Fuck AI

I would further argue that the possibility of the erosion of skills being something of an active goal is non-zero. \ mid to long term power/control/profit can only be helped by fostering a dependence on throwing more and more tokens at a problem because the developer no longer has the ability to solve it themselves.

Though that's some full tinfoil hat speculation there on my part.

I think it's the conversation we should be having. I also can't say for certain that this is their case, but a certain company which rhymes with "boogle" is putting a huge amount of pressure on the industry to get people to use their alpha earth embeddings to create derivative ml products. They put on a wowfest at ForesttSAT a few weeks back, but it's clear that either a) the earth engine project is deeply unprofitable and is going to get axed, or b) they think they can run the same strat for satellite remote sensing they're doing with llms in programing.

Unfortunately I couldn't attend so it was just a coauthor who attended who reported back, but then low and behold, all kinds of non profits and "for good" organizations are finding funding (since, you know, Musk collapsed the state funded research apparatus via DOGE.. coincidence?) to build solutions off of these embeddings. It's a solution looking for a problem but it basically means all solutions using it will be built on that company's architecture and hardware.

And like.. I don't have a problem with the idea of an embedding layer. And earth engine absolutely has been a major force for good..

But there is clearly an effort to center corporations as owning information we all collectively paid for with our taxes, which is what those embeddings represent.