Captcha is redundant to the deeper spying Google does at this point.
Likewise captcha is useless against multimodal LLM available to anybody, many of which can be run locally.
I see this as a tacit admission captcha is a dead technology more than anything.
You have a fundamental misunderstanding of why captcha exists. If the attacker has to deploy a multimodal LLM to solve captcha, the service provider using captcha has already effectively achieved its goal - since the goal is to raise the cost (in terms of any combination of complexity, computing power, and dollar amount) of sending bulk traffic and ultimately to reduce, not eliminate, the overall attack rate. 0 bulk traffic is never the goal.
The world has shifted and the underlying assumptions of the captcha design (computers are bad at vision tasks relative to humans) is no longer true.
We are also on the backend of a rapidly depreciating cost curve, and this will accelerate. People were already using mturk at scale anyway, and it was cost efficient.
In five years captcha won’t exist, and the entire “are you a human” paradigm is cooked.