Like a product I wouldn't touch with a bargepole.

Financially this feels similar to Uber's business plan in the 2010s; undercut the market with unsound pricing propped up by venture capital (PE was literally subsidising taxi fares; they admitted this and their intention to readjust, but no one seemed to care) then stop manipulating the market and allow fares to even out at (gasp) what it cost to get a cab before Uber.

The difference here is that the LLM market is human productivity; enormous subsidies are afforded to Anthropic, OpenAI etc. in the form of VC or compute credit, but eventually those debts will be called in, the free-to-use aspect will vanish because it's simply not profitable, and we'll be left with several premium products that only a few people will actually pay for, and even then that may not be enough to cover their costs. That's when the bubble will burst.

This statement is redundant; the article screams with the author's ignorance.

The issue with generative 'AI' isn't that they generate text, it's that they can (and are) used to generate high-volume low-cost nonsense at a scale no human could ever achieve without them.

> Life’s too short to go through it hating others

Only when they don't deserve it. I have my doubts about Google, but I've no love for OpenAI.

> Plagiarism has a particular definition ... no-one is required to append a statement crediting every text he has ever read

Of course they aren't, because we rightly treat humans learning to communicate differently from training computer code to predict words in a sentence and pass it off as natural language with intent behind it. Musicians usually pay royalties to those whose songs they sample, but authors don't pay royalties to other authors whose work inspired them to construct their own stories maybe using similar concepts. There's a line there somewhere; falsely equating plagiarism and inspiration (or natural language learning in humans) misses the point.

My family was ultimately able to convince my grandmother to get rid of her computers altogether, when her dementia really kicked in. I think we were lucky as she never really got on with computers, and would tell anyone who'd listen how computers 'came in' to her office the year she retired (in the 90s) and so never needed to learn.

The replies you're getting are a bit reminiscent of the "guns don't kill people, people kill people" defense of firearms - like, yes that's true, but the gun makes it a lot easier to do.

Labour actively avoid doing anything the Tories can spin to weaponise the electorate against them. They don't feel bold enough to reverse anything the Tories have done, because the Tories will spin it as Labour taking away our freedoms or charging us too much tax whatever nonsense.