The fact that Silicon Valley interests effortlessly shrugged off the non-profit board’s attempt to hit the kill switch last year, and now are preparing to take the company commercial despite the deliberate design otherwise, becomes much more interesting when you consider the theory that corporations are a form of artificial superintelligence.

If the AI idealists can’t stand up to basic forces of capitalism, how do they expect to control an actually dangerous AGI?

My man, I said nothing about the science or the validity of that comment, just that it’s wrong to call Ask MetaFilter “some Ask Yahoo knockoff”. If you want to get het up about an argument I never made, you do you.

It doesn’t matter if it was created before Ask Yahoo or if it’s older.

It does if you’re calling it a “knockoff” of a lower-quality site that was created years later, which was what I was responding to.

edit: btw, you’ve linked to the profile of the asker of that question, not the answer to it that /u/half_built_pyramids quoted.

some Ask Yahoo knockoff…

AskMeFi predated Yahoo Answers by several years (and is several orders of magnitude better than it ever was).

Science location, you rube.

I do try to block ads, but tbh it’s impossible to be mad at Google for pushing them. YouTube is a modern miracle of engineering – no other platform on the planet hosts the scale of video it does, indefinitely, with instant access, for free. It is more than fair for them to recoup the massive cost. Personally, if they had a cheaper version of Premium without the music features, I’d pay for it in a heartbeat.

I imagine it’s because of the generative AI stuff. If they’re using their servers to generate, they’re going to be responsible for what it puts out, even if it’s just responding to user prompts.

If it is just a repackaging of ChatGPT’s existing “search the web” function, I don’t know why they’d bother. It can at best summarize a page of search results for a very literal-minded query, and even then it’s often lobotomized by the fact that OpenAI has made it easy for a large number of top websites to opt out of having their pages accessible to their search crawler, which means you’re only getting a summary of the search result snippet and metadata. A competent user of Google search can run rings around it in terms of research, even with Google’s decline in quality. I guess it makes it faster to answer basic queries for recent information not in the training data, but that hardly seems worthy of a big event.

I listened to it and it’s genuinely not bad (on a content and voice synthesis level), to the point that I have a hard time believing it was entirely AI-generated. If it’s not a fake ghostwritten by the creators, it must have been heavily rerolled and edited to make it so coherent.

IIRC based on the source paper the “verbatim” text is common stuff like legal boilerplate, shared code snippets, book jacket blurbs, alphabetical lists of countries, and other text repeated countless times across the web. It’s the text equivalent of DALL-E “memorizing” a meme template or a stock image – it doesn’t mean all or even most of the training data is stored within the model, just that certain pieces of highly duplicated data have ascended to the level of concept and can be reproduced under unusual circumstances.

Tbh, I block ads when I can but have a hard time getting angry about this. YouTube is both incredibly useful and incredibly expensive to operate – seriously, what other service lets you upload hours of HD video which anyone in the world can access instantly, indefinitely, for free, and at the same scale YT does? It’s a peerless engineering marvel and it would be a tragedy if it were to shut down. If seeing some short skippable ads is what it takes to keep that resource viable, that’s honestly pretty fair.