If you're unhappy with this, an immediate way to signal it is with your wallet. In my case I've just uninstalled chatgpt from my phone, cancelled my subscription and will up my spend with anthropic.
The little respect I had left for Sam is now wiped. Makes me sick.
Growing up I always thought AI would be this beautiful tool, this thing that opens the gates to a new society where work becomes optional in a way. But I failed to think about human greed.
I remember following OpenAI way back when it was a non profit explaining how AI uncontrolled could be highly detrimental. Now Sam has not only taken that non profit and made it for-profit. It seems he’s making the most evil decisions he can for a buck.
Cancel your subscription, tell your friends to. And vote to heavily tax these companies and their leaders.
Perfect timing - Had already cancelled my Claude sub over their OAuth ban in external tools and was about to pick up a Codex sub as the next best alternative.
Ended up renewing my Claude sub today instead. Principled stances matter and I no longer trust OpenAI to be trustworthy custodians of my AI History.
Just canceled my subscription! I immediately received an email with the subject “We’d love your feedback on why you canceled your ChatGPT plus subscription” and a link to a survey.
Totally agree. Signed up for a claude code account and will not give OpenAI any money in the future. Let's see what Google does. I will definitely vote with my wallet.
Personally I'm happy about this. OpenAI are being fair about letting the gov use their models to spy on everybody, doesn't seem right that Americans get a pass.
Do you honestly believe that cancelling a subscription makes a bit of difference to a company that is either committing accounting fraud on a monumental scale or shoveling venture capital money into a furnace? not to mention the whole collaborating with a fascist government thing.
taking real action is your choice, but stop pretending this kind of thing matters one iota
edit: to be clear, i'm not advocating for nihilism, but tricking yourself into thinking you made a difference to make yourself feel better isn't the play either
It absolutely matters, especially when done in unison like this.
Cancelling ChatGPT sends a signal that you don't agree with weaponizing AI. Switching to Claude says you support Anthropic's principled stance against it. If you have a strong opinion either way, today is the day to vote with your wallet.
Dismissing every small action as meaningless is just apathy and how nothing ever changes.
Anthropic isn't against weaponizing AI, it's just against two specific carve outs for now. They happily accepted the Pentagon's money so long as it was only spying on other countries. And now that the leopard is eating their face they're claiming the moral high ground.
It's entirely possible for both Anthropic and OpenAI to be in the wrong here. This is a massive publicity win but it doesn't make them heroes in my book.
It sure does but it's hard to get a bigger wallet than public money in the US. I do think it's fundamental as an individual to take a moral stance, even if it's entirely pointless, for one owns psychological well-being but honestly here I believe the whole point is precisely to decouple from the need of consumers who are clearly NOT paying for AI. Relying on income from governments is a smart move.
So yes, do cancel if you were paying for OpenAI. Stop using it entirely even, but don't necessarily expect to slow down their encroachment, sadly.
What has an impact is cancelling a subscription and then talking about it. The media will amplify it the pushback. The goal is to make the name OpenAI and ChatGPT toxic, that whatever you do will be converted into a technology that will surveil or bomb you.
Do they? What are those OpenAI earnings that you are talking about? That's a company that should have ceased existing some time ago if earnings were important
I think you have too much pessimism. It's not guaranteed to work, but as I mentioned in another thread, since around December, Claude (and Gemini to a lesser extent) has had all the buzz in tech circles, while Chat-GPT has seemed like the also-ran. And that matters: decision-makers in companies notice these things and momentum becomes self-reinforcing (you use Claude Code because everyone else uses Claude Code). If a large enough group of developers visibly defects from OpenAI because of this, it definitely could have consequences. It's not a sure thing, but it's far from hopeless.
I was not a Chat-GPT user even before this, but I'm bumping my Claude Code subscription to the next tier up. Fuck OpenAI.
> but stop pretending this kind of thing matters one iota
This is blatantly false and intellectually dishonest. Of course it matters. Your edit is also wrong; you are advocating for nihilism with statments like these.
It's the only thing that matters. These companies don't follow the rules of capitalism physics. They live or die on vibes alone and the tech community abandoning them en masse is bad for the vibes. Once they lose the vibes they are Wiley Coyote looking down at the canyon below.
If anthropic is saying “you can use our models for anything other than domestic spying or autonomous weapons” and the pentagon replies “we will use other models then”, I'd say Anthropic are the patriots here...
A huge chunk of those trillions come from European and other non-US sources. Capital controls (or triggering the EU anti-coercion legislation), a truly integrated EU capital market and a few failed USD treasury auctions could very rapidly re-direct those flows.
>A huge chunk of those trillions come from European and other non-US sources.
Well that's even worse isn't it. Europe invents something only for the US to produce it and then sell it back to Europe?
Maybe it's time for Europeans to come home from their 30 year post cold war vacation. 60-70 hour work weeks, performance based job security, 15 days vacation (that you work during anyway), corporate tax exemptions funded by social program cuts, and 35 year old billionaires leading the charge. Droves of SWE's pulling €200k and the locals complaining about gentrification. There will be a vibrant tech scene and actually competitive software across the board within a few years.
But you probably recoiled in horror reading that. So do most other Europeans. So the strong players leave to reap the rewards that those things bring, and the rest stay behind the in the comfy status quo and say "We'll just buy xyz from the Americans".
If the EU just continues to slowly, deliberately continue on it's path towards tighter integrated capital markets, less reliance on US security, continuing energy build out and the growing of the EUR's share of global transactions; I think that will already be more than sufficient without the need for Europeans to "come home from their 30 year post cold war vacation." - whatever that means.
I'm not sure you understand what that krugman post is saying, but it's not saying that Europe has actually been keeping up with the US. It also doesn't refute anything I said, and infact actually supports it.
It's saying that prices of goods in Europe have remained in line with income that people get, people are happy, so who cares about anything else? And then there is short sentence at the end about tech is bad because it makes billionaires, so Europe need not worry.
Which all basically goes back to my point about Europe being happy with the status quo (the 30 yr post cold war vacation), and unwilling to change. However, like Krugman doesn't mention at all in his post, the status quo includes immense American tech and Chinese hardware imports.
So if Europe wants to stand on it's own, it's going to need to do very antithetical things relative to the current culture, that will in the short term be very painful for Europeans, but in the long term will provide the stability and independence they need.
I don't know about the womens side but on the male side, I recently discovered https://www.tailorstore.com/ and am trying them out for some t-shirts. I'm an odd shape and always struggle to get good fitting clothes so hoping this might be a solution.
I live in Europe and my city has had a large, very noticeable uptick of American expats arriving over the last two years. Conversely, I have never known my European friends and acquaintances to be as bearish on the US as they are right now (no one I speak to has the slightest interest in moving stateside and two friends who both emigrated to the US years ago are seriously considering moving themselves and their families back to Europe)
My takeaway was that it's not really high energy costs (though for sure that doesn't help) but, in the UK's case at least, much more caused by political and policy ignorance over decades. Industrial, polluting industries were simply not vote winners and none of the politicians understood or cared about the strategic implications of letting these industries collapse.
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