I think paying for search is becoming more acceptable when you look at the amount of people paying $20/mo for their AI subs, which to many people are just search engines.
There will always be users who refuse (not going to convince my parents ever), but for many power users, or semi-power users, it's becoming more acceptable to just pay the $20/mo and get a better product.
It's true that lots of people pay for AI, and that lots of people use AI like search engines. But I don't know anyone who just uses AI as a search engine and pays for it.
The limited/free functionality seems to more than suffice if your use case is just replacing Google.
Confused by his portrayal of Massena, NY. I don't live there and have never driven through, but looking on Google Maps it doesn't seem that bad or depressing as the author (and I guess commentators) make it out to be.
It has a Walmart, Home Depot, BJs (similar to Costco), a main street with several businesses. A walkable grid with sidewalks in that main town area....
Feels like reaching that this place is so desolate and depressing.
Edit: I've spent a few more minutes on Street View. This is not at all the podunk backwater that the author makes it out to be. They've got plenty of commercial streets, and big blocks of houses with nicely trimmed lawns.
I suppose this actually makes the author's point more strongly -- even if you have very little money, you can live pretty nicely in Massena!
Alcoa (Aluminum Smelter, *cheap electricity*) was the major industry in the area. Massena plant now produces 85% less aluminum compared to ~15 years ago (AFAICT), leading to something of a ghost town (and cheap housing).
Also what I was thinking! I saw the Home Depot on the map, and an International Airport (with daily flights to Boston no less), and thought, "Wait a sec, is this guy pulling our collective legs?".
https://flymassena.com/
It’s got three elementary schools, one junior high and one high school. My hometown had two public elementary schools, few pre K options, two religious options for K-8, one middle school and one high school at 25k residents. And we don’t have an international airport (we do one hour away and in the same county though)
It's definitely an attempt to compare models, and Gemini clearly won in the tests. But, I don't think the tests are particularly good or showcasing. It's generally an easy problem to ask AI to give you greenfields JS code for common tasks, and Leetcode's been done 1000 times on Github and stackoverflow, so the solutions are all right there.
I'd like to see tests that are more complicated for AI things like refactoring an existing codebase, writing a program to auto play God of War for you, improving the response time of a keyboard driver and so on.
They heavily compete on "privacy" and "security", so I wouldn't expect them to. Additionally, once you start rolling with one government, every one wants you to do something for them while offering you no additional money for the work and weakening of your project.
Can probably achieve the same level of deanonymization by just monitoring what times the user communicates most often. Or send them enough links that they'll click on.
