Sure but your therapist is also monetizing your pain for his own gain. Either A.I therapy works (e.g can provide good mental relief) or it doesn't. I tend to think it's gonna be amazing at those things talking from experience (very rough week with my mom's health deterioriating fast, did a couple of sessions with Gemini that felt like I'm talking to a therapist). Perhaps it won't work well for hard issues like real mental disorders but guess what human therapists are very often also not great at treating people with serious issue.
I agree, in severe mental disorders A.I is probably not enough (and afaik it acknowledges this to the user right away) but it might be able to help. If we accept/believe that the act of talking about your problems and having them reframed back to you empathetically helps , I don't see why we can't accept LLMs can help here. I don't buy that only a human can do that.
But one is a company ran by sociopaths that have no empathy and couldn't care less about anything but money, while the other is a human that at least studied the field all their life.
> But one is a company ran by sociopaths that have no empathy and couldn't care less about anything but money, while the other is a human that at least studied the field all their life.
Unpacking your argument you make two points:
1) The human has studied all his life; yes, some humans study and work hard. I have also studied programming half my life and it doesn't mean A.I can't make serious contributions in programming and that A.I won't keep improving.
2) These companies, or OpenAI in particular, are untrustworthy many grabbing assholes. To this I say if they truly care about money they will try to do a good job, e.g provide an A.I that is reliable, empathetic and that actually help you get on with life. If they won't - a competitor will. That's basically the idea of capitalism and it usually works.
I partly agree and partly disagree. Yes, we're more individual and more isolated. But ChatGPT/Gemini can really provide mental relief for people - not everyone can afford or have the time/energy to find a good human therapist close to their home. And this thing lives in your computer or phone and you can talk to it to get mental relief 24 / 7. I don't see it as bleak as you see it, mental help should be accessible and free for everyone.
I know, we've had a bad decade with platforms like Meta/TikTok but I'm not convinced as you are the current LLMs will have an adverse effect.
I agree, though the time to buy was 6 months ago when everyone hated the stock. I think it can still appreciate nicely in the coming 1-3 years, search isn't really going anywhere and their other pieces (Youtube, Cloud, A.I subscriptions) will do good. If this bull market continues 4 trillion market cap is reasonable.
> So you click a button, it pops open a text box in a floating window, you type in a question, and the AI replies. This is the most underwhelming implementation of browser-based AI that they could have come up with. Quite literally just gemini.google.com in an iFrame.
Well, they're gonna have to support an astronomical scale of queries - not many companies in the world are able to do it and Alphabet is doing it pretty much on their own stack of cloud, a.i chips and software. So sure, the front end is not a big deal but this is still a big move.
They don't gain much from disclosing anything imo , their competition reads every word they say. I'm not sure it matters that much but as a habit I don't see why they should disclose exact numbers.
Not really: this past few years, listed companies tend to be _very_ pessimistic on their quarterly projection, and then reveal that either: it wasn't that bad, and nothing change, or that is was great, and their valuation shoots up. Weirdly the market doesn't react over those pessimistic projections, so it seems it's just a safe play for CEOs. They started doing that in Europe as well.
> but it's really not that much lower, plus life is just cheaper, even here in the Netherlands.
Lived in the NL for 4 years, it was many things - cheap wasn't one of them. With the enormous taxes , high rents and mediocre salaries I don't think you can make the case it's somehow cheaper than the U.S unless you specifically mean Manhattan and Silicon Valley.
There's a reason I included that "even", because indeed NL is not cheap. However if you're not in SV or NYC, you're also not making the ludicrous half-a-million figures that people often talk about as well. Myself having lived in NYC, I can tell you right now QoL is dramatically higher in NL even if I'm earning a lot less cash. Also, it definitely is cheaper than those cities, even if you're in Amsterdam (and cities like Utrecht or Den Haag are a lot cheaper than Amsterdam too).
Around the 50-60k Euro mark is a VERY decent and comfortable living in the Netherlands and you'll be hard pressed to find companies not paying that much for medior roles, yet alone senior ones. Plus you have the bigger companies like Adyen, Booking, ASML etc. plus remote US companies that pay ~100-125k for Medior+ talent (I know this as I literally today, a mere 4 hours ago got an offer letter from one of the mentioned companies as a SWE II). The taxes only really start hurting in the 70k-90k region, but since it's progressively taxed it's still not the end of the world. Also if you work for one of the aforementioned big boys then you're probably going to be in the party bracket (literally what it's called :p) where the sting is lessened, stupidly enough.
Remember, average salary in NL is around 40k-45k EUR. If anyone above a medior level manages to work at a tech-adjacent company as is getting paid less than that, it's time to move jobs because the market has shifted up massively as of late in terms of wages, at least anecdotally from what I can see.
And most importantly, money isn't everything which is so often missed in these discussions talking about EU vs US comp. Most importantly of all is that I never have to worry about healthcare costs should anything happen to me or my loved ones that don't have the privilege of being sponsored by a megacorp, and very importantly I have job security and a permanent contract that makes it damned hard to get rid of me.
Now things aren't perfect here obviously, train costs are astronomical, the tax brackets are absurd (the aforementioned party bracket being an absolute farce), the healthcare system while great can be very annoying to navigate alone, and indeed rent in the private sector and housing costs in general is completely detached from reality... But compared to anywhere in the US I've ever lived, especially if we zoom out a bit and look at it from a lens of someone not in tech and not making FAANG-level money? I'll take Utrecht 100 times out of 10, thank you very much.
> One out of every 40 searches worldwide being made using your product is, in your opinion, a very small share?
I meant in terms of Google's dominance in search. Currently, not even ChatGPT / LLM search are shrinking Google's dominance - Google keeps growing search traffic and revenue. It does seem though that the whole search market has grown with LLMs , people now query for stuff they've never queried before.
> In a thread about a monopoly abusing its power, the least you can do is to stop measuring success by how monopolistic a company is.
How do you measure success then? All companies want to dominate their industries why are we picking on Google? This is capitalism.
You're absolutely right, we shouldn't pick on just Google. We should pick on basically every company that owns over 50% of its market share, as I'm sure how they got there is by abusing their power in one way or the other.
A healthy economy is the one where you have 50 smaller companies each with 2.5% market share, not one with over 80% and everyone else being called a failure like you just did. Hope that clears things up!
It's not clear to me why Google has to be broken up. Google built the best browser around, people aren't using it for no reason, and then it used its user base to direct them to their search - which to me sounds reasonable (most people would use Google for search even if they're on a different browser. Whether it's habit or simply a superior search engine - that's what they want).
Making Google sell chrome, to me , wouldn't be different than making Nvidia sell a big part of their GPU know how or making Microsoft sell Windows or making Apple get rid of the App Store.
> The 404 links are truly bizarre. Nearly every link to github.com seems to be 404. That seems like something that should be trivial for a tool to verify.
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Same issue with Gemini. Intuitively I'd also assume it's trivial to fix but perhaps there's more going on than we think. Perhaps validating every part of a response is a big overhead both financially and might even throw off the model and make it less accurate in other ways.
I agree. It's getting tougher and I don't know why you're being downvoted.
However, so many people can now build new companies we might have a good few years left, perhaps more than you'd think. It could be another decade of good work which is enough for me personally.
It's both the identifying thing and of course the steady (and mostly - high) income. Could be quite a hit for many people to become economically dislocated just like that.
> It's both the identifying thing and of course the steady (and mostly - high) income.
It's the income for me. This career was my only ticket out of poverty, it actually saved me from an otherwise horrible life. Now supposed to cheer that I might very well be replaced in the foreseeable future? It's the only line of work I'm skilled at or qualified to do and I honestly don't know what awaits me if I lose it.
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