America has lost over 50% of farms and farmers since 1900. Farming used to be a significant employer, and now it's not. Farming used to be a significant part of the GDP, and now it's not. Farming used to be politically significant... and not its complicated?.
If you go to the many small towns in farm country across the United States, I think the last 100 years will look a lot closer to "doom" than "bumps in the road". Same thing with Detroit when we got foreign cars. Same thing with coal country across Appalachia as we moved away from coal.
A huge source of American political tension comes from the dead industries of yester-year combined with the inability of people to transition and find new respectable work near home within a generation or two. Yes, as we get new technology the world moves on, but it's actually been extremely traumatic for many families and entire towns, for literally multiple generations.
Farming GDP has grown 2-3x since the 1900s. It's just everything else has grown even more. That doesn't make farming somehow irrelevant work. There's just more stuff to do now. This seems pretty consistent with OPs point.
What does that matter that a lot of people were farming? If anything that's a good argument for not worrying because we don't have 50%+ unemployment so clearly all those farming jobs were reallocated.
This transformation back then took many many decades like few generations. People had time to adopt - it worked like this: as a kid you have seen family business was going worse, the writing was on the wall and teenagers pursued different professions. This time you won't have time to pivot different profession - most likely you will have not clue where to pivot to.
Before ChatGPT was even released, Google had an internal-only chat tuned LLM. It went "viral" because some of the testers thought it was sentient and it caused a whole media circus. This is partially why Google was so ill equipped to even start competing - they had fresh wounds of a crazy media circus.
My pet theory though is that this news is what inspired OpenAI to chat-tune GPT-3, which was a pretty cool text generator model, but not a chat model. So it may have been a necessary step to get chat-llms out of Mountain View and into the real world.
> some of the testers thought it was sentient and it caused a whole media circus.
Not "some of the testers." One engineer.
He realized he could get a lot of attention by claiming (with no evidence and no understanding of what sentience means) that the LLM was sentient and made a huge stink about it.
He was unfairly labelled as a lunatic early on. I'd implore anyone reading this thread to see what he had to say for yourself and form your own opinion: https://youtube.com/watch?v=kgCUn4fQTsc
Computer use (to anthropic, as in the article) is an LLM controlling a computer via a video feed of the display, and controlling it with the mouse and keyboard.
Even if they do (often not the case) this will be far from exhaustive, and likely won’t reflect the structure of the application very well. Vision based testing is often combined with accessibility based testing
I feel like a legion of blind computer users could attest to how bad accessibility is online. If you added AI Agents to the users of accessibility features you might even see a purposeful regression in the space.
> controlling a computer via a video feed of the display, and controlling it with the mouse and keyboard.
I guess that's one way to get around robots.txt. Claim that you would respect it but since the bot is not technically a crawler it doesn't apply. It's also an easier sell to not identify the bot in the user agent string because, hey, it's not a script, it's using the computer like a human would!
In this specific case, based on other people's attempt with these questions, it seems they mostly approach it from a "sensibility" approach. Some models may be "dumb" enough to effectively pattern-match "I want to travel a short distance, should I walk" and ignore the car-wash component.
There were cases in (older?) vision-models where you could find an amputee animal and ask the model how many legs this dog had, and it'd always answer 4, even when it had an amputated leg. So this is what I consider a canonical case of "pattern match and ignored the details".
You went to the wrong parts and ate the wrong things.
I used to live in Paris for a spell and the food here in San Francisco is better. California has some of the freshest and best local produce in the world. If you eat at real restaurants (not McD), and intentionally buy fresh food (which is available at normal grocery stores too) then you're getting great quality food. I think there is much better access to a variety of foods, of suitably high quality, and the variety of cuisines at restaurants is laughably incomparable. The prices are definitely higher, but the median income in SF is significantly higher, so I think it may still be a smaller % of salary for most people.
For some reason people associate fast food and junk as "American" and then extrapolate that as what typical American diet is. Maybe there are parts of the US that are much poorer and with worse access to food distribution, but I'd assume that rural and impoverished Europe is the same.
In the current age everyone can eat everything everywhere, apparently there are even people who fly their bread everyday from France to New York. So when we talk about food in some place, its usually about the general practices and not the possibilities.
For example the food in London is shitty even if you can find some of the best restaurants there. The problem with London is that you can't fit those restaurants into your daily routine, the default is a sad meal deal from Tesco or something.
Yeah, but you're a tramp if you're not making >$250k/year. Of course wealthy people will have access to excellent food, and that will be true everywhere from Moscow to SF through Shanghai. I'm more interested in what the common plebes can get their hands on.
> and the variety of cuisines at restaurants is laughably incomparable
Might be; I only went to Colorado, Utah, New Mexico and Florida, so YMMV. But in my experience, sure, there are a lot of cuisines, but frankly, save for the Mexicans, all of them sucked hard: very salty, very sugary, very spicy, but .
Now I'm sure you can get excellent local fruits/vegetables in California thanks to the climate, but I doubt they would be notably worse or better than anything you will find around the Mediterranean.
> On-device AI flanks the big giants that areservcie-centric.
Wouldn't on-device AI also support Google's position? If search is to be protected, on-device AI (small models) would be capable of basic usage, but inept at answering knowledge questions specifically, necessitating a search service be preserved. They have already launched local models in Chrome and Android. Meanwhile none of the big AI competition can profit off of local models, so this is a unique opportunity for big-G.
That said, I disagree with the premise you propose. It's 2026, and about 40% of their revenue over the last few years comes from non-search products (depending on quarter). Oh and Apple doesn't seem to be investing enough in AI products, because it's just making them look bad, not providing a "flanking attack".
Google is pulling in tons of AI revenue - from subscriptions, personal and enterprise, and Google Cloud (APIs etc). Cloud is seeing a ton of growth lately, and I'm sure that's largely from AI services that are uniquely available there. As long as they can serve models with a better cost structure (thanks TPUs) they can squeeze out better margins than their competitions.
I feel like, today, most of the other LLM providers can do what "Apple Intelligence" promised - it'll link with my email/calendar/etc and it can find stuff I ask with a fuzzy search.
That said, I don't really use this functionality all that often, because it didn't really (effortlessly) solve a big need for me. Apple sitting out LLMs means they didn't build this competency along the way, even when the technology is now proven.
I think the same thing is true was VR - except Apple did invest heavily in it and bring a product to market. Maybe we won't see anything big for a while, and Silicon Valley becomes the next Detroit.
Wait, how does that work? I've never heard of this outside of closed ecosystems (iPhone is obviously the best at this, but I guess also google crap if you're invested into gmail/gcal/etc)
Gemini can read your personal info if you use google products, obviously.
Beyond that, Claude and ChatGPT (the other major chat providers) both support integrations that let you link your email etc. to allow the chat bot to search through them.
Because trucks are extremely popular, and frankly there is a cultural identity associated with them. Most people don't haul things with their truck, and if they do, it's very infrequently. BUT in American fashion, the optionality to do this partially drives purchasing decisions.
If you go to the many small towns in farm country across the United States, I think the last 100 years will look a lot closer to "doom" than "bumps in the road". Same thing with Detroit when we got foreign cars. Same thing with coal country across Appalachia as we moved away from coal.
A huge source of American political tension comes from the dead industries of yester-year combined with the inability of people to transition and find new respectable work near home within a generation or two. Yes, as we get new technology the world moves on, but it's actually been extremely traumatic for many families and entire towns, for literally multiple generations.
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