AllenAI is also one to keep your eye on. Founded by Paul Allen of Microsoft, they are one of the best teams working towards truly transparent / open AI (including training data)
It's less of a bet against him.
It's more of a bet for the future of humanity.
And contrary to what Elon believes about himself, his work has been toxic for humanity for the last 5 years and is getting worse.
This is literally what happened with DMCA and digital trade agreements in the 90s/2000s. The US "suggested" other countries create their own equal laws (by threatening them with tariffs if they didn't).
The threats worked up until current Big Boss decided to tariff everyone anyway, on Liberation Day.
Not only is there now no incentive for other countries to follow suite - there is now strong incentive for other countries to distance themselves from US trade. Recent history has made that abundantly clear.
It is the abrupt cancellation of such enormous funds and projects that caused the most damage. If DOGE / Trump had taken his 4 years to "slowly" cancel, far fewer people would have died.
Neocities is one of the few websites I go to restore my faith in the future of the internet - it's the healthiest online creative community I've come across!
I work in IT, part of which is AI training - so I see how widespread these tools are. But surveys have shown there is a stark difference in how many people use it and how many people trust it. In Australia, 4% of people say they trust AI companies with data [1]
This is also one of the first "new technologies" that the older generations are far more optimistic about than younger generations. In the US, only 22% of Gen Z are optimistic about the technology, and that number is dropping [2]
Just for anyone else reading, I would say it is inaccurate to say it is a different front-end over Google. They pull from a range of search engines, but also run their own web crawlers and indices. It's the closest thing to a fully new search engine we've had so far.
I also work in music production (for video games) and fully switched to Linux + FOSS about a year ago.
I'd say it is a lot more doable if you make electronic styles of music. Harder if you make classical styles, as many of the big sample libraries don't support Linux yet.
Allen AI do not get enough love. They are doing GenAI how it should have always been done.
In fact, if the frontier companies had taken their approach, it would have started much slower, but I think we would be far more advanced by 2035. Instead we have a majority of society that wants to see AI fail.
Even if Dario and Altman originally believed what they were saying, their scaretactics worked wonders for investment. Their companies are now incredibly incentivized to keep the AI Apocalypse narrative going further and further. It is hard to imagine them stopping, as that may lose them investment.
The last 10 years have been a decade of Big Tech Vaporware. NFTs and the Metaverse were assured to be the future. Once this narrative fails too (which I am almost certain is inevitable) I think society's love affair with Technology being the solver-of-all-things will finally fracture.
I do think the last 100 years' assumption of "it's physical material or it doesn't exist" should not be so easily accepted as fact.
It's like saying love, or nation states, or music doesn't exist. These things exist as much as it can matter to human experience, but you can't explain them by materiality alone.
This is the same argument I hear about too-fast AI rollouts.
"If we don't adopt AI, then we will lose to the business that does."
It is so obvious how competition dynamics naturally ends up as a fight to the bottom, and yet so many people are happy enough clocking in to this grind, then trying to forget about it the moment they clock off.
I totally understand this from a survival standpoint - but choosing to work at Meta is likely not "the only job you could get"
Years later it was uncovered that it was never System of a Down, but one Joe Pleiman
https://kotaku.com/no-system-of-a-down-did-not-make-a-zelda-...