Careless People and Your Induction Ceremony
More with Sarah Wynn-Williams and Facebook
As you may know, I select the header images for the posts from the photos I have from my hiking and other activities outside. Part of recovering from digital overload is to set the noise aside and embrace what’s out there in nature. When your eyes are treated to the lack of square corners and symmetry in all the shapes you find, it gets you thinking differently. If you look at the branch just above the “L” in the logo, it looks like Japanese Kanji characters if you stare at the shapes long enough.
What a contrast that photo is with the topic of AI, Facebook and the Tech Bros. Severed Conscience is becoming a major theme again in the events that are affecting us all.
On Thursday, 4/10/25, Sara Wynn-Williams, former Director of Global Policy at Facebook / Meta, testified before Congress regarding her legal battles over her devastating book Careless People and her tenure at the Zuckerberg organization. Earlier this week my article featured her revelations in summary, and I’m including her testimony here as another chapter in this long saga of losing of agency and liberty to Big Bro-ligarchs. Hat tip to Dr Naomi Wolf for that phrase, it captures the uber cavalier attitude that is wreaking havoc on our society and the generations who haven’t had the pleasure of growing up untethered from the collective like Gen-X has. One of my generations few advantages.
There is a new thread in Wynn-Williams’ testimony that ties AI to tariffs and of course to China, and that will be the focus in the next coming weeks. In an exchange with Senator Josh Hawley and Wynn-Williams, you hear a term called “open source” software when there is discussion of Facebook collaborating directly with the CCP. You may recall in On the Flip Side of the Stargate I described that DeepSeek had made their software open source and its inner workings were published in a white paper.
OpenAI CEO has floated the chance to use a PhD version of AI for $2,000 a month. That threatens actual PhDs, but for a business that is still a huge cost if you have 100 of your employees sign up. Currently there are two paid tiers, $20 and $200 per month, with less features. OpenAI currently has 200 million users a week.
A few weeks ago, a competing LLM from DeepSeek released a product that matches, and in some cases, beats OpenAI’s ChatGPT performance. This LLM is open source, meaning that anyone can download it, and with the right equipment, run it on their private network.
For free.
On the Flipside of the Stargate
On the heels of the OpenAI's Stargate announcement of a $500 billion dollar investment, a Chinese hedge fund announced that they had trained their own LLM for far cheaper, and that the source code and research paper were both publicly available for free. What does this mean for the US AI Tech industry?
Some have falsely claimed that DeepSeek is based on stolen intellectual property, and while the CCP is notorious for that, in the case of the immediate work that resulted in DeepSeek usurping ChatGPT’s model in several benchmarks, DeepSeek used new methods to achieve the capability for only $6 million. This was the shockwave just within days of the mammoth $500 billion dollar investment for OpenAI and their platform ChatGPT.
You will hear Senator Howley refer to “closed source” software which is what OpenAI has up until recently produced. Open source software has been a standard practice in the software industry for years, yet there was a hint in the conversation that this was somehow nefarious. For the past few months the theme has been “AI is vital to US interests”. As we have seen many times, government can intercede and do more damage than good. Outlawing open source software to protect OpenAI is what I fear may be coming, and this would be like rotating the car’s tires when the oil really needed to be changed.
So next week will be your induction ceremony to the Humanzee Digital Irregulars. Since AI is being touted as the key driving force for our economy and given how critical it is that our proprietary intellectual capital is kept safe from China, there will be a lot of terms thrown around that you should be prepped for, it will help you discern whether we are doing the right thing for our tech industry, and it will also give you more insight into what Facebook may have been doing to curry favor with the CCP. More on that next week.
Sunday Nights Radio
This Sunday, 4/13/2025, is Thomas Jefferson’s birthday. As you know, Cultural Courage is here, in part, to get to know the Founders more intimately, as their ideals are a part of our heritage that is sadly slipping away. So this upcoming episode of Sunday Nights Radio will be devoted to looking at Jefferson and his views on judicial review and constraint of power. Unrestrained power is what drove the colonies to seek independence, and while Jefferson is famous for his “blood of patriots” fervor, there are moments when he clarifies how power should be kept in check. Rebel and and thinker, and a catalyst for a whole new society.
I think you’ll enjoy this episode on Sunday, 930 PM Eastern. That will be live streamed to Substack.
Your Feedback Is Welcomed and Gold For Me
I do hope you find the articles and videos compelling, and as I said, sometimes I have a theme for the month in mind and yet there are events which are related the topics discussed here that compel me to switch gears and develop earlier ideas fruther. That said, I would love to hear from you regarding on what you like and what not’s working for you as well. Some newsletters have the Chat feature enabled, and I’ve hesitated to turn it on, because there are so MANY places where we all chat, sometimes less is more.
I include the Morning Mission streaming events on the OZFest Live page as well. Those themes and the Sunday Nights Radio podcasts are how the ideas for the articles develop, so while some just want to read I think there are good - and crazy - ideas there in other formats.
DM and let me know. I would love to hear from you. Dave Wise pinged me regarding Lysander Spooner and BOOM I was off the races and wrote a nice article based on what I learned. I’m always up for that.
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