yah, that’s the point. They go for queries because each query, theoretically, means more ad views and more ad views means more money. So they made the search worse to increase query count.
Like, this was intentional and understood internally. Not saying the people who actually carried it out liked what they were doing, but management said to make number go up, so they did.
Ah yes because the cost savings on solar power in constant sunlight over nuclear reactors or solar with batteries definitely justifies the cost of launching hundreds of thousands of tons in to orbit, including the miles of radiators that will be needed to cool all this. Oh and definitely justifies the cost of having to hire astronauts as technicians to repair the thing when something goes wrong.
The numbers for these data centers don’t even work on fucking earth, how does increasing the set up cost by an order of magnitude make this work?
Lmao, of course they backed off, they need to say they’re going to do it to get cash to keep going, but they can’t actually do it.
Because the moment they go for profit they’re gonna have to start explaining how they loose money on every single user of the product, all the way up to the highest tier of subscription. Then people might start asking hard questions like “wait…isn’t this more expensive to run than just having a person do these things?”
It’s so funny, because people act like open AI has a viable business model, but they’re loosing money even on their paying customers, even the highest tier of subscription. The product they’re selling really isn’t good enough to charge the price they would need to charge to pay for the operation costs, let along the training costs, and that’s with Microsoft giving them a bunch of servers for essentially free.
Like, there isn’t a path to profitability for them, certainly not on this scale. They’re just praying that if they throw enough data in to a big enough model that somehow it will start doing something different than what it currently does. It’s not a plan, it’s a prayer, a cult.
“ don’t worry, we’ll offset some of the demand by restarting nuclear plants to prevent burning as much fossil fuel”
“Wait so we could have just had those running already rather than burning fossil fuels?”
“Noooo… because… uh… reasons”
it goes deeper than just “investors are greedy” though. Most people making these investment decisions are doing it at the behest of other people who have handed them their saving in exchange for returns. Those people aren’t privy to the nature of how money is getting invested and why, they hire someone else for that, the investors.
The investors may be making short sighted, stupid decisions, but they’re doing it because they’re pursuing their own personal incentives, get a raise, a promotion, or just not get fired. The managers are doing the same. If they don’t do it, someone else will.
It’s not the fault or moral failing of any one individual, but a fault in the system of incentives. A failure in the fundamental structure of how we decide how investments are made, in how we accumulate capital for investment.
The problem is that the AI branded software doesn’t run easily on old devices, unless you just stream it from one of their server farms. But they’re losing money every time they run one of these services for you, and the vast majority of people aren’t going to pay them a subscription for that.
They’re trying to justify selling new devices with software now, not giving out software that can run on old devices. You gotta replace your 2017 laptop to run windows 11. Gotta get a new computer with an NPU to run AI models locally. But it’s happening again, users are not embracing these new AI features, let alone buying new devices just so they can use them.
Much like wearables and VR headsets, the interest for these things is largely limited to enthusiasts spaces and isn’t translating to mass adoption. The average person doesn’t care about having their computer writing their email in to a limerick, they just want their email client to not freeze up and crash because they got an email with a weirdly formatted picture.
Perhaps there is a better term and I should be more clear, but people know, roughly speaking, what “new” does, even “active” is fairly straight forward. They are literally algorithms but not what people are talking about when they complain about “algorithms”.
When people complain about the “algorithm”, in the colloquial sense, they’re talking about some nebulous unknowable method of sorting that only the people at meta and alphabet are privy to the details of, not the literal definition of the word.
I should have chosen my words more carefully but I think the point stands, there is a marked difference between a system where it is clear to the user how things get sorted, and the home, discovery or “for you” systems of major social media sites.
Depending on how you browse, it was not algorithmically recommended. Even if you’re using “active” to filter, it’s barely an algorithm. Certainly not a personalized one, unless you’re just looking at the subscribed feed, in which case the personalization was done by you, not the formula.
That’s kind of the appeal of this kind of website, when there is automatic sorting it’s very straight forward and user mailable.
There is this interesting push and pull with algorithms, they need to show content users will engage with, but, their main value to the companies is that it allows them to easily manipulate what is seen.
They push people to hard they stop using the algorithm, but if they just let the algorithm act purely one what people engage with, then they can’t monetize it.
There is a third access of preventing people from going down self destructive rabbit holes, but they don’t care about that until people start talking about regulating them or start moving away.
Would be nice if we could see the same kind of chain of response from other models.
I’d love to see what other implicit biases other groups have built in to their models.
I mean there are huge issues with tech, but like, they’re in no way limited to kids… nor does it seem to affect them particularly strongly.
I’m slowly just migrating away from windows as much as I can because Microsoft is being so pushy with this nonsense. Like, they keep trying to get me to log in to a Microsoft account that doesn’t exist, they keep changing settings and asking for more permissions, they keep reinstalling stuff I’ve ripped out purposefully, and from the way they’re talking it seems like it’s just going to get worse. Stuff like putting cloud run python functions in to Excel just sounds like they’re testing tech to push more and more functions off the device and in to their centralized processing centers.
I’d consider apple but I don’t have “spend 3x as much money on the same hardware” money TBH, and really I don’t have any guarantees they won’t do the same thing Microsoft is doing.
I’ve got an older laptop that I’m slowly rebuilding my work flow in mint Linux and once I’ve got that working I’ll set it up on my main computer and be done with windows for the foreseeable future.
The personal incentives for leadership does not align with long term well being of the company.
Executive compensation is derived from quarterly or yearly metrics, if it loses the company influence and success long term, so be it. The board choose those incentives because it served their goals, and likely because it’s what shareholders have asked for, perhaps because the shareholders are largely similar institutions with similar incentive structures.
Ultimately they answer to pension funds and other such retirement focused clients, IE those who will not be here long enough to suffer from the consequences 10 or 20 years out. Or at least where the predominance of the clientele are such.