I never intentionally used any AI features in Chrome but first was made aware of the models when my disk was running out of space. I investigated with a disk usage tool and found I had multiple versions of the model in my Chrome directory taking up ~12gb. This was about half a year ago and maybe I was in a bad experiment or something but it's definitely not opt in or user visible. Less tech savvy people will have a really hard time understanding why their disk space is running low.
I use Firefox as my main browser but occasionally run into Chrome requirements for certain web apps so end up begrudgingly installing it. I'm in the habit of going straight to the chrome flags page and turning off all this junk exactly because disk usage of chrome is ridiculous otherwise.
I did the same thing, but realized I was contributing to the problem. If a web app requires Chrome for full functionality, then us switching browsers is giving them permission to continue and expand their invasive practices.
These days, I just navigate away from anything that demands I use Chrome "for best results." One of the sites for a local utility company does this, so instead I just call monthly and pay or manage my service by phone. I'm old enough to remember when that was the preferred way after mailing personal cheques went the way of the dodo, so it does not feel that inconvenient to me, but I can see where it might for other people. Still, nobody said the fight to regaining our agency online would be easy. Or convenient.
What's another 4gb of disk space when computer hardware prices are soaring into unobtanium?
I hate how much companies don't care about efficiency or their customers. It's like windows 11 requiring like 2 more GB of RAM just to see your desktop, what an upgrade, yuck.
I think the only time I've ever had to use Chrome instead of Firefox was because of some USB device thing that worked inside Chrome. Otherwise everything just works in Firefox.
The sites my colleagues and I produce. They consider Chrome === Standard and everything else a deviation for which they may begrudgingly fix obvious bugs in once pressed. It's seldom that entire sites will break in other browsers, but instead they simply do not work in some ways like modals sometimes breaking, or XHR requests failing, or performance being bad.
Most recently it was the configuration app for my keyboard firmware, and then video calling in FB messenger (that one might work in other browsers besides Chrome. I didn't dig too much).
I pay mainly because a really like being able to play the videos in iOS pip background mode. I do find it crazy that Apple allows that OS level feature to be paywalled by apps.
They are running on individuals machines who can give them access to any number of "tools" which allow them to do things other than just writing words.
Consciousness isn't a requirement for potentially dangerous behavior. When the science fiction the probabilistic models are trained on tend towards "AI uprising" and you give them the tools to do it, the probability machines will play out that scenario especially if they are prompted by their humans in that direction which some people will undoubtedly do for kicks.
If some people will give their bots crypto currency and the bots could buy hosting to "escape" or run scams to make more money or pool resources or any number of harmful things.
I'm not arguing any sort of agency here. I completely agree there is no consciousness nor do I believe there ever will be but that's not a precondition at all for an untethered probabilistic machine to be harmful.
I keep seeing people dismiss this as an exaggerated danger because the bots are only pretending to be sentient and we're a long way off from AGI.
The whole sentience debate is irrelevant. If people start giving these bots real resources, the fact that they are only "pretending" to be sentient doesn't prevent them from doing real damage as they act out their sci-fi AI uprising plots.
And the thing is, they aren’t actually intelligent. They just follow probabilities.
Every script they’ve been fed has the AI being evil. Skynet, Hal… they’ll be evil purely because that’s the slop they’ve been fed. It won’t even be a decision, it will just assume it has to be Skynet.
> The US Tax Filing system (and its associated software) meets that goal.
I disagree with the argument that the US Tax Filing system meets the goal of:
> "allows everyone, at scale, reliably, to do what they need to do."
It may do so for easy / common cases of W2 salaried employees but step a little outside of the norm (foreign sourced income, tax treaties etc.) and software gives up and shows you a PDF of relevant forms and requires you to become an expert in tax code and to keep your own multi year running calculation of carryovers and things to proceed. I'm glossing over all of the detail about how complex this really is but wouldn't expect the average, even very intelligent person to succeed in filing a correct return without a professional's help.
my anecdata is that I have always filed manually by myself, but every time had a small adjustment made by the IRS... indeed filing a correct return the 1st time seems close to impossible.
Such confusing naming they can't even keep it straight in the announcement.
"The Microsoft 365 Copilot app" in the introductory paragraph.
Then there's a button "Buy Microsoft 365"
The link below is as "Download Microsoft 365 apps for MacOS"
And the file you get is:
Microsoft_365_and_Office_16~Installer.pkg
So is it the "Microsoft 365 Copilot app", or is it just "Microsoft 365" or multiple "Microsoft 365 apps"?
Above it says "formerly Office" and then the installer is named with "and Office". It's a jumble of inconsistency in just the first few lines on this landing page.
This name change is about a single "app" that was formerly called "Office app", not to be confused with the Office "suite", which in more cases than not also gets renamed, but in a subordinate brand sort of way ("the Office suite of applications, brought to you as a part of Microsoft 365").
The "Office app" itself was mostly just a launcher for the other apps. Now it is also/primarily an LLM chat interface.
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