bignose

joined 10 months ago
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Google Translate is now Gemini — and you can prompt-inject it in c/techtakes@awful.systems
[–] bignose@awful.systems 9 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

I have no idea why they would do this

I do. For the same reason they are cramming LLMs into every other product:

They need to pretend to their investors that there is an enormous market hungry for more of this, so the investors will not demand their money back.

By turning more users of existing services, into “users of Gemini”; by turning more translate requests, more email messages, more search requests, into a “Gemini usage”; they can with a straight face claim more and ever more usage and demand, propped up by users who never agreed to any of this.

94
Exclusive: OpenAI Losses Increased Nearly 8X in 2025, With Spending Hitting $34 Billion (www.wheresyoured.at)
submitted 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) by bignose@awful.systems to c/news@lemmy.world
15 comments fedilink
 

Edi Zitron has an exclusive report on OpenAI's 2025 finances:

The financial condition of OpenAI is deeply concerning. $38.53 billion in losses are astronomical, and far higher than most believed it would be. Losses also appear to be mounting year-over-year at a dramatic rate, and I’m not sure how this company finds a way toward any kind of sustainability or profitability.

107
Google I/O 2026 And Its Consequences (fedi.vale.rocks)
submitted 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) by bignose@awful.systems to c/technology@lemmy.world
13 comments fedilink
 

If Google only takes and never gives, then sites cannot profit. What is the incentive to publish if the only outcome is feeding Google’s AI with no return? What sources will LLMs have to pull from if all the sources are defunct? How far will Google go folding adverts into their AI output?

I can see the huge short-term gain for Google, but I see no long-term path – not even an unsustainable one. This feels like the end, but of exactly what I’m uncertain.

Google is replacing search results with only the AI in c/techtakes@awful.systems
[–] bignose@awful.systems 6 points 1 month ago (1 children)

From TFA:

So what do we search with instead of Google? There isn’t a lot of choice. There’s various flavours of Google or Bing.

[…] Kagi resells Google’s actual link results for a monthly subscription. Kagi is really an AI company that sells search as a sideline, and they’ve got a terrible AI slop news service too. But the search has a good reputation for now.

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European Parliament bars lawmakers from using AI tools (www.theregister.com)
 

Data privacy and AI services have not been the greatest of bedfellows. Studies have shown that employees regularly leak company secrets via assistants, and on-device AI services are a focus of vendors amid concerns about exactly what is being sent to the cloud.

The thought of confidential data being sent to an unknown location in the cloud to generate a helpful summary has clearly worried lawmakers, which is why there is a blanket ban. However, the issue has less relevance if the process occurs on the device itself.

GEMA wins against OpenAI on copying song lyrics in c/techtakes@awful.systems
[–] bignose@awful.systems 5 points 7 months ago

GEMA versus OpenAI. Whoever wins, we all lose.

But I'm still happy to see them fight.

awesome old AI paper Artificial Intelligence Meets Natural Stupidity (PDF, 1976) in c/techtakes@awful.systems
[–] bignose@awful.systems 2 points 9 months ago

So many of the criticisms here survive essentially unchanged, fifty years later:

If he calls the main loop of his program "UNDERSTAND", he is (until proven innocent) merely begging the question. He may mislead a lot of people, most prominently himself, and enrage a lot of others.[…] If Quillian <1969> had called his program the "Teachable Language Node Net Intersection Finder", he would have saved us some reading. (Except for those of us fanatic about finding the part on teachability.)