Well, at least one CEO is being honest about the owning class's end goal with AI: a new source of cheap labor, but this time without entities that can negotiate.
I like Perplexity as a product. I’ve used the product a bit and was always impressed that it seemed pretty balanced.<p>Why would the leadership of a fairly popular, generally well-liked company with a generally useful, generally well-liked product take a pretty strident stance at the maximally high-temperature moment: fuck labor as a bloc, we’ll cross the strike lines?<p>Don’t technology companies want to avoid this kind of political shit and just build and ship?
Quite recently, lots of people were calling on almost-striking longshoremen to be replaced by machines.<p>How is replacing tech workers with AI any different?
dupe from techcrunch: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42044956">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42044956</a>
I was able to get Perplexity to hallucinate very easily. Once it even cited the article where I got the prompt idea (I forget the URL, it was about teddy bears in space and published by the <i>Signpost</i>.) That was a while ago and I assume their model has improved, but hallucinations are still much more of a risk with AI than humans.<p>Also, how can Perplexity do things like interviews, tours, and other things that still require large amounts of human interaction?
[dupe] (because TechCrunch changed the url midday)<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42044956">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42044956</a><p>More discussion on main thread:<p><i>New York Times Tech Guild goes on strike</i><p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42040795">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42040795</a>
Isn't the <i>tech</i> union the one striking? So what is he implying -- that perplexity would automate the software development of the NYT needle or something?
“ The NYT and Perplexity aren’t exactly on the best of terms right now. The Times sent Perplexity a cease and desist letter in October over the startup’s scraping of articles for use by its AI models.”<p>Just trying to smooth things over now… in the most supervillain way possible.
So much work to avoid being upset at this guy: "But to offer its services explicitly as a replacement for striking workers was bound to be an unpopular move."<p>No, really? You'd think these AI guys would have better PR departments.
Honestly, the fact that he posted it the way he did, publicly in a tweet suggests he wasn’t trying to undermine workers but rather wanted to be seen as supporting election coverage. Based on his past interviews, he seems quite autistic in ways.<p>But really I think this could have been a good opportunity to strike some licensing deal in exchange for technology, had he been a bit more discreet