Musk's Pig Teammates

Lin Yuan's open-source action, in the short term, opened up the standard entry point for the food delivery industry.

Originally, Tesla Food Delivery, with its standard entry point and algorithm advantages, could have completely stabilized its position in the domestic mid-to-high-end food delivery market. Lin Yuan's move eliminated Tesla Food Delivery's technological advantage, giving various foreign companies a fair chance to compete with it.

And once there is no technological advantage, if it's just about 'involution' (intense internal competition), no company can 'involute' more than the domestic 'involution kings'.

In the short term, Lin Yuan has preserved the domestic food delivery market, preventing it from being controlled by foreign capital.

Therefore, based on this point alone, Lin Yuan already deserves commendation from the authorities.

But more importantly, Lin Yuan has prompted reflection on the future development of technology. Lin Yuan's food delivery standards and algorithms did not blindly encourage 'involution', but instead achieved full competition through algorithms.

This full competition is not just about price 'involution', but encourages every participant to operate with their own unique characteristics.

"The good use of technology" is Lin Yuan's long-term contribution with this move.

Originally, due to these contributions, it would have been a given for Lin Yuan to join the party urgently. However, Lin Yuan is currently deeply embroiled in an overseas commercial dispute.

His action of open-sourcing Tesla Food Delivery has been sued by Tesla Global Headquarters in a New Homestead Court in Eagle Country.

Although Musk is the owner of Tesla, Tesla is a publicly traded company, and all major decisions must be governed by the board of directors, so Musk cannot prevent Tesla from suing Lin Yuan.

Because this commercial dispute involves a market value of hundreds of billions of US dollars, the Dragon Country authorities found it inconvenient to have Lin Yuan join the party at this critical juncture. Otherwise, it would easily be interpreted by the outside world as the Dragon Country authorities backing Lin Yuan.

Therefore, the authorities only gave Lin Yuan an honorary title, and the reason for conferring the title was from the perspective of a community with a shared future for mankind, praising Lin Yuan's action as a major contribution to the global software open-source field.

By commending Lin Yuan from a moral high ground, the Eagle Country side would find it difficult to over-interpret the Dragon Country authorities' intentions.

But if Lin Yuan were to join the party at this time, it would inevitably be exploited by those with ulterior motives. Furthermore, in scenarios involving the grand narrative of human destiny, minimizing the influence of political factors is also very necessary.

The power of morality indeed manifested itself at this moment.

After Lin Yuan was officially sued, several major international open-source organizations expressed dissatisfaction to varying degrees, and even GitHub, which has been controlled by large capital, called for the dismissal of the charges against Lin Yuan on its homepage.

Lin Yuan's stated reason for open-sourcing was that Tesla Food Delivery's algorithms extensively used open-source software. This is actually an unspoken rule within the software industry.

Various companies use open-source software to varying degrees, but they generally aren't foolish enough to truly comply with the "protocol pollution" of open-source software and actually open-source their own software. Generally, they either obtain commercial closed-source authorization or simply play dead.

But regardless, the open-source community admires Lin Yuan's grand gesture, as it is clearly at the cost of his personal career prospects.

The open-source community has been a gathering place for a large number of left-leaning individuals since its inception; it can even be said that the open-source spirit itself belongs to the left-leaning spirit.

Therefore, Lin Yuan's self-destructive open-sourcing naturally easily gained the recognition of the open-source community. As for commercial rules, what the heck are commercial rules? Bill Gates has been treated as a closed-source devil by the open-source community for how many years? In the face of ideology, commercial rules must also step aside.

So, very quickly, some people on the international internet emerged to use ideology to criticize Tesla's attitude towards this move, and even used it to criticize Eagle Country's attitude towards this move. "Aren't you always advocating freedom and equality? You've turned OpenAI into CloseAI, and the open-source spirit has become a tool for you to accumulate wealth."

Therefore, Musk is very helpless, because OpenAI has indeed become CloseAI.

According to Musk's vision, the advantage of the West lies in its 0-to-1 innovativeness, which is currently the only advantage the West has compared to the East. And innovativeness must embody inclusiveness, which naturally includes software open-sourcing.

But now even OpenAI has become closed-source. Why was it named OpenAI in the first place? It was to lead the whole world to embrace the arrival of the AI era with an open stance.

As a result, due to the high research and development costs in Eagle Country, which could not be reduced after being led astray by the financial industry, Musk had to introduce Microsoft to participate in OpenAI.

Thus, there is the legend of OpenAI spending 20 billion US dollars. Even Musk himself doesn't know where the heck 20 billion US dollars went. It should be noted that Musk was also a programmer when he was young; he himself wrote code, and he clearly knows how code is produced.

So, the question arises: even if OpenAI's codebase is incredibly vast and data-related work is incredibly complex, does it really need to cost 20 billion? The heck, I didn't squander money like this when I founded Tesla!

In fact, Musk was not the original founder of Tesla; he became the largest shareholder through a large investment in Tesla's Series A funding round in 2004, and thus Tesla became his.

And that Series A funding round for Tesla in 2004 had a total of only 7.5 million US dollars.

Musk feels bitter. Back then, he invested in Tesla with 7.5 million US dollars and took it over.

Four years later, in 2008, when Tesla's first car rolled off the production line, a total of only 140 million US dollars had been spent, all in all.

140 million US dollars completed Tesla's first car, from scratch to off the production line.

But now, it's 20 billion US dollars, and OpenAI has gone from open-source to closed-source.

Although AI is a massive investment, it shouldn't be burned through like this.

So, according to Musk's initial vision, the plan was to follow the brainstorming route similar to the Linux system. Through a commercial company as the core, and then through the power of the open-source community, organize the world's excellent AI talents through an open-source approach.

In other words, OpenAI, this company, should be a mediator and a direction controller, similar to a core committee, to lead the development of the entire world's AI large language models.

As long as it seizes the initiative and faces latecomers with an open attitude, followers will inevitably flock to it. Even if a rising star emerges, based on the usual nature of open-source software, these rising stars will inevitably use the achievements already pioneered by OpenAI.

Even if they don't use it, it will be difficult not to learn from OpenAI's experiences and lessons.

Then all latecomers will not be able to escape OpenAI's shadow. This is a pure overt scheme, and this is where open source is truly powerful.

Just like the Linux system, it seems that the Linux system doesn't make money at all, but because of the existence of the Linux system, it is no longer possible for a second Linux system to appear in this world.

As for how to make a profit, when you occupy a large enough market share, you have ten thousand ways to make money.

Just as SpaceX seems to only make money by launching rockets, in reality, SpaceX saves Tesla electric vehicles a massive amount of marketing expenses. Because people will irresistibly connect the two, they will spontaneously believe that by purchasing a Tesla car, they are participating in SpaceX's great space exploration.

This is Musk's most ruthless overt scheme – first-mover advantage.

However, all of this changed after Microsoft, this evil company, got involved.

Microsoft was eager to monetize OpenAI and recoup its investment. Since Microsoft itself makes money by selling operating system copyrights, it naturally fell into path dependence and closed-sourced OpenAI. The purpose, of course, goes without saying: it wants to follow the old path of selling operating system copies.

Musk beat his chest in frustration, feeling that this group of incompetent teammates was completely unmanageable.

And what's even more exasperating is that now even his own Tesla has become so eager for quick success.

Musk had already prepared a set of talking points, roughly meaning that he strongly supported Lin Yuan's open-source action, and then subtly indicated that this open-sourcing was originally one of OpenAI's work achievements.

As a result, the Tesla board of directors and OpenAI jointly sued Lin Yuan.