> Why is there such an anti-OpenAI bias on a forum run by YCombinator, basically the pseudo-parent of OpenAI?

Isnt that a good thing? The comments here are not sponsored, nor endorsed by YC.

I'd expect to see a balance though, at least on the notion that people would be attracted to posting on a YC forum over other forums due to them supporting or having an interest in YC.

Why do you assume there would be a balance? Maybe YC's reputation has just been going downhill for years. Also, OpenAI isn't part of YC. Sam Altman was fired from YC and it's pretty obvious what he learned from that was to cheat harder, not change his behavior.

Sam Altman wasn't fired from YC.

The story I heard before the PR spin that came from Paul Graham later (where he tweeted that he never fired him and asked him to choose between YC and OpenAI) was that he was asked to resign. I don't have an official source, I heard this from multiple YC alumni. I don't know exactly what happened but based on what I've heard and actually having interacted with Sam Altman, it seems most likely to me he was asked to resign (which isn't technically being fired) because he does weird stuff. He claimed to be a chairman of YC which wasn't true, he barred other YC partners from running personal funds while he did it himself, and then all the further similar behaviors we've seen play out at OpenAI. Maybe you're right, but it seems to me he was "fired" and later there was some PR to smooth it over.

https://archive.is/Vl3VR

https://archive.is/2mzD7

You don't know what exactly happened, but you stated confidently what happened.

You're right about that and that's why I'm providing additional context.

That doesn't address the substance of the claim though. What do you know that you aren't telling us about that situation?

I think the majority of people don't care about YC. It just happens to be the most popular tech forum.

> posting on a YC forum over other forums due to them supporting or having an interest in YC.

I've been posting here for over a decade, and I have absolutely no interest in YC in any way, other than a general strong negative sentiment towards the entire VC industry YC included.

Lots of people come here for the forum, and leave the relationship with YC there.

It's Saturday morning for California, where YC is centered. Everyone here should be out doing anything else (including me). It's not a random sampling of HN commenters, but a certain subset. I think we've just found out which way the subset that comments on Saturday mornings leans.

Well, in a way they are endorsed. They actively censor things they don’t like. Since there’s no moderation log, nobody prevents them from removing things just because they don’t like them.

Why do you assume that a forum run by X needs to or should support X? And why is it unwise - from what metrics do you measure wisdom?

because of the repeated rugpulling?

People remember things and consistently behaving like an asshole gets you treated like an asshole.

OpenAI had a lot of goodwill and the leadership set fire to it in exchange for money. That's how we got to this state of affairs.

What are the worst things OpenAI has done

The number one worst thing they've done was when Sam tried to get the US government to regulate AI so only a handful of companies could pursue research. They wanted to protect their moat.

What's even scarier is that if they actually had the direct line of sight to AGI that they had claimed, it would have resulted in many businesses and lines of work immediately being replaced by OpenAI. They knew this and they wanted it anyway.

Thank god they failed. Our legislators had enough of a moment of clarity to take the wait and see approach.

It's actually worse than that.

First, when they thought they had a big lead, OpenAI argued for AI regulations (targeting regulatory capture).

Then, when lead evaporated by Anthropic and others, OpenAI argued against AI regulations (so that they can catch up, and presumably argue for regulations again).

Do you believe AI should not be regulated?

Most regulations that have been suggested would but restrictions mostly the largest, most powerful models, so they would likely affect OpenAI/Anthropic/Google primarily before smaller upstarts would be affected.

I think you can both think there's a need for some regulation and also want to avoid regulation that effectively locks out competition. When only one company is pushing for regulation, it's a good bet that they see this as a competitive advantage.

Dude, they completely betrayed everything in their "mission". The irony in the name OpenAI for a closed, scammy, for profit company can not be lost on you.

They released a near-SOTA open-source model recently.

Their prerogative is to make money via closed-source offerings so they can afford safety work and their open-source offerings. Ilya noted this near the beginning of the company. A company can't muster the capital needed to make SOTA models giving away everything for free when their competitor is Google, a huge for-profit company.

As per your claim that they are scammy, what about them is scammy?

Their contribution to opensouurce and open research is far behind other organisations like Meta and Mistral, as welcome as their recent model release is. Former security researchers like Jan Leike commonly cite a lack of organisational focus on security as a reason for leaving.

Not sure specifically what the commenter is referring to re: scammy, but things like the Scarlett Johansson / Her voice imitation and copyright infringement come to mind for me.

Oh yeah, that reminds me. the company did research on how to train a model that manipulates the metrics, allowing them to tick the open source box with a seemingly good score, while releasing something that serves no real purpose. [1] [2]

GPT-OSS is not a near-state-of-the-art model: it is a model deliberately trained in a way that it appears great in the evaluations, but is unusable and far underperforms actual open source models like Ollama. That's scammy.

[1] https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/pLC3bx77AckafHdkq/gpt-oss-is...

[2] https://huggingface.co/openai/gpt-oss-20b/discussions/14

That explains why gpt-oss wasn't working anywhere near as well for me as other similarly and smaller sized models. gemma3 27b, 12b, and phi4 (14b?) all significantly outperformed it when transforming unstructured data to structured data.

When you call yourself "Open"AI and then turn around and backstab the entire open community, its pretty hard to recover from that.

They undermined their not-for-profit mission by changing their governance structure. This changed their very DNA.

They released a near-SOTA open source model not too long ago

open weights != open source

they didn't release the source to it.

People here are directly in the line of fire for their jobs. It’s not surprising.

True, but there are many reasons besides. Meta and Anthropic attract less criticism for a reason.

I’ll bite, but not in the way you’re expecting. I’ll turn the question back on you and ask why you think they need defending?

Their messaging is just more drivel in a long line of corporate drivel, puffing themselves up to their investors, because that’s who their customers are first and foremost.

I’d do some self reflection and ask yourself why you need to carry water for them.

I support them because I like their products and find the work they've done interesting, and whether good or bad, extremely impactful and worth at least a neutral consideration.

I don't do a calculation in my head over whether any firm or individual I support "needs" my support before providing or rescinding it.

Perhaps the people you see as cynical have more research and/or experience behind their views on OpenAI than you. Many of us have been more naive in the past, including specifically towards Altman, Microsoft, and OpenAI.

Microsoft, especially, has a long history of malfeasance.

These guys are pursuing what they believe to be the biggest prize ever in the history of capitalism. Given that, viewing their decisions as a cynic, by default, seems like a rational place to start.

True, though it seems most people on HN think AGI is impossible thus would consider OpenAI's quest a lost cause.

I don’t think one can validly draw any such conclusion.

I don't want to be glib - but perhaps it is because our "context window lengths" extend back a bit further than yours?

Big tech (not just AI companies) have been viewed with some degree of suspicion ever since Google's mantra of "Don't be evil" became a meme over a decade ago.

Regardless of where you stand on the concept of copyright law, it is an indisputable fact that in order for these companies to get to where they are today - they deliberately HOOVERED up terabytes of copyrighted materials without the consent or even knowledge of the original authors.

I don’t think anyone’s disputing that these companies are evil or that when they’re changing the world it’s generally for the worse.

The question is, why are people who have a problem with that hanging out in evil technologists making the world a worse place for money HQ?

This. I’ve been on HN for a while. I am barely hanging on to this community. It is near constant negativity and the questioning of every potential motive.

Skepticism is healthy. Cynicism is exhausting.

Thank you for posting this.

In the current echo chamber and unprecedented hype, I'll take cynicism over hollow positivity and sycophancy

My takeaway is actually the opposite, major props to YC for allowing this free speech unfettered - I cant think of any other organization or country on the planet where such a free setup exists

Unfettered? Have you ever seen how many posts disappear from being flagged for the most dubious reasons imaginable? Have you been on other sites on the internet? Hell, Reddit is more unfettered and that’s terrible.

hmm interesting - based on the kind of posts that I see I made the presumption that this place is free but the opposite actually makes more sense. What kind of posts have you seen disappear?

I would call it skepticism, not cynicism. And there is a long list of reasons that big tech and big AI companies are met with skepticism when they trot out nice sounding ideas that require everyone to just trust in their sincerity despite prior evidence.

> Why is there such an anti-OpenAI bias on a forum run by YCombinator, basically the pseudo-parent of OpenAI?

Because our views are our own and not reflective of the feelings of the company that hosts the forum?

When dealing with organizations that hold a disproportionate amount of power over your life, it's essential to view them in a somewhat cynical light.

This is true for governments, corporations, unions, and even non-profits. Large organizations, even well-intentioned ones, are "slow AI"[1]. They don't care about you as an individual, and if you don't treat everything they do and say with a healthy amount of skepticism and mistrust, they will trample all over you.

It's not that being openly hostile towards OpenAI on a message board will change their behavior. Only Slow AI can defeat other Slow AI. But it's our collective duty to at least voice our disapproval when a company behaves unethically or builds problematic technology.

I personally enjoy using LLMs. I'm a pretty heavy user of both ChatGPT and Claude, especially for augmenting web search and writing code. But I also believe building these tools was an act of enclosure of the commons at an unprecedented scale, for which LLM vendors must be punished. I believe LLMs are a risk to people who are not properly trained in how to make the best use of them.

It's possible to hold both these ideas in your head at the same time: LLMs are useful, but the organizations building them must be reined in before they cause irreparable damage to society.

[1]: https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2018/01/dude-yo...

Because at some point, HN builders mostly left the site and it’s just become /. 3.0.