Palantir's entire purpose for existence is to implement the Total Information Awareness program that US citizens rejected. They're domestic spies.
Are they worse than Meta? I don't know, a strong argument can be made that both organizations are very harmful and there's no point in trying to rank which is worse.
Not much worse. I would wager that governments around the world buy data from data brokers and from Meta to be processed with Palantir to target journalists, protesters, political opponents, and random innocent people inadvertently between deliberate intention and sketchy AI correlation without real evidence.
Where's the monopoly (or rather oligopoly) you are talking about?
There's many models offered by many companies and labs that are close enough to state of the art. Many of them are completely open source or at least have open weights.
You might complain about outsourcing your thinking to a machine, sure. But there's no monopoly nor oligopoly.
Google, currently thought of as the AI leader has shown time and time again they will resort to monopolistic practices.
I really hope open source models are the way, but the fact is the vast majority of day to day usage of LLMs is on models owned by multi-bullion dollar companies.
And even if they're not monopolies, people being influenced by companies to this extent should worry people.
It's news to me that Google is the AI leader. Where did you get that information / impression? I'd assumed that if anyone is a leader, it's OpenAI, but even their lead seems pretty tenuous at best.
And people trying shading things doesn't make a monopoly. Especially if there's plenty of competition.
> "Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them."
- F Herbert, 1965
I want to emphasise the "other men with machines" part. Mr Herbert wasn't talking about an AI takeover. He was talking about a techbro takeover.
He didn't even believe in the agency of machines, just human potential - an inanimate thing that does not want, will not want to take over. It is a tool for the people who command it and do.
Not just our thinking, but our search for truth. The biggest problem I see is that models can hallucinate or be biased (for example, Grok being told explicitly not to mention Trump and Musk when asked about misinformation) for the benefit of their owners or creators. This happens with Chinese models too, of course, because of their laws.
The problem is that people just trust what the LLM tells them, not realising they can be misled, or the model tells them "you're right" without any pushback or invitation to think further—just like an echo chamber, the consequences of which we've seen with social media in the last few years
It's starting to feel to me that a lot of tech is just converging on other platforms solutions. This for example sounds incredibly similar to how a mobile app works (on the surface). Of course it goes the other way too, with mobile tech taking declarative UIs from the Web.
Yep when I use agents I go for Claude Code. For example I needed to buy too many Commodore 64 than appropriate lately, and I let it code a Telegram bot advising me when popular sources would have interesting listings. It worked (after a few iterations) then I looked at the code base and wanted to puke but who cares in this case? It worked and it was much faster and I had zero to learn in the proces of doing it myself. I published a Telegram library for C in the past and know how it works and how to do scraping and so forth.
For example I needed to buy too many Commodore 64 than appropriate lately
Been there, done that!
for those one-off small things, LLMs are rather cool. Especially Cloude Code and Gemini CLI. I was given an archive of some really old movies recently, but files were bearing title names in Croatian instead of original (mostly English ones). So I claude --dangerously-skip-permissions into the directory with movies and in a two-sentence prompt I asked it to rename files into a given format (that I tend to have in my archive) and for each title to find original name and year or release and use it in the file.. but, before commiting rename to give me a list of before and after for approval. It took like what, a minute of writing a prompt.
Now, for larger things, I'm still exploring a way, an angle, what and how to do it. I've tried from yolo prompting to structured and uber structured approaches, all the way to mimicking product/prd - architecture - project management / tasks - developer/agents.. so far, unless it's rather simpler projects I don't see it's happening that way. Most luck I had was "some structure" as context and inputs and then guiding prompting during sessions and reviewing stuff. Almost pair-programming.
I think you're right, but you're also ignoring the effects of monopolies and/or collusion. There's a absolutely a chance prices don't come down due to broader anti-competitive plays.
Not just their users, the US government too. They've successfully turned it into a geopolitical issue. Apple not being viewed in the same light as Microsoft in the 90s is one of the best marketing ploys ever seen.
Towards the US government they surely play a different narrative and emphasize on revenues/profits as well as their leadership position as US company being threatened.
Towards the users the narrative is never about revenue/profit of Apple, and never acknowledge their leading market position.
But the end user narrative also works for US government members with influential position but low subject-matter knowledge.
