They’re unwilling to pay for fast mode because of the current step function price increase once you hit your quota. It’s a psychological effect. Because most shops I know in the US currently paying $125/mo per seat for Claude would happily - HAPPILY - pay 2x, and begrudgingly pay 10x that amount for the same service. If fast mode was priced 25% or 50% more they’d happily pay for that too. But it’s just not priced that way currently with weird growth subsidization & psychology.
Seems like a pretty obvious effect no? There’s a major power imbalance between professor and student. Not sure how much it would extend outside of the classroom.
Unfortunately the problem is literally the way the government is structured from an electoral + mathematical perspective. Particularly heinous failure mode is polarization, which has been the norm for 50+ years (really started after Vietnam). Biased towards inaction and status quo structurally. The last sustainably unifying event was WWII, which doesn’t bode well.
Things actually changed in 2018 with some implementation details of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Step_Act. Parole is not given, true; but you can earn a bunch of credit days for participating in non-recidivism activities, which - when combined with good behavior - can amount to leaving prison 30-40% early. Not sure about the details after (house arrest or halfway-house may be somewhere in that mix), but not as grim at that point.
The reality is that the research organizations at big tech companies have always been a very different kind of labor relationship than typical rank-and-file business units. Many of the senior or otherwise high-profile researchers at FAANG companies would otherwise be professors or academics, in positions where there is essentially unbridled academic freedom and no expectation of separating personal convictions and principles from the academic environment.
Google lured many of these researchers away from academic roles, with the tacit promise that they would be able to continue their research - and at times political - endeavors relatively unencumbered. Google has built a research empire on this promise, which has been responsible in part for their continued dominance in various markets.
My point here is that these researchers have a lot of leverage. Advocating for action within an organization, counter to the current immediate goals of management, is only taboo (and thus “fireable”) in most companies because workers have almost no leverage, generally speaking. Not because it’s some inherently “bad” thing. If Google becomes seen as a place that fires researchers for advocating for their beliefs, especially in a capacity that they’ve been explicitly hired to do, then I think a lot of researchers would - and rightly should - reconsider whether such an environment is consistent with their values as academics and, often times, activists. Google’s research group is enormously valuable to the company, and there’s only so much reputational damage of this nature the organization can sustain before academics decide to take their talents elsewhere.
Although in this day and age it seems to be one of the very few ways one individual can make a difference. It saddens me, but probably easier for a man to take advantage of the system and become absurdly wealthy in order to do good for the world than it is for that man to change the system itself :/