All of big tech is really worried about this.
- Apple is worried about its own science output, with many of their office heavily employing data scientists. A lot of people slate Siri, but Apple’s scientists put out a lot of solid research.
- Amazon is plugging GenAI into practically everything to appease their execs, because it’s the only way to get funding. Moonshot ideas are dead, and all that remains is layoffs, PIP, and pumping AI into shit where it doesn’t belong to make shareholders happy. The innovation died, and AI replaced it.
- Google has let AI divisions take over both search and big parts of ads. Both are reporting worse experiences for users, but don’t worry, any engineer worth anything was laid off and there are no opportunities in other divisions for you either. If there are, they probably got offshored…
- Meta is struggling a lot less, probably because they were smart enough to lay off in one go, but they’re still plugging AI shite in places no one asked for it, with many divisions now severely down in headcount.
If the AI boom is a dud, I can see many of these companies reducing their output further. If someone comes along and competes in their primary offering, there’s a real concern that they’ll lose ground in ways that were unthinkable mere years ago. Someone could legitimately challenge Google on search right now, and someone could build a cheap shop that doesn’t sell Chinese tat and uses local suppliers to compete with Amazon. Tech really shat the bed during the last economic downturn.
Monopolies don’t care about the user experience, only profit. The AI doesnt understand the former, only the latter. The continued degredation of the user experience is a likely indicator of an increase in revenue as function of successful application of AI.
But that’s also a path for them to no longer be a monopoly, if the right competitor makes the right moves.
We’re living in a late stage capitalistic hellhole and you’re advocating faith in the free market.
What. The. Fuck.
The AI doesnt understand the former, only the latter.
Do you possibly mean “The AI evangelists” or something similar?
Like, I could totally understand it in the “software will also include the biases of those who wrote it” kind of way (a la Amazon’s failed attempt at automating job candidate search). If the only incentive you’re given as a programmer is “make it make money”, then yeah, your AI is going to bias towards that end.
Just couldn’t tell on first reading
I’m not actually asking for good faith answers to these questions. Asking seems the best way to illustrate the concept.
Does the programmer fully control the extents of human meaning as the computation progresses, or is the value in leveraging ignorance of what the software will choose?
Shall we replace our judges with an AI?
Does the software understand the human meaning in what it does?
The problem with the majority of the AI projects I’ve seen (in rejecting many offers) is that the stakeholders believe they’ve significantly more influence over the human meaning of the results than exists in the quality and nature of the data they’ve access to. A scope of data limits a resultant scope of information, which limits a scope of meaning. Stakeholders want to break the rules with “AI voodoo”. Then, someone comes along and sells the suckers their snake oil.
its a function of paying their employees less for more work relatively speaking and extracting more profit from consumers through ads and enshitification in general
I think it will hinge on one thing: Will AI provide an experience that is maybe worse, but still sufficient to keep the market share, at lower cost than putting in the proper effort? If so, it might still become a tragic “success”-story.
It’s very, very costly, both but the hardware and the electricity it takes to run it. There may be a bit of sunk cost fallacy at play for some, especially the execs who are calling for AI Everything, but in the end, in AI doesn’t generate enough increase in revenue to offset its operational costs, even those execs will bow out. I think the economics of AI will cause the bubble to burst because end users aren’t going to pay money for a service that does a mediocre job at most things but costs more.
AI did boom, but people don’t realize the peak happened a year ago. Now all we have is latecomers with FOMO. It’s gonna be all incremental gains from here on.
AI did boom, but people don’t realize the peak happened a year ago.
A simple control algorithm “if temperature > LIMIT turnOffHeater” is AI, albeit an incredibly limited one.
LLMs are not AI. Please don’t parrot marketing bullshit.
The former has an intrinsic understanding about a relationship based in reality, the latter has nothing of the likes.
I’m not sure there could be any sort of legitimate threat to them, but I could definitely see a Netflix situation playing out. That is a popular upstart temporarily seems poised to take over, but then suffers from extreme levels of interference from bigger players who artificially hold the upstart down while they desperately catch up and then ultimately come at least equal while the Netflix equivalent is mostly a shell of what it could’ve been.
Never underestimate how much buckets and buckets of cash reserves can overcome even incredibly out of touch laziness when it comes to competing with any start ups. Apple in particular could probably afford to let competitors get a decade ahead and still be able to come back based on the ridiculous amount of cash they have to float their business along with.
Google has let AI divisions take over both search
I fucking bing’d something the other day to get a better search result. What the fuck google.
Try Kagi. Paid search engines are the future in order to extract yourself from the enshittification of “free” search engines.
If your goal is to get away from this AI shit show, Kagi might not be the answer, according to their own blog.
I will search for a very interesting article you should read, before deciding to give kagi any money.
Edit: found it
No. They are still capable of pressure typical for oligopoly (censoring out mentions of their competition, tactically buying out things which could help that competition and shutting them down, defamation, lobbying for laws directed against their competition).
Unless that happens too fast for them to realize.
Someone could legitimately challenge Google on search right now
Not really, unfortunately, because of the sheer mass of the internet the infrastructure to just support the index of it requires massive funding. Even other giants like MS with Bing struggled with this. Short of a radical new way to run a search engine without a massive index, I just don’t see it happening.
Kagis ok, it’s better than Google now, but not the Google of the past and only if what you were looking for is recent and indexed. If not, it just falls back to the same Google results. Good if you want separation and not having Google know what you’re searching for, but beyond that…meh.
It’s kind of curious to me about search because honestly my Internet world has only grown smaller and smaller. Where I used to use Google to find new websites, I feel like most of my searches on Google are now to search a handful of sites I already know. Ironically if Reddit had a better search function, a lot of my Google usage would fall off as I’d just go directly there, as it’s still the best place I’ve found for troubleshooting support and real reviews of lots of products. A competitor to Google wouldn’t really need to index the entire web for most people, but rather a relatively small number of website super giants like Amazon, Reddit, Wikipedia, etc.
Meta is struggling a lot less, probably because they were smart enough to lay off in one go,
or more like their user experience was already so garbage, adding AI to it doesn’t make any noticeable change lol
I don’t use a single Meta product on purpose. I’m sure they scrape my data despite my best efforts to not be tracked online.
I still unfortunately order things from Amazon for the convenience, use Windows for gaming and at work, and occasionally use Google search with heavy boolean search, custom search engines, and browser extensions for filtering out the garbage. I also still use Google Maps and I have an Android based tv where I occasionally watch SmartTube.
Hell I even get Netflix included with my T-Mobile subscription. My wife watches that.
And for now, I have an iPhone SE until it dies and I make the switch to a Google phone or something.
Typing this out makes me wonder what I’m waiting for to find alternatives for this FAANG garbage, but I have no idea how Facebook still exists.
I still unfortunately order things from Amazon for the convenience
It turned out that it’s incredible easy to order as guest at other sides
No shocked pikachu?
I cant stand microsoft I have to use windows at work and it drives me nuts.
Only reason I like using windows at my work is the only other choice is Mac, and my work mac is only sorta barely usable for what I need
They own like half the company, so wouldn’t OpenAI’s success be their success?
Boeing turned to shit after acquiring another company (not sure of the name), and it changed the culture and leadership
Boeing turned to shit because successive executive teams looted the company.
I am not following how bombardier acquisition plays into this
It was McDonnell and John Oliver had a whole episode about it
It was McDonall Douglas, and post merger the MD executives largely took over the company. I don’t see Satya giving up the helm to Altman any time soon.
I think maybe execs and investors might feel it’s all the same, but if you’re a project manager for cloud infrastructure for enterprise services or you’ve been working for years on releasing a new component of Bing search that you think is a real gamechanger and some muckity-muck at the top says, ‘Oh, don’t worry about that anymore: a property manager that’s owned by a private equity partner of one of our big investors wants the chatbot that schedules apartment viewings in Huntsville to be more flirty, so go massage the prompts to make it convincingly laugh at bad jokes,’ some of those folks are liable to start grumbling that this isn’t the role that they were pitched when they took this job.
Isn’t that a good thing? The best job in the gold rush was selling shovels. Nvidia is already doing that, so I guess the second best thing is providing lodging, which is what Microsoft is doing.
