He's just one of many. Forcibly removing privacy from the internet, one service at a time.

Fuck collectivism.

The man who took the open source, not for profit company OpenAI and made it a closed source and for profit company could be a dirty, money-grubbing cunt.

Could be.

The threats of AI to shut down every account you own and not let you shop anywhere or search anything prevents you from doing anything it doesn't want you to.

The main pusher has been Meta. They want age verification everywhere because it (mostly) allows distinguishing real humans from bots, including AI bots. From what I read, no idea whether this is accurate or not, they want that because of ads. Bots don't generally buy products, so showing them ads reduces click-through metrics, thus ad revenue.

AI companies I don't know. For Altman, World might be a driving factor, but I imagine a more important factor is regulatory capture. The more roadblocks to competition billion- and trillion-dollar incumbent companies manage to add to their markets, the less competition from new entrants unable to afford compliance.

Facebook is tightly tied to the government, launched the day after DARPA shut down LifeLog and was originally funded by Peter Thiel. It's always been intended as a global surveillance system. OpenAI also has ties to the US government and any of the same Peter Thiel backed entities.

OpenAI benefits from a global control grid. You know what China has with surveillance and companies providing individual person credit scores? The US and EU governments want that, but automated and on steroids. These people ar

I've been told he wants to turn me gay and Jewish, but that scares me a lot less than building a panopticon and turning the eyepiece over to Trumpistas.

Soros hasn't been the Soros of tech, or anything, for a long time. He's one billionaire doing advocacy and lobbying for liberal causes, while all the others, individually and put together, are nowadays doing advocacy and lobbying for conservative causes. If anything, he's currently the lone underdog fighting an uphill battle against impossible odds.

All of that is true but I think it is far more about barriers to entry. For all the talk about the need for these massive datacenters, a lot of, maybe most of, the use cases for the the frontier models that actually are worth $$ like code assistants etc rapidly falling into the range where what OpenAI is selling just isn't needed. Qwen is not as good as GPT but it is close, a Mac Studio maybe can't pump out tokens quite as fast as an API hosted on OpenAI's infrastructure but it is knocking on the door (for one human consumer, applications).

Is there going to be market for hosted models, of course not many are going to want to onprem the LLMs running the chat bot on their websites. A lot of companies will want to onprem their RAG tools and anything handling data they care about protecting.

At one point Microsoft people were saying workstations were over, that developers, engineers (not in the software sense), Architects (not in the software sense), were going to use Azure hosted VDIs...Yeah have not seen that, yes I know its possible and someone here will tell us how wonderful their thin-client virtual desktop experience is, but the lion's share of these professionals that I encounter anyway are still buying workstations (or near-workstations pro-line Mac). Point is people are going to want to run their GenAI work loads locally, and they very nearly can. The free and "Open" models combined with affordable performant hardware are going to eat OpenAI's lunch, in a huge slice of the market.

Unless - they could somehow make it impossible to distribute and bundle these things for compliance reasons....Then they'd have nice little moat that would be difficult to cross.

> even if it is ineffective and easily worked around by minors

Australia is on the forefront of not allowing that to work for long. Their age-verification enforcement agency is actively monitoring every single trick kids use to bypass verification and updating their compliance rules to force companies to block those loopholes one by one.

For example, they've recently started threatening fines to websites that allow users to update their age to be higher than the threshold when they had previously informed they were younger than that, that allow a user to keep sending photos over and over and over until one is accepted as being higher than the threshold, and that accept known videogame characters to be accepted as photos of real people.

The game of cat and mouse will continue, and there's going to always be techniques that work, but they will become harder and harder, as well as more and more hidden, since revealing them in public where the authorities can also learn of them will trigger their banning. At some point it'll become so hard to bypass for anyone but the most dedicated teens that they expect most will simply give up such attempts and accept living under the imposed restrictions. Some will bypass them regardless, but as long as the percentage is tiny the law will be considered a success from the enforcers' perspective.

The "why" is pretty easy to understand:

1) It makes them look like responsible citizens to government officials, who will now be more willing to turn a blind eye to their privacy raping default "privacy" settings. Who knows, it might even help with the permitting process to plop a new data center somewhere.

2) It adds a barrier of entry for startups and open source projects who can't afford an army of lawyers to ensure that they're meeting the specific age regulations for every US state and country.

3) It allo

Speaking as someone who does think we need stronger age, and locality verification on the internet; I too find the whole thing unseemly.

There are plenty of good reasons to want know if someone is over the age of majority whatever that is defined to be wherever they are, and what laws the other party to your interaction may or may not be subject to in terms of jurisdiction.

I also believe this is achievable while preserving some degree of privacy/anonymity. States could as part of issuing IDs for example prov

I heard, on a regular-people radio show, some commentary on the Sora thing. (They first had to explain what LLMs were, to give you an idea of the audience.) Even a lot of regular people now are getting tired of the slop. It's just not interesting to look at day-in and day-out.

On the flipside, I do know 1 person who seems to gravitate heavily toward the slop and repost it on a daily basis. He seems genuinely drawn to it. He has a learning disability.

In many ways, these times are really separating the wheat f