This proposition boils down to a belief that there are 3 billion people who are interested in AI for free but aren’t currently paying $20, but who would pay $20 if that was the price.
The global median income is around $12k, so this would mean that there’s roughly be a global budget of 0.5% of everyone’s annual income going to chatbots.
If you’re off by half, the price doubles for each person.
I think you’d make a lot of money betting against the existence of 3 billion ghost customers
Every single post here these days. “Startup founder of Communality.ai says ai good for people” and then the comments are AI bros declaring that all work can end, the good times are here at last
It went down 48%, I checked with my eyes instead of going through a hallucination layer.
Edit: sorry- thought this was about the stock price, not about picking up stragglers in cloud computing. I’m gonna contradict Gemini and say that’s bullshit marketing
All of those are examples where technology replaced the core skill completely. In the age of digital photography and printers I can run a Photo Booth without worrying about the specific techniques of photographic lab technicians. LLMs aren’t replacing the core skill of engineering, because the core skill isn’t writing code, it’s articulating complex systems.
Re-reading your comment, I think we’re both generally anti-corporate-fuckery. I view the current batch of copyright pearl clutching to be an argument about if VCs are allowed to steal books to make their chatbots worth talking to, and the Wine/MSoft debate about if it should be legal to engage in anticompetitive behavior by restrictive use of copyright. In both of these cases the root of the issue isn’t really the copyright as an abstract- it’s the bludgeoning of the person with less money by use of overwhelming legal costs to have a day in court.
If you want people to read and learn from each other, you should incentivize people to make content worth reading and learning from. Making LLM training a viable loophole for copyright law means there won’t be incentives to produce such work.
I never understand why anyone wants authors to not be able to enforce copyright and licensing laws for AI training. Unless you are Anthropic or OAI it seems like a wild stance to have. It’s good when people are rewarded for works that other people value. If trainers don’t value the work, they shouldn’t train on it. If they do, they should pay for it.
This thread is entirely people bemoaning how this happens to other people and how the commenter has a work around so it never happens to them. Unless your workaround is “don’t use LLMs you have to pay for,” it’s happening to you.
It’s incredible to come online every day and read breathless articles about how the future is here on the same 5 apps, using the same crappy sources, with the same horrible ad content.
Say what you want about the dotcom bubble at least websites were new. Besides the chatbots nothing feels new or better at all
In my experience what you’ve described as the ideal setting for Eng work does lead to a very high quality product. The problem then is understanding if the market you’re in values high quality over speed or familiarity. All markets claim to value quality, many markets don’t.
Abstractions truncate the decision space of the layer above them by making understandable trade offs. LLMs don’t abstract anything, your code is still in python or php or Go. It just feels like they abstract if you don’t understand the output since not understanding the layer down is what we associate with non-leaky reliable abstractions. LLMs are abstractions the same way that your code editor is an abstraction- it’s not a layer, it’s an interface.