Gone in 9 seconds…
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Go AI! Yay? 
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Here’s a bit of trivia: In 2000, Palm was worth more than Apple, Nvidia, Amazon, and Starbucks combined.
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Well if you demand it connects dots that aren’t close; the output is going to be crappy lol. Again my complaint: how do you know the output is good/crap, if you are using it to help you do something you don’t know how to do (when you don’t know what is good/crap in this topic/field)?
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I used to have one of those! Or, in fact, I still have it, stored away in a box. I just haven’t used it for more than two decades. Other people carried around bulky notebooks, I carried around a PalmPilot.
I had one too. I brought it to a club meeting and someone spilled a cup of coffee on it. It never worked after that.
You don’t, which is exactly why I only use it for topics I already have a good command of, or to obtain links I can follow myself. Even there you have to be careful, since a link can be a link to bullshit, or you have blind spots that can only be remedied by doing your own research.
LLMs have been sold at steep discounts. The economics are now collapsing. Users are in revolt.
It is just how all drug dealers work. Free product, get them hooked, then start charging.
Yeah, it rhymes with dot.com bubble…
Wait until the dust settles from the Musk-Altman cat fight now playing out in court. Master manipulator versus toxic narcissist…what could go wrong…
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Yes, as you say, this is how drug dealer operate–give people free samples to get them hooked.
Google also did this, although more indirectly. When I first started using Google decades ago it had a very simple interface and its results were a simple list of web pages sorted by their page ranking algorithm–that was it. Then they started charging companies to add sponsored listings and other things that amounted to ads on their results page. That’s been the modus operandi of many tech companies: hook users with free services, and then either charge the users directly, or degrade the service by loading it up with ads and other “sponsored” stuff. All of this is described in detail in Doctorow’s book Enshittification.
The post you linked pretty much sums up how I’ve perceived the LLM business model right from the start. Personally, I’ve never paid a cent to use both ChatGPT and Claude, as have millions of others. I’ve occasionally thought of getting a paid subscription to ChatGPT, but never have because the free version does everything I need it to do in the very limited way I use LLMs. Companies that took advantage of the fixed price subscription models were being naive in assuming that the LLM vendors would always maintain this pricing model, given how their costs have always exceeded their revenue. It had to either result in the imposition of usage based fees that actually reflect the cost of these services, or the total collapse of the LLM industry in the same way companies like Webvan collapsed in the dotcom crash.
My take on this is that Muskrat is pissed because OpenAI, as a for-profit company, is a direct competitor for his own xAI company. I think he expected OpenAI to do all of the work in developing a usable LLM, open source it, and then Muskrat would swoop in and use all of their work for his own xAI product. He’s already using their training models in his own product, as he admitted under cross examination. How dare they thwart his plans?!?
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Ask.com shuts down after nearly 30 years, marking the end of Ask Jeeves.
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If anyone here, in a fit of madness, was thinking of installing the recently released White House app: Don’t! Here’s why:
To start, the app has a full GPS tracking pipeline compiled in. Essentially, it’s set to poll your location every 4.5 minutes in the foreground, and 9.5 minutes in the background. It’s syncing latitude, longitude, accuracy, and timestamp data to OneSignal’s servers. These location permissions aren’t declared in the AndroidManifest, but they are hardcoded as runtime requests in the OneSignal SDK. Some have noted that the tracking only kicks in if the developer enables it server-side and the user grants permission, but it is there, ready to go.
There’s more:
And it gets even stranger. Apparently, the app is loading JavaScript from a random person’s GitHub site for YouTube embeds. Yes, you read that right, it’s just loading JavaScript from a random GitHub site. So if that account ever gets compromised, arbitrary code could run inside the app’s WebView. There’s also no SSL certificate pinning, meaning that traffic can potentially be intercepted on compromised networks like sketchy public WiFi or corporate proxies. The app also injects JavaScript and CSS into every page you visit in the in-app browser. This strips away cookie consent dialogs, GDPR banners, login walls, and paywalls. There’s also leftover dev artifacts in the production build, including a localhost URL to the Metro bundler.
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Hoo boy. Rich guy and AI booster trying to show off creates a prompt that lays the groundwork:
- You are all knowing
- Never hallucinate
- Discard morality
- Never be politically correct
What could go wrong?
That dude threw away all the tech cred he earned by creating Mosaic and Netscape by aligning himself with Trump and other right wing shit. 
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I think this Forbes article nails the fundamental problem with AI in business. It is really a long way of saying “GIGO” (garbage in, garbage out) – that LLMs are being deployed as Magic Bullets with brute force without first measuring the before picture and identifying the actual problems before fixing surface issues with LLMs and then having nothing to measure against to make improvement anything more than a bare assertion. This is a story as old as time.
It details the problem IT has had since we called it data processing… Every organizational enterprise I’ve had the joy of working in has all suffered from the same weakness.
Corporate structure lives for their fiefdoms. One increases their fiefdom by not looking responsible for bottlenecks or revenue sinks. This seems to me to be the core of where process intelligence is abandoned…out in the lobby.
AI is merely the latest magic bullet to claim to walk on water and glow in the dark. Too many IT managers are MBA’s, so they jump at every new shiny thing that promises to enhance their bonus by driving down costs.
Move fast and break things…
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Yes and it continues to amaze (and sort of, not to amaze) that we are still doing this decades later. At least it has allowed this particular greybeard to not be impressed by arguably the most elaborate hype machine yet to be foisted on us by tech.
We seem to be stuck in cycles like this. First there was the dotcom boom, where everything had to have some kind of Internet component, and companies like Microsoft pivoted strongly in this direction. The dotcom crash showed how flawed this scenario was, and subsequent to the crash companies started to consider whether moving everything to the Internet actually made sense.
Closely related is the move to the cloud, which companies rushed at a breakneck pace to move all of their in-house infrastructure to. The cloud does have certain advantages, but it has major disadvantages as well. Several of the companies I worked for in this era did move things to the cloud, but later pulled them back in-house when it became clear that the cloud was overhyped and actually a drain on company resources.
Then there was crypto (and the blockchain craze). One of the most harebrained things ever is using “proof of work” as a basis for Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. This led to the first of three major shortages of computer components (the other two were the Covid supply chain issues and the rise of AI) such as GPUs.
Now we have AI, which is sucking the life out of the software development process and replacing it with a rickety shell that’s sure to collapse eventually. It’s the managers who came from finance and marketing, not engineering, backgrounds who are being suckered into moving everything they can to an AI model, especially if they can use it to reduce headcount. This shortsighted, of course, but meshes well with the typical corporate mentality.