> Everyone already hates that Google can arbitrarily ban people
Yet they’re still the predominate search engine, sadly the concerns of the few don’t interest monopolistic profit seekers without forced regulations, think how airlines are legally required to give refunds for delayed flights, there’s a reason it required legislation
> clearly useful for people who took the time to understand it
people -> programmers, I haven’t met a non-developer who reports getting more time out of current AI platforms than they put in. If anything I’ve anecdotally heard the opposite, introducing AI at work creates so much slop (output) it takes more time to process it all without a tangible bump in overall productivity
I think the article is right about outsourcing but not from cheap offshored contractors, good experts will become more independent and be more enabled to support more clients with AI, meaning small and medium businesses won’t need internal as many engineers, finance, marketing, etc
It’s well integrated into massively underpriced agentic coding (and noncoding) workflows, I doubt there’s much more reason than that. The hip thing to do now is hold all your docs in github instead of notion so your agent can traverse them locally
Every c suite in the country is panicking about being left behind, from their perspective it’s either token max or fade into obscurity, or at least that’s what they were sold
I don't think that's accurate. I think every C suite in the country is looking to do away with labor's leverage as much as possible. I think this is a cultural thing more than anything else, C suite + investors looking to get rid of those pesky humans required to prop up their lifestyles. AI is the most credible path toward that. Short, medium or long term returns be damned, this is a reconfiguration of society and they want to shed what they consider to be baggage.
Like anything it's a mixed bag. I am certainly working with people who I think truly believe the "max out on AI usage or become irrelevant" line. There are people who will privately let you know they're just working with the current meta the best way they can, but others who are drunk on kool aid.
Trying to operate as a rational, thinking person in a lot of environments right now feels impossible. Rational thought is being treated like AI skepticism.
its a herd mentality, its a lot easier to follow the louder voices than to spend time understanding how it impacts your own particular business. Because google does this way, or apple does this way is a common argument in lot of feature/business decisions
Please. These are the same people that force their employees to use Microsoft teams because slack is $5 an employee a month. They're not going to sit idly by while employees burn thousands a month in tokens.
It depends on which people you're referring to. The allocation toward AI budget has been so massive that I think a lot of businesses are way behind on trying to assess value for dollar for the AI-related crud they're shelling out for.
Everyone is feeling it out but the vast majority of spend has been subscription based. Some outliers may have used a massive amount of tokens but companies didn't pay for that.
That VC funded gravy train is likely coming to an end. But fortunately there are also reasonably efficient models now so that the tokenmaxxers can still make the (much cheaper) tokens go brrrr.
Those reasonably efficient models assume you use a harness that supports them well, the one size fits all harness of Claude desktop or codex does not support what you want well, and that’s intentional. It’s contradictory that these AI companies will continue to brrrr to the moon and return on AI spend requires discipline…
The next recession (and there's always a next recession) will clean up this AI bubble. The actually useful products and companies will make it the rest goes down.
Yes, but unlike the dot com bubble we’ll be left with half finished (or not even started) abandoned data center projects, instead of reasonably reusable fiber and ISP infra
But aren’t the revenue numbers that have investors foaming at the teeth based on that “tokens as a metric” world? It can’t be both an explosive growth business and also only ROI with more disciplined spend.
Apple may be behind, and even getting sued for false advertising around AI features, but at least they haven’t spent hundreds of billions of dollars with no indication of how they’ll make their money back.
You’re right, they’re simply playing a different game. That said, Apple sold millions of phones with the promise that 3 months later users would be able to use AI to automate their phones and use Siri similar to how they use ChatGPT. That was summer 2024, and it still hasn’t shipped.
How do you ban psyops? Require every user register with a gov ID so there’s someone to go after? What’s a psyop vs a grassroots contrarian movement like LGBT used to be?
Anonymity online seems the ultimate double edge sword. I prefer privacy over government prescribed safety.
I know I'm in the crazy minority but I'm over anonymity at this point. I want to know who's a real person and sincerely who they claim to be.
The harms of trolling, scamming and societal mis/disinformation, for me, outweigh whatever benefit exists in anonymity. I've never assumed I was anonymous from the government anyway so really, we're just anonymous from one-another. Seems like a classic method of divide and conquer now that I think about it.
All that said, I have no idea how to safely enforce ID'ing without some kind of authority (goverment or ideally something else).
You investigate and punish groups found to be running psyops, simple as. No need to automate the whole process with ID checks, these organizations make and spend money so the tracks are there to find. If suspected drag them into discovery and gather evidence like you would for financial fraud or criminal conspiracy.
They are often in other countries, and there are much worse crimes to focus attention on with a limited budget. This does happen and should more often, but it’s far from a full solution.
Sure, let's just give the state a pretext to jail anyone espousing opinions they don't like for running a psyop. Surely no government will abuse this power and brand anyone in their opposition as a psyop bot army that needs to be removed from the internet.
If they want to they'll do that under any pretense they can get away with. See the current administration declaring intent to treat pro-LGBT speech or anti-fascist speech as indicative of participation in terrorist groups.
You just can't let a government get this bad, and the set of rules and procedures you need to reign in a tyrant are pretty different from the ones you need to keep a system stable and functioning under normal operation.
Right now you can in fact express pro LGBT or anti fascist opinions despite the administration's efforts to stop you precisely because there are no such regulations.
Had a previous US administration thought that the US is a stable and functional democracy that can be entrusted with such a law, you will be in trouble.
It's not for a lack of laws granting the necessary powers; anti-terror laws passed in the wake of 9/11 allow for basically arbitrary use of warrantless surveillance and specifying any enemy as a terrorist. The reason this admin hasn't been successful in vindictively prosecuting its enemies is because they've only captured the Supreme Court, not the majority of the legislature. It's up to judges to interpret the law and decide if it's being applied appropriately. If you write an anti-psyop law it's far from impossible to make clear in the text what sort of organization it is meant to apply to. That's the case for all laws. Where it breaks down is when the legislature changes its interpretation standards. And at that point any law can be interpreted to mean anything and rule of law breaks down, so it doesn't really matter what laws you have or don't have on the books.
Surely part of the value is the talent, the rest comes from removing a tool like this from the open market? I wonder how much of each went into the final valuation.
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