I think Anthropic had to pay out because their tool works with Blender now. There is some sensitive corporate issue with losing face and simply invading blender with an AI without asking first.
TBH i think the AI situation sucks, and especially for people trying to build portfolios or create a lifes work project. The AI can just top them, sure, large companies could anyway, sure, but what about the employability lost damages accountability, they could get sued … rest of the world vs AI
I doubt this is the reason, they’ve scraped a lot of data without “paying” for it, and “AI” plugins for various open source software has existed for years at this point, so this seems like a way to gain favor from (and probably influence over) a major player in the FOSS market to offset the massive backlash from the broader FOSS community by giving some token support to Blender
I’m honestly surprised Blender didn’t ask their community what they thought before they decided to do this. This is the kind of decision that can sink an open source project. I’ve been watching a lot of Leverage: Redemption recently, so excuse the dark look, but: I think Anthropic sent someone to smooth-talk Blender into accepting their money is the hopes of causing a public backlash, and causing the money to fail so they can acquire it.
In 2006 MySQL created an Enterprise edition. 4 years later they open source foundation was acquired by Oracle/Sun. They jacked up the prices significantly, and everyone switched to MariaDB which was the open source solution most of the original MySQL developers had jumped ship to.
This smells similar, but at a faster rate and more calculated.
Blender has rock solid foundations, it wasnt built from vibe coding, instead hand coded with research paper diving.
No, I am with the theory that it was intended tp highlight the idea of keeping people from complaining about the AI and instead makong them appreciate that at least they donated. After all, if Blender is good for Anthropic then some payment is useful to keep the ecosystem active.
Thats just like what i was saying, i suppose i didnt explain quite clearly.
So was MySQL.
I’m not saying you’re wrong, I just think you’re being optimistic. The blowback @conz3d is talking about seems significant.
What happened to MySQL?
This. I worked for a number of large companies who abandoned MySQL for MariaDB.
Ah ok, i remember SQLite was useful too. MariaDB was not something I got into. MySQL was always pretty good at least used in a LAMP stack that was easily installed via script on linux and automated on AWS. That might have been a bit of a comeback for MySQL in 2015/16.
I appreciate the point, the donation seems dramatic but I think running a project like Blender is difficult and any funds are helpful.
I am having trouble seeing AI as all that bad, it isnt human slavery (yet ) and isnt drug or blood money. I suppose all the stolen data isnt the problem because it arguably isnt stolen, whats wrong is the loss of jobs/work and basically a competitive market and revenue source.
Anthropic recently released a design/layouting tool. Who knows, maybe they’re cooking some generative 3d abomination, so they may think that buttering up Blender would be a good tactical move and possibly a basis for some future “partnership”.
You think yet another financial bubble doesn’t owe its existence for the need to launder and hide drugs, blood (war, sex trade and human trafficking) monies ? The financial system and our governments are fully complicit in knowing that banks and markets actively work with the top echelons of organized crime to bring back all that cash into the electronic system that is ‘‘legitimate’’ high finance nowadays ?
When you get into the big piles of money, it’s always drug and blood money behind it. Always.
Or oil…. or rare earths… Oh wait, that’s all blood money too, hehe
Hint: fintech runs on ML and LLMs too 
Second Hint : yes, I’m a jaded, sarcastic and very cynical mid 50s brownish male anarchist
Yes. SQLite is great. I worked for one of the developers of it early in my career. So I started using it in the early aughts.
The LAMP stack as a term was coined in 1998. It might have been, but I worked plenty of places where the ‘M’ in LAMP stack stood for MariaDB. Just like the ‘P’ changed over time from meaning Perl to PHP to Python. Though nowadays you also have MEAN stacks for JavaScript and its flavors.
But yes, it could’ve been a comeback.
There are LOTS of threads on here getting into why LLMs are bad. It seems to me that you have either a myopic, or uninformed, view of how LLMs affect the world based on this response.
I don’t want to play the “prove it game”, because I already did in other threads with lots of links to articles, as did other people. The short answer is, go take a look at those other threads and educate yourself and then we can discuss if you think those reasons are valid.
My assumption is that they’re not yet very effective but mass hysteria can be.
The point i made was that the real harm done by the AI is job loss and the impact of a tool or toolchain that creates faster than professional humans - why then doesnt OpenAI, Meshy, HuanYan, Deepseek etc just publish assets and screenplays? Because they are cashing in and after revolution of industrial and social nature. They release instead as a data center that allows greedy people to upload and generate and sell stuff that would otherwise cost them time, that causes publishers and indys a problem keeping ahead of the game.
I believe you, ive seen plenty of Narco shows.
That assumption ignores the economic and societal impacts. Such as power costs going up in cities and counties where data centers are built. Where water prices also go up because of the massive cooling costs for LLMs, and the shortages happening in some cases. There’s a thread on here where we discuss in detail the astronomically cost for one LLM query - which equates to the power cost of anywhere from 30 minutes to 8 hours of constant Google searches. And how those are already affecting small towns in the US.
It also assumes that copyright is not something that should be defended or upheld. Which I believe you mentioned in your previous post:
And I disagree with that. It is a problem for many people. But since LLM companies have steamrolled over it, and lawsuits take years (again many threads, many links) these things haven’t really been sorted out yet and companies like OpenAI and Anthropic are trying to present a fait accompli. If everyone is already using it, ruling against them hurts everyone.
Again, addressed other places on here. It doesn’t do it well. About 5% of businesses saw any ROI in “AI investment” in the first few years. That number is now up to like 15 or 20%. But most are losing money and productivity. So while it might cause job loss, it might not. Businesses appear to have overcorrected towards LLMs for fear of being left behind.
In my company at the time, we started investigating ChatGPT the DAY it came out and how we could use it.
I actually over explained the last post in very easy language …
The question I just thought of is: perhaps its impossible to use AI to create an exclusive asset because the data is inside the bubble on the data center and anyone else could pay £50 to generate the same content. You can only make or create things that everyone else can make or create.
Then perhaps real value just gets consumed by the data center in the long run anyway.
I dont know about that. Whats “AI Investment”? Is that like buying Tesla stocks or Vanguard?
The copyright stuff is a total mess because the AI developers want the right to bend ethical standards slightly just to contribute to science, as though it is more important than copyright.
Another way to look at this is to say the attitude of a group cannot be generalized reliably because there is always the opportunity for complete denial - i guess maybe some of them want to do it for greed alone.
To what science?
Frankenstein level science
I dont even know what to say about this.
AI corporations saying “We paid for the data we used! See, we funded the open source! Your welcome! GIVE US MORE OF YOUR DATA”
I mean they just want to make profit, they don’t care about science in itself
exactly! just like they received grands for C# implementation, which i have no idea if slowed down development of the rest at all… M$ for sure had and has its unethical, anti-competitive moves so maybe a rigid Foundation that fights for digital rights/freedom wouldn’t accept their stuff but i believe funds from a generative AI company feels a much greater disrespectful move. doesn’t matter if the funds will go to something totally non-related to the core. even donations with zero strings attached that shows them as sponsors on the main website feels offensive. those run on violation of copyrights which was discussed and settled back in 1886 by almost all countries that exist. it’s not like their technology, even if not dependent on artists and programmers creations, doesn’t use a huge amount of resources, like rare minerals that funds slavery and armed groups and water
there’s this essay among biologists that plants on their evolution didn’t choose the blue color for their leaves (green is less efficient on absorbing sun energy) as more energy means more mutations and faster mutations means more (evolutionary) stuff going wrong (cancer, malformations etc.) and i totally agree on this and how it can be translated to Blender… no need to rush the development, core people are already there, well-paid in a meaningful project