I noticed too much use of the word "safety", like the LLM was told to emphasise it, so I did a little test: randomly scroll and move the mouse without looking, is there "safety" in there? I did it for 4 times and every time I found it. Ctrl+F -> 136 results.
I highly doubt he actually fully read, understood and analysed it for his words to have any particular value. Intuition tells me it is a knee-jerk jumping on the media train press release.
It is just one comment on Y Combinator's link aggregation service. People who haven't tried starting a serious FOSS project, do not understand how unsustainable it is. Funny thing is, like you mentioned, the monetisation isn't even imposed on the software itself, the entire software is free. It is on the *gratis* service to host it.
Entitlement knows no bounds. Don't worry about those disheartening comments, they are not coming from a place of genuine concern.
The failure of the organization to meet productivity expectations without questionable forms of psychophysiological manipulation of employees should not be met with open arms.
Yes, it can be effective to deploy such methods over the limited physical access to employees, but ultimately it is an unsustainable method of control that arguably breeds a cohort of disinterested middle managers over time. A successful organization for its goals has the most motivated workers, needless of such methods of control.
Ads are manipulation, that is not a reputation, that is a definition. There is no logical conclusion that omits a message from being classified as both an ad and manipulative. One can't come without the other. An ad is non-consensual. You don't ask for ads. The ads don't answer questions you specifically are asking, they are exploiting your demographic using keywords and phrases their research shows to be effective towards influencing your decision making to doing exactly what they want (selling you something.)
If you really think ads are not by definition intrusive, I am curious to reconsider my stance.
Google is pretty much unusable today if you don't look for specific websites. If you are using it to look up information, learn or discover new things in the web it is just SEO LLM spam. Features like shopping and LLM-powered Q&A are quite misleading and potentially dangerous for a trusting user.
I understand, and even agree with the notion that deep societal distrust is unhealthy and problematic, however, that doesn't necessarily answer the question of needing that trust in the first place [to regulate]. Having a company with that much power is in fact harder to regulate, which in turn means we are going to have to trust the public institutions even more to do their jobs.
I don't see why we should put ourselves in a position where we need that kind of trust. Another way to put it is, why burden the government with an unsustainable uncompetitive market? For what?
OpenAI is a for-profit private corporation with a commercial service to offer that has no bearing on the most important concerns the government is elected each year to tackle.
And how many 'innocent' didn't-test-it-enough targetted user agent incidents do we have to witness in order to call it what it is and stop making excuses?
This utilitarian point of view quickly crumbles once it stops naïvely looking at profit-driven organisations as anything but what they actually are: money-making machines. The first and foremost goal is the money, not the software, certainly not the end this POV claims the means maximise for. It is not a possibility, it is a certainty, especially given that $MSFT is a publicly-traded organisations with legally financial obligations to its shareholders.
Framing actual long-term sustainble practices and policies as "ideological purity" is misleading at best and a textbook example of a strawman at worst.
This new narrative makes it as if backdoors started existing the moment xz happened. As if that wasn't always a threat, and that xz more than anything did prove that free software is a lot more resilient than to suffer similar attacks that have happened and will continue to happen without public acknowlegement or as much publicity in unfree software/SaaS.
Maybe that is what we need. Maybe we are in need of a moral panic to address the massive concerns of mental health, surveillance, misinformation and others that built up over the years with the rise of social media, smartphones and the centralisation of the internet.
No, we don't. The issue was never and will never be the content, it is with the curation and mobility deeply and systemically taken over by social media and smart phone makers. If Google displays spam and AI generated nonsense, and almost everyone relies on it (including those who use "alternative front-ends"), then how do you expect anyone to find a healthy internet? Even if the "extractive and fragile monoculture" made up 0.001% of the internet, it doesn't matter if people can never reach the 99.999%.