As part of the ongoing enshittification of the internet, tragedy of the commons etc., these big centralized internet platforms decided that instead of being responsible and making their products *slightly* less terrible it was better to maximize short term engagement metrics, and that, egotistically, the chance of there being real consequences for their actions was near zero. (Or, even more cynically, that their yearly performance review was more important).
Now I'm afraid they've screwed everyone over and the idea of an anonymous open internet is now dead- we're gonna see age (read, real ID) verification gating on every site and app soon....
The dumb thing is to look back and see how umimportant it is that Facebook feed algorithm be this addictive. They already had the network effects and no real competitors. They could have just left it alone.
What's horribly frustrating with the age ID stuff is that the issue at question with Meta wasn't that they didn't know what they were doing and that they were doing it to children. They did. This wasn't an issue of "If only they had the the age, then they could have done the right thing".
The laws being passed target exactly the wrong thing that wasn't a problem. They should have been passing "duty to care" laws aimed at social media companies not "give me your age" laws.
I may have missed it, but almost all these laws being passed for this issue have been pretty much solely around data collection rather than modifying the behavior of the worst businesses in the game.
It would be like seeing a car wreck kill a bunch of pedestrians and then passing a law that pedestrians need to carry IDs on them.
Yea, in the end there will basically be no consequences for Meta- Facebook is already mostly dead, and the ad revenue from that time has already been collected.
Now we're just moving on to a kind of moral panic think-of-the-kids kind of moment that is thinly-veiled state surveillance.
Watching Mark testify before the senate it honestly appears like it may have never occurred to him that it is an option to have not offered a feature. He treats the product as if it is some kind of inevitable outcome that was destined to exist.
Mass surveillance 'for your own good' instead of regulating social media in any way.
You can purchase a scam ad it'll be up in 10 minutes. Lie to every anxious child they have ADHD and need meth, lie to every dejected boy that they just need to manosphere up and buy supplements.
They think the public is stupid. They might be right.
I'm still waiting and hoping that open street map becomes a viable alternative to google maps- it would be great to get a firefox of mapping (maybe not the best analogy, but....)
I definitely know that an open mapping solution could gain traction and be supported by bigger companies that would use it. It seems like a good candidate for the kind of collective OSS work that supports other projects- that there are enough big-enough companies out there that want an open non-google reliant mapping solution that are willing to pool resources.
I know that with mapbox and others that active work is being done, but it just doesn't quite seem like it's there yet.
It doesn't matter if Amazon, Microsoft and Facebook contribute or pay huge sums.
Even Apple Maps is heavily, heavily behind Google Maps simply because very few users are entering Point of Interest info into Apple Maps.
New restaurant opens, or store closes, or opening hours change? Google Maps has the updated info within a few days. Apple Maps in a year or two, maybe.
That's the moat. The only way either Apple or the other corpos catch up is by offering massive financial incentives for their users to contribute PoI data.
> It doesn't matter if Amazon, Microsoft and Facebook contribute or pay huge sums.
It may not matter for your purposes (i.e. replacing Google-Maps-the-product in your daily use as a consumer).
I'd naively expect that having hundreds of thousands of Amazon drivers dogfooding these maps daily does help with data quality though. So maybe OSM dataset works best as a Google Maps replacement if you can shoehorn your usage into something that overlaps with the things a gigantic logistics operation cares about.
A few years ago I got annoyed at Google and switched to Apple Maps. Earlier this year I got annoyed with Apple Maps and tried Google Maps again before switching back. Point of interest data was a minor factor in all of this. It might be enough to lock me into using Google to find local businesses I didn’t know about before, but that doesn’t force me to use Google Maps for turn by turn navigation.
I think GDPR is a good example of why it doesn't really work in practice.
I think the fines and enforcement have been a generally good balance to the status quo in the USA.
But- in practice, is your data materially used differently than in the USA?
The problem is that no one is abandoning facebook, instagram or youtube and that data is being used in the exact same way as it is in the USA- to sell you things and track you across the web. Technically there are more barriers to getting and using that data, but I would argue that it's not a blocker, just an inconvenience to those using that data- it just makes the targeting etc. 10% less accurate. The whole system still runs the exact same way.
And, to make it look like it seem like it works now everyone has to deal with these dumb popups that don't mean anything.
I think the main quote from the article is important but the headline misses the point:
>> Markets are failing to adequately price or value biodiversity, such as filtration of pollutants, climate regulation and pollination.
It doesn't seem immediately obvious to me that growth rate of GDP is a direct proxy for this fact. How is GDP growth rate is a consequence of this or vice versa, rather than a second or third order effect?
I think plenty of people agree that an open and fair market also tries to price in externalities, especially ones that could end all life on the planet.
The lie of Europe is that they get to launder their environmental and humanitarian responsibility through other countries. If not for their amazing growth then for the maintenance of their current lifestyles.
Sometimes just through simply getting raw materials and finished goods from the third world or china in the open market, then still claim to be "green".
Or also directly from neighbors; Looking the other way when buying Russian natural gas, or Germany buying nuclear energy from France, etc.
Or the worst, paying Libya to sweep their refugee problems under the rug.
You forgot to mention the part where EU model is to export demographic deficit which is "purchased" by the young generations of other countries stiffling their growth and displacing the dwindling younger european generations.
"Dont buy cheap tshirts from bangladesh just bring its youth in" is apparently morally superior model
The cultural relevance of movies, and American made movies isn't going anywhere anytime soon, but I think the economics of streaming is finally playing out in the loss of the geographical concentration of power in Hollywood and California.
This is the endgame of the feedback loop of streamers causing industry consolidation... the direct connection of dollars people spend to sit in a theatre seat was slowly declining, but now I think it's gotten so small that it no longer matters- and once the whole box-office feedback loop disappears a lot of the economics of how films are produced are being forced to change.
One of the reasons that people have loved to make fun of Hollywood for literally it's entire existence (besides the fact that the meta talk is self-indulgent artist stuff) is that making movies with so much money and waste is fundamentally ridiculous.
The optimistic viewpoint is that maybe new AI production tools will trigger a re-democratization of creative movies in the next wave, like in the 70s and the 90s indies.
I think the issue is that content creation and distribution has already been fully democratized. How many hours do people spend watching videos shot by individuals on their phones in their apartments?
Combined with streaming, there's just an overabundance of "good enough" content at everyone's fingertips. The moat that protected big-budget feature films is gone. You don't see a trailer for a movie and salivate and wait for it to come out, it just blends in to the stream of 5000 other things you can watch right now.
Like I said elsewhere, I think people still want to watch 1+ hour fiction stories that are compelling. This is a broad category that I think people still want that's differentiated from 30sec vertical video, and that should exist in the cultural conversation.
It doesn't feel fully democratized because if it was, you'd see more indie things in this same format competing with "big budget" movies on the same playing field.
Creating a good story, getting good actors and getting it all to come together is hard and still costs millions. At the end you may also not get your money back
Take 'I Swear', a very good recent film. It's well worth a watch.
It's made 8.3M. Has it made the money back?
It's not going to compete with 'The Mandalorian and Sidekick'.
That's likely to make several hundred million and still be fairly poor.
> I think people still want to watch 1+ hour fiction stories that are compelling
Might be an anecdote, but I've noticed several friends and family unable to focus on a movie and lately even on a tv show without pulling their phones every few minutes.
> I think people still want to watch 1+ hour fiction stories that are compelling.
I mean, "want to" is one thing, but the numbers show what they end up doing. Instagram and TikTok, like video games as someone else mentioned, have taken a significant share of the "entertainment hours" budget. I feel like the impact of the low-to-no-budget content creator is undeniable (this traces back to ebaumsworld and early YouTube, it was just internet dorks then, now it's been industrialized. Gen Z probably wholeheartedly prefers this type of content).
My point was that content creation has been democratized -- unfunded individuals can now compete -- not that making traditional Hollywood-style movies has been. It's gone so far they've been phased out, the entire premise is largely untenable at this point. That specific sector was actually somewhat more democratized in the late stages of the heyday, when a Hollywood movie called Dude, Where's My Car was made, and indie films did flourish because the industry was healthy enough to support them.
True but I think a lot of them would be in the "I totally want to watch feature films" camp. By wholeheartedly I meant that the kids don't even have that pretense.
Cultural relevance of movies is already greatly diminished. Maybe these AI tools will trigger a reversion of movies to the days of the nickelodeons where plot, story, and character are irrelevant and people just shell out money (attention) as long as the moving image looks cool.
A lot of the best Marvel movies are really other genres wearing a marvel skin
Look at Captain America: The First Avenger. It's a pulpy world war 2 film, really. If you took Captain America out it would still be a fun film. Captain America: The Winter Soldier is a spy thriller
Ant Man is a heist movie, like Oceans 11. Guardians is a sci fi comedy.
After a while they started to all just become "Marvel Movies" and that's the point they stopped being nearly as fun imo
A lot of them are only "Marvel Movies" in their final act, which still leaves a lot of room for fun genre-surfing and -bending, before they have to get back to the business of, "This is part of a franchise." But even on that note, I don't think they get enough credit. Phases 1-3, Marvel et al. managed to wrangle a dozen films of varying genres, working through the stories of just as many main characters, into a single series with a coherent, overarching narrative. It was the biggest spectacle ever created in the Spectacle Industry, yet with a handful of examples of genuine cinematic sublimity (if not entire films, at least a few scenes), to boot.
And people would rather hate than just ride the wave.
Right, most of the context of who the original characters were and represented in the comic books are washed away in the movie versions- it's just a marketing thing that draws people in.
Batman and the different actors and directors over the different versions of the franchise is another example.
There will be some creative people that can now tell stories they couldn't before with AI, but I think by and large the major use case is to create short form video clips to get attention on the internet (advertising). I don't foresee a "movie" (meaning narrative story told via visuals and sounds in 1-3 hours) renaissance happening, in part because I think the form is fully mature and there's not really much more that can be done with it. It's essentially gonna be where Jazz music is today in 40 years, it will have its fans, and there will be talented practitioners, but every year it will be more and more culturally irrelevant.
It could be "film" as a medium is dead- but most likely 1+ hour video fictional story telling as a medium is just a very broad category and will probably continue to exist as a format that people enjoy.
It could be that in 20 years the Oscars are like the Jazz awards (the Grammys? - I listen to Jazz but I can't name a single Jazz Grammy winner)
> The cultural relevance of movies, and American made movies isn't going anywhere
It already has. People under 20 do not have the connection to movies. They don’t have a share experience around it - maybe picking up a handful of family movies and the occasional marvel or spiderman.
For some nations there is still a sort of paternal fixation with US influence but it does seem to be fading with time. Couldnt point to any one factor than maybe just an overall sort of boredom of it.
It's easy to say that because the whole idea of "movies" has been fundamentally linked to the USA for the last 60-70 years. So if nowadays there are a few other countries who also have "movies", you could say it's true, but it speaks more to the level of cultural dominance and soft power USA movies have held up to this point than anything.
Can you comment further on this? As an American it's kind of hard to see that. Is this just kind of a temporary reaction to the Trump administration or a larger trend? What is taking its place? Are there more localized media pockets (e.g. is there a significant German-language Instagram influencer world)? Geographically which areas are you talking about?
People no longer look up to America like they did 40-50 years ago. It's been a slow decline, really starting I think in the early 2000s with GWB's "war on terror" and stupid invasion of Iraq, and the election of Trump accelerated it, and the re-election of Trump has really put the final nails in the coffin. Instead of a force for good that sometimes screwed up as America was formerly viewed, it's viewed as an empire in rapid decline with a toxic culture. It's not perceived quite as badly as Russia, but it's getting there.
That's not really about media though. While it does factor into the overall sentiment, a think a lot of people can enjoy America's cultural exports regardless of how they feel about the geopolitical side of things (certainly we can).
I'm just curious because, for better or worse, American movies, music, and TV still seem globally dominant from my POV and it'd be interesting to know if and how that is changing. There's kind of a huge moat, other countries haven't built out these global powerhouse media industries.
Another layer of the moat is how much that media and tech hegemony has entrenched English as the global language. Any culture based on a different language is going to have a really hard time getting beyond their borders.
When someone says that the relevance of American media is in decline, that implies that something else is becoming more relevant. There has to be something there beyond "America sucks now."
Small but important correction: the biggest issue for the movie industry aren't streaming services or them filming in locations with good tax incentives like UK or Australia but Youtube.
It's hard to compete with millions of videomakers, some of them extremely skilled and able to produce interesting content on a budget.
As much as I support unions and labour rights, the last SAG-AFTRA strike mostly just helped the big studios realize they could do more with less.
Hollywood is a factory town at the end of the day, and we all know what happened to most factory towns in America. This one is just getting there a few decades after the others.
This is definitely another case where a union could either understand where the bigger economic forces are headed (in this case globalization, IP licensing, residuals that no longer make sense, attention economy fracturing the marketplace etc) and adapt to how people will consume content in the future, or double down on an economic model that is one generation behind.
In theory the union is the only org capable of standing up to the streamers' buying power, but it has to make sense within a business model where consumers pay one monthly fee for content. I'm not even sure what that really looks like in the end.
Maybe it's also that the FTC allowed all this monopolization to happen, and turns out that having three media companies in the US is bad.
How will unions help stand up to streamers? Many of the “Netflix originals” are already just co financed or licensed foreign films and many others are filmed in Canada.
People always think unions are magic when I saw in my small town where I grew up in South GA was that when union demands got to onerous - factories just picked up and left.
Just like software engineers scream unionization when tech companies can just expand departments overseas and as a bonus, they don’t have to worry about H1B shifting policies
Ironic that pro-unionization people on HN frequently use SAG as an example of what a software industry union could look like. Ignoring that that's absurd (no other engineering union I know of works like that), just as the parent highlights, unions won't make a difference when the economics of an industry no longer make sense and that is what is happening to software right now.
Don't really see anyone doing this, more like the pro-union arguments I see on HN are mostly about getting paid for on-call, wanting a worker elected member to the board, and having leadership actually held accountable for their decisions.
Getting paid for being on-call seems straight forward to me.
One of the main differences I've heard referenced is that acting and being a movie star means that the work is fundamentally differentiable via the end-product, where producing software is meant to have the same outcome no matter who creates it.
That is just not the case with acting, where the end product being differentiable is part of the inherent value of the product.
Also, it's probably true that SAG's loss of industry power has very much to do with the loss of the power of movie stars in general.
> One of the main differences I've heard referenced is that acting and being a movie star means that the work is fundamentally differentiable via the end-product, where producing software is meant to have the same outcome no matter who creates it.
But that never happens. The different browsers should in theory be exactly the same but they are different in many ways due to engineers being different.
Well, Hollywood is not the end all be all of Los Angeles (though that is the image Hollywood projects out onto the world).
It’s not even Los Angeles’ biggest industry. Everything from China enters through the Port of Los Angeles, which is the biggest in the United States. In fact, the top two busiest ports in the USA are both Los Angeles and Long Beach (which directly borders Los Angeles).
This is just one example, but Los Angeles, despite its own external projections and self-mythology to the contrary, is much more than just a one industry town. Aside from shipping and logistics, it’s also a center for auto+aerospace manufacturing, and a major healthcare hub. Downtown Los Angeles, which actually serves as a glorified rail freight hub, is still far and away the nation’s capital of garment manufacturing, with over 80%(!) of the nation’s made-in-USA clothing produced here (this is downstream of being the biggest port in the US). Los Angeles has always existed as a center of industry and agriculture before Hollywood, and while the decline of Hollywood certainly hurts the city, it will not kill it.
SF, ironically, is actually moreso a factory town: if one day its tech champions decided to up and leave, there wouldn’t be much left relative to its current GDP. But one thing that may protect both SF and Los Angeles from ever becoming Detroit are their beautiful weather and geography. People will always want to live here, despite the costs. See Santa Barbara, a real city with no major industry to claim as its own, yet it still boasts some of the highest real estate prices in the world.
I meant Hollywood as the collection of all of the film/TV people and industry that are geographically located in that area.
This was never about the city itself. Nor was it in comparison to, or competition with, San Francisco, but I guess projectors are inexpensive on Amazon these days.
> The optimistic viewpoint is that maybe new AI production tools will trigger a re-democratization of creative movies
I don't think so.
Part of the downfall of movies -- blockbusters movies anyway, the kind where being a box office hit matters -- is that they have seemed produced like AI slop even before AI. Making it easier to produce more slop isn't going to fix this.
Then there's one thing making noise in my brain. It's not polite to say it, but here it is anyway: should movies be democratized? And art in general? Maybe people without the means of making art that reaches millions shouldn't be enabled by AI. Maybe it's ok that not everyone can produce this kind of art. Maybe the world is saved from a crapton of, well, garbage. More than what's currently being produced, anyway.
As for non-blockbuster art, it's already democratic. Everyone can grab a phone camera or a paintbrush and create art for their friends and family. And that's ok.
What I object to is this notion that everyone should make art, and that AI empowers them. As in (and yes, I've read this, I'm not making this up) "people without writing skills can now write novels". That seems wrong to me. People without writing skills (or drawing, or movie making) should not be making those things.
I would distinguish: they could make them for their own entertainment, but should not market them. But come to think about it, how much non-AI slop is out there that has become popular from entities with no or mediocre talent in it: generic Hollywood blockbusters, supplements, yellow papers, influencers ... all slop that became popular not due to its quality but secondary resources in form of marketing, placement and persistence of the propellants.
Yes, I thought of this too: the industry was full of slop way before AI. We spoke of "Netflix's algorithm", but even before Netflix blockbuster movies were done with a cookie cutter. Transformers (to pick one example) existed way before this brand of AI. Movies like it are perfect candidates to be prompted and built by an AI, since they were almost there anyway.
I can't help but think this "AI empowerment" will make it even easier for studios to produce more garbage at an unprecedented pace. And they won't have to even let actors age gracefully and die; now we can have Tom Cruise (or whomever, pick your poison) forever.
Well, I guess one nice thing about that last part is that we'd be able to just enjoy AI "actors" as they are, instead of being conflicted because in real life, they're not cult promoters, rapists/groomers, etc. Moviemakers wouldn't have to worry that their star isn't going to suddenly be embroiled in some scandal, requiring them to hire another actor and re-shoot all their scenes quickly.
For me the "blockbuster" movies use so much CGI that it's impossible to suspend disbelief. They've gone too far and ruined the experience. AI will only make it worse.
In the end people have limited number of hours to watch content, and only a few things bubble up to the popular attention.
What I meant is that I don't see truly indie-produced feature films reach the zeitgeist anymore.
I don't mean AI slop, but the next gen of creative tools that will allow people to make cool and creative and compelling stuff without the backing of 100's of millions of dollars.
It seems like movies are just another cyclical creative industry and this has already happened multiple times before- with each new technology and distribution platform there's the potential to get a wave of creative output that wasn't possible before.
Another aspect could be that the hollowing out of the top / polarization of the industry is another catalyst.
It could be enough that people who don't work on 100's of million dollar budget films get funding to do the next 1 million dollar film that looks great and is amazing.
That's more analogous to the SaaS startup boom that happened in the previous gen of tech startups. Initial costs went down and platform access went up.
> What I meant is that I don't see truly indie-produced feature films reach the zeitgeist anymore.
Maybe they shouldn't. Maybe word of mouth from among those in your circle of friends that have good taste is enough. I'm not sure that blockbuster cinema reaching millions is tenable, or a good thing.
As for "watching content"... yuck, I hate the word "content".
Summary: it's okay to talk about "content" if you're a "content plumber" like some kind of backend video engineer or sysadmin, someone whose job is to help the bits get to the viewers and doesn't need to care what the bits represent. It's not okay if you're a director, actor or viewer, someone who's actually interacting with the the specific piece of content.
looking at the last 4 years of world events, I think some people already have some nostalgia for a shared cultural experience, instead of everyone being in their own algorithmically and socio-culturally / demographically segregated bubbles. Or maybe it's just looking back with rose colored glasses shrug
To be honest, I'm ambivalent about it. I do value a shared experience (contradicting somewhat what I wrote earlier). I don't have everything figured out...
Arguably this existed for the limited time in history with invention of over-the-air TV and ended with advent of cable. Event before internet streaming nobody watched same stuff anymore.
Not disagreeing with you, but the last time I experienced this was much later: with HBO's Game of Thrones. Everyone discussed the latest episode, it was an almost universal shared social experience.
It seems to have died for good after it ended, though.
They don’t have to reach the zeitgeist. Tyler Perry has made a good living producing crappy movies and plays that appeal to certain demographic. It’s a lot easier to get 5x ROI on a $5 million movie than a $200 million movie.
Before the pearl clutching starts - yes I’m Black.
Democratization is a specious argument. The artistry in an AI assisted work is the part that the human contributes as opposed to the the part that the AI contributes. If the human contribution is negligible, the artistry is negligible and there is no meaningful democratization because there was only token artistic intent in the first place.
And what's actually happening with AI? Someone mentioned in another submission that 7500 new books _per day_ are being released on Amazon Kindle. The wave of low quality AI submissions to HN was so severe that the HN mods had to restrict them. Whatever democratization is actually happening is drowned out by those taking advantage of the low cost of AI slop for profit.
I guess there's the distinction between capacity that could be taken up by other things, and free capacity that doesn't necessarily cost anything.
For a server built in the cloud those cycles could actually be taken up by other things, freeing the system and bringing costs down.
For a client computer running electron, as long as the user doesn't have so many electro apps open that their computer slows down noticeably, that inefficency might not matter that much.
Another aspect is that the devices get cheaper and faster so today's slow electron app might run fine on a system that is a few years away, and that capacity was never going to be taken up by anything else on the end user's device.
It’s more likely that Electron app uses poor code and have supply chain issue (npm,…). Also loading a whole web engine in memory is not cheap. The space could have been used to cache files, but it’s not, which is inneficient especially when laptops’ uptime is generally higher.
I think it points to OpenAI trying to pivot to leveraging their brand awareness head start and optimizing for either ads or something like the Jony Ive device- focusing on the consumer side.
For now people identify LLMs and AI with the ChatGPT brand.
This seems like it might be the stickiest thing they can grab ahold of in the long term.
Consumer AI is not going to come close to bailing them out. They need B2B use cases. Anthropic is a little better positioned because they picked the most proven B2B use case — development — and focused hard on it. But they'll have to expand to additional use cases to keep up with their spend and valuation, which is why things like cowork exist.
But I tend to agree that the ultimate winner is going to be Google. Maybe Microsoft too.
Unless you're totally dumb or a super genius, LLMs can easily provide that kind of monthly value to you. This is already true for most SOTA models, and will only become more true as they get smarter and as society reconfigures for smoother AI integration.
Right now we are in the "get them hooked" phase of the business cycle. It's working really damn well, arguably better than any other technology ever. People will pay, they're not worried about that.
It would have to be $60-$80/mo. in value over and above what you could get at the same time with cheap 3rd party inference on open models. That's not impossible depending on what kind of service they provide, but it's really hard.
The value is well worth over $60-$80/mo. But conflating that with the market condition is very different.
In the world where you cheap open weight models and free tier closed sources models are flooding the market, you need very good reason to convince regular people to pay for just certain models en masse in b2c market
After 30 years with a shit operating system known as Windows, Linux still cannot get over 5% adoption. Despite being free and compatible with every computer.
"Regular People" know ChatGPT. They know Gemini (largely because google shoves it in their face). They don't know anything else (maybe Siri, because they don't know the difference, just that siri now sucks). I'm not sure if I would count <0.1% of tokens generated being "flooding the market".
Just like you don't give much thought to the breed of grass growing in your yard, they don't give much thought to the AI provider they are using. They pay, it does what they want, that's the end of it. These are general consumers, not chronically online tech nerds.
> After 30 years with a shit operating system known as Windows, Linux still cannot get over 5% adoption. Despite being free and compatible with every computer.
You need to install linux and actively debugging it. For ai, regular people can just easily switch around by opening an browser. There are many low or 0 barrir choices. Do you know windows 11 is mostly free too for b2c customers now? Nobody is paying for anything
> "Regular People" know ChatGPT. They know Gemini (largely because google shoves it in their face). They don't know anything else (maybe Siri, because they don't know the difference, just that siri now sucks). I'm not sure if I would count <0.1% of tokens generated being "flooding the market".
You just proved my point. Yes they are good, but why would people pay for it? Google earns money through ads mostly.
> Just like you don't give much thought to the breed of grass growing in your yard, they don't give much thought to the AI provider they are using. They pay, it does what they want, that's the end of it. These are general consumers, not chronically online tech nerds.
That's exactly the points, because most of the internet services are free. Nobody is paying for anything because they are ads supported
It's nothing to do with Windows but with the applications (including games) that just run on it and the fact that most companies just run it it by default.
I don't see that. I've used LLMs and I've seen very little direct value. I've seen some value though Photoshop etc. But nothing I'd pay for a direct subsciption for.
It doesn't matter. I firmly believe both OpenAI and Anthropic are toast. And I aay this as someone that uses both Codex and Claude primarily.
I really dislike Google, but it is painfully obvious they won this. Open AI and Anthropic bleed money. Google can bankroll Gemini indefinitely because they have a very lucrative ad business.
We can't even argue that bankrolling Gemini for them is a bad idea. With Gemini they can have yet another source of data to monetize users from. Technically Gemini can "cost" them money forever, and it would still pay for itself because with it they can know even more data about users to feed their ad business with. You tell LLMs things that they would never know otherwise.
Also, they mostly have the infrastructure already. While everyone spends tons of money to build datacenters, they have those already. Hell, they even make money by renting compute to AI competitor.
Barred some serious unprecedented regulatory action against them (very unlikely), I don't see how they would lose here.
Unfortunately, I might add. i consider Google an insidiously evil corporation. The world would be much better without it.
They also have tons of data on the users' habits and desires which they can use to inform the AI with each specific user's preferences without them having to state them. Because so many people use Google maps, Gmail etc. It's not just about training data but also operational context. The others lack this kind of long-term broad user insight.
I'm not using Google services much at all and I don't use Gemini but I'm sure it will serve the users well. I just don't want to be datamined by a company like Google. I don't mind my data improving my services but I don't want it to be used against me for advertising etc.
Compared to the USA, is a contributing factor because things can't be put on discount sale in the EU?
In american many things are always on a discount, and there are so many channels through which this discounted merchandise is funneled. Which has to be a major way retails manage excess stock.
A lot of people don't realize that european retailers are legally disallowed from selling at a discount.
Edit to clarify: things can't be put on sale, except for a few times during the year? I guess this is not every country, although I'm not sure which and when.
> Compared to the USA, is a contributing factor because things can't be put on discount sale in the EU?
Nonsense. They can.
> In american many things are always on a discount, and there are so many channels through which this discounted merchandise is funneled. Which has to be a major way retails manage excess stock.
Major fashion brands refuse to do any discount at all to avoid damaging the brand. No second hand, no outlets, no rebranding, nothing at all except burning the excess.
> A lot of people don't realize that european retailers are legally disallowed from selling at a discount.
False. They aren't allowed to *falsely* claim that an item is discounted, which happens all the time in the US.
To clarify, this is a consumer protection law which is set in all EEA countries. Discounts are regulated to prevent stores from tricking their customers into thinking they are getting a product at a lower then usual price. You can only claim a product is on discount if the price has been lowered from a previous price less then x-days ago (I think 2 weeks is not uncommon), after which this discount becomes the new price.
As a European immigrant to the USA, it infuriates me to no end that American stores are allowed to use the words “price” and “discount” interchangeably. When I get things “on a discount” I expect to be paying lower then usual price.
Now I'm afraid they've screwed everyone over and the idea of an anonymous open internet is now dead- we're gonna see age (read, real ID) verification gating on every site and app soon....
The dumb thing is to look back and see how umimportant it is that Facebook feed algorithm be this addictive. They already had the network effects and no real competitors. They could have just left it alone.
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