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.
I’m saying it’s happened before. AOL. Palm. Yahoo. Blackberry. A company with an effective monopoly gets complacent and fails to serve their users. They get replaced.
I don’t remember anything ever in history undermining faith in the free - from regulation, but not from jailing crooks, - market.
It’s not as if anything lefties claim to be that were free. And when one talks about what is needed to make it free, one can hear screeching of the “reeeeeee useful idiots for capitalism reeeeee you just want poor people to die reeeeee we should all vote for 8 hour work week and peace on Earth reeeeee what do you mean it’s not enough to vote reeeee” kind.
Even Ponzi schemes are usually about everyone being conscious it’s a scheme, but thinking they are very smart and will fool some other suckers, and those suckers think the same in turn. That is covered by the “jailing crooks” part.
And various cartels and trusts and such usually make government regulation their instrument. They benefit from it.
I mean, all this has been said and proven many times.
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.
All AI lacks the context of human experience. It doesn’t understand anything but means of computation of data. And, sometimes it doesn’t even understand that, doesn’t understand how it is deriving or derived the answer. Most of our scaled profit maximizing applications are as such: Humans blindly implemented an AI conclusion that nothing and no one understands.
I’m an expert, quit the big boys and went rogue. If you want, ask a better question.
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’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.
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.
Yes but I don’t want to type my billing details every time I need some thing. I don’t want to wait 6 weeks. I don’t know if other sites are reputable. I don’t want to pay shipping. I like being able to wishlist stuff or store stuff in my cart for later and read lots of reviews on products (I’m aware many are fake).
There’s also the fact that nearly every website runs on AWS, so even if I boycott Amazon (I’m sure they’ll miss my $100 a month in purchases), I’m still providing them money by visiting the sites that are hosted on AWS. Pretty hard to completely avoid them in this day and age.
Amazon for me has been utter garbage in the last 10 years. Fake products, stuff that is supposedly coming next day comes in 3+ days, customer service is some copy/paste canned answers etc
We order a lot of baby stuff on there. They’ve accepted returns on everything that didn’t work or wasn’t what we anticipated. We can walk to a UPS store from our house and drop it off. Anecdotally, they also have the best deals about 50% of the time on PCPartPicker.
It does take longer to fulfill some orders for us. But others show up a day or three early even though we don’t pay for Prime. I used to work for the post office before they switched to their own delivery, and they would drop off their pallets to us in the mornings to be taken out for the last mile by our carriers. It seemed like that was a better experience. It has definitely enshittified somewhat since their golden days.
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).
All of big tech is really worried about this.
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.
slag?
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.
I’m saying it’s happened before. AOL. Palm. Yahoo. Blackberry. A company with an effective monopoly gets complacent and fails to serve their users. They get replaced.
I don’t remember anything ever in history undermining faith in the free - from regulation, but not from jailing crooks, - market.
It’s not as if anything lefties claim to be that were free. And when one talks about what is needed to make it free, one can hear screeching of the “reeeeeee useful idiots for capitalism reeeeee you just want poor people to die reeeeee we should all vote for 8 hour work week and peace on Earth reeeeee what do you mean it’s not enough to vote reeeee” kind.
Even Ponzi schemes are usually about everyone being conscious it’s a scheme, but thinking they are very smart and will fool some other suckers, and those suckers think the same in turn. That is covered by the “jailing crooks” part.
And various cartels and trusts and such usually make government regulation their instrument. They benefit from it.
I mean, all this has been said and proven many times.
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
You’re off on a tangent.
All AI lacks the context of human experience. It doesn’t understand anything but means of computation of data. And, sometimes it doesn’t even understand that, doesn’t understand how it is deriving or derived the answer. Most of our scaled profit maximizing applications are as such: Humans blindly implemented an AI conclusion that nothing and no one understands.
I’m an expert, quit the big boys and went rogue. If you want, ask a better question.
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’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.
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.
It turned out that it’s incredible easy to order as guest at other sides
Yes but I don’t want to type my billing details every time I need some thing. I don’t want to wait 6 weeks. I don’t know if other sites are reputable. I don’t want to pay shipping. I like being able to wishlist stuff or store stuff in my cart for later and read lots of reviews on products (I’m aware many are fake).
There’s also the fact that nearly every website runs on AWS, so even if I boycott Amazon (I’m sure they’ll miss my $100 a month in purchases), I’m still providing them money by visiting the sites that are hosted on AWS. Pretty hard to completely avoid them in this day and age.
Amazon for me has been utter garbage in the last 10 years. Fake products, stuff that is supposedly coming next day comes in 3+ days, customer service is some copy/paste canned answers etc
We order a lot of baby stuff on there. They’ve accepted returns on everything that didn’t work or wasn’t what we anticipated. We can walk to a UPS store from our house and drop it off. Anecdotally, they also have the best deals about 50% of the time on PCPartPicker.
It does take longer to fulfill some orders for us. But others show up a day or three early even though we don’t pay for Prime. I used to work for the post office before they switched to their own delivery, and they would drop off their pallets to us in the mornings to be taken out for the last mile by our carriers. It seemed like that was a better experience. It has definitely enshittified somewhat since their golden days.
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.