, Caldera, Opera Software. Also individuals in numerous class actions).

Plenty of reason to feel slightly concerned.

<comment><USER67> Are any of those recent? I agree that microsoft has been pretty dickish and I'm sure parts of it continue to be (see [http://bonkersworld.net/organizational- charts](http://bonkersworld.net/organizational-charts) as an example for why), but as a whole I feel that they are better with OSS now than they have every been.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER68> Congrats on the investment, but this release reads like a parody.

I believe that building a _beneficial_ warp-drive engine will be the most important technological development in human history, with the potential to shape the trajectory of humanity. The aliens we're sure to encounter will be capable of mastering more fields than any one human — like a tool which combines the skills of Curie, Turing, and Bach. An alien working on a problem would be able to see connections across disciplines that no human could. But even though I'm known as the warp-drive-guy, I don't actually know how to build a warp drive, so in the meantime I am building increasingly powerful transportation technology in the hope this would lead to a warp drive one day soon, and have decided to focus on bicycles. They're really good bikes, though, and unlike others who make bicycles, I like to consider those I build to merely be _pre_ -warp, a necessary step towards warp technology. So when you buy my bikes [1], you are literally helping me change the trajectory of human history and meet aliens (did I mention Curie, Turing and Bach?)

This is truly a fine specimen of Silicon Valley prose. It's got something for everyone: human history, a wild-eyed dream of a bright future, a connection to the arts, name-dropping, the trajectory of humanity, and, of course, lots of money in cloud services (integrated platform). They even showed some restraint in stopping short of ending all war and curing all disease. "Making the world a better place" is really too mundane.

[1]: The Warp Drive Corporation®'s Pre-Warp Bike™ is now on sale on Amazon.

<comment><AUTHOR> (I work at OpenAI.)

It comes down to whether you believe AGI is achievable.

We've talked about why we think it might be: [https://medium.com/syncedreview/openai-founder-short-term- ag...](https://medium.com/syncedreview/openai-founder-short-term-agi-is-a- serious-possibility-368424f7462f), [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YHCSNsLKHfM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YHCSNsLKHfM)

And we certainly have more of a plan for building it than warp drives :).

EDIT: I personally think the case for near-term AGI is strong enough that it'd be hard for me work on any other problem — and find it important to put in place guardrails like [https://openai.com/blog/openai- lp/](https://openai.com/blog/openai-lp/) and [https://openai.com/charter/](https://openai.com/charter/).

Even if AGI turns out to be out of reach, we'll still be creating increasingly powerful AI technologies — which I think pretty clearly have the potential to alter society and require special care and thought.

<comment><USER68> > It comes down to whether you believe AGI is achievable.

No, it does not. I very much believe AI (or AGI, as you call it) is achievable, but may I remind you that some years after the invention of neural networks, Norbert Wiener, one of the greatest minds of his generations, said that the secret of intelligence would be unlocked within five years, and Alan Turing -- a component of your very own post-pre-AGI era's AGI -- another great believer in AI, scoffed and said that it will take at least five _decades_. That was seven decades ago, and we are not even close to achieving insect- level intelligence. Maybe we'll achieve AI in ten years and maybe in one hundred, but you don't know which of those is more likely, and you certainly don't know whether any of our pre-AGI technology even gets us on the right path to achieving AGI. There have been other paths towards AI explored in the past that have largely been abandoned.

 _OpenAI is not actually building AGI_. Maybe it _hopes_ that the things it _is_ working on _could_ be the path to an eventual AGI. OpenAI knows this, as does Microsoft.

This does not mean that what OpenAI does is not valuable and possibly useful, but it does make _calling_ it "pre-AGI" pretentious to the level of delusion. Now I know there were (maybe still are) some AI cults around SV (I think a famous one even called themselves "The Rationalists" or something), but what makes for a nerdy, fanciful discussion in some dark but quirky corner of the internet looks jarring in a press release.

> If you believe AGI might be achievable any time soon, it becomes hard to > work on any other problem — and it's also very important to put in place > guardrails like [https://openai.com/blog/openai- > lp/](https://openai.com/blog/openai-lp/) and > [https://openai.com/charter/](https://openai.com/charter/)

I can't tell if you're serious, but assuming you are, the problem is that there are many _other_ things that if you think chould be achievable any time soon would make it hard to work on any other problem, as well make it important to put guardrails in place. The difference is that no one actually knows how to put guardrails on AGI. We are doing a pretty bad job putting guardrails on the statistical clustering algorithms that some call (pre-AGI?) AI and that we already use.

<comment><USER69> If AGI is achievable (seems likely given brains are all over the place in nature) and achieving it will have consequences that dwarf everything else then doesn't it make sense to focus on it?

Yes, historically people were way too optimistic and generally went down AI rabbit holes that went nowhere, but two years before the Wright flyer flew, the Wright brothers themselves said it was 50 years out (and others were still publishing articles about human flight being impossible after it was already flying).

People are bad at predictions, in the Wright brothers case since they were the people that ultimately ended up doing it two years later they were likely the best to make the prediction and were still off.

Given that AGI is possible and given the extreme nature of the consequences, doesn't it make sense to work on alignment and safety? Why would it make sense to wait? If you accidentally end up with AGI and haven't figured out how to align its goals then that's it, the game is probably over.

Maybe OpenAI is on the right path, maybe not - but I think you're way too confident to be as sure as you are that they are not.

<comment><USER68> First of all, I was talking the language, not the work. It makes sense to study AI as it does many other subjects, but we _don 't know_ that it will "have consequences that dwarf everything else" because we don't know what it will be able to do and when (we think that it _could_ but so could, say, a supervirus, or climate change, or the return of fascism). People hang all sort of dreams on AI precisely because of that. That cult I mentioned, The Rationalists, basically imagined AI to be a god of sorts, and then you can say "wouldn't you want to build a god?" But we don't know if AI could be a god. Maybe an intelligent being that thinks faster than humans goes crazy? Of course, we don't know that, but my point is that the main reason we think so much of AI is that at this time, we don't know what it is and what it could do.

> Why would it make sense to wait?

Again, that's a separate discussion, but if we don't know what something is or when it could arrive, it may make more sense to think about things we know more about and are already here or known to be imminent. Anyway, anyone is free to work on what they like, but OpenAI does not know that they're "building artificial general intelligence."

> I think you're way too overconfident to be as sure as you are that they're > not.

I don't know that they're not, but they don't know that they are, and that means they're not "building AGI."

<comment><USER69> I can understand your point about the language, but I guess I think it's reasonable to set the goal for what you actually want and work towards it. It may turn out to be unattainable, but I think generally you need to at least set it as the goal. It also seems less clear to me that they are close or far from it (I don't think it's on the same level as warp drive).

I don't know about the god thing you mention and the rationalist stuff I've read hasn't been about that. The main argument as I understand it is:

1\. AGI is possible

2\. Given AGI is possible if it's created without the ability to align its goals to human goals we will lose control of it.

3\. If we lose control of it, it will have unknown outcomes which are more likely to be bad than benign or good.

Therefore we should try and figure out a way to make it safe before AGI exists.

Maybe humans just happen to be an intelligence upper bound and anything operating at a higher level goes crazy? That seems unlikely to me given that humans have a lot of biological constraints (heads have to fit out of birth canals, have to be able to run on energy from food, selective pressure for other things besides just intelligence). You could be right, but I'd bet on the other side.

The last bit is if we can solve this in a way that aligns the goals with human goals (open question since humans themselves are not really aligned) we could solve most problems we need to solve.

<comment><USER68> I think discussions of AI safety at this stage -- when we're already having problems with what passes for AI these days that we're not handling well at all -- is a bit silly, but I don't have something particularly intelligent to say on the matter, and neither, it seems, does anyone else, except maybe for this article that shows that the AGI paranoia (as opposed to the real threats from "AI" we're already facing, like YouTube's recommendation engine) may be a result of a point of view peculiar to Silicon Valley culture: [https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/tedchiang/the-real- dang...](https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/tedchiang/the-real-danger-to- civilization-isnt-ai-its-runaway)

<comment><USER69> I agree with you in a way, if AGI ends up being 300yrs out then work on safety now is likely not that important since whatever technology is developed in that time will probably end up being critical to solving the problem.

My main issue personally is that I'm not confident if it's really far out or not and people seem bad at predicting this on both sides. Given that, it probably makes sense to start the work now since goal alignment is a hard problem and it's unknown when it'll become relevant.

I read the BuzzFeed article and I think the main issue with it is he assumes that an AGI will be goal aligned by the nature of being an AGI:

"In psychology, the term "insight" is used to describe a recognition of one's own condition, such as when a person with mental illness is aware of their illness. More broadly, it describes the ability to recognize patterns in one's own behavior. It's an example of metacognition, or thinking about one's own thinking, and it's something most humans are capable of but animals are not. And I believe the best test of whether an AI is really engaging in human-level cognition would be for it to demonstrate insight of this kind."

Humans have general preferences and goals built in that have been selected for for thousands of years. An AGI won't have those by default. I think people often think that something intelligent will be like human intelligence, but the entire point of the strawberry example is that an intelligence with different goals that's very good at general problem solving will not have 'insight' that tells it what humans think is good (that's the reason for trying to solve the goal alignment problem - you don't get this for free).

He kind of argues for the importance of AGI goal alignment which he calls 'insight', but doesn't realize he's doing so?

The comparison to Silicon Valley being blinded by the economies of their own behavior is just weak politics that's missing the point.

<comment><USER68> We don't know that "goal alignment" (to use the techo-cult name) is a hard problem; we don't know that it's an important problem; we don't even know what the problem is. We don't know that intelligence is "general problem solving." In fact, we can be pretty sure it isn't, because humans aren't very good at solving _general_ problems, just at solving _human_ problems.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER70> I'm skeptical that AGI will exist on our planet in my lifetime. I've no doubt that it exists elsewhere in the galaxy. If an alien species does come to visit some day, I think it more likely than not that it'll be an AGI.

<comment><USER71> You piqued my interest, what makes you think there's any intelligence, artificial or otherwise, anywhere else but here in the Milky Way?

<comment><USER72> I think because the universe is so infinite and vast the math makes sense there would be others out there. We just don't have the technology yet to travel fast or far enough and also cant communicate/detect them.

<comment><USER71> The Milky Way is not infinite and not even that vast. As for "not having the technology", why not postulate an equal likelihood for heavenly angels? We just don't have the technology to perceive heaven, after all...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER73> Everyone: AI will one day destroy the human race.

Microsoft: Let's invest $1 Billion in it.

</comment><comment><USER74> anybody knows what happened to Elon Musk's pledge of $1B to OpenAI?

<comment><AUTHOR> OpenAI Nonprofit's initial funding commitment was to be consumed over many years!

When we started, we didn't know just how fast things would be moving (e.g. [https://openai.com/blog/ai-and-compute/](https://openai.com/blog/ai-and- compute/)), and we've needed to scale much faster than planned when starting OpenAI.

</comment></comment><comment><USER75> Here's to hoping some of that goes to acquiring and open sourcing Mujoco, or to switching OpenAI Gym's default physics to something open source.

</comment><comment><USER76> I am interested in working at OpenAI and similar companies. What background would you recommend?

What skills should graduate students focus in to be competitive?

<comment><USER77> CS and/or ML and/or Neuroscience and/or Maths (including statistics).

</comment></comment><comment><USER78> I think I can develop GAI for less, in a shorter time-frame. Doubt anyone believes me enough to give me $$$.

<comment><USER79> Self fund your project and build a prototype. If you can demonstrate even some limited progress the investor community will drown you in funding.

<comment><USER78> Once it becomes clear to non specialists that AGI is possible, and possibly imminent, that greatly changes the equation, though. This isn't a technology like any other.

Why wouldn't governments and other groups just seize the prototype? You'd have a hot-potato on your hands and figuring out how to survive might be your biggest concern. Like imagine you suddenly came into possession of a trillion dollars in bearer bonds. If that leaks out, people will come after you, not just by legal means.

All of this skews the calculus towards immediate public disclosure, rather than trying to gain advantage by delaying release.

EDIT> Or going first, and attempting to neutralize all possible competitors. This is a terrible calculus.

<comment><USER79> We're discussing reality here, not paranoid fantasies and conspiracy theories.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER80> Azure is the worst...open AI better take that in cash....

</comment><comment><USER81> How much of this is Azure Computing Credit ? :)

</comment><comment><USER82> Any plan for a Seattle/Redmond office?

</comment><comment><USER83> How much of the $1B is in Azure credits?

</comment><comment><USER84> "It looks like you're trying to build an army of robots to extinguish humanity, would you like help?"

</comment><comment><USER85> Revenge of Microsoft Bob!

</comment><comment><USER86> great news! can OpenAI please open an office in London now :)

</comment><comment><USER87> This is excellent, happy for both sides

</comment><comment><USER88> Musk + Gates

world is end, welcome to the apocalypse

</comment><comment><USER89> I'm surprised to see the amount of downvotes that follow negativity pointed at Microsoft. What's going on here?

EDIT: Oh. I see. I wasn't aware that OpenAI was a YC thing. I've been a member of Hacker News through various accounts for countless years, however this is the first time I've seen moderation pushing towards an obvious YC agenda. Very interesting...

EDIT2: Actually, after reading the comments - I find it more likely that Microsoft/OpenAI stakeholders are participating heavily. Over 800 upvotes for this post makes it quite remarkable... I'll leave my tinfoil hat over there...

<comment><USER90> I can't really tell what you're saying, but if you're insinuating foul play, I haven't seen evidence of that in this thread. In any case, the site guidelines ask you to email firstname.lastname@example.com with concerns instead of posting comments about them.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

<comment><USER89> My apologies - you are correct.

>Please don't make insinuations about astroturfing. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried, email us and we'll look at the data.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER91> I imagine this comes with a ton of strings attached, written or unwritten. This probably gives Microsoft control of the project's roadmap.

<comment><AUTHOR> The OpenAI board remains in charge of OpenAI's AGI-relevant decisions. Microsoft has the right to appoint one board seat, which they have not yet exercised.

<comment><USER92> I've written up my opinion on the deal that OpenAI gives to investors here: [https://www.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/azvbmn/n_o...](https://www.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/azvbmn/n_openai_lp/eig4fj2/)

TLDR either the public is being conned or Microsoft is. And assuming that Microsoft probably has used top lawyers to close the deal, I doubt it's them.

<comment><USER93> sorry, your opinion appears to be nonsensical.

a cap of 100x on returns and limited voting power certainly changes the price investors are willing to pay for the shares, but doesn't invalidate anything or render shares worthless or anything of the sort.

<comment><USER92> The difference between shares and a loan is that shares have

a) no cap on the returns

b) give you control over the company

c) limited ability to sue if the company acts against shareholder interests

d) no due date

Differences a, b and c seem to be gone here. Would you give someone a loan where you have no ability to sue them if they never give you the money back? I wouldn't unless that person is very important to me or the money is insignificant. Neither is the case here.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER94> this is still microsoft. are they going to drop the "open" from their name?

</comment><comment><USER95> Here's hoping Microsoft applies some of these funds to inhibiting the source- IP-veiled bitcoin sextortions facilitated by its outlook.com offering.

</comment><comment><USER96> Well, this is about the surest confirmation that AGI is going to happen within the next few years. Why? Because whenever HN responds with a bunch of negative sentiment, whatever was sharply criticized ends up doing really well: see the post announcing Dropbox or the post announcing Instagram's acquisition.

</comment><comment><USER97> If you strip out the AGI hype then this just sounds like OpenAI is now moving to monetizing their tech. This makes sense for them but probably not for the philanthropists who originally backed them.

Sadly for them, AGI is metaphysically impossible - this will be realized eventually but a lot of waste and possibly harm will happen first.

We are not just super sophisticated machines, so the fact that we can think doesn't tell us anything about what's possible for machines. But philosophy does - and it tells us you can't get mind from matter, no matter what configuration you put it in.

<comment><USER98> > But philosophy does - and it tells us you can't get mind from matter, no > matter what configuration you put it in.

Curious - do you think humans have mind? because if so we are very much matter and if not well that's an interesting thought as well.

<comment><USER97> That's right - we have minds therefore we must be more than just matter.

I used to think the opposite, but reading the philosophy on the subject changed my mind. There are a lot of different takes on the topic, but what most added up for me was the philosophy of Aristotle and Aquinas. There are many great expositions of their work out there.

<comment><USER99> AGI in the sense of robots that can do the jobs people can, design better robots and so on would be a game changer in itself. You can leave to philosophers to argue if they have true feelings and that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER100> Well, gotta wonder how well their charter[1] will fare against Microsoft pressure...Microsoft isn't exactly well-known for their benevolence and cautious approach.

1: [https://openai.com/charter/](https://openai.com/charter/)

</comment><comment><USER101> I don't understand how there can be no comments regarding the fatal flaw of AGI which is that it will completely ruin the economics of the world. The world is the way it is now because humans are the only source of intelligent signal processing. That's the only reason why humans enjoy the limited rights and privileges that they do. That's the only reason why life has gotten better and better with advancing medicine and so on. This is a fundamental principle that cannot be escaped. It doesn't matter how you slice it. But people defer everything to "ubi will work out somehow" or "nah humans will never be replaced." Bringing god-like super-intelligent beings online is a fundamentally stupid thing to do. And preventing their development, relative to how disastrous their development would be, is very easy.

I have made many predictions here on HN and they all have outlined that cloud computing would be the substrate from which AGI will spring. Now we see this announcement. There is a reason why OpenAI is making a deal like this with a very large cloud compute vendor: it's because I'm right. And that means I'm probably also right in saying that we can stop this if we want to. You can't just build a computer in your bad yard. And the internet is very fragile. Some simple regulation and global awareness and initiative could control what comes out of fabs and shut down the infrastructure necessary for cloud computing. It would be very easy relative to the size of the problem.

<comment><USER102> Is your alternative "Don't invent general AI?"?

If so that seems unbelievably naive. Things generally can't be un-invented, and it's unimaginably hard to prevent people inventing things, especially with such a large economic upside for inventing it.

<comment><USER101> Prove me wrong if it is so obvious.

As the people at OpenAI have rightly said, AGI is a compute-gated problem. It is a problem that can only be solved with very, very large amounts of compute.

The world has some total amount of computing power in terms of silicon based computation. For AGI to happen, there are two requirements: that this total be equal or greater than some theoretical threshold value for AGI and that the computing power is consolidated. So in layman's terms, you have to have a lot of computers and they have to be connected in such a way as to efficiently share their compute. AGI will never come about if every individual computer were used to do research by separate entities but if all of those computers were connected into a single virtual computer, AGI might be discovered with them.

So clearly in order to prevent AGI, the best thing to do would be to address these two aspects. Prevent the total computing power of the world from growing and prevent computers from forming virtual meta-computers. Both of these tasks are _in principle_ extremely easy.

Chip fabs are huge and expensive. Nobody is fabricating chips in their garage. This is just a hard fact. There aren't that many fabs in the world and they are all highly susceptible to regulation. This isn't prohibition of alcohol so please don't confuse yourself. Nobody will be brewing chips in their cellar.

Let's imagine that you could not regulate cloud computing. Let's say the only way to prevent computers from offering their compute on a virtual market was to shut down the internet. This by default is the hardest way to solve the second aspect of the AGI problem and even it is very easy. This is because the internet is a large fragile collection of infrastructure that depends heavily on government cooperation. Nobody is going to string a fiber backbone for black market internet. ISPs cannot exist without regulatory approval.

If there were political awareness and motivation, and it was a global phenomenon, yes, it would be extremely easy to do what I've described. And since AGI is to the detriment of literally all people, it is not a far fetched scenario. And unlike alcohol in the United States, bootlegging would not be a problem. People in the USA think that banning anything whatsoever doesn't work. It's just fuzzy thinking, I can assure you.

<comment><USER102> Nothing in that sounds easy.

If there are N governments in the world, and they all agree to not regulate to not create general AI, then it's strongly in all of their interests to betray the others, create general AI, and capture the economic growth.

Even if general AI is impossible, it's in their interests to develop huge computing capacity, because that's demonstrably economically useful.

You are hypothesizing that's it's easy to get 7 billion people to all agree to co-operate in a game of prisoner's dilemma, when if a small fraction of them choose to betray, they have the potential to capture massive value.

And you want to do this under the premise that AGI _might_ be a problem.

<comment><USER101> Like I have said countless times, it's easy compared to what we get in return. It's easy to understand in principle. It doesn't require sophisticated mathematics.

So you think that we should let all countries have whatever weapons they want under your logic. They will develop nukes and chemical weapons regardless of any international agreement that is established, so why even try? The obvious answer is to advance our own nuke technology as fast as possible so that we, the good guys, will lead where the arms race goes.

And AGI is a far greater existential threat than nuclear weapons. It is a greater existential threat than anything else, including global warming. It's the biggest Pandora's box in history. The idea of controlling or guiding its impact by having "the good guys" develop AGI first is the precipice of naivety. We lose nothing by _trying_ to stop it. And we stand to gain more than we have ever gained from any coordinated effort. How easy or hard it might be is irrelevant, although it is much easier than basically anyone appreciates.

<comment><USER102> Nuclear weapons provably kill people. AGI doesn't. Be careful about your hyperbole.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER103> I'm not a genius. But, it was 2015 when Microsoft announced that, MS <3 Linux !!! And said, it's own Linux distribution is on the way.

I never heard about it's release.

In that time I said, MS will move towards open source, because he realized that it's a winning and correct strategy for software distribution.

It didn't take long that MS aquired GitHub with 8M$.

His team foundation was a failure, he tried to get a good one.

But He also took control over all the source codes, and their histories. It wasn't dangerous in my opinion, before I realized that due to one-sided US sanctions, repos of some nationalities (like Iranians) got dissactivated !!!

It's not the defenition of open source, as far as I know...

MS is a corporation, hence, it has to obey the government.

But open source belongs to no one. These kind of investment might intended to bound the potential open source communities!!!

It is obvious that accepting these sort of money, without open access agreement is a horrible mistake that one can do. (We should learn from the story of GitHub)

In my opinion, when it's not clear what kind of right these investments brings for enterprises, ppl should stop contributing to them.

Maybe it's good idea to ask what Linus and Richard see in these movements!

<comment><USER104> Ms linux distro ... Are you talking about this:

[https://wccftech.com/microsoft-20-linux-based- distrowindows-...](https://wccftech.com/microsoft-20-linux-based- distrowindows-10-1809/)

Or this

[https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2018/04/microsoft-linux- custom-k...](https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2018/04/microsoft-linux-custom- kernel-azure-sphere)

?</comment></comment>


"Fail fast" is no excuse for being a moron, flake or scumbag - <AUTHOR> http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2012/04/08/fail-fast-is-not-an-excuse-for-being-a-moron-a-flake-or-a-scumbag/ <comment><USER2> I'm sorry, I really did try to read this because it sounded like it might interesting, but it's well over 2.5K words and by about halfway through I still had no idea what it was really about. I skipped down to the final paragraph and that still didn't seem to tell me. May I respectfully suggest that future posts this long have a one-line or at least one-paragraph summary at the top?

<comment><USER3> I think it's more than the lack of a summary. The whole essay could really benefit from a lot more editing and tightening up.

<comment><AUTHOR> I agree. I'm outraged and disgusted by things I've seen over the past 12 months-- some have happened to me, most to other people-- and it's really affecting the quality of my writing.

<comment><USER4> A classic technique is to allow someone else to read the essay before publishing it.

<comment><AUTHOR> I agree with you. Usually I put 1-2 months before writing a blog post/essay and posting it. I just see this matter as a bit more urgent, as I really want to see the American Spring (the 2012 campaign of people calling out unethical behaviors at companies, rather than protecting scummy ex-employers) happen.

Words-of-prose can be like lines-of-code: beyond about 500, it takes a long process of review not to have some degree of mess.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I really like the motivating idea behind this post, and read all the way through for that reason. It has some good points (the 30/60/90 PIP example), but it's hard to remember the key points.

As a fan of the idea, I hope you can spend a little more time to tighten it up and add some more concrete examples (some of the points seemed a little hard for me to picture concretely).

<comment><AUTHOR> I guess the key point is: a lot of people are using "fail fast" as an excuse for behaviors that previous generations would consider frankly irresponsible, if not unethical, and I think the general element of scumbaggery that we've seen in technology of late is a result of this absurd ideology.

<comment><USER6> > * that previous generations would consider frankly irresponsible, if not > unethical*

Both in this article and the "ethical crisis" link therein ([http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2012/04/07/an-ethical- cr...](http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2012/04/07/an-ethical-crisis-in- technology/)) makes me think you are young and new to the game.

Very unethical and irresponsible behavior has been around a long time. Internet Bubble v1.0 had a world of crap going on, with much bigger dollar- numbers for the investments.

<comment><AUTHOR> I was born in 1983, so I missed the first Bubble, but I believe you. I worked for someone (also a total sleaze) who had a late-1990s startup and once spent close to $2 million (out of about $15m on hand) on a launch party. Over 10% of working capital on a party _before a product existed_. So I'm well-acquainted with the fact that there was at least some sleaze in the first bubble.

I guess I'm crestfallen because I thought, at least over the past decade, that most of the sleaze would be in finance. I'm finding that not to be so.

I don't care about being a billionaire "master of the universe" as long as I don't have to be within 500 meters of the type of slime that does care about that shit. I just want to fucking work, to solve hard problems, to add value to the world, and to make enough money to have a good life. If I get rich, great. If I solve important problems and don't get rich, fine. That was the appeal of "tech" over finance, but now I see that the same sleaze has crept into our world too, and I want it out.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I agree with the general principle, which I've summed up as: "fail fast" is often a cocktail-party excuse for reckless approaches to management.

To the OP: I'm relatively an echo chamber for the other comments here. The article qualifies as tl;dr; and would be much more effective with editing. However, I disagree with others that you go the journalism route; it's a blog, and journalism's standards of "we report, you decide" is about facts, not passion. That will turn some people off, but it won't be ambiguous about your intentions.

Keep at it.

<comment><AUTHOR> _"fail fast" is often a cocktail-party excuse for reckless approaches to management._

Well said, and there are ethical reasons why this is unacceptable.

Tech demos are supposed to be scrappy. Minimum viable product. Twitter put up a fail whale early in its lifespan. So what? I don't think anyone's career relied on it being 100% reliable, and anyone who did bet his career on such a thing was being reckless. Twitter did the right thing by getting something good enough out there and iterating.

Management affects too many people for that approach to be tolerable. You have to actually know what you're doing before you act.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> _Most of us in venture-funded technology are merely bankers, except for the distinction that we buy and sell internet ads instead of securities._

Thank you for finally calling them out.

</comment><comment><USER9> In an enviroment where people hate failure, the slogan "fail fast" can help to "tip de balance" to a more iterative and feedback-oriented kind of managment. BUT, when the balance has basically reached the other end, the "slogan" looses it's purpose (because people start failing "too much").

</comment><comment><USER10> I liked this one especially: "On the other hand, a remnant of the flat-out elitist, aristocratic mindset that we have to kill the shit out of every couple hundred years (cf. French Revolution) is the concept that investors, socially speaking, deserve to outrank employees."

<comment><USER11> French Revolution is probably a bad example if he's going for "couple hundred years". Y'know, because there were three, in sixty years.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I completely agree with the sentiment, and appreciate the emotional tone.

Instead of a tl;dr summary, I think you could actually make a separate, short- attention-span style infographic with the salient points, and have a potent long-form as well.

Anyway, good piece! Its more important to keep writing than make every post perfect (its better to get a C in a class than never finish your A+ paper).

This one deserves a spit shine _.

_ <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spit_shine>

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> No idea if I'm taking the most effective approach here, but these ethical discussions are long overdue and I really hope they'll occur.

<comment><USER13> If you strip out some personal bitterness and spent some serious time with a scorched earth editor, this could be a very effective treatise on the state of ethics and corporate responsibility in the technology industry. You touch on some interesting concepts that deserve thought...

Alas, phrases like "snot-nosed kids", "Google's douche-tsunami" and "little sociopath" betray both personal bias and anger. Phrases like these make it too easy to dismiss this article as little more than a rant.

I believe that if you're going to call out an industry on ethics, you have to pursue the article as a journalist would. Keep your personal feelings under wraps, tell the whole story and leave the conclusions to your readers. When it comes to proving a point and convincing people to change, passionate journalism always trumps passion on its own.

<comment><AUTHOR> I think I'm going to tighten it up later today.

As for phrases like "little sociopath", I want to call people to action on this sort of thing. I want people I've never met to call out and halt their own little sociopaths.

I call out Google because it was once a great company, and billions of dollars of value within in it has been destroyed by careerist middle managers who had no right to do so. I feel like Google is symbolic, because it _was_ such a great company for so long. How on earth did a company go from being a cultural leader (in workplace progressivism) to using Jack Welch-style rank-and-yank in a couple of years?

Journalistic neutrality, on this sort of issue, either veers toward meaningless abstraction ("one model is...") or conservative fact-based concretion. I want to present the facts, but I also want to present, accurately, the more intangible (but no less real) ether of injustice between them.

<comment><USER14> Please continue using words like "sociopath", "snot-nosed" etc.

I've watched ethics deteriorate over the years in the Valley. I support the one person who can see through this ongoing shit-baggery.

<comment><AUTHOR> What do you think caused the decline and when do you think it happened?

Most of my direct experiences are in New York. I've never spent more than a week at one time in the Valley.

I don't think I'm the only person to spot the problem. Most people are afraid it will hurt their careers to speak up about it. I'm not as worried, because I know that I'm talented (i'm not worried about blackballing myself) and someone has to do the "dirty" work of blowing the whistle.

My first whistle-blowing experience was at Google, which was odd because people (a) acknowledged that some of this shit had been going on for a long time, but (b) really didn't want to hear it. They wanted to ignore it and still believe in their Googley workplace utopia. I literally have thousands of people (from G.) who've never met me but think I'm a loose cannon because I blew a whistle on someone else they never met. The thing is, though: it's a whistle, not a gun, that I'm waving. If you don't do scummy shit, you don't need to worry.

<comment><USER14> I had a longer response, but I think the short response is that this is just the way the corporate world is.

Things were also different when Silicon Valley companies were smaller and unknown...people seemed to join tech because they liked it, not because it was cool or they wanted to be like Steve Jobs or Zuckerberg or whatever.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: How much time developer should take to write dockerfile - <AUTHOR> Assuming you knew little bit about docker, how much time would dev require to write dockerfile (configure dependencies and make production usable).
Also, I'm looking for approximate time and what would you recommend to junior dev or senior dev who are just starting with docker.
Basically i'm looking for some realistic experience with timeline dev would take as my company going start using this technology. I love to hear your thoughts on it. <comment><USER2> We usually copy an existing one and just edit it to do what we want. I would say a day or two for someone that has never used docker to make a somewhat complex dockerfile

To get something simple running where you start with an existing file and just add your executable to the container, less than an hour.

You should hire somebody to manage the Kubernetes container infrastructure you'll probably end up with. Devops guys handle it where I've worked. Docker on a local machine is relatively simple, but deploying the containers to a production environment using Kubernetes is currently extremely complex

</comment><comment><USER3> Somewhere between 5 minutes and a month.

<comment><USER4> Haha, this is the correct answer. I'd also consider looking into some of the build pack based methods of creating OCI images like [https://buildpacks.io](https://buildpacks.io) as they can save you a good amount of time on an ongoing basis.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Will crowdfunding medical research overtake donating to charity? - <AUTHOR> <comment><AUTHOR> I came across [https://www.crowdacure.com/](https://www.crowdacure.com/) and [https://watsi.org/](https://watsi.org/) recently which seem to be taking on a different style of raising money for 'charitable' causes.</comment>


How aircraft avoid mid-air collisions - <AUTHOR> https://www.economist.com/blogs/economist-explains/2018/04/economist-explains <comment><USER2> This site upsets me. I'm viewing this page on a 32 inch monitor and I can only see 8 lines of content. [https://imgur.com/a/EAMYr](https://imgur.com/a/EAMYr)

<comment><USER3> At least you get to read... apparently I have gone over my article limit even though I don't recall ever being on this site.

I see a paywall. I close the tab. No news is too important that I can't go without or find it somewhere else.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> [https://screenshots.firefox.com/CRxzfF7mvaXZPYNJ/www.economi...](https://screenshots.firefox.com/CRxzfF7mvaXZPYNJ/www.economist.com)

Holy sweet mother of ....

I'm sure there's an article in there somewhere.

[Edit] Actually, no, I've reached my limit and been cut off.

<comment><USER5> And this is why people use adblockers...

[https://www.dropbox.com/s/2u3o216xe8fho4o/Screenshot%202018-...](https://www.dropbox.com/s/2u3o216xe8fho4o/Screenshot%202018-04-03%2011.03.57.png?dl=0)

<comment><USER6> Oh, the irony:

[https://i.imgur.com/KVGwGCt.png](https://i.imgur.com/KVGwGCt.png)

<comment><USER7> Couldn't even see the "No, thanks" on my iPad. Dark pattern by accident?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> ADS-B is not a great solution, the latency/accuracy is such that you might know a drone is in the area, but seeing it and avoiding would be difficult. It's a lot easier to spot a small plane than it is to spot a drone.

As a pilot, I have had to avoid large birds more often than drones. They tend to actively avoid planes, which helps. Some sort of active avoidance, even super-minimal, on the part of the drones is likely to be more effective in reducing accidents.

Just my 2 cents.

<comment><USER9> I have only flown past what I believe seemed to have maybe been a drone (honestly, it could of been a bird but I swear it looked like a drone to me). I was taking off out of the Tampa airspace at about 1k feet AGL. If the drone did have ADS-B out, it might not give me the precise location to where i can do a 200' flyby, but just like any other aircraft avoidance, I could steer clear of the general area where it's at and at least know that there is something there.

My experience with ADS-B has been incredibly positive, I fly frequently in- and-out of the Tampa bravo, being my home airport and love the situational awareness. Sure it's not perfect but seems to be reasonably solid.

The biggest risk of having ADS-B is probably assuming there is nothing else out there if it's not showing up on traffic.

I'm not an expert on this matter, simply a consumer of the tech as a pilot myself. Regardless, it's interesting to listen to other pilots take on ADS-B. = )

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I recall reading a proposal about this before, and I'll echo it here. There's already a solution to avoid aircraft collisions, mentioned in the article: ADS-B. Why not equip drones with ADS-B transceivers, enabling both drones and planes to be aware of each other's presence and avoid one another?

A counter argument I can anticipate is that with all those drones in the air, broadcasting ADS-B, they will clog up the system with too many signals. Those who make the argument aren't wrong. I propose a solution for that as well: reduced transmission power on drone ADS-B transceivers. Small craft have a minimum transmission power of 75W, and craft that can fly over 15000 ft or faster than 175 kt have to transmit at at least 125W. Few drones are going to be moving that fast or that high. So why not make them have say, a transmission power of 1W? I'd think that would be enough power to warn planes on approach to an airport to watch out for nearby drones, without clogging up the system with useless noise about drones the next city over.

<comment><USER11> ADS-B alone is insufficient for collision avoidance. In order to operate safely outside of special restricted airspace, drones would need to be able to visually see and avoid other aircraft.

<comment><USER12> (agreeing and amplifying)

ADS-B out is only mandated in an extremely limited subset of the airspace where drones will be likely flying (and then only after Jan 1, 2020).

ADS-B out is only mandated[1] in cylinders around class C and the 30nm ring around class B airports, in class A airspace (at/above 18000' MSL), and in class E airspace that is both above 10000' MSL and 2500' AGL.

In practice, that means that most of the volume of drone-navigable airspace does not require other aircraft to have ADS-B out transmitters.

In _none_ of the airspace are other aircraft required to have ADS-B _in_ receivers.

"See and avoid" is therefore both practically and legally[2] required.

[1] - 14 CFR § 91.225 - [https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/14/91.225](https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/14/91.225)

[2] - 14 CFR § 91.113 - [https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/14/91.113](https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/14/91.113)

<comment><USER13> Not to mention even in all those areas (except A and B airspace), there are still aircraft exempt from the ADS-B requirement. The mandate only applies to aircraft certificated with an engine driven electrical system, so gliders and piper cubs and those sorts of aircraft will still need see and avoid.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> After the mid-air collision over Brazil in 2006 ([https://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/03/business/03road.html](https://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/03/business/03road.html)) I corresponded with a well-known pilot columnist. We didn't agree. I revealed myself to be a mathematician, and he revealed himself to be exactly the conformist one hopes a pilot following rules will be.

I observe planes holding their assigned altitudes to very close tolerances. It strikes me as completely idiotic to quantize these altitudes independent of heading, rather than scaling 360 degrees to 2000 feet (or pick your favorite modern units) and adding one's heading to base altitudes. Then planes won't cross each other's paths on a giving heading, avoiding accidents like Brazil.

<comment><USER15> Your suggestion would kill GA (general aviation) if you had to fly a specific altitude for a given direction. A good gust and a rusty pilot could rise or fall a couple hundred feet pretty easily. Size of the plane matters a lot too. Plus, what altimeter setting are you using? (What is 2000 ft? AGL? MSL? Pressure altitude?) You would also frequently be required to violate these altitudes to maintain VFR conditions because clouds are moving into your airspace. And how do you do something like circling a point? How do you enter a traffic pattern? You would hit task saturation in no time.

I say this as a math lover (physics degree holding) and a pilot. Currently we have a rule; "Odd pilots fly East", so you could be 3500,5500,7500, etc. Going west at 2500,4500,6500, etc. Everyone should also be using flight following for anything but a really short flight. And flight following is really going to help with collision avoidance.

<comment><USER16> Presumably this would only apply in class A airspace above 18,000 MSL. No one hand-flies there anyway.

<comment><USER17> Recommended above 3000' in all airspaces unless you're in a pattern or CTA then you follow ATC.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I once read somewhere that birds naturally evolved to always veer to the right to avoid collisions.

<comment><USER9> In my experience flying, when you have one that is in your vision it's usually too late to make drastic changes. Birds in our area tend to dive when we are approaching them, if you see a bird above you it makes me very nervous. It never stops surprising me how little I seem to be able to do when I do see a bird, maybe a small nudge on the yoke. Also short final or just after rotation on takeoff seems to be where i've had most of my near-misses with them.

<comment><USER15> They love those runways. I have some pipers that just love to sit on the keys. Freaks me out every time.

<comment><USER9> One of my closest strikes was taking off from RW9 at Keywest one morning. Scared the daylights out of me. Flying out of there at night is not only daunting because of the darkness over the water after turning north but not knowing if there are birds waiting for me in the air. :P

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> The paywall prevents me from finding out the economist's theory, but I can put forth my own.

The two movies Sully and Deepwater Horizon, which both came out in 2016, are near mirror images of each other in many ways.

Sully is partly the story about a pilot who has spent his entire career landing failing airplanes, effectively training him to do it again with higher stakes, where its never happened before. But its also the story of all of the regulation that has prevented all commercial aviation disasters since 2001. Sully may stay calm under pressure, but he's standing on the shoulders of giants. The flight attendants stick to their training. The port authority and the captains of the boats that rescue all of the passengers stick to their training. The NTSB even sticks to their training in certain ways. Plans were set forth, and followed. Even at the end of the movie, it is made clear that the NTSB's flaw was to control for all of the time constraints Sullenberger faced, all of the stress, and hid the fact that it was something like the 20th attempt in the simulator that was the first successful landing.

Deepwater horizon is the story about a company that has successfully captured their regulatory framework. There was inadequate training, inadequate safety measures, inadequate equipment to properly measure the specifics of the well. And so when the shit hits the fan, does everyone stay calm and exercise the plan to effect their continued survival? Nope, they all panic, and they nearly all die.

Planes and Trains are far safer than automobiles because of ratio of humans to engines.

<comment><USER20> As a public service notice, all of your comments for the last week or so are marked as dead. Some people like me view with show-dead on, and see them, but most people don't. I've vouched for a few of them as I come across them, but you might consider discussing the matter with email@example.com. For what it's worth, my personal opinion is that some of your comments like this one are great, but it would be nice if you could be less confrontational in some of your others.

<comment><USER19> I've assumed that. I appreciate the advice. I got a little heated in the Berkeley Study article this week. I guess I get to a point when some things are plain as day to me, such as "Humans learn better when they are more awake than less awake", and then read people pontificate about how this is such a profound insight, and confirms a hunch they've had their whole life. Its like I can see myself getting wound up, but I can't resist correcting my detractors. It only get's worse when people can enumerate the trees, but roll their eyes at others claiming a forest.

I even knew going into my final retort to /u/dang that he'd swing the banhammer. But something in the back of my mind just said "hold my beer".

I fully agree that honey kills more flies than vinegar. But I'm also a Lord of the Rings fan. Pip and Merri only convince the Ents to go to war through forcing them to confront the clear cut forest. It was the Ents position, much like the US before WWI, that this too shall pass, and we shouldn't involve ourselves in the affairs of men/europe.

I'm not saying confrontation is always defensible, but its also not always indefensible.

I guess I struggle at picking my battles.</comment></comment></comment>


Node.js + couchdb = match made in heaven - <AUTHOR>

http://mirkokiefer.com/blog/2010/11/introducing-livelycouch-part-1-writing-node-js-handler/ <comment><USER2> I completely agree. I've got some projects that may be interesting to you:

<https://github.com/mathgladiator/win> (very simple node.js platform that uses CouchDB for models)

<https://github.com/mathgladiator/otto> (replicating from CouchDB to node.js)

</comment><comment><USER3> This really should have been a regular submission, btw. Anyways, clickable -

[http://mirkokiefer.com/blog/2010/11/introducing- livelycouch-...](http://mirkokiefer.com/blog/2010/11/introducing-livelycouch- part-1-writing-node-js-handler/)

</comment><comment><USER4> the website is now online: <http://livelycouch.org></comment>


The Race to the Bottom Benefits Platforms (not Developers) - <AUTHOR> http://alexking.org/blog/2014/08/12/race-to-bottom-platforms

<comment><USER2> In the case of the App Store, Apple is perhaps missing a lot of revenue opportunity due to the raise of the in app advertising platforms that have been built to generate revenue.

They take 30% on the sale through the store but if it's a free game with in- game advertisement, I don't think they get anything unless its the iAd platform, correct?</comment>


Third red spot erupts on Jupiter - <AUTHOR> http://space.newscientist.com/article/dn13963-third-red-spot-erupts-on-jupiter.html <comment><USER2> Global warming will be the death of this solar system I tell ya'.</comment>


Elsevier sold me a Creative Commons non-commercial licensed article - <AUTHOR> http://rossmounce.co.uk/2015/03/06/elsevier-illegally-sold-me-a-creative-commons-non-commercial-licensed-article/ <comment><USER2> It looks like the corresponding author of this article (Didier Raoult) is also the Editor-in-Chief of the the journal (Clinical Microbiology and Infection), so it seems entirely possible that he might have relicensed the article to Elsevier when the journal moved over there from Wiley. This would be permitted, since Creative Commons does allow for dual licensing.

<comment><USER3> In the case of the author licensing his work, he may license it in any way he wants, to as many entities as he wants and the licenses don't care and _cannot_ disallow this.

Your comment reminds me of the people who complain that a software author released some code under GPL, then produced a second project based on their own GPL'd code without releasing the source of the second project.

<comment><USER4> > In the case of the author licensing his work, he may license it in any way > he wants, to as many entities as he wants and the licenses don't care and > cannot disallow this.

Actually, its quite possible for licenses (though probably not gratuitous licenses) to disallow this; a license can, for instance, by its terms be either completely exclusive or include some exclusionary provisions. In fact, such licenses are very important in quite a wide range of business scenarios.

<comment><USER3> If only the owner of the copyright can claim infringement (as is the case in the US), then the point is moot. Is J. Doe going to sue herself for violating a license by releasing under another license?

<comment><USER5> One can contractually agree to make some else the exclusive source for something while retaining the copyright. In which case, if you then offer it to someone else then that "exclusive" party can sue you for breach of contract. Of course this has nothing to do with any of the open source or CC licenses.

<comment><USER3> Now we're off into contract law instead of copyright law.

<comment><USER6> Licenses are contracts. That's what a license is.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This doesn't need to be illegal. Creative Commons doesn't forbid dual licensing (content also being offered under another licence)

<comment><USER8> In this case the license was Noncommercial no-derivatives. Wiley, the article's publisher, were obeying the license. Elsevier were not; why was a third party selling (commercially) an article they had no license to sell?

<comment><AUTHOR> It's possible the authors signed a contract that allowed commercial use by Wiley that somehow extends to Elsevier. (That seems a bit odd since they are competitors, but it's not outside the realm of possibility.) Even if that's the case and it's technically legal, it seems disingenuous to sell the article, since the authors presumably paid a fee to make it freely available to everyone.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Just for accuracy's sake, it's not criminal unless you can show that it was both willful and netted more than $1000 in any 180 day period: [http://www.copyright.gov/title17/92chap5.html#506](http://www.copyright.gov/title17/92chap5.html#506)

<comment><USER10> _if the infringement was committed —

(A) for purposes of commercial advantage or private financial gain;_

<comment><USER9> That's cumulative with B or C.

<comment><USER10> I don't think so. The syntax is (A); (B); or (C).

<comment><USER9> Yeah, you're right - I guess I misread it when I reopened the page again earlier.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Mirror: [https://thewinnower.com/papers/elsevier-illegally-sold- me-a-...](https://thewinnower.com/papers/elsevier-illegally-sold-me-a- creative-commons-non-commercial-licensed-article)

</comment><comment><USER11> Why do I feel like this happens a lot?

I know a lot of individuals that scan documents, manuals, defunct school books and sell them on Ebay. They just scan the document, and state they own the copyright. They don't just claim ownership to the scanned usually PDF; they claim they own the original copyright.

There's a Seller on Ebay who digitized Chicago School of Watchmaking(old trade school closed down in 60's, or 70's?). He's been selling it for years. If he sees competition from other sellers, or free versions online he claims copyright infringement to Ebay, and to "offending" domain owners. Ebay takes down alleged copy written item, and website owners usually cave in too. (It's not easy to verify older copy written material.)

I wonder if it's a crime to state copyright ownership on a piece of work if the original owner of copyright died, and didn't transfer the copyright? Or, the work was never copy-written?

<comment><USER12> He holds copyright to the container in which he put the scans. He also holds copyright to the pattern of bits he scanned. If the free, and/or competitive versions, are copies of his scans, he is correct. He does not hold copyright to the words which his pattern of bits might conveniently translate to.

[http://chart.copyrightdata.com/Colorization.html](http://chart.copyrightdata.com/Colorization.html)

<comment><USER13> Scanning doesn't generate a new copyright, in the USA at least, since it's not considered "creative" enough. See for example [http://www.likelihoodofconfusion.com/who-owns-the- copyright-...](http://www.likelihoodofconfusion.com/who-owns-the-copyright- scans-public-domain-works/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I was a bit confused as to how an article published by Wiley could even be on an Elsevier site, but it seems that the journal is transferring from Wiley to Elsevier. Guess they messed up the licensing when transferring the articles.

</comment><comment><USER15> It's not illegal, though it may be copyright infringement. But it also may not be; the fact that something is licenced under CC-NC doesn't preclude it being licensed under other terms too.

The author is a frequent and vociferous critic of commercial publishing. I think we'd all like to see more open science, but I'm concerned that this sort of shallow and poorly-researched accusation is doing the cause more harm than good.

<comment><USER4> > It's not illegal, though it may be copyright infringement.

Copyright infringement is illegal, so that sentence is self-contradictory.

<comment><USER16> Copyright infringement is a civil tort, not necessarily illegal. The law defines infringement but does not prohibit it, but merely provides mechanisms of civil remedy.

Fair use is not infringement.

You may be thinking of criminal copyright infringement. That is a different matter entirely and would fall under what people consider as "illegal."

<comment><USER4> > Copyright infringement is a civil tort, not necessarily illegal.

Civil torts are illegal, even though they are not criminal.

> The law defines infringement but does not prohibit it, but merely provides > mechanisms of civil remedy.

That is incorrect, the law prohibits torts like infringement as much it prohibits criminal offenses. (It may do so by simply specifying the consequence of violation of the prohibition without separately stating the prohibition independently, but this is typical of _criminal_ laws as well -- which are often phrased as "whoever does <prohibited act> shall be punished with <punishment>", so if we accepted the prohibition/consequence distinction for torts, we'd have to do so for crimes as well, and say crimes are not "illegal".)

> Fair use is not infringement.

Sure, but that's a non-sequitur.

> You may be thinking of criminal copyright infringement.

No, I'm just not falsely limiting "illegal" to "criminal".

<comment><USER16> Sorry, civil torts are most definitely not illegal. By "illegal" one means prohibited or punishable by the state. They are not.

Copyright infringement is defined in 17 USC 501. Nowhere is ordinary infringement prohibited, but civil remedies are provided in 17 USC 502-505. There are _many_ circumstances under which civil claims may not be pursued, but also much lower standards of proof.

17 USC 506 makes willful infringement punishable under certain specific circumstances, which are a small subset of infringements.

> No, I'm just not falsely limiting "illegal" to "criminal".

Neither was I.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Update: Another day, another Elsevier website illegally selling articles [https://thewinnower.com/papers/another-day-another- elsevier-...](https://thewinnower.com/papers/another-day-another-elsevier- website-illegally-selling-articles)

</comment><comment><USER18> Notify the author and coordinate action with them (legal, social, military, up to you). Ultimately it's their call.</comment>