Yes, apparently they’re suddenly worried that stealing other people’s work—which is their business model—might backfire on them. I assume this is a measure intended to give the impression—in the face of one of the countless lawsuits against Anthropic—that they’re actually taking licensing or intellectual property rights seriously. I can’t think of any other explanation, because Anthropic simply can’t afford to have questions raised about where the training data used by their models actually comes from.

It was never a secret: it’s still the Mechanical Turk, a historical model that, for example, the Amazon company of the same name is based on—and such services are part of its business.

The U.S. is now the world’s largest oil producer. On top of that, its government really couldn’t be any more corrupt.

Of course, the same question arises in other countries, but I think the answer is always the same: corrupt politicians.

Every Bond villain worthy of the title should have a diabolical plot worthy of respect.

In Die Another Day, Gustav Graves ingratiates himself with the West, constructing a satellite named Icarus without the authorities realising that he is actually developing a space-based superweapon. Ostensibly, Graves has developed the satellite as a means of ensuring that crops can be grown year-round, bringing an end to starvation, but the truth is far more sinister: the purpose of the satellite is to provide North Korea with the clout to become a superpower, if not to actually dominate the world.

Source

In other words: Now that he’s no longer getting any money from Google, he’s suddenly upset that no one is visiting his site anymore, because most of his former visitors now find the answers to their questions directly on Google—the very company to which he sold all of his website’s content.

Well, he could have figured that out sooner. What a moron—but hey, he’s already pocketed the money for all the content he stole from his own users.

It’s a good thing Aaron Swartz doesn’t have to witness all this, especially since the greediest of all corporations are now raking in money with complete impunity for the very thing he was supposed to go to prison for years—even though he had no intention of enriching himself at all.

There isn’t much luxury in a car that annoys you with ads, is there?

But hey, maybe there’s an extra-super-luxury subscription that lets you turn off the ads. You know, like YouTube Premium or something, except that the free version already costs several tens of thousands of dollars.

It’s a win-win: insecure rich guys can feel superior again and BMW gets $.

That is simply wrong. Public pressure can certainly be effective. In any case, it’s definitely better than doing nothing at all.

That makes it pretty clear that most executives are the worst possible people to run a company. Well, that’s just how it is when ruthlessness and greed are the only criteria used to select top executives.

But hey, even if they were to lose their jobs because they’re burning through so much money, things will go on as usual: Anyone who’s ever held a top management position will always be hired for the same role somewhere else, because competence is definitely not the deciding factor here. Never was, never will be.

Indeed!

“The bubble doesn’t want cheap useful things,” Doctorow said. “It wants expensive ‘disruptive’ things: big foundational models that lose billions of dollars every year. When the AI investment mania halts, most of the models are going to disappear, because it just won’t be economical to keep the data centers running. The collapse of the AI bubble is going to be ugly. Seven AI companies currently account for more than a third of the stock market, and they endlessly pass around the same $100 billion IOU. AI is the asbestos in the walls of our technological society, stuffed with wild abandon by a finance sector and tech monopolists run amok. We will be excavating it for a generation or more.”

I think that pretty much sums it up.

The problem seems to be that it takes competent employees to get anything useful out of an LLM in the first place. However, it is these very employees whom the greedy CEOs want to replace. So the result is that an incredible amount of money is being spent on absolutely nothing.

The logical conclusion, then, should be that it would make more sense to replace these useless CEOs with AI. Since they’re just making idiotic decisions for a lot of money anyway, there could be lots of savings.

Unfortunately, however, that will never happen, because contrary to all that talk of KPIs and such, what really matters in the upper echelons of management is never efficiency, but rather ruthlessness and brown-nosing.

Well, if they were to start doing this on a large scale, everything would probably collapse pretty quickly.

If, for example, BlackRock were to pull its billions out of AI companies, “the market” would be terrified and smaller investors would start asking about the business model—then they’d quickly realize that it doesn’t add up at all, and they’d want to sell their shares as well, because even this giant player has lost their trust.

The result would likely be the collapse of the global economic system, since such absurd amounts of money are at stake here that a crash would make the 2003 banking crisis look like a minor slip-up.

The bitter truth is that this will almost certainly happen sooner or later—and this time, governments will no longer be able to step in to bail out the “systemically important” megacorporations, because the sums involved are so vast that even the richest countries in the world can no longer foot the bill.

If even the goddamn BusinessInsider comes to this conclusion, I wonder why they don’t also realize that all stock market transactions work this way today. None of this has the slightest connection to the real world anymore. Stock prices are determined purely by how many billionaires—or rather, their concentrated capital—are betting on which companies. And here’s the key: They always win, because even with the most absurd business ideas, they can drive up the price, which only crashes after the super-rich have sold their shares.

This makes it very easy to understand why the dumbest people in the world never lose money, as long as they’re rich enough.

Humanity is footing the bill for this, and it’s now becoming very clear just how high that bill is.

The worst part is that negatively charged morons attract each other…

The latest attempt at chatcontroll was rejected as recently as April 3 mainly due to massive public opposition. They will try again, and someday they will succeed if too many people succumb to defeatism.

So it’s pretty counterproductive to say that it wouldn’t make any sense anyway, because that’s not the case.

That is precisely why regulations such as the GDPR are so important; among other things, they set limits on automated facial recognition at the European level.

As I said, these regulations are under constant attack, especially from the U.S.

Nevertheless, all is not lost here, and these regulations are indeed being enforced, since the European legal system actually still functions quite well. Here, too, it makes no sense to draw a comparison with the U.S.

Just because the U.S. system is so obviously corrupt that it can no longer fulfill its purpose doesn’t mean it’s the same in other parts of the world. U.S. billionaires have a keen interest in this, and they’re supported by the corresponding elite in Europe as well, but the world in Europe is actually quite different. While you can buy a lot of things here too, European nations are not an obvious oligarchy. The US, on the other hand, has been a de facto oligarchy for several decades. The current regime, through its utter unscrupulousness, simply makes this fact much more obvious than previous administrations did.

That is fundamentally true, yet European law and the respective national constitutions set limits on unwarranted mass surveillance. Lobbyists for tech companies—especially American ones, led by Palantir—are working tirelessly to erode these limits, thought.

Under the status quo, however, the scale of surveillance is currently in no way comparable to that in China or the U.S., as there are still legal limits in place—at least for the moment—that are also enforced, albeit only in a basic sense.

This makes it all the more important to preserve these rights and to advocate for them. It is not helpful to equate conditions in Europe with those in the US, as this creates the impression that insisting on existing law is a futile endeavor.

So Meta wants its own army of unsuspecting spies?

I can’t for the life of me imagine that this is legal. Maybe in the U.S., since the legal system there is so completely broken, but in Europe, the mass surveillance of millions of people by a private company seems likely to be a criminal offense.

This is an approach that could never succeed in the U.S., because there the focus is always on throwing as much money as possible at the defense contractors so that the billionaires can get even richer.

A current example: the war of aggression against Iran that the U.S. is waging in violation of international law.

To my knowledge, not even a halfway plausible reason has been given for this. And so it becomes quite clear that this is simply about shifting state resources into the pockets of the super-rich - and U.S. citizens just go along with it, even though it isn’t even them who are dying by the thousands, but rather, among others, Iranian schoolchildren, hundreds of whom were murdered simply by a bombing of a school…