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Comment by soared | Hacker News Reader

I’ve switched off of chatGPT for general use from a kind of moral/ethical standpoint. All the competitors are effectively the same for easy research questions, so I might as well use a vendor who’s not potentially a scumbag.

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Which one did you move to?

I haven’t found as good of an turnkey chat/search/gen interface as CGPT yet unfortunately.

Even self hosted deepseek on an Ada machine doesn’t get there cause the open source interfaces are still bad

Gemini primarily - but I’m using it for help with house projects, landscaping, shopping, etc and not for coding. Not not a scumbag owner but feels better than OpenAI.

Weird choice, given Google’s track record on privacy. Gemini uses your chats for training and human review them by default. You can opt out by turning off App Activity, but that disables chat history and integrations, which kinda kinda makes it useless. Claude respects your privacy by default and ChatGPT and Grok have an opt-out that doesn’t totally cripple the app.

So what makes Google less scummy? A cheaper price? I’m sure that won’t last long – they’ve played this game before with YouTube, Google Reader, and Search: hook users, dominate, then enshittify. Same old Google playbook: good → monopoly → crap.

Which vendor isn't a run scumbag or owned by a scumbag?

I’ve been using Grok (for free), so in theory I’m getting a vendor to spend money on me.

>Which vendor isn't a run scumbag or owned by a scumbag? >>I’ve been using Grok

The biggest scumbag of them all, but hey "I use it for free."

But they can count you as a user and that positively impacts their valuation.

One of the many inverted incentives in this space, considering every user Grok counts is actively burning through their cash.

Grok one of the two big brands of model associated with a social network? They're not qualified to even be considered.

Grok works fine for generating images, summarising documentation etc., and surprisingly most stuff is now easily usable on the free tier.

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