I'm just sad that this whole thing is destroying tech's reputation. Every time I see an engineer give into this marketing nonsense it makes me fear for the future of our field.
I get that people are worried about becoming irrelevant in the era of AI, but resorting to dishonesty to stay afloat just a little longer has a detrimental effect on the entire industry. Worst part, is it's not even convincing marketing nonsense, it's "science fiction".
Poe's law is an adage of Internet culture which says that, without a clear indicator of the author's intent, any parodic or sarcastic expression of extreme views can be mistaken by some readers for a sincere expression of those views.
This is proof that America has forgot it's own history.
America was founded by men who hated intellectual property, who stole and smuggled the plans and expertise for textile machinery out of the United Kingdom. A gross intellectual property violation. Why? Because they were being exploited by that system. The UK was using the American colonies for raw material and keeping the machinery in the UK for finished goods.
That's the rub, intellectual property is only valuable if you're winning, if you're the exploiter. China never gave a fuck because they, much like the American forefathers, saw a system of exploitation and went "no, thanks".
AI is the culmination of all human knowledge, the idea that anyone could own that is obscene. American AI companies that are trying to horde this are getting exactly what they deserve by being undercut by China on this.
Amen! Europe used to complain about the US stealing their intellectual property! The nuclear bomb would have been possible if not for Jewish scientists from Europe going to America! So until about 100 years ago, US was FAR behind Europe in technology and science.
What if china ends up owning it? Do you think that's better or worse for the world? You're commenting your open opinions on a site run by a company that could not exist in china and cannot today. You can ask ant, xai, and chatgpt models questions and get answers that do their best to reflect the world. There's a set of questions you cannot expect trustworthy answers for from chinese models and you think they're stopping at those few questions?
This already happened. The US government cut off a judge at the international criminal court from her Office365 account because she was pressing a war crimes case against Benjamin Netanyahu.
It's the reason why in the last year you've seen multiple European governments very quickly build an escape hatch against US tech.
We all expect that you'll use our dependency on US services as a weapon, you've already done so, so we're phasing you out. It'll take decades to repair the lost trust in US digital services among the governments of Europe.
If it's the same woman I'm thinking of Office365 is underselling it a bit - she's fully sanctioned by the US. She can't use debit/credit cards, any Apple/Google device or service, Amazon/eBay, etc. She's completely digitally crippled by sanctions. And she's one of several people.
As a European I really hope we create an entirely separate homegrown tech sector, and fast.
Yes, I'm aware of the rest of it, I just didn't feel it particularly relevant to the discussion.
Yes, I'm with you. I'm grateful that most of the news I hear about this is relatively positive. I'm actually kind of in awe of how fast it's all moving. For all the talk about slow Europeans, that single ICC action seems to have launched a ton of initiatives.
More like several decades and 100s of billions of euros which nobody is going to pay. It will simply never happen and right now all the politicians are just quietly waiting for this whole thing to blow over.
It isn't Google's money if they wrongfully profited it, and are fined. It belongs to the victims. The government of the victims will invest it in making the victims less dependent on the perpetrator? Well played.
In general, yes, but I disagree with "It isn't Google's money". But it is. It's right there in their accounts. Possession is 9/10ths of the law as they say.
In the end it is legal tender, owned by the government of said legal tender. But Google owes another legal entity money. They're in debt to that other legal entity, and they should pay said debt (pay the fine). It is actually 4.7 billion EUR.
And on top of all of the above, there's another reason Google owes us money. Google does not even pay fair taxes.
Why is that? Corporations approach governments looking for hand outs and governments give them. It's the politicians that should be the recipient of your ire. If corporations are using loopholes, politicians should close the loopholes. You're hating the player for playing the game. It's not like theGoog is refusing to pay taxes. They've just spent their money on lawyers to find out how to not owe as much tax as you think they should.
I'm not a fan of theGoog or any bigTech, but you especially seem to be taking this rather personally.
> Why spend your own money when you can spend someone else’s?
Funny you would say that in defence of giant mega-corporations, externalising huge chunks of the cost they generate to the rest of the world. OpenAI decided to run the largest social experiment humanity ever undertook without asking any of us. Microsoft is powering up old nuclear power plants to cover for their AI data center consumption. Apple is manufacturing in foreign countries under awful conditions so every American child can own an iPhone. Big Tech made San Francisco unaffordable even for well-compensated software engineers. Facebook actively made children addicted to push more apps.
We all, as a society, have to suffer through the effects of reckless greed from American companies (and we didn't even talk about Big Oil or Big Pharma yet!) Just because nobody bothers to put a price tag on it doesn't mean there isn't one.
The EU doesn't fine companies as a way to generate revenue, but because they break local laws and cause damages to someone.
> Funny you would say that in defence of giant mega-corporations,
It is funny because that's not what I was saying. At. All.
The reply was a reply to the question of why EU countries just hired US based companies instead of developing their own. The response to that was that it would cost too much money "100s of billions of euros". Now the EU is coming up with their own versions of things like Office and what not. I was merely suggesting that they have found a way to offset that "100s of billions of euros" by fining companies billions of euros.
Can you prove that? The EU is fully free to decide on laws that hit exclusively US companies if they so want, with the hope of being able to generate revenue.
There is no law, constitution, court or parliament that explicitly forbids this.
Another indicator, that this is indeed a new business for the EU, is to look at the difference between southern europe and northern europe when it comes to the size of GDPR fines. It's enormous. Clearly the south has found a new way to revenue, since most, if not all of them, are more or less bankrupt.
They will likely take a decade, but only because this isn't top priority. They could be out in a month if it was important to them. The alternatives exist, there is just a lot of pain in switching that they can avoid by doing this over a decade.
A lot more people are working on it than I expected there to be.
It's the one time where the European Union's inability to advertise what they're doing is paying off in their favor. Then again, good, the operation of government isn't meant to be done through a tweet. We should resist the corruption of government to idiotic soundbites on platforms owned by American billionaires.
I want the US tech community to continue thinking of us as some sort of technological backwater. Ridiculing and deriding us, so they never see as any place where they are welcome. Since given the last ten years, they pretty much aren't. There's basically little to nothing that US tech services have to offer Europe.
I mainly use AI for learning things these days. The biggest bottleneck is always providing the machine with your context in sufficient detail that it can understand how to help you. When learning a topic it isn't always clear cut on how to do that, as you're likely missing much of the vocabulary necessary to get the AI to give you the answer you want.
AI is perfectly capable of teaching you quantum mechanics if you understand music theory. However, unless you have a full understanding of music theory, you'll need to explain to the machine what you know, and that takes trial and error that most students won't bother with.
Because there aren't any actual good guys in this story. There is one group that is taking short term gains, and another group that feels rejecting this will lead to long term gains. Neither one of them gives any shits about the use of their technology in to kill people. They just are interested in their companies turning a profit.
Both of these companies have heavy PR teams that they use to convince you that they do, in fact, care about these issues. But that is PR and generally to be considered bullshit. They care about nothing other than their bottom lines.
This has been a wonderous PR move by Anthropic. It gets to make money off the US war machine while somehow being able to portray themselves as the "good guys" in the story leading to that whole #cancelOpenAI trend. If you're dumb enough to believe that Anthropic is really the "good guy" in this story, I have some meme coin to sell you.
Yeah, this is a public relations effort. Corporations, especially ones that have spent an obscene amount of money on AI companies aren't going to change their direction. They have to justify that spending to their shareholders.
