Comment by dgan
1 day ago
"Surely the last time after handing out carrots long enough to kill all competition, they switched from carrots to sticks, that sucks; but look? now they started giving out carrots again!! It will be such a sad day when no more carrots"
“Someone’s handing out free carrots but it may be sticks someday so I’m gonna be mad about it today and grow my own carrots. That’ll show ‘em! My neighbor’s roasted carrots sure do smell good though.”
"I took their free carrots and now several years later, their carrots are a global ~monoculture that have been modified to grow faster but taste much worse. I don't like their carrots anymore but most other carrots are grown by small-scale local farms and can't be bought for cheap because the farmers never managed to get competitive economies of scale."
"I wish I'd supported the crazy folks who did carrot science in public and distributed seeds and allowed everyone to breed them so that we could all find better varieties for the common good! They still seem to be eating well."
(I see your very practical point, but I do think making the locally suboptimal choice in the hope of better long-term outcomes is a valid philosophical position.)
I also see the other side. I wish it wasn’t Google that currently has the best free product, because their well-oiled ad machine is going to inevitably turn the crank to find that sweet spot where the product is barely tolerable due to ads. But if I want free, fast, mostly correct lookups to plain English questions, what’s my alternative? Paying OpenAI or anthropic doesn’t seem to really change much. They’re going to do ads too. Abstain from AI entirely and continue to use non-AI Google search and take 10x as long to learn? Google still wins and I lose.