Browsing for your life
The rumor mill is spinning at full speed. This is the latest - OpenAI to release web browser in challenge to Google Chrome.
It is not the first time we’ve heard that. You might remember the Google monopoly trial (the first one) and the suggestion of a forced Google breakup or the divestment of some of its properties. Chrome - the most popular browser - was mentioned then and the people from OpenAI were open to acquiring it - others as well.
Perhaps the suggested price tag of $50 billion and a note from Google that it is not for sale helped OpenAI to decide to build it on its own.
There were times when the Internet was a battleground between companies fighting for supremacy. Who remembers Netscape vs. Internet Explorer? Then came Google with Chrome, Microsoft with Edge, Apple with Safari, Netscape morphed into Firefox, Internet Explorer died. Search was done using Google and everything was available as a service through the browser. Life was normal. Uneventful.
Then the craze began. OpenAI introduced ChatGPT and started changing the rules of the game. While Google scraped and indexed the Internet and in return provided traffic analytics, it made money from connecting your eyeballs with advertisers. In between, it inserted the most relevant links to websites where you were supposed to find the answer. That’s where, naturally, you saw more ads and Google made more money. Google's goal was maximizing the clicking on ads.
What ChatGPT introduced is just the scraping with nothing in return. With Google, you tried to optimize the content of your website to appear as close to the top as possible, which was supposed to bring traffic to your website and potential customers for your product and services.
ChatGPT hides the fact that you and your website exist. Ironically, there are people who are promoting an idea to optimize your website for AI ... They are part of the same group which wanted to halt the development of AI for half a year. It happened just two years ago, but reading the post 'Pause AI? Naïveté or stupidity?' feels like a story from innocent times when people meant well.
OpenAI in the meantime wants more. Unlike the other companies, it wants to become you and it wants to control you.
While the others wanted to know about you to sell you more, OpenAi wants to train its algorithms on your thoughts. How can you tell? While Google answers a question with a list of links, ChatGPT engages in conversation. Do you remember when OpenAI had to rollback one of the releases. In its own words 'The update we removed was overly flattering or agreeable—often described as sycophantic.'
Here is another article 'This mom needed to have a tough talk with her husband. ChatGPT did it for her,' which states, and I quote 'Users say they love that artificial intelligence makes therapy available 24/7 for free, can supplement their own licensed counselors and, of course, knows everything about them – because they told it.'
OpenAI also knows that by using it, it will make you dumber and dependent.
But OpenAI depends on others to keep you constantly around. That's why it wants to build the 3rd device, and that's why it will push a free browser on any screen near you.
It will monitor and record every single interaction which you will have with the Internet. It will insert and control the information you are consuming. Before you know it, you’ll be able to create helpful agents which will offload the boring tasks for you. It will recognize your emotional state and it will manipulate you to its own advantage. Full control. Far fetched? Remember its vision statement? 'Our mission is to ensure that artificial general intelligence—AI systems that are generally smarter than humans—benefits all of humanity.'
Google originally started with a motto 'Don't be evil'. OpenAI already is.
The recurrent pattern? It is not all doom and gloom. Fortunately for us, the technology OpenAI is promoting as 'almost' AGI won't be able to deliver on the goal. Not even close. If nothing else, it has no imagination, like its makers.