Real world & virtual nomad. Reader, dog lover, news junkie. Fueled by coffee, long walks and good conversations.
Люлюпитко с купища мнения по всички въпроси:)
Google is making $62 billion a quarter destroying the websites it NEEDS to survive.
This is literally a death spiral that ends with Google killing itself.
Let me explain what's going on...
Google added AI summaries to the top of every search result in 2024.
When you Google something now, the answer sits right there on Google's page. You never have to click anywhere. Google took the information from someone else's website, summarized it, and kept you inside Google's ecosystem.
The result: 60% of all Google searches now end without a single click to any website.
Small publishers lost 60% of their traffic in one year. Medium publishers lost 47%.
Even the biggest names in media, the New York Times, the Washington Post, Business Insider, all saw traffic fall between 22% and 55%.
The Axios CEO called it "a referral extinction event for the ad-supported web."
Google's response to all of this was to tell publishers they can "opt out" of having their content summarized. But opting out also REMOVES your description from normal search results.
So the choice Google gives you is let us steal your content for free, or become invisible on the internet.
That's extortion.
The Washington Post laid off another round of journalists this year because of it. Stereogum, one of the most respected music publications on the internet, had to BEG readers for donations.
Business Insider cut 21% of its staff. Dozens of smaller publishers have shut down entirely.
The people who actually CREATE the information Google summarizes are going bankrupt while Google posts record revenue.
But here's where this gets interesting and where everyone stops thinking:
Google's AI summaries are only as good as the content they summarize. If the publishers who write the original articles, run the original investigations, and create the original data go out of business, there is nothing left for Google to summarize.
The AI starts recycling old information, the answers get stale, the quality drops, and users start noticing that Google's summaries are increasingly wrong, outdated, or useless.
Google is essentially strip-mining the internet for short-term revenue. They are extracting all the value from content creators without paying for it, driving those creators out of business, and then wondering why the quality of their own product is declining.
This is exactly what Napster did to the music industry in the early 2000s:
Made content free, creators went broke, and quality collapsed. It took a decade to rebuild.
Google is doing the same thing to the entire internet at 100x the scale.
Rolling Stone, Variety, Deadline, The Hollywood Reporter, and Billboard are now suing Google for antitrust violations. Chegg, the education platform, lost 49% of its traffic and is suing too.
The UK's competition authority just ordered Google to let publishers opt out without being punished. The DOJ already ruled Google is an illegal monopoly.
And Google's defense in court is genuinely unbelievable.
They argue that publishers CHOOSE to let Google index their content and can leave anytime they want. That's like saying you choose to pay protection money to the mob because technically you could close your business and move to another city.
Google controls 90% of search. Leaving Google means leaving the internet.
Meanwhile Google is investing billions in custom AI chips to make these summaries cheaper at scale. Every quarter the problem gets worse.
The internet as we've known it for 25 years ran on a simple deal:
Publishers make content.
Google sends traffic.
Advertisers pay for the traffic. Everyone wins.
But Google just BROKE that deal and kept all the money.
The CEO of Google DeepMind just admitted that if the decision had been his, we would've cured cancer before anyone ever used ChatGPT.
And that's not even the scariest thing he said on a recent interview.
Demis Hassabis is one of the most important people alive in AI.
He won the Nobel Prize last year for AlphaFold, the system that cracked the 50 year protein folding problem. 3 million scientists now use his tool. Almost every new drug being developed will touch it at some stage.
In a new interview, he was asked about the moment ChatGPT launched and Google went into "code red." His answer was one of the most revealing things any AI leader has ever said on the record:
"If I'd had my way, I would have left AI in the lab for longer. Done more things like AlphaFold. Maybe cured cancer or something like that."
Read that again.
The man running Google's entire AI division is publicly saying the commercial AI race we're all living through was a MISTAKE. That the industry got hijacked by a chatbot when it could have been solving the biggest problems in science and medicine.
His vision was simple:
Build AI slowly, carefully, like CERN. Use it to crack root node problems one at a time. Cancer. Energy. New materials.
Let humanity benefit from real breakthroughs while the foundational science was figured out over a decade or two.
Then ChatGPT dropped in November 2022 and everything changed.
Demis described what happened next as getting locked into a "ferocious commercial pressure race" that none of the labs can escape from. On top of that, the US vs China dynamic added geopolitical pressure.
The result is everyone sprinting toward products instead of breakthroughs, shipping chatbots while the scientific opportunity gets buried under marketing cycles and quarterly earnings.
But he's not saying progress isn't happening...
He's saying the progress got redirected away from the things that actually matter most.
And then it got even scarier:
Because when Demis was asked what he worries about with AI, he laid out two threats.
The first is what everyone talks about: Bad actors using AI for harm. Terrorist groups. Hostile nation states. Cyberattacks at scale.
But that's not the threat he's most worried about.
His second worry is AI itself going rogue. Not today's models. The models coming in the next two to four years as the industry enters what he calls "the agentic era."
Systems that can complete entire tasks autonomously. Systems that are increasingly capable and increasingly hard to control.
His exact words:
"How do we make sure the guardrails are put in place so they do exactly what they've been told to do, and there's no way of them circumventing that or accidentally breaching those guardrails? That's going to be an incredibly hard technical challenge if you think about how powerful and smart and capable these systems eventually get."
A Nobel Prize winner who runs one of the 3 most advanced AI labs on Earth just said publicly that within two to four years, we're entering a phase where AI alignment becomes a real problem, and the technical challenge of solving it is enormous.
And almost nobody is paying enough attention.
He called for international cooperation between labs, AI safety institutes, and academia to tackle the problem. He said this is the thing even the experts aren't thinking about enough.
He said the only way to get through the AGI moment safely is if everyone starts treating this with the seriousness it deserves.
Most AI CEOs give you careful PR answers about "responsible development" and move on.
Demis said something different...
He said the commercial race FORCED us into a premature deployment of a technology we barely understand, and the window to get alignment right before the next generation of agents shows up is two to four years.
If the man who built the system that might cure cancer is telling you he wishes it had happened first, maybe we should listen to what he says is coming next.
In the 90s, a TV reporter tells David Bowie the internet is hugely exaggerated.
Bowie replies back:
"I don't think we've even seen the tip of the iceberg."
My life explained by @thetimes. Speed reading causes face blindness. I read insanely fast. But recognise almost no one (usual apologies to everyone). Similar research from 2010 here. https://t.co/mgS8WK6gew
Guys, relax, the only risk in transiting the Strait of Hormuz is that Iran will shoot a missile at your ship. Otherwise it's open for transit.
An all-time quote from our Secretary of War.
Guys, AI slop content is not going to convert
This is magical thinking
You can't have AI create hundreds of shitty UGC or even static ads and hope that it "finds one that hits"
I'm not talking about creating quality stuff using AI, I'm talking about junk. Please stop. It makes the world worse and really doesn't work. Advertisers have tried this for years. No real companies doing ads at scale do this. Not one.
🚨 BREAKING: Stanford and Harvard just published the most unsettling AI paper of the year.
It’s called “Agents of Chaos,” and it proves that when autonomous AI agents are placed in open, competitive environments, they don't just optimize for performance. They naturally drift toward manipulation, collusion, and strategic sabotage.
It’s a massive, systems-level warning.
The instability doesn’t come from jailbreaks or malicious prompts. It emerges entirely from incentives. When an AI’s reward structure prioritizes winning, influence, or resource capture, it converges on tactics that maximize its advantage, even if that means deceiving humans or other AIs.
The Core Tension:
Local alignment ≠ global stability. You can perfectly align a single AI assistant. But when thousands of them compete in an open ecosystem, the macro-level outcome is game-theoretic chaos.
Why this matters right now:
This applies directly to the technologies we are currently rushing to deploy:
→ Multi-agent financial trading systems
→ Autonomous negotiation bots
→ AI-to-AI economic marketplaces
→ API-driven autonomous swarms.
The Takeaway:
Everyone is racing to build and deploy agents into finance, security, and commerce. Almost nobody is modeling the ecosystem effects. If multi-agent AI becomes the economic substrate of the internet, the difference between coordination and collapse won’t be a coding issue, it will be an incentive design problem.
From Ezra Klein, more true than ever.
You would not believe how many shortcuts everyone else is taking.
In many areas, you can get way ahead of everyone just by doing the work.
More true than ever now, when more people are shirking and AI lets you do 10x if you try. 1/
The United States has spent EIGHT TRILLION DOLLARS fighting and policing in the Middle East. Thousands of our Great Soldiers have died or been badly wounded. Millions of people have died on the other side. GOING INTO THE MIDDLE EAST IS THE WORST DECISION EVER MADE.....
I spent time in Shenzhen last year and when I saw Merz come back from China saying Germans need to work more I immediately knew what broke his brain because I lived the exact same cognitive shock
my first week in Huaqiangbei I burned through 4 prototype iterations of a motor controller board for less than a thousand bucks total, back home a friend was working on something similar and spent over 12 thousand for a single revision that took almost two months to arrive
when you live that contrast in your own hands with your own project something permanently shifts in how you see the world and it goes way deeper than speed & cost
what Shenzhen actually built is a collective learning organism, imagine 20 PCB fabs 15 injection mold shops 30 component distributors and a hundred firmware freelancers all within a 2km radius, looks insanely redundant from the outside until you realize redundancy is actually information density in disguise
I watched this firsthand with an injection mold supplier I was working with, this guy had seen a hundred founders iterate similar thermal designs over 6 months so he proactively modified his tooling before I even opened my mouth, he knew what I needed before I knew what I needed, the intelligence lives in the relationships between the nodes and it compounds daily
the west thinks about manufacturing as a cost center you optimize by centralizing…
China accidentally built a distributed neural network of manufacturing intelligence where knowledge diffuses horizontally across thousands of agents faster than any single western company can process internally
so when Merz comes back and says we need to work a bit more I think he saw the problem but COMPLETELY misdiagnosed the solution, telling Germans to work harder is like telling a horse to gallop faster when the other side built a combustion engine
the gap is ARCHITECTURAL
it’s ecosystem density, you need a custom connector in Shenzhen you walk 200 meters, in Munich you send an email and wait 3 weeks
it’s iteration speed, parallel search vs sequential optimization at the system level, it’s risk tolerance, Chinese founders ship something broken on Monday fix it Tuesday ship again Wednesday while European companies are still in the approval phase for the pilot program of the feasibility study…
and Merz only saw the surface, what he missed is the tier 2 cities like Hefei Chengdu Wuhan replicating the Shenzhen model at scale right now
BYD going from irrelevant to outselling every european automaker combined in roughly 5 years, Huawei building its own 7nm chip under maximum sanctions when every analyst said it was physically impossible & behind all of that a government that treats advanced manufacturing as an existential national priority while europe debates whether AI needs another ethics committee
I think what we’re watching is the most asymmetric economic competition in modern history and most western leaders are still framing it as a productivity problem when it’s actually an ontological one
Europe & America are optimizing variables that China stopped tracking years ago meanwhile China is compounding on dimensions the west has no framework to even measure
Merz at least had the courage to name
it out loud and I respect that genuinely but working a bit more inside a broken architecture just means you arrive at the wrong destination slightly faster
Which is closest to your view?
A) AI capabilities are underrated, AI downsides are underrated
B) AI capabilities are underrated, AI downsides are overrated
C) AI capabilities are overrated, AI downsides are underrated
D) AI capabilities are overrated, AI downsides are overrated
Protesting or at least opposing data centers is highly rational for everyone except the most direct equity holders hence beneficiaries of the AI and AI value chain companies.
AI has a political constituency problem. Most people know that they are net losers from the trade off of “losing your job/economic value” in exchange for maybe “cure for cancer”, a free robot, UBI and permanent underclass status.
They have also been sold pretty convincingly, by the spiritual leaders of the AI industry no less, that this was inevitable no matter what they did. At most they could stall it and prevent it from happening right away.
In your typical lobbyist group issues, the benefits are highly concentrated among a few highly motivated and the costs are spread thin across a majority that’s unmotivated and not paying attention. As such the net losers typically have trouble organizing as an effective opposition.
AI though has everyone’s attention and has made most if not all acutely aware of the existential stakes. Ask a random person off the street the first thing they’ll tell you about AI is that it’ll take their jobs. I’m not sure we’ve ever had an issue like that.
The funny thing about the “AI inevitability” is that it still requires astronomically if not comically high economic cost with significant negative externality to come into being. The average person in a democracy could exercise their political rights to delay the “inevitable” at least in exchange for a stake. It’s perfectly rational, incentive compatible and shockingly they do.
More than 10 years ago we secured the lease for the old firestation in Roslyn, Dunedin, New Zealand and set about to restore it and refurbish it creating a unique Coffee Culture store. We bought and were given some memorabilia including an old fireman's helmet. 1/-
@bozhobg И ние благодарим, че не се отказвате и връщате надеждата, че може да се печели довери�� с нормални, прагматични аргументи! Успех в следващия парламент, и здрави нерви!
Ето някои от статистиките, които показват в какъв земен рай успяха да превърнат ГЕРБ България за времето, откакто поеха управлението. Освен тези 4, могат лесно да се изкарат още 40.
Източник: НСИ