The Internet being mostly broken at this point is driving me a little insane, and I can’t believe that people who have the power to keep a functioning search engine for themselves wouldn’t go ahead and do it.
I wonder about this every time I see people(?) crowing about how amazing AI is. Like, is there some secret useful AI out there that plebs like me don’t get to use? Because otherwise, huh?
The problem with conspiracy theories like this is it assumed that the people doing the conspiracy are competent.
Google keeps a secret un-enshittified version of their search engine for anybody to use. Instructions here: https://tenbluelinks.org/
This removes AI but does not undo pragavar rhagavan’s changes
The short answer is yes, and most companies do.
I have a small consultancy with a few staff, and im passionate about self hosting.
Using FOSS projects I’ve configured a selection of private services, which includes search and Gen AI. If I can do this with no resources…
Never considered self-hosting search. How does your LLM compare to the public ones?
Not completely self hosted. Searxng is just a front end for a bunch of other engines, so it fetches results from google et al. Its good but glitches a lot as the engines themselves try to block it.
Yacy is self hosted, it crawls the sites you tell it to.
The LLMs are great. You can self host the models or just link to the hugging face API. The models you can find there are tuned for specific purposes and are far superior for those purposes. You can also train “agents” on top of those models, like upload your policy and procedure manual and ask it to create additional procedures in that context.
They haven’t released the best AI because it’s too valuable
I dont think any of these tech execs (all execs?) use their products. They all have assistants to do everything for them, so they have no idea what this whole “internet” thing is, other than it makes them money.
Oh they know how to get to the porn.
No, porn is for poor people. These people can (and do) easily afford the live action version.
Thot-on-retainer
Pretty sure they don’t bother with just photos, I’m sure there’s some guy that’s replaced the one that died in prison.
is this talking about Epstein?
mmhmm.
Once you get above a certain value in your bank account, laws stop applying to you unless you do something catastrophically stupid as to threaten the whole scheme, then you’re hung out as a sacrificial lamb to protect the others.
I guarantee epsteins cartel never died. its headquarters just moved, and the leader changed. thats all.
The only times laws effect rich people are when they screw over other rich people. Elizabeth Holmes didn’t get in trouble for selling incorrect blood tests to patients. She got in trouble for defrauding other rich people.
Pretty sure they don’t bother with just photos, I’m sure there’s some guy that’s replaced the one that
diedwas murdered in prison.FTFY
They probably use exclusive paid sites. Maybe even … very exclusive.
they probably use hookers? porn is for the poor people.
1k usd? that is actually cheaper than what i would expect in these circles…
Yeah, they just said that their assistants handle everything. Little bit of mood lighting, little bit of a new BMW, little bit of a cover up and hush money. All expensed to the company. Ahh, the good life.
It doesn’t take a lot of tech skill to be an exec for a tech company. My guess is they fall into the same category as those that see the AI overview on Google and think “wow this is so much better” and never second guess the results.
When they unveil it to the public, it will be subscription-based.
Microsoft employees are the beta testers of their software. I expect no different from Google.
Gemini 3 Pro is pretty nuts already.
But yes, labs have unreleased higher cost models. Like the OpenAI model that was thousands of dollars per ARC-AGI answer. Or limited release models with different post-training like the Claude for the DoD.
When you talk about a secret useful AI — what are you trying to use AI for that you are feeling modern models are deficient in?
what are you trying to use AI for that you are feeling modern models are deficient in?
Giving correct answers more than half the time.
Can you give an example of a question where you feel like the answer is only correct half the time or less?
steam deck as bluetooth controller:
You can use the Steam Deck as a Bluetooth controller by enabling Bluetooth in the settings and pairing it with your PC or other devices. This allows you to utilize its controls for gaming on compatible platforms.
For future reference, when you ask questions about how to do something, it’s usually a good idea to also ask if the thing is possible.
While models can do more than just extending the context, there still is a gravity to continuation.
A good example of this would be if you ask what the seahorse emoji is. Because the phrasing suggests there is one, many models go in a loop trying to identify what it is. If instead you ask “is there a seahorse emoji and if so what is it” you’ll get them much more often landing on there not being the emoji as it’s introduced into the context’s consideration.
It is also not good at finding songs where you only (mis)remember some lyrics, but it will confidently invent a fake song.
It also makes up citations.
I wish it was better at expressing how likely its answer is to be true.
Yeah. The confabulation/hallucination thing is a real issue.
OpenAI had some good research a few months ago that laid a lot of the blame on reinforcement learning that only rewards having the right answer vs correctly saying “I don’t know.” So they’re basically trained like taking tests where it’s always better to guess the answer than not provide an answer.
But this leads to being full of shit when not knowing an answer or being more likely to make up an answer than say there isn’t one when what’s being asked is impossible.
Yes.
Without question.
Apple execs use iPhones with a modified iOS that lets them use a keyboard that doesn’t suck and doesn’t have sponsored auto-corrections, and I will die on this hill. /s
Honestly though, I think a lot of people at Microsoft just use Macs. Google? I have no idea. I would imagine the smarter ones search with DuckDuckGo or something like that. Apple? They probably just use their own stuff since they look down their noses at the competition, but they use the best. Co-founder Steve Wozniak basically confirmed that. Even though he no longer works there, he said they send him the best iPhone every year. (I’m not sure if they still do that.) He also said it’s pretty but he wishes it did half the shit his Android phone does. He also uses custom firmware on Android, so he’s not just using a stock Android phone, he’s running something like GrapheneOS or LineageOS. So Woz is basically just collecting them at this point. Maybe he donates them. I dunno. So yeah, Tim Cook has a Mac on his desk, but it’s not the $480 M4 Mac mini, it’s a fully spec’d Mac Studio that would probably set you back close to 10 grand. Because why would he use anything less? And he’s carrying the top spec’d MacBook Pro. And a 1TB iPhone Pro… he doesn’t seem like a big guy, so he might just be using the “regular” Pro and not the Pro Max, as a personal preference. Honestly, the executives can use whatever they want, but they’ll only be seen with the flagship.
I worked for a FAANG company for a lotta years. We always had the fully spec’d laptop/desktop/phone. Its not reserved for just the C-suite. The tech is cheap compared to almost every other aspect of employing expensive labor. Hell, the food we got every day probably cost the company well more than the tech.
They do have unshittified versions of their LLMs on aistudio.google.com where they are not bound by an ultra long system prompt.
every time I see people(?) crowing about how amazing AI is
You’re correct that there’s a massive flood of bots pushing it everywhere. But regardless of what the subject is, once someone has “bought in” to a scam they tend to stick with it and defend it no matter what. Because the alternative is admitting they were fooled, and that’s basically an uncrossable bridge for most folks.
People on their literal death beds were using their literal last words (before being intubated with covid) to threaten nurses not to go near them with “the jab”. So it really doesn’t surprise me that people continue using “AI” despite it being worse than worthless for literally everything
“One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back.” ― Carl Sagan
people continue using “AI” despite it being worse than worthless for literally everything
On the contrary, AI’s been extraordinarily useful for me this year. BUT-- I try my best to understand its ins and outs… i.e., where it’s most accurate, and when it’s most prone to hallucinating confidently incorrect replies.
Pretty much any tool has a narrow range of uses, and is useless for everything else. So it kinda makes sense to me that a ‘do all’ tool would naturally have plenty of flaws in its early stages.
Yeah we’re 3 years past where the scam artists claimed this shit will have already evolved out of its early stages. It ain’t happening.
It takes no effort at all to understand the ins and outs btw. It’s “accurate” for the most abundantly well documented problems you used to solve in half the time by just copy/pasting from stack overflow. The rest of the time it contradicts the advice your mom’s doctor gave her. Sooooo useful wow. But sure shoot your shot, I’d love to hear about how you used it to build a grocery list app or whatever you’re so excited about
Huh, well aren’t you absolutely dripping with cynicism.
Anyway, GPT5.1 and 5.2 have been hugely useful to me across a variety of topics, mainly functioning as a sort of enhanced search engine. For example, loads of searches would take me a lot of time to fully explore the various nuances of that GPT can typically pull together in a coherent way in only seconds.
Probably the most use of all is in helping with my issues that come from learning French, but it’s also helped me with graphics tasks that would have taken me ages in GIMP, helped ID various unknown animals, helped with stats analysis in sports, and easily 2-3 dozen other things I’ve needed help with in the past year.
So you can hang on to your sourpuss attitude all you like, while I reap the growing number of benefits AI has offered me. And no-- that doesn’t mean I love AI or don’t see its very real dangers down the road to human workforces. That stuff I’m indeed very concerned about in the late-stage capitalist reality we live in.
Okay so this time it’s “I like to fuck around with irrelevant sports statistics and I’m really excited to eventually humiliate myself the first time I try my French with a native speaker”
Listen. Thanks for sharing. I genuinely mean that btw I’m aware I’m being abrasive but you’re putting out your perspective in good faith and I appreciate that. That being said I obviously strongly disagree with any of what you’ve listed being a “benefit”, and I especially caution you against considering SlopGPT to be a “nuanced” source of information for your search queries.
There is a difference between believing you have benefitted and actually benefitting. It’s astonishing to me that you would be concerned about the capitalists yet trust them so adamantly in this moment to manage your very relationship with information. Regardless, I hope you have a happy and safe new year. Cheers
…yet trust them so adamantly in this moment to manage your very relationship with information.
That simply isn’t the case, whether or not you choose to believe it, or tot it up on the massive axe you obviously have to grind in these matters. For whatever reasons, you’re choosing to lump me in to a group of people I never belonged to in the first place, which is a -you- problem, and not mine.
And no, GPT is certainly not my primary learning aid upon French. In fact, it’s one of about half a dozen tools I use, which I’m constantly cross-checking against each other for accuracy, forming an overall highly-useful ‘teacher’ of sorts. So when you lead with that pedantic little bit of fluff, what you’re really telling me is that you have no idea what you’re talking about. You seem to see these things in highly binary terms, once again a “you” problem.
Yeah sure, bonne année and cheers, mate.
Yeah, that’s probably the case. But hell, the bots are working. They got me second-guessing myself and wondering if I just haven’t seen the “good” AI that the elites are keeping for themselves.
Wake up, babe. New conspiracy theory just dropped.
I choose to believe this now.
Right? I know this is a conspiracy theory for which I have no evidence. It just makes too much sense to me to not believe it.
I’m not sure it makes sense, but I ❤️ the idea that there’s a functional search engine out there. AI’s best advantage right now is that its the first innovation for searching the web to drop in a LOOOOOONGtime.
Honestly, I wouldn’t be surprised if there were some secret Google search engine that still has decent search results instead of the paid-for mess that us plebs get.
AI, on the other hand? The flaws are intrinsic.
