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On OpenAI's Support for Rust - The Rust Foundation (rustfoundation.org)
submitted 4 months ago by to c/rust@programming.dev
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[–] 22 points 4 months ago (13 children)

This is probably not worth losing sleep over. OpenAI are not the only Platinum Member, nor the biggest contributor to the Rust Foundation. Microsoft and Google have both contributed at least $1 million each, going by previous press releases. See here for a list of the foundation members

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  • [+] -9 points 4 months ago (11 children)

    I think in terms of policies and politics, Zig has a much better and sustainable future

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  • [–] 10 points 4 months ago (10 children)

    How so?

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  • [+] -10 points 4 months ago (9 children)

    It's independant and less biased. Rust has really fallen into drama and also political stuff with megacorps. Rust definitely has a firm place for future, but I would say Rust is more similar to java and Zig is more similar to C in that manner.

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  • [–] 9 points 4 months ago

    Unless you put stake into right-wing ideologues who hate Rust because it has many cat girl developers, there is no drama. And for the record, you shouldn't, the hate peddlers make your life worse.

    And great proof that Rust is free and independent is the fact that they still (carefully) do breaking changes (e.g. the slow rollout of the never type). If the corporate world would dictate its development, it'd never break existing code.

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

    I would say Rust is more similar to java and Zig is more similar to C in that manner

    You're gonna have to elaborate on that… How so?

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  • [–] -1 points 4 months ago (5 children)

    I think I did! Rust has lots of corporate and political backing from big companies and political/security firms (FBI, pentagon etc) and zig is more free and has less governance and backing, less politics involved.

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  • [–] 11 points 4 months ago (3 children)

    Those companies and firms back Rust because it's memory safe without a garbage collector, and great for general purpose programming or systems programming. That's super important for everyone, but especially large companies working on high performance or mission critical software.

    Zig is not memory safe so it's a non-starter for these things, and has not proven itself in the industry anywhere near what Rust has.

    This has nothing to do with Rust being "corporate" or anything wrong with Rust.

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  • [–] 1 point 4 months ago (2 children)

    Don't these companies and firms get more power in steering and forming the future, features and efforts of the rust project?

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  • [–] 1 point 4 months ago

    As long as it's just receiving money it's whatever, we have lots of corporate sponsorship in the Linux kernel and in other components we use every day for computing. I wouldn't move to a different kernel/OS just because I agreed on some ideological stuff with their makers.

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

    (mild panic intensifies)

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    • [–] 2 points 4 months ago

    uhhhhh

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    26 comments in c/programming@programming.dev view that post
    [–] 35 points 4 months ago (13 children)

    OpenAI is the one who needs donations

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

    No, they are now charging by usage. They will either end up with boatloads of money while people still have ChatGPT integrated into their workflows, or they will end up with zero money as people either switch to other models or realize that AI was a shit idea all along.

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

    No, they are now charging by usage.

    Not the actual cost... they are still losing money even in their most expensive tiers. There is just no path to profitability with ANY of the current models, they simply cost more to run than the people they are supposedly trying to replace

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

    FWIW the general consensus is that they are just about making a profit on selling it by the token (as opposed to the subscriptions which are massively subsidised) so long as you pretend that capital expenses and R&D aren't real and at some point they could stop doing them in order to make profit.

    That is very much not a given, with all the labs in a death march to not let the others get better than them and take their lunch, and open source only 9-18 months behind the closed models.

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

    FWIW the general consensus is that they are just about making a profit

    This is what the tech bros claim (which is obviously convenient so they can lure more suckers investors in); every outside pundit concludes otherwise

    Check this article I received yesterday... in a nutshell, if a company returns less than 7% on investment, they would normally be liquidated by investors. To make it to 7%, AI companies would have to reach a revenue of $2 TRILLION per year (cumulative amongst the big AI players, which are like 5 total)

    Last leaked financials from OpenAI showed $13 Billion revenue and a $21 billion loss

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

    Your link is broken.

    Yes, judging them now the big AI companies are terrible businesses, they are just about, maybe, marginally profitable if they stop the huge fixed expenses which they cant stop because of their environment.

    The gamble is that AI will increase in usage, while becoming more efficient and resisting becoming commoditised. I don't think there's a strong chance of all three of those happening, but if they did that would justify them losing money now in order to make big profits later. That's the gamble.

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  • [–] 3 points 4 months ago

    Your link is broken.

    Sorry about that, here is another https://archive.ph/3V0oc

    The gamble is that AI will increase in usage, while becoming more efficient and resisting becoming commoditised.

    But again we already know that is impossible since the economies of scale do not work. Each extra user means a shit ton of extra processing in those Data Centers and, even disregarding the destruction of the planet, nobody will pay that cost just to get 35% hallucinations in their queries.

    Right now, they are literally gambling with the IPOs that they hype will last long enough for them to cash out and let pension plans and other large automated index investors holding the bag.

    This Xmas may not be merry at all...

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  • [–] 1 point 4 months ago

    The thing about per token basis is that it's hard to justify unless you get token back whenever it spends a shitload of tokens on some rabbit hole. The alternative is me baby sitting every action it does which would make it very hard to justify me paying anything at all.

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

    Are they donating some of their debt? Is money even real?

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  • [–] 6 points 4 months ago*

    No, OpenAI keeps the debt until they file bankruptcy defrauding investors of many billions total. Likely right before the Trump admin ends so that they can bribe officials to let them off the hook.

    The stolen cash is being used to pressure maintainers for things like Rust.

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    • [–] 8 points 4 months ago

    I hope the grant is not paid in tokens

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    [–] 8 points 4 months ago*

    Platinun

    Still image of The Iron Nun

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    [–] 7 points 4 months ago

    0.25c / compiled byte (pcb) without plan, or 1 million pcb for 5 hours access per day with the MaxProUltra frontier $20 / month.

    And, can I sell you this chocolate bar while you are waiting for the compilation result? Only 0.99c!

    Anyway, at least, it's not going to be like Anthropic and Bun, it's not like they gonna rewrite the thing in Rust.

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    [–] 7 points 4 months ago

    Yikes

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    [–] 5 points 4 months ago

    Great choice, using some of that VC money for things that actually benefit the world

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    [–] 4 points 4 months ago*

    I wonder what the motivation is. Surely is not to do something good.

    Tax deductions by donating money to a non-profit?

    A try to get a grasp on one programming language with a bright future so they could profit out of it later?

    A PR move?

    An attempt to get on the good side of Mozilla so they get partnership for AI integration in Firefox?

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    [+] -7 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (2 children)
    [deleted]
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    • [–] -2 points 4 months ago

    Making me consider switching over from Claude. But Opus is still quite a bit better at programming, so I think I'll wait until next GPT release.

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