Apple has physical stores that will provide you timely top notch customer service. While not perfect, their mobile App Store is the best available in terms of curation and quality. Their hardware is not so diverse so is stable for long term use. And they have the mindshare in way that is hard to move off of.
Let’s say Google or Anthropic release a new model that is significantly cheaper and/or smarter that an OpenAI one, nobody would stick to OpenAI. There is nearly zero cost to switching and it is a commodity product.
Their API product is easy to swith away from but their consumer product (which is by far the biggest part of their revenue) has much better market share and brand recognition than others. I've never heard anyone outside of tech use Gemini or Copilot or X AI outside of work while they all know ChatGPT.
Anecdata but even in work environments I hear mostly complaints about having to use Copilot due to policy and preferring ChatGPT. Which still means Copilot is in a better place than Gemini, because as far as I can tell absolutely nobody even talks about that or uses it.
Let's say Google release a new phone that is significantly cheaper and/or smarter than an Apple one. nobody would stick to apple. There is nearly zero cost to switching and it is a commodity product.
The AI market, much like the phone market, is not a winner take all. There's plenty of room for multiple $100B/$T companies to "win" together.
> Let's say Google release a new phone that is significantly cheaper and/or smarter than an Apple one. nobody would stick to apple.
This is not at all how the consumer phone market works. Price and “smarts” are not only factor that goes into phone decisions. There are ecosystem factors & messaging networks that add significant friction to switching. The deeper you are into one system the harder it is to switch.
e.g. I am on iPhone and the rest of my family is on Android. The group chat experience is significantly degraded, my videos look like 2003 flip phone videos. Versus my iPhone using friends everything is high resolution.
> Let's say Google release a new phone that is significantly cheaper and/or smarter than an Apple one. nobody would stick to apple.
I don't think this is true over the short to mid term. Apple is a status symbol to the point that Android users are bullied over it in schools and dating apps. It would take years ti reverse the perception.
You’re aware that LLMs all have persistent memory now and personalize themselves to you over time right? You can’t transfer that from OAI to Anthropic.
There is only a zero cost to switching if a company is so perfectly run that everyone involved comes to the same conclusion at the same time, there are no meetings and no egos.
The human side is impossible to cost ahead of time because it’s unpredictable and when it goes bad, it goes very bad. It’s kind of like pork - you’ll likely be okay but if you’re not, you’re going to have a shitty time.
When I look at the state of how humans have manipulated each other, how the media is noxious propaganda, how businesses have perfected emotional and psychological manipulation of us to sell us crap and control our opinions, I don't think AI's influence is worse. In fact I think it's better. When I have a spicy political opinion, I can either go get validated in an echo chamber like reddit or newsmedia, or let ChatGPT tell me I'm a f'n idiot and spell out a much more rational take.
Until the models are diluted to serve the true purpose of the thoughtcontrol already in fully effect in non-AI media, they're simply better for humanity.
ChatGPT has been shown to spend much more time validating people's poor ideas than it does refuting them, even in cases where specific guardrails have supposedly been implemented, such as to avoid encouraging self-harm. See recent articles about AI usage inducing god-complexes and psychoses, for instance[1]. Validation of the user giving the prompt is what it's designed to do, after all. AI seems to be objectively worse for humanity than what we've had before it.
Strongly disagree, and you've misread what you've linked. These linked cases are situations where people are staying in one chat and posting thousands and thousands of replies into a single context, diluting the system prompt and creating a fever-dream of hallucination and psychosis. These are also rarely thinking and tool calling models, relying more on raw-LLM generation instead of thinking and sourcing (cheap/free models versus high powered subscriber only thinking models).
As we all know, the longer the context, the worse the reply. I strongly recommend you delete your context frequently and never stay in one chat.
What I'm talking about is using fresh chat for questions about the world, often political questions. Grab statistics on something and walk through major arguments for and against an idea.
If you think ChatGPT is providing worse answers than X.com and reddit.com for political questions, quite frankly, you've never used it before.
Try it out. Go to reddit.com/r/politics and find a +5,000 comment about something, or go to x.com and find the latest elon conspiracy, and run it by ChatGPT 5-thinking-high.
I guarantee you ChatGPT will provide something far more intellectual, grounded, sourced and fair than what you're seeing elsewhere.
Why would an LLM give you a more "rational take"? It's got access to a treasure trove of kooky ideas from Reddit, YouTube comments, various manifestos, etc etc. If you'd like to believe a terrible idea, an LLM can probably provide all of the most persuasive arguments.
Apologies, it sounds like you have no experience with modern models. Yes, you can push and push and push get it to agree with all manner of things, but off-rip on the first reply in a new context it will provide extremely grounded and rational takes on politics. It's a night and day difference compared to your average reddit comment or X post.
In my years of use and thousands and thousands of chat uses, I have literally never seen chatGPT provide a radical answer to a political question without me forcing it, heavy-handedly, to do so.
A lot of people are picking apart the many problematic parts of this, but I'll choose to target "Regurgitating content from the trending influencer of the week."
This is fundamentally how humans work. Our civilization is far too large and complex for you to be a bona fide expert in everything. And even worse, the more time you spend dedicated to expertise in one thing, the less well rounded you are in the ~infinity other things.
So what do you do if you cannot have authentic "taste" in everything?
You trust people. You find "influencers" that seem to succeed and have knowledge and you trust their opinion.
In practice, the vast majority of everything we think and do are not because of our personal expertise, but because of our un-expert belief in other people who do these things. Taste isn't just a measure of your personal expertise, but a measure of your ability to find and listen to experts.
So to call this out as a negative is harmful. You need to assemble a group of influencers not just professionally, but in every part of your life, who themselves are experts and can lend you their taste so you can make decisions without the paralysis of needing personal expertise in all things. That, or you need infinite time to become an infinite expert.
It's not lazy, it's by design. We have chat messages because the actual knowledge is stored inside of people, and chat messages are the most searchable way to see what people know outside of being able to ask them personally.
So why don't all of these people simply write it down in a notion/document store and meticulously keep it all up to date?
Because the business does not want that. We demand efficiency, so we understaff engineering departments sufficiently that there is always a little crunch, so that slightly-too-few engineers have to work slightly-harder-than-they-want to make the business successful. The end result of this intentionally engineered "lack of time" is that things like maintaining meticulous documentation are ignored, and the only time the knowledge is shared is in a frantic slack message.
The business is designed to do this. It's not laziness. It's the standard operating procedure to increase efficiency and profit.
The purpose of the software is not profit, but usability. Profit for the organization/owner is a tool to achive that, in some instances (it is very valuable, but not essential).
The primary self-serving focus of bigger and quicker profit leads to serious erosion of trust in technology, making the life of those building a livelihood on top of it shaky at best.
Is this a thing? I've been using a Pixel 9 Pro Fold for one full year now and my inner screen looks pretty flawless. I don't see a single scratch, and I've never used any kind of protector on the inside. This kind of sounds like a "sour grapes" excuse where a really good thing is presumed to suck only because you can't have it. Personally, as someone who isn't really interested in a full tablet, the foldable is really really nice.
I have an OG Pixel Fold and the inner screen is flawless. My iPhone 14 Pro screen is visibly scratched. The Fold replaced tablets and e readers for me.
As a counterpoint: Using a foreign model means the for-domestic-consumption censorship will not effect you much. Qwen is happy to talk about MAGA, slavery, the Holocaust, or any other "controversial" western topic.
However, American models (just like Chinese models) are heavily censored according to the society. ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, are all aggressively censored to meet western expectation.
So in essence, Chinese models should be less censored than western models for western topics.
They don't actually care about the block or ban, they just want to put in enough token effort that a judge in the area will feel that it was reasonably done. It's performative for the legal system.
I disagree that "performative" and "token" are the opposite of "best effort".
The opposite of "best effort" is clearly "worst effort".
You seem to take offense with the idea that the company is doing "the minimum viable legal requirement" and you insist that "no, by doing what the judge says, it's actually an earnest and good attempt!"
If you actually think a company puts in even 0.1% more effort than a court requires of them, then I think you are very naive. Clearly the company could prevent VPNs from working if they wanted to invest the effort, like Netflix and China do, but they literally can't be bothered if the court doesn't require it.
I consider "minimum viable legal requirement to get past the judge" to be "performative and token" because they do NOT actually care if users access it, they want them too, they are only checking a liability box forced on them by the court and their legal department, doing the literal minimum.
I'm not taking offense at any mythical company, and am being very specific as to what I am discussing.
As I've said, several times, the court will barely tolerate the minimum, and any form of token or performative, hand-wavy attempts to act as if complying, but not, will be taken poorly by the court.
Performative by its very root, is to put on a show, an act of story telling. This in not even remotely inline with compliance, but instead, pretending to do so, whilst not.
"something that you do, or a thing that you give someone, that expresses your feelings or intentions, although it might have little practical effect"
The 'little practical effect' is the key point here. A display without actual effect is not complying, even minimally. Courts care not for performances, displays, but instead actual fact.
You seem to have different definitions for these terms, perhaps even less used ones or colloquially derived. However, when one dives into the legal, terms take on a more rigid definition.
I don't see the value of this back and forth beyond my reply here, for there isn't much I can do, or that we can agree upon, if you use terms in ways that really aren't inline with how they will be taken.
And really, if you're simply going to argue that performance and token displays are somehow doing something meaningful, that's just plain incorrect.
> something that you do, or a thing that you give someone, that expresses your feelings or intentions, although it might have little practical effect
Perfect definition for the geo block, since it's trivial to bypass and billions worldwide use the technology to bypass such a check.
Thank you for providing a dictionary definition that perfectly captures how the businesses efforts are "token", since literally billions of humans can bypass it with minimal effort.
I feel you're approaching this issue, not from the perspective of a court.
There have been endless court decisions, eg there's loads of case law, where geoip is specifically determined to be a best-effort for blocking.
It's not for show, it's not token, and it absolutely hands down works. Courts have had this specifically argued within their halls, and I believe I recall it being described as a house.
If a homeowner has a locking door, and windows, they've performed a 'best effort' in "keeping people out". Certainly someone can break the window, kick in the door, but those actions are beyond the reasonable efforts of a homeowner, without turning their home into fort knox. Put another way, the burden if perfect security, armed guards, cameras, impenetrable house is an undo burden.
This is akin to what we are seeing here. GeoIP is a reasonable, beyond best effort to block.
Can you name any other method of denying people from one region to connect to your services? Bearing in mind that you may not have the power to compel people to stop, as they may be outside your legal jurisdiction?
And of those methods, would they be arguable as an undue hardship? I assure you these things have been argued thousands of times in courts of law. And the whole point here is that geoip is used extensively, and found to be within the scope of compliance.
I should add, that at first you were trying to claim that your use of the words 'performative' and 'token' were fine, for they meant something different than the standard use. Now, you're trying to argue that geoip blocks are actually the issue, and that the words are as I've stipulated.
You seem to enjoy argument, and frankly that's perfectly fine from where I sit. Debate makes the world go, as they say.
But I think you're pulling at the wrong string here. We all make dives into a wrong pool. Get out, dry yourself off, and find another pool. Someone had an accident in this one, you don't want to stay in it.
(Yes, that went weird)
>There have been endless court decisions, eg there's loads of case law, where geoip is specifically determined to be a best-effort for blocking
Bullshit. Absolute hogwash. Cite your case law. Cite a SINGLE court which says geoip is "BEST EFFORT". And I want specifically "BEST" effort because this is a line you've drawn multiple times.
From European GDPR cases, to American gambling cases, to new cases around pornography blocks, every single court has held that it was circumvention-prone, a mitigation measure, part of a scheme of compliance, "reasonable but insufficient", but certainly not actually effective and not a generally held "best" effort or gold standard
Tip: Use AI to judge your comment. It's embarassing to make a real human sift through this. Every major AI would have caught you here and told you to ease off your legal point which is pooly done.
P.S. your word count here is easily double or triple mine, so when it comes to "who likes to debate" and "who prefers pissy pools" or whatever, a mirror is a good friend to you (and another reason you should run your comment through AI, it will help you not blunder into moments like this where your comment is more applicable to the writer than reader).
Best effort is a specific legal term, not my standard. My example with a house, uses mechanisms as to how best effort vs undue burden(another legal term) is often described.
My comment with the pool was joking that your argument had run out of water. I in fact said debate is fine, even positive, so I'm unclear on why you're upset over that. No offence was intended.
Your conflating of 'best effort' and 'gold standard' is not viable. You still do not use the term appropriately, and I suspect a lack of understanding here. Go to a legal dictionary for terms such as 'best effort' and 'undue burden'. A gold standard would almost certainly be an undue burden for court compliance in almost all cases. I'm not sure where you're getting your information, but AI is too error prone, and has in fact landed endless lawyers into trouble with hallucinated case law.
Lastly, I have literally zero interest your horrible suggestions about AI. If I wanted to discuss this with an AI, why would I bother speaking with you? Or any other human? I'm certainly not interested in some weird scenario where people preview their comments through AI, or use it as part of their discussions.
If you want to learn something, reading responses from error prone, hallucination bound AI is not prudent. Instead, just read and learn from actual, real sources.
Ah Michael Burry, the man who has predicted 18 of our last 2 bubbles. Classic broken clock being right, and in a way, perfectly validates the "no one can see a bubble" claim!
If Burry could actually see a bubble/crash, he wouldn't be wrong about them 95%+ of the time... (He actually missed the covid crash as well, which is pretty shocking considering his reputation and claims!)
Ultimately, hindsight is 20/20 and understanding whether or not "the markers" will lead to a major economic event or not is impossible, just like timing the market and picking stocks. At scale, it's impossible.
I feel 18 out of 2 isn't a good enough statistic to say he is "just right twice a day".
What was the cost of the 16 missed predictions? Presumably he is up over all!
Also doesn't even tell us his false positive rate. If, just for example, there were 1 million opportunities for him to call a bubble, and he called 18 and then there were only 2, this makes him look much better at predicting bubbles.
If you think that predicting economic crash every single year since 2012 and being wrong (Except for 2020, when he did not predict crash and there was one), is good data, by all means, continue to trust the Boy Who Cried Crash.
This sets up the other quote from the movie:
Michael Burry: “I may be early but I’m not wrong”. Investor guy: “It’s the same thing! It's the same thing, Mike!”
>stack up the habitual offenders and send them to jail for a few months to few years setting them on straight path.
I'm not sure if you have been to an American jail but they do not set folks on the straight path. They are basically Crime University, and the folks on the inside trade all kinds of information about how to crime more effectively, where to crime, what tactics police use and what neighborhoods are safest or most dangerous for police activity.
I was thrown in lockup for a weekend for not changing my tags after moving and letting it escalate out of control and what I saw in that inner city lockup truly shocked me. Folks had incredible amounts of illegal goods on them (despite having been searched and thrown in jail) and were openly performing transactions, sharing "industry secrets" and coordinating for future work once they were out.
If you have spent any time in an American jail or prison, I think you would be disabused of the notion that you can simply lock a criminal up for a few months and "fix" them. I would suggest that it's the opposite, a few months in jail turns a newbie criminal into a true amateur or journeyman with networking, education and future opportunities.
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