Technology

I like a simpler analogy, with websites featuring lots of scraped text to appear in search engines and show you ads (sometimes serve malware).

Was absolutely normal 10 years ago. It's just Google itself doing this now.

There's a degree of convergence between different directions of exploration of new technologies' applicability, one can say.

But also they have a technology a bit too expensive to run locally (not sure of that honestly, but for the same quality of results definitely) but not to run server-side, and much of public Web's development happened the way that companies that made something couldn't optimize it niche-wise so that it benefitted only them.

It's a solution of the problem of freeloaders, in some sense.

I wonder if crowd-funded AI is still going to become a thing. After all, people don't expect free AAA games, but people do expect free search engines and also free AI chatbots and in general many free things on top of the paid thing they are using to run the free web browser.

I'm optimistic in the sense that paying for stuff is a solution. Most important things being in appearance free is the trap we've been dwelling in. Models and datasets are too expensive to just be competitive volunteer undertakings, but making it a business, it's not end of the world. Until, of course, it's not illegal to compete with Google and Meta, it's not.

EDIT: At the same time I'm not missing the fact that in this case Google is too acting awfully similar to those freeloaders mentioned.