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Anthropic Joins the Blender Development Fund as Corporate Patron (www.blender.org)
submitted 6 months ago by [B] to c/hackernews@lemmy.bestiver.se
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[–] 12 points 6 months ago (2 children)

Before anyone goes nuts over this, look at the companies already listed on the Blender Development Fund page

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    [–] 10 points 6 months ago (1 child)

    Don't like that.

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    • 49 comments in c/fuck_ai@lemmy.world view that post
    [–] 57 points 6 months ago

    Remember, guys; being a patron of an open source project is not the same as being an investor at a company.

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    [–] 19 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

    Discussion on Blender Artists forum. If you want extra cortisol today.

    edit:
    My prediction... their 2026 financial report gonna see a huge drop for small donation from individuals.

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    [–] 17 points 6 months ago (10 children)

    I think it's more worrying that Blender has been merging Claude code for a while now. Maybe Anthropic is going to give main devs free tokens now to incentivate the use.

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  • [+] -6 points 6 months ago (9 children)

    It will continue to happen and every piece of software you use will contain generated code in the next decade.

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  • [–] 2 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (8 children)

    Lol I love how these confident comments about how "AI is the future so get used to it" always get ratio'd because it really shows how delusional people like you are.

    Most people are not brainwashed about this like you.

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  • [–] -1 points 6 months ago* (7 children)

    Most positive comments about llms are downvoted on Lemmy, especially on the "fuck ai" page. It's not unexpected. I'm not brainwashed in the slightest, I don't love or praise llms but I understand what they are good at and what they aren't good at. I bet a large portion of all software that's been updated in the past year or two has generated code already, disclosed or not.

    I am just seeing reality how it is, unlike you. Like it or not llms are a tool that are used by many and will continue to be adopted. Oh and most normal people are pretty brainwashed by the LLM craze and like "Ai", you are on Lemmy which is full of abnormal people, pretty much nobody here is a "normal" person.

    I think it's quite sad and cringe how normal people around me at work and In my personal life use llms improperly and have generated profile pictures on slack.

    You will use generated code all day everyday brother, you can't stop it. Sorry.

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  • [–] 3 points 6 months ago* (1 child)

    generated code

    Copied code.

    All an LLM does when it "generates" code is plagiarize other coding projects it was trained on. This saves a little bit of time for people who would have done the plagiarism themselves, but it degrades open source projects by taking from them without credit.

    It's parasitic.

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  • [–] 1 point 6 months ago

    Mmmm not true on a technical level. It could spit out verbatium code that was in the training data but that isn't inherently how they work, they aren't just copy paste indexes.

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  • [–] 2 points 6 months ago* (2 children)

    Yes I can, this is a bubble, the software made with AI is crap and I have no interest in supporting software companies who think they can replace humans with AI by stealing other programmers' work.

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  • [–] 1 point 6 months ago (1 child)

    The .com bubble was a bubble and look where we are now, no shit ai is a bubble but under that is still a very powerful tool that isn't going away.

    I wouldn't support those software companies either, because like I keep saying llms are a tool that should be used correctly, for coding that means being used by a competent programer as an assistant not a replacement.

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  • [–] 1 point 6 months ago (1 child)

    Gen AI code has very big flaws that slowly arise as projects that use it start to have a bigger proportion of it.

    Generated code can't keep a consistent and premeditated global design while the devs will slowly become less familiar with the code they have to maintain. So rate of bugs increases and devs can't develop without the AI because everything becomes a fucked up mess.

    We are seeing it with Windows and other software. Maybe when devs see how messed up their projects become they reconsider.

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  • [–] 1 point 6 months ago*

    You see, I would describe that as using LLMs improperly. Like I keep saying, they are a tool for developers to use. They should be used as an assistant, but at no point in time should the developer not understand the code and they should always review all the output. I know we have a major problem with many people using llms improperly, but I will say again they are an absolutely incredible tool when used properly.

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    • [–] 15 points 6 months ago (1 child)

    I wonder if Blender's actually received any actual real money from Anthropic, or if its just like, money hasn't actually changed hands yet.

    I know its not uncommon for big open source projects to accept money and sponsorships from corporations, but idk where Anthropic would really get the cash to even do this. AFAIK they're still staying afloat on investor cash and are burning way more money running models than they can realistically charge people to use them.

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  • [–] 5 points 6 months ago

    This is the other reason Blender should steer clear of Anthropic.

    AI is a bullshit industry that isn't profitable and it is all going to collapse sooner or later, Blender should pursue sponsors that are actual profitable businesses that will be around in 5 years.

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    • [–] 14 points 6 months ago (2 children)

    As a man of wealth and taste, I am also interested in sponsoring Blender.

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    • [+] 18 points 6 months ago (2 children)
    [deleted]
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    • [–] 23 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (2 children)

    FOSS users:

    Big tech leeches off FOSS and never gives back!

    Also FOSS users:

    These big tech companies should stay out of our favorite projects, thei money is poison!

    And this is why we can't have nice things.

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  • [–] 21 points 6 months ago

    Well yeah, capitalists playbook.

    Give money to thing, people who do thing are grateful but wary. People who do thing are able to do more thing with the money and become reliant on the money, then corporation starts putting the lean on them to push agenda while threatening to pull funding that the thing needs now.

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  • [–] 9 points 6 months ago

    They support well established projects and foundations that broke the corporate glass to push their agenda on those projects but not single user projects that they use in their closed source software.

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    • [–] 8 points 6 months ago

    Blender will be fine. They can't make changes without going through pull requests and audits. At most, you might see some kind of Claude add-on. Totally opt-in.

    ...Until we're convinced otherwise, of course.

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    [–] 8 points 6 months ago (15 children)

    Welp, that's Blender fucked then. It's just a matter of time.

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  • [–] 7 points 6 months ago (12 children)

    Doesn't sound that bad, does it?

    A lot of open source projects take money from companies to develop their stuff.

    It's not like Blender is forced to integrate AI now.

    I think this is a net good.

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  • [–] 16 points 6 months ago (6 children)

    I may just be being overly cynical, but once big corporations start giving money to these kinds of things, it's not a big stretch for them to start influencing things in their favour for their money. I hope I'm wrong.

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  • [–] 7 points 6 months ago (1 child)

    I hope you're wrong too!

    I believe projects are not all the same. Some projects might be quick to bend the knee, but others would never.

    Depends how the Blender team works I guess :)

    It is FOSS, so if it takes a turn to the worse I am sure they will be forked quickly 😄

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  • [–] 3 points 6 months ago (3 children)

    Bro how do you think Blender has been getting money all this time?

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  • [–] 3 points 6 months ago (2 children)

    I haven't really been keeping abreast of the situation. I'm only going by a gut reaction to this article. I'm happy to be proven wrong about this.

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  • [–] 3 points 6 months ago* (1 child)

    They are sponsored by major corps like nvidia, meta,amd. Despite this they've continued to put out a good Foss product. I think they'll resist undue influence from antropic.

    But I do think they'll integrate ai inas they're working on that at the moment.

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  • [–] 5 points 6 months ago (4 children)

    It’s not like Blender is forced to integrate AI now.

    from anthropic’s announcement: "The Blender developers have created an MCP connector, which is now officially available for Claude."

    MCP stands for "modern context protocol" and is a tech developed by anthropic for ai integration. in effect, yes, blender is forced to integrate ai. not claude specifically, mind you, but still.

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  • [–] 0 points 6 months ago (2 children)

    Okay, but how bad is that?

    It is just an interface, or am i missing something here?

    Anthropic has no control over the project.

    They sponsored a feature that is still open to anyone to use or not use.

    The project is intact for all I can tell?

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  • [–] 1 point 6 months ago (1 child)

    Think about MCPs as an API for AI. It's just an interface that let's AI do a set of predetermined tasks/configurations. It'll very likely be used for model generation via a prompt

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  • [–] 0 points 6 months ago

    Yeah, i get the gist of it.

    Its just that I don't really see a problem with Blender creating an API.

    There are 2 options:

    1. AI will become awesome and take over the world. In this case I don't see how Blender would survive regardless of MCP integration status.
    2. AI will always be shite, Blender devs has implemented a useless API and got a lot of cash to keep developing Blender.

    I don't see how this is bad, honestly.

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  • [–] 0 points 6 months ago

    It’s ’model complex protocol’ and you can’t stop people from making them to integrate with software. Basically you can create instructions so that the agent can use other software. I bet even w/o entropic there are already more than one on GitHub.

    It blew my mind when I played with the godot mcps for the first time not gonna lie.

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    • [–] 1 point 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

    idk why i like when Corporations donate/contribute to open source projects .

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    [–] -1 points 6 months ago (1 child)

    They just partnered with Adobe. I have mixed feelings about this, as someone working in the creative industries. I have used AI to do some amazing things, and recently figured out how to use Claude to automate some boring, non-creative and time-consuming worklflows. This all, in theory is freeing me up to spend more time on the fun creative stuff, the problem is that nobody values creativity any more because they can just outsource that to AI.

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  • [–] 3 points 6 months ago*

    This was never about bots being able to make art, they can't, they can only steal it from humans and throw it into a woodchipper and then try to duct tape it back together.

    This was about dehumanizing human artists and I am INCREDIBLY unimpressed by how so many artists have leaned into this dehumanization without any reflection over whether this is actually a future or just a way to permanently reduce the quality of life of digital human artists by culturally associating them with algorithmic robots even though the human output is 1000% more creative.

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    • [+] -11 points 6 months ago (5 children)

    /me checks the date, notes this was not posted on the first, and searched "Blender Alternative."

    What the Adobe, you dipshits?

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  • [–] 18 points 6 months ago (4 children)

    Blender is great software that makes 3d modeling accessible to a lot more people. Why would you need an alternative because Anthropic donates money to it?

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  • [–] 13 points 6 months ago (2 children)

    It isn't about there being any contact at all, it is about the inherent corrupting nature of money. If they become a corporate patron they are paying money to the Blender Foundation who can then use that funding to hire people to work on Blender. This all seems cool and normal.

    The problem is not with getting the funding. The problem is once you have the funding you don't want to lose it. That means you will be more likely to tweak things a little, embrace things that suit your corporate patrons, and not block features your community doesn't want. For example, AI.

    So if I make a prediction about this it isn't that tomorrow Blender will have AI tools integrated throughout the whole stack. It is that over time, especially a year or more from now, AI related tools will come to Blender and they will be Anthropic based tools.

    Will they be required? No, of course not. But they will be there and they will be opt out. And along with that the development of other tools which would have filled the niche the Anthropic tools have taken over will not be developed. So less work will go into something that an Anthropic tool could do instead.

    It isn't malice, it isn't direct evil, but it will give Anthropic a quick leg up to getting all the graphic artists and modelers to use their tools rather than a competitors, and they can do it all while looking good.

    The same thing happened with computers for schools. If kids grow up using Apple computers they buy them as adults and take those skills into their careers. If they instead learn on Windows machines then they take those skills forward. The whole industry is shaped by these choices and that locks in massive profits for those companies. Why do you think Google worked so hard on Chromebooks?

    I would prefer for none of my apps to use the plagiarism machines in any way. I would prefer that any AI "enhancement" was a plugin I could easily install but not installed by default. But I am not going to get that, so it is disappointing.

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  • [–] 1 point 6 months ago (1 child)

    I think the main counter argument to this is a practical one. Microsoft, Google, Amazon, all these greedy corporations have contributed to many open source projects and initiatives. Google has a strong influence in defining web standards, should we ditch web browsing? Amazon and even Microsoft have contributed to Linux either trough donations or direct contributions, both in the kernel and in foundational software that runs on top of it. Should we ditch using Linux servers?

    What shows is that while money can corrupt it is not an inevitability. So instead of ditching Blender because Anthropic donates to it I'd suggest ditching Blender only if and when they start rolling out vendor-locked Antrophoc AI integrations rather than take a dogmatic ai company = bad stance.

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  • [–] 5 points 6 months ago

    I agree, I didn't say with clarity that the reason for the worry is the above. I worry things will work out that way and AI companies are the absolute worst offenders for screwing everyone over constantly so it seems more likely with them than another company.

    That said, Blender wouldn't be where it is without contributions from various companies that drove features forward and made contributions to it. I do worry about the future, but I feel that way about most tech, the average person does not benefit from DRM at all but Linux supports it to some degree. I can remove support if I want and there are distros that support that, but in a world with corporate control as law I guess this is the best we can hope for for now.

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    • 19 comments in c/opensource@programming.dev view that post
    [–] 30 points 6 months ago (1 child)

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    • [–] 13 points 6 months ago (3 children)

    Are non-profits even allowed to refuse donations?

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    • [–] 10 points 6 months ago

    So they donate €240k per year and they have a say in where that money goes? I don't imagine this will be the AI takeover everyone thinks it is.

    https://fund.blender.org/corporate-memberships/

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    [–] 9 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (11 children)

    Really disappointed by this, this will not be good for Blender.

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  • [–] 8 points 6 months ago (4 children)

    Really curious why you would say that. Was Anthropic given something in exchange?

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  • [–] 1 point 6 months ago (3 children)

    Would they need to for it to be worrying?

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  • [–] 2 points 6 months ago (2 children)

    There needs to be some reason for it to be worrying, and I'm not seeing it. So what is it?

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  • [–] 0 points 6 months ago (1 child)

    1. The mindset of AI obsessed CEOs and tech people is toxic towards progress in any meaningful sense, having Anthropic anywhere near Blender is an awful idea for Blender's competency and power as a software since AI people are universally all bullshitters.

    2. Anthropic is NOT PROFITABLE, what is Anthropic sponsoring Blender with? Even if I didn't think Anthropic was a bunch of scammers that you don't want to associate with they don't even have anything to give, Anthropic IS NOT PROFITABLE AND HAS NO CLEAR ROUTE TO BEING PROFITABLE.

    3. The distraction of building stupid AI capabilities into Blender is a massive waste of time that will suck up more and more development time if the culture of Anthropic is allowed to degrade the Blender Community. I am learning Blender so I CAN USE IT not tell a stupid, shitty broken glitchy AI to try to cobble together something I want.

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  • [–] 0 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

    The mindset of AI obsessed CEOs and tech people is toxic towards progress in any meaningful sense

    Oh so the CEO is being given control over the direction of the project?

    Anthropic is NOT PROFITABLE

    Oh so when Anthropic starts to go under they're going to get their money back?

    The distraction of building stupid AI capabilities into Blender

    What AI capabilities are being built into Blender?

    E: No answers were provided. Just downvote and move on, I suppose.

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  • [–] 5 points 6 months ago

    If we look at only the Blender Development Fund, the list of the corporate patrons include Meta, Google, Nvidia and even Adobe. In general, this is the situation for a lot of FOSS projects. If Anthropic as a Blender patron is bad news, then things were never good in the first place.

    In my opinion, whether it's good or bad, it is a compromise that we rely on.

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  • [–] 2 points 6 months ago (4 children)

    You'd think so, but from what I've personally heard at least... Anthropic seems to mostly be doing right by the community with their contributions like this. I could be falling for the propaganda, but guys are even backing groups pushing for stronger AI guardrails and oversight.

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  • [–] 6 points 6 months ago (2 children)

    I'd guess they want restrictions because they want to stay on top? (and keep everyone else down)

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  • [–] 1 point 6 months ago

    Too late, I have an AI running on a server at home. I love it like that... My know it all bitch. The other way around with only a handful of companies holding all the knowledge is totally crazy.

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    • 15 comments in c/opensource@lemmy.ml view that post
    [–] 27 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (3 children)

    What do we make of this? Why this? Why now?

    E: relevant blog post

    https://gardinerbryant.com/the-blender-x-anthropic-thing-is-an-overreaction-but-also-not-at-all/

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    • [–] 5 points 6 months ago

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropic#U.S._military_and_intelligence

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    [–] -2 points 6 months ago (9 children)

    Best alternatives to blender on linux?

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  • [–] 2 points 6 months ago (6 children)

    Fork

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  • [–] 7 points 6 months ago (4 children)

    And who's going to develop this fork?

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  • [–] 2 points 6 months ago (3 children)

    Whoever wants to. Hasn't this been the FOSS signature forever? If you don't like where it's going fork it.

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  • [–] 6 points 6 months ago (2 children)

    The reality is far more complicated than that. Maintaining a large project takes a lot of work in practice, and you can't just fork it and expect the fork to magically succeed. There are very few examples of such successful forks in the wild.

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  • [–] 4 points 6 months ago (1 child)

    To add to this, when forks do succeed, it's typically because they're either making very few changes which can easily be reapplied to new versions of the original project, or because a significant number of the existing developers disagree with the project lead and are just doing what they were already doing before the fork, just without having to obey one specific person.

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