The primary value is accrued by the AI labs. You pay hundreds or thousands of dollars a month to train their AI models. While you probably do increase your productivity saving time typing all the code, the feedback that you give the agent after it has produced mediocre or poor code is extremely valuable to the companies, because they train their reinforcement learning models with them. Now while you're happy you have such a great "assistant" that helps you type out code, you will at some point realize that your architectural/design skills really weren't all that special in the first place. All the models lacked to be good at that was sufficient data containing the correct rewards. Thankfully software engineers are some of the most naive people in the world, and they gave them that data by actually paying for it.
It just boggles my mind that anyone would use something like this. Why would one send their data to some unknown company that internally likely just delegates the work to one of the big AI labs?
Do you honestly believe that the opt-out by Anthropic and Cursor means your code won't be used for training their models? Seems likely that they would rather just risk taking a massive fine for potentially solving software development than to let some competitor try it instead.
> For API users, we automatically delete inputs and outputs on our backend within 30 days of receipt or generation, except when you and we have agreed otherwise (e.g. zero data retention agreement), if we need to retain them for longer to enforce our Usage Policy (UP), or comply with the law.
If this is due to compliance with law I wonder how they can make the zero-data-retention agreement work... The companies I've seen have this have not mention that they themself retain the data...
>Anthropic spent "many millions of dollars" buying used print books, then stripped off the bindings, cut the pages, and scanned them into digital files.
The judge, Alsup J, ruled that this was lawful.
So they cared at least a bit, enough to spend a lot of money buying books. But they didn't care enough not to acquire online libraries held apparently without proper licensing.
>Alsup wrote that Anthropic preferred to "steal" books to "avoid 'legal/practice/business slog,' as cofounder and CEO Dario Amodei put it."
Aside: using the term steal for copyright infringement is a particularly egregious misuse for a judge who should know that stealing requires denying others of the use of the stolen articles; something which copyright infringement via an online text repository simple could not do.
Using torrented books in a way that possibly (well, almost certainly) violates copyright law is a world of difference from going after your own customers (and revenue) in a way that directly violates the contract that you wrote and had them agree to.
In the spacex subreddit there are comments claiming that key engineers have left the company because of differences with leadership/culture. Not sure how credible those are, but spacex has had suspiciously many failures recently.
It’s not even just a binary state of an engineer being there or not. The morale and general attitude of the environment can cause engineers still there to just not have their hearts in it.
I think about the countless engineering success stories I’ve read where you can tell the people involved were just living and breathing the problem.
It's hard to tell whether key engineers were the differences between success and failure but Comparably lists SpaceX’s Retention Score as an A– grade, placing it in the top 15% of similarly sized companies based on employee feedback. Additionally, SpaceX boasts an Employee Net Promoter Score (eNPS) of +25, placing it in the top 25% among peer companies
comparably.com.
Sounds impressive, sure. Question is how much weight do you put into survey stats like those given Musk's extensive history of things like buying the influence he wants, putting his thumbs on the scales of his truth-bot, getting generous valuations based on hype and stories, knowing about "those vote counting computers" (Trump's own words), ruthlessly firing anyone who disagrees with him, etc etc etc.
Then again, they are launching tons of rockets, and any cult leader has his followers, so what do I know...
Not to say that Musk's been particularly endearing lately - but what would the normal turnover in an engineering-centric company the size of SpaceX be?
Especially with how hot the field is these days. I suspect "key" SpaceX engineers do not lack for lucrative offers.
Where's the actual evidence for the productivity boost though? Wouldn't one expect a huge increase in valuable software products or a dramatic increase in open source contributions if llms provide this kind of productivity increase?
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