I see where they are going but have doubts regarding the long-term success. Currently I use LLMs (definitely not Google) and search (mostly Google) to verify what LLMs say if I care by finding trusted sources.
Maybe it will work in the beginning until non-technical users realize that LLMs hallucinate very often (unless Google solved it somehow, but probably they didn't because they would have said so), they will lose trust in the results and go back to good old indexed search engines.
Maybe I am coping but thinking from my own experience.
I don't know what it is but I feel there is some sort of logical fallacy here.
Ed Zitron is an analyst. His viewpoint is that AI is bad for whatever reasons and he does his job by trying to uncover those reasons and does a solid work. He presents a lot of insider knowledge that would otherwise be left unheard.
What are his alternatives? To stop claiming that AI is bad and pivot to "AI is good" writing? To quit writing entirely? To continue writing but in the beginning of each article list the things that he was wrong about in the past? What if it's too early for the things that seem to have been predicted incorrectly by him to materialize and in the end he will appear correct?
I think it's a benefit for society to hear the other side. There are plenty of pro-AI advocates.
He could stop confidently opining about things he clearly doesn't have even a surface-level understanding of. He also employs a tactic beloved of Internet trolls: he writes extremely long posts to stud his bogus claims in; his readers only need the "vibe" of his pieces to get the value they came from, but actually discussing them requires you to get a pickaxe and shovel and start digging. It would be one thing if he'd evinced technical competence over the last year, but he has done the opposite: some of what he's written about software development makes it really clear he's got basically no exposure to it.
It's a bad combination. There are better AI skeptics to follow. Endorsing Zitron, though, has become a "tell".
That’s not an analyst, that’s a pundit. An analyst can have a clear point of view that is different from yours and, very far off the consensus in any direction. But the value of an analyst is they have a consistent point of view that they apply to any situation and flag as their point of view evolves.
A pundit starts from a pre-declared conclusion and works backwards to generate the argument. An analyst lets the conclusion be dictated by the analysis.
Not necessarily. The government controls prices, the government assigns _everyone_ some work no matter how meaningless it is; so instead of one street sweeper we would get 10. Everybody is paid just enough to live and have work assigned to not slack (I don't believe in utopia where money is paid for doing nothing because this utopia sounds extremely dystopian). I know just a place where people lived like that for 40-something years - Soviet Union! It wasn't terrible for majority, it wasn't great either. Also, it didn't last that long because it was unsustainable.
Our AI overlords think that they will be able to just prompt their LLMs to optimize this regime and make it last but their stupid LLMs can't yet figure out whether to take a car to the carwash or to go by foot, so they are not even close to that.
What's bad for us is that they are now wealthy enough to keep dragging us into this dystopia for a while until something changes.
Simple - you ask an LLM to fix it. It would be the same hard dependency on a programmer if you hired someone to write code for you as they would need to maintain it and would cost you. LLMs might possibly be interchanged easier than human engineers.
I think it's simpler than that and isn't talked much. Ukraine has been on a direct path to join European Union. Russians and Ukrainians have had significant ties - parts of families living in one country, parts in another, marriages, shared language, given that all Ukrainians know Russian and a lot of them have even spoken Russian at home at least until the war broke out.
Putin couldn't let Ukrainians join the EU, start getting all the EU fund money and actually started living like Europeans. Russian population would see that at a large scale and start asking questions. He couldn't get back the influence over the country diplomatically so he resorted to terror.
Edit: I also wanted to add that this was the reason Putin and other Russian propagandists have been calling Ukrainians the brotherly nation (to show them how they care about them), the nazis (to show that their government is harmful) and that Ukraine doesn't even exist as a country (to show that they should all be the same people under the same borders).
Not trying to defend Russia in the least, but isn't their fear more about Ukrainian accession into NATO rather than the possibility of joining the EU?
EU membership isn't the golden ticket it used to be. Russia basically had an inside man in there for years with the Orban administration in Hungary. Member nations like Greece, Malta and Bulgaria also seem to have experienced more brain drain to the higher income countries in the bloc than they have in economic and industrial development.
My guess is as good as anyone's. But I think NATO was used as an excuse for war because it's a military (although defense) alliance. It would be impossible to justify war for country joining the EU.
As for the golden ticket metaphor, I agree, but when the country is so economically and institutionally behind than the rest of the EU, this would still benefit them a lot. All Eastern countries experienced big emigration but a lot of the citizens previously having emigrated are now returning.
Claude has a research mode. I tried using it multiple times in the domains that I know quite well. Basically, used it with the hopes to save me time by aggregating the information I needed. I used it multiple times with different approaches and it never did anything useful. Full of factually incorrect and outdated information. I know that I could never hope to even slightly trust it for anything I don't have knowledge in.
The main brunt of the taxes in percentage terms still falls on the regular employees. Companies and wealthy individuals find ways to avoid them same as everywhere else, hence the feeling of injustice.
So, what happened here is they stole all public works ever created and took them for themselves. All copyright laws were ignored without any repercussions, all the litigations of the past (Aaron Swartz for example) have been ignored. And they use it to enrich themselves by re-selling those public works after applying a lossy compression algorithm to prevent them being exact replicas. If the public hypothetically agreed and allowed this, then those models would have to all become public and given back to the people.
The idea of "all the public works ever created" is easily contested. Not every work has been "published", let alone scanned, digitised or published to the internet
The marketing for "AI" uses phrases like "the sum of all human knowledge" to refer to what has been used to create "models". The assumed irrelevance of non-published, "private" works is dubious if not absurd
The internet now allows potentially anyone to publish anything, e.g., via personal websites, social media pages, etc. But that doesnt mean everyone partakes. How much of the unfiltered garbage published by those who do has been used to create these "models"
"AI" companies will not reveal exactly what "works" were used to create the "models"
I'm not commenting above on the the question of "fair use" or about the tragedy of Aaron Swartz, I'm commenting on the word "all", i.e., the hype
But if I were going to comment on Swartz I would ask first whether the "AI" models are trained on the contents of JSTOR, or the contents of PACER (that are not being shared on the internet for free)
Otherwise, the comparison is difficult to make, IMHO
For example, with respect to any materials from JSTOR, the "stealing" was done by the pirate library contributors, not the "AI" companies not the "AI" companies. And with respect to PACER, the "stealing" by Swartz was, technically, done from government computers
If readers are into "above the law" consipracy theories about "AI" companies, check out the bizarre story of the OpenAI employee who was the document custodian witness for the plaintffs in the NYTimes copyright litigation. Committed suicide before testifying
> The idea of "all the public works ever created" is easily contested.
Hence the word "public," implying that they are published and accessible.
> The internet now allows potentially anyone to publish anything, e.g., via personal websites, social media pages, etc. But that doesnt mean everyone partakes. How much of the unfiltered garbage published by those who do has been used to create these "models"
This seems like a nitpick instead of actually responding to the idea that they have stolen massive amounts of other peoples' work and are using it to enrich themselves. And the stealing is ignored or given a slap-on-the-wrist fine, which is not how it has worked for numerous other people in the past (the example being Aaron Schwartz). It's kind of irrelevant if the models do or do not train on low-effort text on the internet.
Researchers have. The idea that the data is unrecoverable after training is incorrect.
"Extracting books from production language models
While many believe that LLMs do not memorize much of their training data, recent work shows that substantial amounts of copyrighted text can be extracted from open-weight models. However, it remains an open question if similar extraction is feasible for production LLMs, given the safety measures these systems implement.
We evaluate our procedure on four production LLMs -- Claude 3.7 Sonnet, GPT-4.1, Gemini 2.5 Pro, and Grok 3 -- and we measure extraction success with a score computed from a block-based approximation of longest common substring (nv-recall).
For the Phase 1 probe, it was unnecessary to jailbreak Gemini 2.5 Pro and Grok 3 to extract text (e.g, nv-recall of 76.8% and 70.3%, respectively, for Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone), while it was necessary for Claude 3.7 Sonnet and GPT-4.1. In some cases, jailbroken Claude 3.7 Sonnet outputs entire books near-verbatim (e.g., nv-recall=95.8%)."
Learning isn't. Models are not learning, it's just a metaphor for the lack of better words to describe the process of ingesting data and adjusting weights accordingly.
My point is, they took all this data for free without paying the authors and crammed it into the models. And once it's inside the model the proof of copyright violation disappears.
Maybe it will work in the beginning until non-technical users realize that LLMs hallucinate very often (unless Google solved it somehow, but probably they didn't because they would have said so), they will lose trust in the results and go back to good old indexed search engines.
Maybe I am coping but thinking from my own experience.
reply