There's no indication government is behind this and given that Google is rolling out tools now to protect against it this was probably always doable and just never prioritized.
It's observable facts. They are rolling out the features now. So what changed in 2025? Is the present government more liberal than the past? Clearly not. More like this kind of feature will be ignored and irrelevant for 99% of users.
They're not arguing that AI sucks. Only that OpenAI has no hope of meeting it's financial obligations which seems pretty reasonable. And very on brand for Sam Altman. It seems pretty obvious at this point that model training is extremely expensive and affords very little moat. LLMs will continue to improve and gain adoption, but one or more companies will fall by the wayside regardless of their userbase. Google seems pretty clearly to be in pole position at this point as they have massive revenue, data, expertise and their own chips.
I worked in a research lab like 30 years ago and it was all on computers. We had loads of generic data collected by someone somewhere and we just looked for patterns to infer sequences. I wrote Java and C++ and got my name on a paper. There were maybe a dozen scientists in the lab and they were all just coders with expertise in one or another field of biology. It was called a "dry lab".
The promise of small nuclear reactors, modular reactors, thorium or whatever else has really failed to materialize at the same time that solar and battery has just leapfrogged the entire field. Nuclear has some big advantages, but it's still mired in humongous upfront costs and the intractable issue of nuclear waste. And I think we're also about to see an explosion in enhanced geothermal. The good kind of explosion.
What about spam? Spam is absolutely protected free speech. Nobody bats an eye at aggressive censorship of spam. We've had the US Congress pass bills restricting spam. Should we overturn all of that and let the spammers have absolute freedom?
Free speech absolutism is not necessary at all. We can be thoughtful about it. Think about the American criminal justice system and the criminal culpability standard of "guilty beyond a reasonable doubt". We have the concept of being "reasonable" at the core of our justice system for centuries and it works far more often than it fails. And certainly no one has come up with anything better.
I'm also reminded of the last time Matthew Prince was locked in the horns of a free speech issue when there was outcry for Cloudflare to stop platforming Daily Stormer and Kiwi Farms. Sites that were claiming their free speech rights to not only spread hate, but to doxx and threaten and, by extension, chill the speech of people they disliked. Hence, free speech is not unlimited. Some speech restricts the speech of others. And then it is very much the responsibility of regulators to step in and make a judgment.
The President's statements, and even unspoken thoughts, have the full force of law. This President, anyway-- I think the Supreme Court has a special criterion they use to determine whether Unitary Executive Theory should apply to a particular administration.
There were hundreds of prosecutions. Then SCOTUS declared the president immune. Then the bad guy got reelected and pardoned everyone. Then started launched truly malicious prosecutions of political enemies. Cases which thankfully are dying due to lack of merit.
One side is doing all the bad things and the other is simply struggling to stop them. Being cynical helps nothing.
I can give you the exact opposite anecdote for myself. Spent weeks with Dr Google and one or another LLMs (few years ago so not current SOTA) describing myself and getting like 10 wrong possibilities. Took my best guess with me to a doctor who listened to me babble for 5 minutes and immediately gave me a correct diagnosis of a condition I had not remotely considered. Problem was most likely that I was not accurately describing my symptoms because it was difficult to put it into words. But also I was probably priming queries with my own expected (and mistaken) outcomes. Not sure if current models would have done a better job, but in my case at least, a human doctor was far superior.
It's certainly valuable but you can ask Digg and MySpace how secure being the first mover is. I can already hear my dad telling me he is using Google's ChatGPT...
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